The archaeological evidence that has accumulated over the past five decades demonstrates that two very different situations existed successively in Britain in the centuries on either side of 4000 bce. While this is in some ways an arbitrary date, it is nonetheless a convenient one, since there are very few indications that ‘Neolithic’ artefacts and structures existed in Britain for long before the turn of the fourth millennium. Up until 4000 bce (or perhaps a century or two earlier), the mainland and islands were populated by people who were heavily dependent upon hunting and gathering; afterwards the population lived a way of life that to a greater or lesser extent relied on herding and cultivating. Further, whereas the technology of the hunting societies had been skilfully made but was highly portable, more durable artefacts and architecture now proliferated, creating a much denser world of crafted things. However, the available evidence can be cast in a number of different ways, with the material before and after the critical date being capable of sustaining either maximal or minimal interpretations. As a consequence, the ways in which the character and degree of change across the threshold can be understood are also multiple and varied.
Differing views of a threshold
As we saw in Chapter 1, the archaeologists of the 1920s to 1960s emphasized the contrast between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. Before the ‘transition’ between the two, Britain was home to a sparse population of hunter-foragers who followed game (including deer, wild pig, and wild cattle) and collected plants, nuts, and berries, and, for those near the sea, exploited marine resources. They had few, often simple artefacts, although it was acknowledged that significant skill was invested in some of them. They lived in informal campsites composed of rudimentary shelters while pursuing a transient way of life. Afterwards, in contrast, there were settled agriculturalists living in stable communities, in well-built houses, enjoying a mixed farming subsistence base. They were capable of building barrows and tombs for their dead, which may have demonstrated their incorporation into a widespread megalithic cult. The dichotomy between these two ways of life demanded that some fundamental change must have separated them, of whatever kind. Gordon Childe initially imagined that this involved a transformation in the way of life of the native people, with only monumental architecture being introduced from the Continent. Later, he and others preferred the explanation that agriculture had been brought to Britain by immigrants, who had established pioneer communities in a new island setting. The indigenous Mesolithic people of Britain had meanwhile either died out or, as we have seen, been later drawn into the new way of life, contributing to the formation of Stuart Piggott’s Secondary Neolithic Communities.
The accumulation of evidence since this time has created a situation that is messier and more complex. In the first place, new investigations, including scientific analyses and insights gained from researching old data anew, are cumulatively revealing these Mesolithic people to have been more sophisticated than previously imagined, in several ways. Recent studies have shown that Mesolithic communities were able to achieve a variety of outcomes that once would have seemed unlikely for them. Among other things, they were capable of colonizing Ireland, the Scilly Isles, the Hebrides, and Shetland by sea, while the genetics of modern snails indicate that there was maritime contact between Ireland and Iberia during the Mesolithic. It has also been suggested that the Isle of Man must have been in frequent contact with Britain or Ireland during the period in order to maintain a viable human population. Such was the degree of logistical sophistication amongst Mesolithic people that they were capable of introducing red deer to offshore islands by sea, and perhaps also of bringing wild pigs to Ireland. Furthermore, Mesolithic communities raised substantial pine posts to mark particularly significant locations. As recently as 2012, moreover, an oak post bearing complex geometric carvings on its side was found buried in peat at a site near Maerdy overlooking the upper Rhondda Valley in south Wales (Fig. 2.1). It has been convincingly dated from dendrochronological samples of its sapwood to around 4175 bce, and this suggests that late Mesolithic peoples living in Britain were capable of producing elaborate designs that echo similarly complex contemporary patterns carved in wood in Scandinavia by similarly ‘Mesolithic’ people, and that prefigured those known in stone in British passage tombs from several centuries later.
Indeed, the Maerdy decoration has also been compared with that on the stones of the large passage tomb of Gavrinis in the Gulf of Morbihan. If so, this would be an indication that the Mesolithic people of Wales had some contact with Neolithic communities in Brittany, a theme to which we shall soon return. These hunter-gatherer people occasionally built structures as robust as any of the small-scale domestic dwellings built by later inhabitants, and in the earlier part of the period substantial houses are known from Howick in Northumberland and Star Carr in Yorkshire. They worked flint nodules to make and exchange stone axes and adzes that could in turn be used to work wood. And they made and used stone maceheads (pebble-like stones with drilled perforations presumably for hafting) that were either used as weapons or were emblems of power (or both), thereby marking and maintaining personal social authority or seniority.
