A History of Britain - Stone Age Builders (8000 BC - 2200 BC)

as the end of the ice ages tears Britain from the rest of Europe so too did its people find themselves torn between two rival ways of life the old ways reach their twilight as the sharp edge of progress transformed its citizens from scattered hunters into landed farmers before long these people would turn their eyes upwards as the heavens above came to rule the fate of those who dwelled below [Music] you the year is 8,000 BC the last ice age ended almost two millennia ago and since then much has changed in Britain to the inhabitants of these islands their cataclysmic events would have seemed as far removed from their lives as our own are from theirs to them life continues on as it has done since time immemorial the great megafauna of the past have fallen into extinction but the herds that remain still control the fate of the British people and they are not alone to the south and the east the last surviving land bridge still connects them to the ancient hunting trails of Western Europe but already the seas around Britain are beginning to rise soon these land bridges will fail and in the millennia ahead our island home is fated to be cut off from the rest of the continent from there it will be left to develop on its own devices to plot its own course free from interference or so you might be forgiven for thinking today the ice ages are frequently cast as the Great Tribulation for the people of Northern Europe from these periods of glacier advance and retreat humans seemed to spring a fully formed a band of Hardy survivalists equipped already with the tools needed to colonize this post-glacial world but this it seems is as far as the modern script allows these people to go it would take the passage of many more millennia during which the people of Northern Europe remained barbarians before the enlightened rule their southern conquerors brought them up to speed with the rest of the continent the people of Britain are presented as the most remote corner of these barbarian societies and one kept barely civilized by the coming of their Roman masters their abandonment of these shores nearly five centuries later saw the romano-british quickly descend back into their barbarous ways corrupted only further find influx of heathen anglo-saxons Britain would remain lost to enlightenment until San Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent in the year 597 it's a compelling narrative for sure but it is one without basis and in many ways it does a great disservice to the ingenuity of the people who made these islands their home prior to the arrival of Rome yes it is true that at times Britain would lag behind the rest of Europe when it came to technology but it is not an exaggeration to say that there are times ahead in which the inhabitants of these islands were on the cutting edge of progress you before we get started let's catch up with what the lives of the average British man and woman would have looked like almost 10,000 years ago you see in the aftermath of the ice ages people all over Europe were still reliant on the ancient methods of survival that had brought them this far the term hunter-gatherer has been coined to describe this lifestyle and for the denizens of Britain the emphasis is much more on the former the small communities that occupied its shores at this time would have been highly mobile moving regularly between useful hunting spots tied to the seasons and the herds they would have relied on a diet heavy in lean meat including Red Deer boar and wild cattle but whilst these meats are high in protein they have little of the fat or the carbohydrate that these people would have needed to fuel their intensive lifestyle fishing or a degree of foraging for edible plants such as nuts berries or tubers would have been required to round out this Neolithic diet at the time this plant-based foraging would have comprised only a part of the British diet even so it is this relationship with plants that will come to define humanity in the millennia ahead but before we get into that we have a radical new invention to discuss and it's something we touched on briefly in the last episode the earliest known example of it in Britain was discovered in 2010 on the coast of North Yorkshire at the already existing Stone Age site of star car it's comprised of a simple structure built over a sunken area about three and a half meters across post holes had been dug around its edges and in the area surrounding it there are signs of charred Flint's the telltale sign of early Hoff's properly reconstructed these posts would have supported a larger structure which would have been covered by hides reads are over building materials by modern standards this shelter seems crude but it retains a blueprint that is recognized for almost ten thousand years later it was Britain's first known house and by extension it was also Britain's first home this structure represents a turning point in the way that humans interacted with nature along with other early houses such as those found in Howick Northumberland this structure shows that people were already shaping their domestic environment to suit their needs moreover there is a level of coziness to these buildings that exceeds those shown to older debris-filled hunting camps their earthen floors would have been covered by the warm pelts of creatures such as pine martens red foxes or even beavers roaring halves would have been built within them around which people would have sheltered from the weather of Stone Age Britain what's more people would return to these dwellings for centuries carefully repairing them long after their original builders would have passed from memory Cosi or not it is still unlikely that these early houses would have been occupied all year round as their denizens would have been required to keep up with the movements of the herds that they relied on instead it is more likely the bands of people would migrate between multiple homes depending on the time of year comprising of maybe a few hundred individuals these bands might