Panel stitched by:
Jo Constantine
Frances Gardiner
Rosalind Neville-Smith
Stitched in:
Orkney, North Berwick
In the years around c. 3,000 BC, the greatest revolution in Scotland’s history took place. Farmers crossed the North Sea from Europe and they brought new techniques of cultivating crops and domesticating animals. Life changed utterly and amongst many spectacular monuments to the productivity of the farmers were the great stone circles of Orkney and the large timber halls built on the banks of rivers in eastern Scotland at places such as Balbridie, Claish and Kelso. The population grew very quickly particularly as a consequence of growing cereal crops. It turns out that the invention of porridge changed the world. In hunter-gatherer societies infants with soft baby teeth found the wild harvest of roots, fruits, nuts and berries difficult and consequently they were breastfed for much longer. While nursing, women generally cannot conceive and so the birth interval was long. When cereal cultivation began, the dried or charred grains could be mashed into a protein-rich porridge and fed to infants. This allowed mothers to stop breast-feeding earlier and it greatly reduced the birth interval so the first farmers began to have much larger families. And the production of food surpluses in good years allowed these growing communities the time to do work not associated with agriculture – the building of the great religious monuments of prehistoric Scotland.
Panel stitched by:
Jo Constantine
Frances Gardiner
Rosalind Neville-Smith
Stitched in:
Orkney, North Berwick