The precise level of population toward the end of the Mesolithic is difficult to ascertain, given that the archaeological visibility of any pre-Neolithic community in Britain is modest. The reasons for this are easy to appreciate: not only are hunting and gathering societies often mobile, minimizing their belongings to facilitate portability, but they also often observe cultural prohibitions against the accumulation of possessions. At the same time, the comparative scarcity of cut features such as pits, ditches, and post-holes dating to the Mesolithic that might serve as ‘traps’ for artefacts appreciably reduces the extent to which activity can be recognized by archaeologists, while also restricting the opportunity to recover samples suitable for dating. Mesolithic use of caves and rock shelters has been demonstrated in several regions, prefiguring Neolithic (and later) use of these same, or similar sites for the disposal of the dead.
Other new discoveries offer the prospect of a significant rethinking of the whole organization of society in Late Mesolithic Britain. One example derives from the investigation of a pit containing cremated human bone during the construction of a pipeline at Langford near Maldon in Essex late in 2014. The pit was assumed to be Bronze Age in date by its excavators, since its form was identical to myriad similar others when revealed, investigated, and recorded. That is, until the report on the radiocarbon dating of the cremated bone early in 2015 revealed that the bodies concerned had been committed to the pyre around 5600 bce. Meanwhile, the extreme scarcity of sites dating to the final Mesolithic, and the perceived chronological ‘gap’ between Mesolithic and Neolithic is starting to be eroded. Locations such as the tree-throw hole (the ragged-edged, often crescent-shaped pit produced by the lifting of the root-bole of a tree blown or pulled over) containing Mesolithic flints at Irthlingborough Island in Northamptonshire, and Pennine sites such as March Hill and South Haw, are now producing dates in the late fifth and early fourth millennium bce, actually overlapping with the earliest Neolithic presence in Britain. Furthermore, recent excavations by Oxford Archaeology North at the site of Stainton West near Carlisle in Cumbria have revealed a large occupation dating the period to around 4300 bce, immediately before the start of the Neolithic. This produced an assemblage of over 300,000 flaked stones, which included pieces of pitchstone from the Isle of Arran, till flint from East Yorkshire and pebble flint from the Cumbrian coast, radiolarian chert from the southern uplands of Scotland, Carboniferous chert from the Pennine Hills, and volcanic tuff from the Lake District. Evidently, this was a location at which substantial gatherings took place, and that demonstrates social connections and patterns of movement spanning a vast area of northern Britain.
On the other hand, during the first few decades or centuries of the Neolithic period in Britain, people constructed very few substantial monuments of earth or stone, and the scale of their cereal gardens and animal herds may have been quite modest to begin with. And although it is difficult to specify what the balance was between hunting and gathering on the one hand and farming on the other, there is appreciable evidence to support the notion that animal hunting and plant collecting, if not sea fishing (and as practices, rather than an ‘economy’), remained integral to the subsistence concerns of people living in Britain after 4000 bce. Initially at least, the contrast in the scale of activity between Mesolithic and Neolithic may not have been as great as it is sometimes portrayed.
However much this may be the case, the attraction of interpretations that rely on a complete discontinuity between the two periods remains considerable. The past two decades have seen new finds of timber-built houses dating to the earliest Neolithic, and a refinement of dating techniques has enabled us to chart for the first time the earliest appearance and subsequent geographical dispersal of Neolithic innovations. These developments have contributed to a reinstatement of arguments attributing the initiation of the Neolithic to a process of large-scale population movement from the Continent. However, one issue that remains unclear is the extent to which the various novelties that were introduced during the period constituted an integrated ‘package’, occurring alongside each other from the start.
In The Tale of the Axe, already discussed in Chapter 1, David Miles has clearly restated the case for a transition from ‘gathering’ to ‘farming’ that was wholly attributable to the movement of distinct (and implicitly ethnically homogeneous) groups of people on a substantial scale. In the book, Miles asserts that a new orthodoxy has increasingly held sway since the 1970s. This is that the transformation into a ‘fully’ Neolithic Britain could not have been as abrupt or as wholly externally inspired as was previously thought. He says, ‘until recently, it has been fashionable among English archaeologists to dismiss the idea of wholesale migration from the Continent and instead emphasize the role of the, albeit invisible, indigenous population’ (p. 226, our emphasis). He continues,
According to this view of the origin of the Neolithic, British hunter-gatherers gradually selected and adopted elements of the Neolithic package. Domestic animals could fit relatively easily into the mobile, Mesolithic way of life. Continued mobility would explain the flint-scatters, the limited evidence of cereals and, above all, the absence of continental-style houses.
Miles then goes on to demonstrate what he sees as the limitations of such a view, by describing his visit to see an Early Neolithic hall-like rectangular building being excavated a few years ago at the White Horse Stone site in Kent. This structure was found—somewhat amusingly, it has to be conceded—as a result of the construction of a high-speed rail link to Europe through the Channel Tunnel. His account of that visit and his interpretation of what it signifies for the transition period are worth considering at some length, and we shall therefore return to a discussion of it later in this chapter. This is not least because re-examination of what was actually found at the White Horse Stone site poses some interesting, perhaps even fundamental, questions regarding the nature of the evidence for the earliest Neolithic in Britain and what it tells us about what was novel and what persistent in island culture in the years following 4000 bce.