have been loosely associated grouping together on occasion in order to select mating partners depending on the paths of their prey followed these groups may have marked out their own rough tribal territories and interestingly they don't seem to have had much in the way of competition Stone Age Britain was a difficult place to survive in and its population at the time likely reflects this fact now for obvious reasons an exact estimate is difficult to generate but anthropologist suggests that the population of the entirety of hunter-gatherer Britain may have been as low as just a few thousand people this low population density meant that aside from isolated incidents there simply was no reason for wild scale conflict between tribal groups the available resources though pouring calories were far from scarce and this lack of scarcity prevented any need for competition as a result each tribal society may have been left to develop in isolation to a degree building up their own rich cultures and languages that are sadly lost today the developments elsewhere in Europe would eventually align to change the very environment in which these people would have operated that's because 2,000 years before then when Western Europe was still in the grasp of the last ice age humanity had stumbled across perhaps the most significant invention in all of its history it was discovered far away from Britain in a temperate region of the Middle East along the valley of the Euphrates River here somewhere around 10,000 BC the hunter-gatherers that made the Euphrates valley their home began to interfere more and more with the grains of an abundant wild grass over time they began collecting these grains and planting them in specially prepared patches of soil when these grasses were fully grown they rehearsed at the grain and replanted that from plants with characteristics they preferred over time this selective breeding would give rise to the ancestors of modern crops like wheat barley and rye soon this process of domestication expanded to include animal husbandry first of the ancestors of modern sheep and goats then of pigs and cattle by the time we reach 8,000 BC domestication had spread out of Asia and into Greece the Gateway to Europe in the past archaeologists once compared this spread of this new farming lifestyle to a wave crashing across Europe with its old hunter-gatherer denizens being invaded and supplanted by new colonies of farmers the reality however is more mundane more recent evidence has shown that the spread of farming was more a case of gradual adoption than a wave moreover the pace of its progress across Europe varied greatly in many places it likely spread through imitation rather than invasion with tribes of hunter-gatherers slowly absorbing ideas from their neighboring farmers in the long term Britain would be no exception to this pattern but for the moment there was one factor working against it perched as it was on the very edge of Europe farming simply took a long time to spread that far west by the time it reached Northern Europe the collapse of the land bridge of doggerland delayed its spread further the result of this was that farming took many thousands of years longer to take root in Britain than the rest of Western Europe but take root it did and it's adoption along the coast of Britain from around 4000 BC onwards would soon transform British life now it's doubtless that this new way of life would have met with some resistance on its surface the farming lifestyle would have held little appeal to an established hunter-gatherer after all farming of this type would have required huge amounts of labour to accomplish land had to be deforested and cleared before it could be planted and then fields would have had to have been dug planted and their produce harvested by comparison a hunter-gatherer could have gathered their diet in far less time and through much less monotonous work but dough as it might be hunting simply couldn't compete with the sheer amount of calories that farming can provide grain and seed are also far less perishable than meat and berries and thus a farming lifestyle would have left tribal communities with ample food stores during the harsh winter months the domestication of herd animals also allowed humanity more freedom in choosing the lands that they inhabited along with a reliable supply of meat and dairy finally the pappy foodstuffs that can be made from grain would have allowed children to be weaned far earlier and for women to support more than one infant at a time slowly these factors added up to make farming a logical lifestyle for humanity this adoption of farming might have meant the doom of the hunter-gatherer way of life but it also represents the most momentous change in the relationship between us and the world we live in here for the first time humanity sought to control their wider environment and to reshape it according to their needs and it's something that we've been at ever since thanks to the arrival of Agriculture the population of Britain began to increase that fact alone opened up new opportunities for the people who made it their home until now we've only spoken a building in terms of houses and hunting camps that's because before the arrival of farming we simply didn't have the workers to perform the great feats of Engineering that this period is famed for but from its adoption onwards people in Britain slowly gained the manpower to express their cultures and beliefs in a more permanent manner and whilst we don't know the names of the gods or the spirits that these early Britons would have worshiped we do know from the stone structures that they left behind that they were driven by powerful belief structures that attempted to rationalize their chaotic world even so it might be logical to think that many of these early stone structures would be of a more practical nature this is true in some cases as seen as sites like the twin houses of the nap of hower or at the famous village of skara brae in Orkney both these sites built during the early and the late 4th millennium BC give us a