Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

THE EARLIEST FARMERS OF ENGLAND

To describe the later prehistory of all Europe for you would take another book and a much larger one than this is. Therefore, I have decided to give you only a few impressions of the later prehistory of Britain. Of course the British Isles lie at the other end of Europe from our base-line in western Asia. Also, they received influences along at least two of the three ways in which the new way of life moved into Europe. We will look at more of their late prehistory in a following chapter: here, I shall speak only of the first farmers.

The assemblage called Windmill Hill, which appears in the south of England, exhibits three different kinds of structures, evidence of grain-growing and of stock-breeding, and some distinctive types of pottery and stone implements. The most remarkable type of structure is the earthwork enclosures which seem to have served as seasonal cattle corrals. These enclosures were roughly circular, reached over a thousand feet in diameter, and sometimes included two or three concentric sets of banks and ditches. Traces of oblong timber houses have been found, but not within the enclosures. The second type of structure is mine-shafts, dug down into the chalk beds where good flint for the making of axes or hoes could be found. The third type of structure is long simple mounds or “unchambered barrows,” in one end of which burials were made. It has been commonly believed that the Windmill Hill assemblage belonged entirely to the cultural tradition which moved up through France to the Channel. Professor Piggott is now convinced, however, that important elements of Windmill Hill stem from northern Germany and Denmark—products of the first way into Europe from the east.

The archeological traces of a second early culture are to be found in the west of England, western and northern Scotland, and most of Ireland. The bearers of this culture had come up the Atlantic coast by sea from southern France and Spain. The evidence they have left us consists mainly of tombs and the contents of tombs, with only very rare settlement sites. The tombs were of some size and received the bodies of many people. The tombs themselves were built of stone, heaped over with earth; the stones enclosed a passage to a central chamber (“passage graves”), or to a simple long gallery, along the sides of which the bodies were laid (“gallery graves”). The general type of construction is called “megalithic” (= great stone), and the whole earth-mounded structure is often called a barrow. Since many have proper chambers, in one sense or another, we used the term “unchambered barrow” above to distinguish those of the Windmill Hill type from these megalithic structures. There is some evidence for sacrifice, libations, and ceremonial fires, and it is clear that some form of community ritual was focused on the megalithic tombs.

The cultures of the people who produced the Windmill Hill assemblage and of those who made the megalithic tombs flourished, at least in part, at the same time. Although the distributions of the two different types of archeological traces are in quite different parts of the country, there is Windmill Hill pottery in some of the megalithic tombs. But the tombs also contain pottery which seems to have arrived with the tomb builders themselves.

The third early British group of antiquities of this general time (following 2500 B.C.) comes from sites in southern and eastern England. It is not so certain that the people who made this assemblage, called Peterborough, were actually farmers. While they may on occasion have practiced a simple agriculture, many items of their assemblage link them closely with that of the “Forest folk” of earlier times in England and in the Baltic countries. Their pottery is decorated with impressions of cords and is quite different from that of Windmill Hill and the megalithic builders. In addition, the distribution of their finds extends into eastern Britain, where the other cultures have left no trace. The Peterborough people had villages with semi-subterranean huts, and the bones of oxen, pigs, and sheep have been found in a few of these. On the whole, however, hunting and fishing seem to have been their vital occupations. They also established trade routes especially to acquire the raw material for stone axes.

A probably slightly later culture, whose traces are best known from Skara Brae on Orkney, also had its roots in those cultures of the Baltic area which fused out of the meeting of the “Forest folk” and the peoples who took the eastern way into Europe. Skara Brae is very well preserved, having been built of thin stone slabs about which dune-sand drifted after the village died. The individual houses, the bedsteads, the shelves, the chests for clothes and oddments—all built of thin stone-slabs—may still be seen in place. But the Skara Brae people lived entirely by sheep- and cattle-breeding, and by catching shellfish. Neither grain nor the instruments of agriculture appeared at Skara Brae.