Yet what remains undisputed is that there was a relatively rapid transformation in the outward appearance and seemingly also the basic concerns of communities in Britain between 4100 and 3800 bce, that was made manifest for example in the use of pottery, polished stone axes, certain kinds of flint tool, the planting and growing of several kinds of grain, and the keeping of domesticated animals such as pigs, sheep, goats, and, above all, cattle. In the midst of all this, these post-4000 bce inhabitants of the British mainland, and some islands, also began constructing sometimes massive rectangular timber halls, and some while later started burying some at least of their dead in purpose-built repositories. In this context, it is not at all surprising that the people who did all these things were presumed to have been, wholly, exclusively, and from the start, immigrants from the continent of Europe where many of these cultural attributes had long existed. Yet this is not the only interpretation that has been proposed, and even those arguments that presume some form of population movement are highly varied in character. With these points in mind, we need to explore and explain the complexities of the processes involved in the establishment of a radically different set of cultural practices, unquestionably evident in the archaeological record of Britain sixty centuries ago.
To that end, it is important not to assume that the structures, artefacts, species, and practices that manifested themselves in Britain during the fifth to fourth millennia bce necessarily represented an invariant and closely bounded package of elements that could only travel through space and time alongside closed groups of pioneer people with a uniform ethnic or genetic identity. But equally, we should not imagine that these innovations were simply cultural ‘traits’ that could be readily exchanged between social groups living in different locations and leading different kinds of lives. Whatever the mechanisms involved, the arrival of the Neolithic involved both a transfer of technology and a transformation of everyday practices and social relationships, potentially achieved in a variety of ways, but the ultimate outcome of which was comprehensive and irreversible. Appreciating the character of these developments demands a recognition that they involved a complex combination of continuity and change.
Continuities across the threshold
It is one thing to assert persistence within a pattern of change, and quite another matter to be able to document it closely. We think, however, that in order to achieve this we must look at changes and continuities in practices as attested in the archaeology we encounter, rather than simply focusing upon objects or structures that we can all too easily regard as somehow emblematic or representative of those changes or continuities. For example, people living in diverse locations across Britain well before 4000 bce had repeatedly met at particular places to share collective meals, and to make and exchange objects including flint tools and (sometimes) axes, while at the same time they quite probably spent much of their time in small family or task groups, or even individually, ranging widely across the landscape. It is of more than passing interest in this context that one of the main ways that we know about these occasional meeting places is that traces of Mesolithic activity have been identified sealed beneath substantial monumental structures of Neolithic date. At both Hazleton North in Gloucestershire and Ascott-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, chambered long cairns were constructed in locations that contained both concentrations of Mesolithic chipped stone tools and midden deposits indicating gatherings of people and the collective consumption of food in the earliest Neolithic. At Gwernvale in south Wales, another such long cairn had been built over a prominent boulder that had served as a focus for the deposition of flint burins and microlithic tools during the Mesolithic, and pottery, axe fragments, and leaf-shaped arrowheads at the start of the Neolithic. At Crarae in Argyll, and Glecknabae on the Isle of Bute, chambered tombs had been constructed over heaps of marine shells and other debris of Mesolithic date, known as ‘shell middens’.
In other cases, human bones of Neolithic date had been introduced into these shell middens, or into rock shelters that had been occupied in the Mesolithic. Examples include An Corran on the Isle of Skye, and Raschoille Cave near Oban. At Cnoc Coig on the island of Oronsay the situation is more complex. Human bones began to be inserted into the midden there around 4000 bce, but have produced stable isotopic signatures (see Glossary) suggesting a predominantly marine diet, generally considered a hallmark of a Mesolithic way of life. So did the change of mortuary activity amongst these indigenous people at the dawn of the Neolithic period indicate that they were being drawn into a new world, emulating the practices of other communities?
Other kinds of sites also see the coincidence of Mesolithic and Neolithic activity. At Fir Tree Field on Cranborne Chase in North Dorset, a deep natural solution shaft descending through the chalk underwent a process of gradual infill from the seventh millennium bce onwards (Fig. 2.2).
Two roe deer appear to have fallen into the shaft in the later fifth millennium bce, indicating that it was open at that point. Shortly afterwards, probably in 4240–4100 bce, as the shaft was becoming infilled naturally, a group of small flints which probably represent the barbs of a compound weapon (an arrow or spear) came to rest in a layer that also contained fragments of disarticulated animal bones. The presence of a scatter of Mesolithic flints and pits containing burnt flints nearby indicates that the immediate area had been sporadically visited by hunters throughout the Mesolithic period. A little higher in the shaft, bones of domesticated cattle and pigs, Neolithic pottery and a ground flint axe fragment occurred, yet these may have been deposited a century or two after the Mesolithic remains.