picture of domestic life in Stone Age Britain at both sites we see the outlines of stone furniture such as bed boxes storage shelves and sophisticated stone half's canopies of hides would have kept out the elements in the rest of these buildings would have similarly been decorated with furs and skins so sophisticated with skara brae that we see evidence of lockable stone doors along with rudimentary toilets and drainage systems it comes as little surprise therefore that both sites seem to be occupied for hundreds of years only eventually being abandoned due to extreme changes in weather and climate as sophisticated as they are these examples of domestic stone working arrived only later in Britain and in areas where few trees were available instead the evidence seems to show that the majority of Stone Age houses would have been wooden structures which left behind comparatively little trace of their existence most of the stone structures we see around this time weren't intended for use by the living the earliest of these structures are known as the Cotswolds 7 tombs a series of stone barrows found across Western Britain tombs in this style are common in Europe and may represent the first widespread tradition of stone building perhaps the best example of these can be found in Wiltshire near Avebury overshadowed somewhat bites famous neighbor West Kennet Long Barrow is actually much older than the existing structure at Stonehenge its construction having begun in the early fourth millennium BC running nearly 100 meters in length the Barrow Hill would have taken many thousands of man-hours to complete there are signs that a ritual complex was based around its forecourt and the ditch that rings it contains evidence of buried offerings within the mound lie a series of chambers containing the carefully sorted bones of some 40 individuals ranging from elderly men and women to newborn babies meticulously cleaned these bones assaulted more by type than by individual and show clear evidence are having periodically been removed and reorganized much like the stone houses this site remained in use for hundreds of years before the entrance was finally sealed by two great sarsen stones you so what was the point of all this effort after all the number of people buried in the great complex hardly seems to match the effort that its construction would require but the most popular theories as to the function of these barrows suggests that the ceremonies perform there had little to do with the individuals buried within instead the constant resourcing of bones may have been deliberately designed to turn them into collective symbols of the tribes hallowed ancestors these remains may that then served a practical role within tribal life with bones being mingled to seal new tribal of family alliances on the spiritual side the ceremonies performed at the barrows may have served to tie the remains direct week to the lands around them granting their protection to the people who dwelled within so what sorts of offerings were people giving to their ancestors we can find clues to this in the items found within the ditches that often surround these barrows hidden in amongst the pottery volcanic glass and even early milling stones we often see ritualized hand axes carved from flint often green stone compared to those that we have seen before the artistry of these tools is remarkable requiring perhaps hundreds of hours to carve often the stone used to make them came from sources dozens of miles away and there is evidence that these far-off places where supplies of flint or green stone could be found were themselves considered special places in fact in many early mines such as the ones found at great langdale in the lake district seem to become associated with our own set of ritual practices with minors symbolical returning portions of what they are taken to the earth the axis from these places have been found in one ritual site after another appearing all over Britain and as far abroad as mainland Europe for an early British farmer the cost that these sort of offerings represent was high indeed a flint axe head fitted with a recent innovation of a handle would have been of tremendous practical use for clearing farmland a green stone axe though impractical for everyday use would still have represented a loss of many work hours along with the cost of sourcing the stone between the difficulties of farming and barrow construction people's willingness to offer up these hard-won objects displays the level of seriousness with which they would have considered these rituals impressive as they are these barrows were far from the most visible portion of the ritual landscapes of Stone Age Britain coinciding with the adoption of farming in the 5th millennium BC communities in Britain started to mark out specific circular areas within their lands these areas were often placed prominently on hilltops and would have been ringed by a series of ditches broken up by the causeways that give them their names as with the barrows these enclosures would have taken many hundreds of man-hours to construct and they seemed to have been designed with maximum visibility in mind the people that use them didn't rest there either there are signs that these enclosures were frequently the target of ritual cleansers with the ditch has been buried and refreshed every few generations and it is here at these enclosures that the first signs of mass conflict in Britain take place you see the increasing population density brought on by farming began to pose new problems for its denizens by the time of the later cause Wade enclosures each territory may have held populations in the high hundreds of the low thousands and as groups move through their lands it wouldn't be unusual for them to come into contact with others in times of Plenty these meetings may have been worn presenting each group a chance to trade and exchange cultures but in times of scarcity these meetings could have been less welcomed routes may have looked upon the success of their neighbors with envy and sought to improve their own lot by any