Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

End of PREHISTORY

You’ll doubtless easily recall your general course in ancient history: how the Sumerian dynasties of Mesopotamia were supplanted by those of Babylonia, how the Hittite kingdom appeared in Anatolian Turkey, and about the three great phases of Egyptian history. The literate kingdom of Crete arose, and by 1500 B.C. there were splendid fortified Mycenean towns on the mainland of Greece. This was the time—about the whole eastern end of the Mediterranean—of what Professor Breasted called the “first great internationalism,” with flourishing trade, international treaties, and royal marriages between Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hittites. By 1200 B.C., the whole thing had fragmented: “the peoples of the sea were restless in their isles,” and the great ancient centers in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were eclipsed. Numerous smaller states arose—Assyria, Phoenicia, Israel—and the Trojan war was fought. Finally Assyria became the paramount power of all the Near East, presently to be replaced by Persia.

A new culture, partaking of older west Asiatic and Egyptian elements, but casting them with its own tradition into a new mould, arose in mainland Greece.

I once shocked my Classical colleagues to the core by referring to Greece as “a second degree derived civilization,” but there is much truth in this. The principles of bronze- and then of iron-working, of the alphabet, and of many other elements in Greek culture were borrowed from western Asia. Our debt to the Greeks is too well known for me even to mention it, beyond recalling to you that it is to Greece we owe the beginnings of rational or empirical science and thought in general. But Greece fell in its turn to Rome, and in 55 B.C. Caesar invaded Britain.

I last spoke of Britain on [page 142]; I had chosen it as my single example for telling you something of how the earliest farming communities were established in Europe. Now I will continue with Britain’s later prehistory, so you may sense something of the end of prehistory itself. Remember that Britain is simply a single example we select; the same thing could be done for all the other countries of Europe, and will be possible also, some day, for further Asia and Africa. Remember, too, that prehistory in most of Europe runs on for three thousand or more years after conventional ancient history begins in the Near East. Britain is a good example to use in showing how prehistory ended in Europe. As we said earlier, it lies at the opposite end of Europe from the area of highest cultural achievement in those times, and should you care to read more of the story in detail, you may do so in the English language.

METAL USERS REACH ENGLAND

We left the story of Britain with the peoples who made three different assemblages—the Windmill Hill, the megalith-builders, and the Peterborough—making adjustments to their environments, to the original inhabitants of the island, and to each other. They had first arrived about 2500 B.C., and were simple pastoralists and hoe cultivators who lived in little village communities. Some of them planted little if any grain. By 2000 B.C., they were well settled in. Then, somewhere in the range from about 1900 to 1800 B.C., the traces of the invasion of a new series of peoples began to appear.

The first newcomers are called the Beaker folk, after the name of a peculiar form of pottery they made. The beaker type of pottery seems oldest in Spain, where it occurs with great collective tombs of megalithic construction and with copper tools. But the Beaker folk who reached England seem already to have moved first from Spain(?) to the Rhineland and Holland. While in the Rhineland, and before leaving for England, the Beaker folk seem to have mixed with the local population and also with incomers from northeastern Europe whose culture included elements brought originally from the Near East by the eastern way through the steppes. This last group has also been named for a peculiar article in its assemblage; the group is called the Battle-axe folk. A few Battle-axe folk elements, including, in fact, stone battle-axes, reached England with the earliest Beaker folk,[6] coming from the Rhineland.

[6] The British authors use the term “Beaker folk” to mean both archeological assemblage and human physical type. They speak of a “... tall, heavy-boned, rugged, and round-headed” strain which they take to have developed, apparently in the Rhineland, by a mixture of the original (Spanish?) beaker-makers and the northeast European battle-axe makers. However, since the science of physical anthropology is very much in flux at the moment, and since I am not able to assess the evidence for these physical types, I do not use the term “folk” in this book with its usual meaning of standardized physical type. When I use “folk” here, I mean simply the makers of a given archeological assemblage. The difficulty only comes when assemblages are named for some item in them; it is too clumsy to make an adjective of the item and refer to a “beakerian” assemblage.