At Spurryhillock in Aberdeenshire, a pit that produced a radiocarbon date of 4900–4300 bce was identified in the midst of a scatter of Early Neolithic debris, while at Chapelfield near Stirling a group of Mesolithic pits had been re-dug in the Neolithic. Finally, at Perry Oaks in Greater London the central earthen bank of a massive linear monument known as the Stanwell Cursus sealed a group of pits containing burnt flints that had been dated by thermoluminescence methods (q.v.) to the seventh millennium bce. A possible Mesolithic midden may have lain nearby. A little to the south, a group of substantial post-holes which might have been either Mesolithic or Neolithic in date was also incorporated into the monument. The excavators conjectured that the cursus had been deliberately constructed in such a way as to connect these groups of earlier features together.
In none of these examples is there compelling evidence for unbroken continuity of activity across the temporal boundary between Mesolithic and Neolithic, and sometimes the chronological gap between the two may be one of hundreds of years. What seems undeniable is that these locations were identified as places of enduring ancestral significance, which were memorialized, revered, and venerated over many generations. They attracted later activity of various kinds, owing to the occurrences and ceremonies that had occurred there, time out of mind. They formed parts of the collectively remembered geography that enabled people to make themselves at home in a landscape. It is difficult to imagine how these places would have been recalled and returned to if one population, of indigenous hunter-gatherers, had been replaced by another, composed of pioneer colonists who were entirely unfamiliar with the land, with complete discontinuity. How, then, would their cultural importance have been appreciated and transmitted through time?
While it is supposed that a wide range of gathering- and foraging-related subsistence practices continued throughout the period concerned, some specific foodstuffs and their residues appear to have had a continuing resonance over and above their calorific value. Gathered substances such as crab apples are well represented among the surviving traces of such collected foods, but pre-eminent among them are hazelnuts. This is due to some degree to their durability when carbonized, which leads to greater archaeological visibility in early fourth-millennium deposits. By the by, this also renders them more important to archaeologists owing to the capacity of their shells to be preserved, while also representing short-lived organic items that can therefore provide radiocarbon dating precision for the contexts concerned (see An outline of chronologies). Significant numbers of hazelnut shells have been found in several late Mesolithic contexts (for example at two sites at Goldcliff, just to the east of the Usk estuary in south Wales), but they are also remarkably common in the more frequently encountered Early Neolithic deposits. Such ubiquity is, for instance, to be gauged by the discovery of hazelnut shells among the debris of most of the known early timber halls in Scotland, and especially at Claish Farm in Perthshire.
Although the presence of hazelnut shells in such deposits is well known and well documented, their significance has rarely been debated among archaeologists. It is broadly acknowledged that they constituted such a readily available foodstuff that they would have provided an obvious dietary supplement. However, the ‘wild’ status of hazel trees in the fourth millennium has occasionally been questioned, given the widespread evidence for hazel coppicing from an early stage in the Neolithic. It may of course be the case that such coppicing was practised in the Mesolithic also, although this has been remarked upon less often. Be that as it may, the key point to be understood here is that hazelnuts were important to the Early Neolithic communities just as they had been to the preceding fifth-millennium people in Britain. Moreover, given an apparent decline in hazelnut consumption (and more especially in their deliberate inclusion in buried deposits) by the end of the third millennium bce, it is likely that there was a cultural and symbolic significance for these nuts in the Mesolithic and through much of the Neolithic that was just as fundamental to explaining their ubiquity as any ‘economic’ consideration.
Equally, the raising of wooden posts, and possibly also in some places of tall stones, is a practice that has only recently been realized was a feature of the life of some Mesolithic communities. At Stonehenge, immediately north of the location where the circles and arcs of standing stones were later to be raised, this involved creating a line of three posts, perhaps dug sequentially in the period between the ninth and the seventh millennia bce. A fourth feature nearby may have been a treehole, while a fifth was revealed about 100 metres further east in 1988. This implies that the people who raised them (or whose forebears had done so) returned to the site at intervals to renew their marking of the place or to commemorate ceremonies conducted there. That these are by no means alone is indicated by the eighth- millennium dating of a pair of similar posts at Hambledon Hill in north Dorset. At this site, these features were ‘submerged’ under a welter of traces of subsequent Early Neolithic activity (see Chapters 3 and 4), and it is only because there was a major programme of excavation, and in recent years a significant amount of analysis of dating evidence, that their presence there was detected. The posts at Hambledon Hill would have been a very visible feature of the landscape both on the hill itself and beyond. A further group of six less substantial timber uprights, dating to the middle of the fifth millennium bce, was recently located on the Thames foreshore at Vauxhall, close to the present-day home of UK government intelligence services. These may originally have stood on dry land, potentially forming a monumental structure, platform, or bridge of some kind.