means necessary here at quickly hill in Gloucestershire a cause waiting closure circling free Hector's was constructed around the middle of the 4th millennium BC not too long after the site was suddenly and violently raided we know this from the remains of over 400 Flint arrowheads found clustered around the enclosures entranceways all of them pointing towards its centre these arrowheads would have been propelled with lethal force by long bows the premier weapon of Stone Age Britain they're targeted nature clearly indicates a premeditated attack one way or another the group was looking to seize the enclosure along with its contents sadly there is no evidence of how this rate concluded but the violence of its proceedings gives us a good idea of the perils that a Stone Age community may have faced another stark indicator the sheer proportion of head wounds seen amongst ancient burials so what exactly made these enclosures so precious unsurprisingly archaeologists have suggested a whole host of potential functions some of them could have been purely practical as their visible placing would have made them easy meeting places for the wider tribe they could have been centers for business where local people could Corral and trade cattle and other goods others have suggested that they may have acted as sanctuaries forming defensive outposts such as it quickly Hill to which the tribe could then retreat in times of conflict these hypotheses have been fervor boosted by the wooden gate houses found guarding causeways and places like Eton in Cambridgeshire however the sheer volume of offerings found buried within their ditches along with the occasional cleansing 'he's also seem to suggest a level of ritual significance to these sites perhaps ceremonial rites such as weddings or coming-of-age trials may have been performed within their boundaries the circular nature of these enclosures may also have had a spiritual significance representing a portal between worlds with which they could commune with their ancestors and regardless of their true functions their fixed locations would also have served to tie their builders and their ancestors to more and more specific pieces of land the building of these cause waiting closures would have been a regular site on the British Isles throughout the 4th millennium BC it is only around the Year 3000 BC that they're building ceases and another related structure takes precedence found only in Britain they are again circular in nature surrounded by a large encircling ditch much like the enclosures people would have congregated within them and there are offerings of axes human remains pottery and carefully carved antler items and jewelry found buried within them but unlike the enclosures which were placed so prominently within their Stone Age landscapes they had no obvious defensive role in fact in many cases a great degree of effort seems to have gone into concealing them often they can be found on low-lying ground with their banks built on the outside rather than the inside along with these ditches some contain evidence of internal structures made of wood or stone these are the hinges and the most famous of them requires no introduction Stonehenge is a remarkable site the impression given by its gigantic standing stones and vast encircling ditch are a testament to the thousands of hours this construction would have required but an internal stretch of this complex is almost unheard of amongst the other hinges some do display their own intricate features but many perhaps the majority would have contained only simple rings of autumn posts or rings of standing stones far lesser in scale than the mighty Stonehenge but despite their relative simplicity the basic goal of what these circles were erected to achieve remains all but identical to that of their showboating cousin around 3,000 BC there seems to have been something of a revolution in spiritual thought where before they focused on the earth beneath them people seemed to have turned their attentions to the heavens above that's because as farming took hold in ancient Britain the significance of celestial events would have had a greater significance to its inhabitants knowing the correct time to plan crops or to bring in the harvest or even when the winter days would begin to lengthen again or would have been of paramount importance to a Stone Age farmer it is not surprising then that new rituals would become associated with them and structures would have been built to anticipate their coming many of these sites act as crude observatories providing an ordered guide to the apparent chaos of the changing seasons the level of sophistication here is remarkable for the time many of these henges are aligned to predict the solstices the longest and the shortest days of the year the winter solstice in particular would have been marked by celebratory feasting throughout the land evidence of which has been found at the nearby Stone Age settlement of Durrington walls these preoccupations of the solar cycle are reflected in contemporary burial traditions perhaps the best example of this can be found just across the Irish Sea in County Meath where a tradition inherited from northwestern France had taken hold in a dramatic fashion here in the late 4th millennium BC people began building vast tombs aligned to the winter solstice the most impressive of these can be found at Newgrange where a 76 mile diameter Hill hides a long passageway at its end lies a high arch vault along with several side chambers in its day this chamber and passage would likely have been coated in bright ritual artwork bedecked in the swirls sun symbols and checkered marks still visible on its stonework back at the tombs entrance a roof box allows light into the passageway carefully designed to reach its central chamber on only one day each year at the height of the winter solstice this light finally reaches the central chamber and the rituals that accompanied this must have been a feast for the senses in his book written BC archaeologist Francis Pryor suggests that they would have been a riot of