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.
THE EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT
The above is only a very brief description of what went on in Britain with the arrival of the first farmers. There are many interesting details which I have omitted in order to shorten the story.
I believe some of the difficulty we have in understanding the establishment of the first farming communities in Europe is with the word “colonization.” We have a natural tendency to think of “colonization” as it has happened within the last few centuries. In the case of the colonization of the Americas, for example, the colonists came relatively quickly, and in increasingly vast numbers. They had vastly superior technical, political, and war-making skills, compared with those of the Indians. There was not much mixing with the Indians. The case in Europe five or six thousand years ago must have been very different. I wonder if it is even proper to call people “colonists” who move some miles to a new region, settle down and farm it for some years, then move on again, generation after generation? The ideas and the things which these new people carried were only potentially superior. The ideas and things and the people had to prove themselves in their adaptation to each new environment. Once this was done another link to the chain would be added, and then the forest-dwellers and other indigenous folk of Europe along the way might accept the new ideas and things. It is quite reasonable to expect that there must have been much mixture of the migrants and the indigenes along the way; the Peterborough and Skara Brae assemblages we mentioned above would seem to be clear traces of such fused cultures. Sometimes, especially if the migrants were moving by boat, long distances may have been covered in a short time. Remember, however, we seem to have about three thousand years between the early Syro-Cilician villages and Windmill Hill.
Let me repeat Professor Childe again. “The peoples of the West were not slavish imitators: they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.” Childe is of course completely conscious of the fact that his “peoples of the West” were in part the descendants of migrants who came originally from the “East,” bringing their “gifts” with them. This was the late prehistoric achievement of Europe—to take new ideas and things and some migrant peoples and, by mixing them with the old in its own environments, to forge a new and unique series of cultures.
What we know of the ways of men suggests to us that when the details of the later prehistory of further Asia and Africa are learned, their stories will be just as exciting.