At the time when the pine posts at Stonehenge were first discovered and dated, there was very little evidence of Mesolithic activity in the near environs. However, in recent years fieldwork at Blick Mead, Amesbury, on the banks of the River Avon only a mile to the east of Stonehenge, has transformed appreciation of the local cultural context. This work has revealed a location close to a spring, with evidence of intense episodes of deposition during the Mesolithic period, in a pool whose active use apparently extended from the mid eighth millennium bce right down to the late fifth millennium. The scale of deposition involved, and the fresh condition of much of the flintwork retrieved in the excavations, imply that the deposits derive from large-scale gatherings at, or very near to, the locality in question. This was a large, dense, and long-lived site, at which the meat of large animals, and particularly wild cattle, was consumed on a considerable scale. Stone tools were manufactured on site, implying that it was occupied for appreciable periods of time. The tooth of a dog recovered from the site has produced isotopic measurements (see Glossary) that indicate that it may have been raised in the Vale of York, while some of the stone tools on the site derived from sources as far away as Wales and the Midlands. Like Stonehenge after it (and Stainton West at much the same time), Blick Mead was a place that was connected to a much wider world through the movements of people, animals, and things. In the immediate region, concentrations of Mesolithic stone tools have also now been identified just west of Stonehenge, and beside the River Avon at Durrington Walls, West Amesbury, and Countess Farm, as well as downriver at Downton. As we will see in Chapter 5, there is now good reason to believe that Stonehenge was eventually constructed in a landscape that had been intensively occupied from the Mesolithic onwards. At Stonehenge itself, the recovery of a fragment of bovid bone radiocarbon-dated to the fifth millennium bce from the packing of Sarsen stone 27 may indicate that large mammals such as aurochs (wild cattle, Bos primigenius) were hunted over a significant area of Salisbury Plain, whose comparatively open landscape was partially maintained by the browsing of the animals themselves.
Meanwhile there is also evidence, supported by radiocarbon dating, that gatherings that involved the digging and filling of pits were taking place in the later Mesolithic period close to the spectacular outcrops of stone jutting out of the hilltop on Carn Menyn on the top of the Preseli Hills in north Pembrokeshire. We now know from excavations in the Brynberian/Nyfer valley at Craig-Rhosyfelin and at nearby Carn Goedog on Mynydd Preseli that long tabular-shaped stones were prised from similar natural stone outcrops and were being shaped nearby, during the fourth millennium bce (Fig. 2.3). This of course again has a Stonehenge resonance, in that the bluestones from Preseli were subsequently a considerable feature in the early ‘stone-built’ phases of that monument in the early third millennium bce (see Chapter 5). So several aspects of the Stonehenge story had Mesolithic antecedents.
It would seem, then, that this kind of gathering, and the erection of structures composed of timber and possibly also of stone, and quite probably also long-distance contacts, were a feature of the ‘Mesolithic world’ in Britain. The distances involved in such contacts, including by sea, have been confirmed by discoveries in the Isles of Scilly, again very recently. So, during recent excavations at Old Quay, St. Martin’s, a Mesolithic worked flint assemblage was retrieved, the closest affinities of which appear to be from the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt region in modern Belgium and Holland. This is over 861 km (535 miles) on a direct line over the sea, but up to half as long again if, as was likely, such a journey was made close to the coastline of southern Britain (which extended slightly further southwards than it does today, given that the post-glacial Holocene coastal inundations had yet to reach their modern extent). In discussing marine journeying around Britain and Ireland in the fifth and fourth millennia bce, Duncan Garrow and Fraser Sturt have suggested that it may be unhelpful to identify this activity as distinctively or exclusively Mesolithic or Neolithic in character. Instead, this may be another area of continuity across the boundary: a maritime culture that was not closely linked to a particular terrestrial subsistence pattern.
The practice of raising timber posts, again, is something that became ubiquitous in the Neolithic in Britain, and the post-holes marking lines of such posts have been found in locations ranging from Hampshire to the Scottish lowlands. One difference, however, is that instead of being isolated standing forms, or single lines, as in the Mesolithic, these posts formed, from an early stage in the fourth millennium, parts of more complex arrangements. In some cases, as at Douglasmuir, Kinalty, and Inchbare in Scotland, these constituted rectilinear enclosures defined by free-standing uprights, sometimes with internal divisions, and possibly vaguely evocative of domestic architecture. These have been referred to as post-defined cursus monuments, and are discussed further in Chapter 3. Other arrangements of posts formed screens or façades, as with the structure associated with a hearth, a concentration of flint and animal bone, and human skull fragments, beneath the Hazleton North barrow. A further linear group of large posts was associated with an elaborate sequence of mound construction, early pottery vessels, and the placing of human remains in rudimentary chamber structures at Eweford West, east of Edinburgh in East Lothian. These various structures can arguably be identified with indigenous traditions as much as with Continental inspiration.