perfume smoke instrument playing and incantation as its stonehenge offerings would likely have been made on those days including human bones and cremated remains similar rituals could have played out in hinges all over Britain as for one day links were opened between our world and a world of spirits and ancestors such was the power of the magic unleashed by these events that it may explain why the people of Britain went to such great lengths to conceal many of these locations and to protect the unwitting from disturbing what lay within them passage tombs like that at Newgrange have now been discovered across large portions of Northern Europe the heyday of their construction lay in the 4th millennium BC many centuries before the iconic features of Stonehenge began to take shape despite their differing origin points both would become incorporated into pre-existing ritual landscapes and would have formed a common part of the belief systems around them both sites were in use for centuries after their construction remaining ritual centres well into the Bronze Age in the case of Stonehenge the whole site would constantly be remodeled so continuous was this process and it was likely never truly finished and rituals may have continued there for centuries long after building would have ceased throughout this time of the styles of worship and burial would come and go in places communal barrows were replaced by smaller and even single occupant burial sites and these changes in burial practice seemed to mirror those in the societies that operated around them until the late Stone Age it is tempting to see British society as egalitarian in nature or at least bereft of an obvious ruling elite whilst this is true the sheer scale of these building operations suggests that some form of leadership was present this doesn't mean that tribal leadership was yet a reality it could simply indicate the presence of traveling groups of artisans who would have been recruited to head these vats projects local warlords of big men may well have existed in certain areas but their rule would likely be based on charisma and family connections rather than ideas of hereditary leadership and above all the people of Britain would have been united by the hardships that their lives would have involved most of them would have been lucky to survive childhood as diseases like cholera typhoid and hookworm spread rapidly in these new population centers between farming and monument building those who survived with experienced lives of constant toil subjected to this back-breaking lifestyle from childhood people would have been recognizably old by their 30s and aged few would have been likely to reach many women who died even earlier than that succumbing to the hazards that accompanied childbirth but as the Stone Age draws to a finish around the late 3rd millennium BC we begin to see a change in society more and more there are signs of individual burials containing a great degree of grave goods perhaps the most spectacular of these was found in 2002 at Ames Bree and its contents date from right around the time that Stonehenge would have been at its peak somewhere around 2300 BC a man was buried here in what would have been a lavish tomb he had most likely died of a bone infection somewhere between the age of 35 and 45 in life he had suffered an injury to his left leg one that would have left him with a distinctive limping gait but what truly marks out his burial is the extravagant nature of the goods that is included buried with him were a set of distinctive pots known as beakers unlike earlier pots which would have largely been used for grain storage these pots were designed to act as drinking vessels for Mead alongside these markers of status the man's grave also contained a set of stone wrist guards and the quiver of Flint arrows items from which his name originates finally and most importantly accompanying him into the afterlife were free copper knives resting on a distinctive cushion stone intended for use in forging the identity of this ames pre Archer so lovingly buried has remained a mystery it's possible he could have been a local leader though isotope analysis on his teeth suggests that he originated from abroad he might have been a wealthy pilgrim of Stonehenge drawn by the healing power of that place in the west where the son went to die whatever the case the source of his wealth seems indisputable he was likely a part of a new class of men whose set of skills made them truly elite in ancient society as we end today a new technology is working its way slowly into Britain like with farming it would have arrived piecemeal adapting itself around pre-existing patterns of life that's because around the end of the third millennium BC magicians began to appear in Britain some of them would have brought their magic with them from abroad plying their wares on the vast trade networks that now link the communities of ancient Europe others would have been homegrown Islanders developing their skills independently or an apprenticeship to these foreign miracle workers these men were the metallurgist and they possess the power taking unassuming chunks of rock and transmuting them into the hard beautiful objects that would revolutionize human society once again [Music] next time on a history of Britain the shadows of prehistory finally give way and from them step the people of Bronze Age Britain using their newfound powers of fire and metal they would recast Britain as a nation of cities and he'll force as they unwittingly draw the attention of chroniclers from far abroad [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 647,077

Keywords: Humans, Britain, Ancient, England, History of England, Scotland, Neanderthals, Stone Age, Neolithic, Mesolithic, History Series, Farming, Warfare, Stonehenge, Barrow, Woodhenge, Seahenge, Amesbury Archer, Newgrange, The Histocrat, Ice Ages, Burials, Tribal, Documentary, Tool Making, Hand Axe, spear, longbow, primitive, house, history, story

Id: B22h9Ftxo34

Length: 40min 19sec (2419 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019