Perhaps equally significant, though documented in fewer places as yet, is the digging of lines of pits across the landscape. One site where this has been closely documented is at Warren Field, Crathes, in the Dee valley west of Aberdeen. Here, an alignment of thirteen pits (some of which may have held posts) was spaced between two and three metres apart. The line ran along the base of a slope on an orientation set obliquely towards the north bank of the River Dee. Six of the pits had fill-sequences that were radiocarbon-dated: the initial digging of three of the pits was found to have taken place around 8000 cal bce, another was found to date to around 7500 and another to around 7000. This latter pit was apparently re-dug on a number of occasions (as were three others in the line), the penultimate fill being dated to the middle of the sixth millennium, and the latest fill early in the fourth millennium. The upper fill of an adjacent pit produced an exactly similar date. The significance of this is the continuity of practice that it demonstrates, albeit at intervals, throughout 4,000 years; as well as the fact that the later dates bridge the Mesolithic/Neolithic divide. Similarly, at Nosterfield Quarry in Yorkshire a double line of pits has produced a radiocarbon date in the mid fifth millennium, in a location close to fourth-/third-millennium Neolithic cursus monuments and henges at Thornborough. A similar alignment of pits, also running obliquely towards (and in this case across) a river, has been found by geophysical survey in the Golden Valley in Herefordshire, close to Dorstone Hill and the Neolithic chambered tomb known as Arthur’s Stone, also in Dorstone. At this location one of only two pits (out of a line of at least ten pits) that were subsequently sample-excavated produced a diagnostic fourth-millennium worked flint from its upper fill, leaving open the possibility that, as with the Crathes situation, the pits were initially dug during the Mesolithic period.
The way in which animals were exploited changed markedly between the late Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic, in that there were no domesticates in the subsistence repertoire before 4100 bce (although domesticated dogs had long been the companions of hunting people), but after 3800 their bones dominate the great majority of contexts examined. And yet there were continuities of practice that indicate that many of the habitual relationships between people and animals continued across the threshold, and that the wild animals of the preceding period continued to be preyed upon by, and potentially to have had a special relationship with, the people of the later period. For example, late Mesolithic communities hunted certain kinds of animal, such as deer and wild cattle, that lived at least some of the time in herds. These indigenous communities also deliberately intervened in the landscape to create or enhance clearings to improve grazing for such wild animals, and would have monitored their movements closely.
Red deer and roe deer were likely to have been ‘harvested’ in this way, but their herding and feeding patterns contrasted markedly with those of wild cattle, which were also subject to specialized hunting. Wild cattle, a considerably larger and more robust animal than the domesticated cattle that derived ultimately from the area of modern Turkey, were only seasonally a herd animal, and then only in herds of thirty or so individuals. They were grazing animals that inhabited wetter parts of the landscape in Britain, as opposed to deer that were browsers inhabiting mostly wooded areas. Bones of wild cattle have been recovered in quantity at Mesolithic sites such as Goldcliff on the Severn Estuary and, as we have seen, at Blick Mead, Amesbury, and this indicates both that they were a favoured source of meat and other products such as hide, and that the consumption of their flesh often took place in the context of significant gatherings of people. They continued to be hunted in the Early Neolithic period and beyond, as is attested by the fact that their remains have been found in small quantities at some sites, often alongside domesticated cattle and deer, including during the transitional period.
Both red deer and roe deer bones were found together with a substantial quantity of other bones, predominantly of cattle, and broken objects, in a large Early Neolithic pit at Coneybury near Stonehenge. The nature and condition of the bones from this pit (many were those of young animals, and fine butchery marks on the bones indicated the processing of carcasses for immediate consumption) point to the likelihood of early summer gathering and feasting—again linking positively with the evidence of communal Mesolithic feasting at Blick Mead less than a mile away. That there was a close familiarity with, and attachment to, red deer among these very early Neolithic communities is evident from the numbers and careful arrangement of red deer antlers in the backfilling of the shafts and galleries of flint mines in Sussex (see Chapter 4). On the near Continent, such mines had primarily been dug using stone axes, whereas in southern Britain, only collected and carefully prepared shed deer antlers were used as digging tools in such locations. Both the restriction of the use of objects made from flint available within these mines and worked into axes on the surface, and the careful deposition of the antler-picks, indicate a deliberate choice to use the antlers. In turn this suggests that the people concerned had a close connection with these animals, which may have involved a recognition of their importance to people in the by-then receding past (see Fig. 2.4 for the discovery of a later example of an antler-pick).
Innovative communities and their practices
To talk of a threshold at a particular point in time emphasizes the transition that certainly occurred at the end of the fifth millennium, but it also potentially telescopes the timescale too much. There were more than two centuries during which change occurred, and Neolithic things and practices were established in the south-east of England considerably earlier than in Wales, Scotland, or the south-west peninsula. Moreover, these were centuries in which there was experimentation, and a certain amount of diversity, based upon emergent practices and already existing cultural differences. This was a period of contact and transformation occurring at various rates of change at different places. It is therefore open to question how much of this change would have been perceived as ‘revolutionary’ by those actively caught up in its midst. Nonetheless, innovation there undoubtedly was, and along with it a significant cumulative shift in identity. It is therefore not unreasonable to talk of innovative, or innovating, communities.
Such innovation included the manufacture and use of some kinds of object that became ubiquitous in the earliest Neolithic of the British Isles but that had no discernible presence in the later Mesolithic. A prime example is leaf-shaped flint arrowheads. These are oval-shaped or pear-shaped wafer-thin flints, the ‘blanks’ for which had been struck from flint nodules or pebbles.1 These blanks were then carefully subject to further subtle chipping on both sides of the flake. They occur in a variety of nonetheless closely similar shapes (pear-shaped, tear-shaped, ogival, diamond-shaped, and so on, as well as and perhaps more so than leaf-shaped), often with very narrow pointed ends and rounded bases (where they were hafted into wooden shafts). Whether used to intercept deer, bring down birds, or slay semi-domesticates such as pigs, these arrowheads testify to the practice of hunting, and in these terms are markers of continuities of practice with those of the fifth millennium. That said, similar, though not identical, flint arrowheads were an innovation among groups in Belgium in the later fifth millennium. These latter arrowheads lack the fine ‘invasive’ retouch found on the British examples, and are found in assemblages that also include triangular and chisel-shaped projectile points, which do not occur in Britain at this date. While their character in Britain diverged markedly from those in continental Europe, their adoption and use clearly signalled new practices within the hunting repertoire and a break with former practices of arrow hafting and traditions of flintworking.
The wide dispersal of leaf-shaped arrowheads in the British landscape not only testifies to the lengthy span of time that they were subsequently in use during the Neolithic period, but also the extent of the territories across which individuals and groups of people ranged on foot over the terrain on hunting and other expeditions. These arrowheads were not necessarily more capable of killing or wounding larger game animals than the composite points, with multiple microliths inserted into the arrow-shaft, that were used in the Later Mesolithic. However, they were perhaps easier and quicker to make and to haft. They also, perhaps incidentally, facilitated the use of arrows in conflicts between human groups, and this is a subject that will be returned to in Chapters 3 and 4.
Nor were these arrowheads the only flint artefacts to represent innovation in the transitional period. While the scrapers, awls, ‘fabricators’, and borers that were a feature of late Mesolithic toolkits continued to be made, and narrow-blade-based technologies continued in use, new forms such as ‘plano-convex’ knives (with one side flat, the other curved), sickles (curved flakes, sometimes with indications of use for cutting plant stems), and laurel leaves (elongated bifacially-worked flint objects) were rapidly brought into the repertoire. Furthermore, it was not only the forms of flint manufacture that were innovative, but also some of the means by which the raw materials were obtained. Flint from beach and river pebbles, and from river gravels, or from nodules collected from clay-with-flint surface deposits covering chalklands, continued to be used for everyday items and ‘expedient’ working to create task-related toolkits in the very early Neolithic, as they had done in the Mesolithic period. In marked contrast, however, nodular flint was quarried, and even mined, at an early stage in the Neolithic, to obtain material that could be worked specifically to create objects for exchange—and especially axes. Although in some cases flint cores may have circulated as exchange items, more commonly the early stages of working axes will have occurred in the vicinity of the mines, creating flaked axes that had not yet been ground and polished. A group of such axes, flaked but unpolished, was discovered at Peaslake in Surrey in 1937, for instance.
It is likely that the flint mines of the Sussex Downs (the character and significance of which are described in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 4) were in use by 3900 bce, while recent radiocarbon results raise the possibility that some of them may be even earlier. This places them amongst the earliest substantial Neolithic works in southern Britain. It is therefore arguable that their creation was not simply a side-product of the establishment of agricultural settlement, but may actually have been instrumental in bringing about economic and cultural change. The flint mines were often dug deep, and through bands of flint nodules as well as chalk, to reach the higher-quality floor-stone (Fig 2.5).
It was this material that was chosen to make axes. The axes travelled from the Sussex mines in an unpolished state, and the very fact of that travelling, and the distances involved (far into the north and west of Britain), implies that the scale of long-distance exchange networks had continued to expand from those hinted at during the later Mesolithic. This in turn implies not only that the acquisition of exotic items became more important to communities widely dispersed across Britain, but also that existing networks of contact were being stimulated more intensely during a period of rapid cultural change.
Perhaps the most remarkable innovation of the transitional period—in Britain at least—and the most overt indicator that the communities concerned were wishing to accentuate the degree of cleavage from past traditions of practice, was the making and using of pottery. During the Mesolithic period, wooden (including birch-bark) containers, woven baskets, and leather vessels and bags would have been widely used, but, unlike in Denmark and southern Sweden (for instance), there were no ceramic vessels in use. However, from the turn of the fourth millennium onwards, broken pottery is found in a variety of contexts in Britain, and often in highly formalized deposits.
The advent of pottery brought to Britain not only the bonfire-kiln technology necessary for its production, but also the introducution of new ways of food preparation, storage, and consumption. The simple bowl-shaped vessels that characterize the earliest pottery used in Britain have close Continental antecedents, like the flint axes or quarries and some flint tool types. Recent work by Hélène Pioffet has shown that assemblages in the south-east of England have both stylistic and technological affinities with pottery from Belgium and north-east France, while those in the south-west are more reminiscent of ceramics from Normandy and Brittany, although in both cases the distinctive form of the carinated bowl was abstracted from a wider range of vessel shapes. Notably, the eastern vessels have more open profiles, while their carinations were formed using distinctive techniques. The legacy of this ‘technology transfer’ was that some of the practices of potting endured over time, although stylistic change soon took place within the insular context, with pots in the east becoming progressively more open and flaring. Paradoxically, some of the earliest pottery was also some of the finest produced in the fourth millennium. The vessels with the sharpest carinations were, for example, some of the thinnest-walled and were made using the finest clay pastes. That some of the later pottery was rougher and coarser in execution could be taken to indicate that the skills necessary to the making of fine Continental wares were gradually lost as contact with the parent communities was lost. Another view, however, is that the finest pots were made as an overt statement about how distinctive such a new practice was, and how it exemplified the condition of ‘being Neolithic’. Soon afterwards, such distinctiveness was no longer deemed essential to the processes of manufacture.
The restricted range of vessel types that characterize the numerically small groups of pottery made and used in the very early fourth millennium suggests that there was a deliberate attempt to restrict the repertoire and to signal both rarity and value in this new form of technology. Such pottery was likely initially to have been used only in a restricted range of social circumstances, and perhaps principally for the communal serving and eating of food rather than in its preparation. This serving, however, may have been highly performative, or ritualized, since the study of lipids in the food residues absorbed into the fabric of the vessels shows that they were often used to contain milk, while at the same time the vessels were mostly too small to have been useful in the storage of this foodstuff.
The number of find-spots of the earliest pottery is so far relatively small, but the range of contexts involved is broad, including pits and shafts (and middens associated with their infilling), other middens spread out across the ground-surface, early burial contexts, and large timber-built halls. The earliest halls will be discussed separately in the next section and in Chapter 3, but the other contexts are worth describing here. Finds of carinated bowl sherds are known from pits at Roughridge Hill in north Wiltshire and Rowden in south Dorset, as well as the pit immediately beside a small megalithic chamber later enveloped in a large long cairn at Dyffryn Ardudwy in north Wales. Alistair Barclay and Oliver Harris have pointed out that most of the richer pit assemblages containing carinated bowls occur in areas that do not have timber halls or houses of the same date, suggesting that they relate to alternative modes of social gathering. Comparably, a natural shaft at Cannon Hill in Berkshire had infills in its upper levels, dated to shortly after the beginning of the fourth millennium, that included pieces from six carinated bowls and three cups.
We have seen that, in two places in the Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire Cotswolds that were later to become the sites of long cairns, middens have been dated to the earliest Neolithic period. Among other items found in these spreads of discarded (mostly food) debris, there were sherds of carinated bowls and, again, small cups. Whether similar middens were associated with the earliest timber buildings is uncertain. At Gwernvale, for instance, a line of timber posts was partially cut through a possible midden deposit, but since only a pit also sealed by the later long cairn is closely dated, the date of neither the midden nor the posts is certain (although they certainly predate the period, probably not later than around 3600 bce, when the stone cairn sequence begins).
Carinated bowl pottery has also been found in some form of association with other long cairns on the Gloucestershire Cotswolds at Cow Common Long and Sale’s Lot, but not at Burn Ground, where apparently early phases of mortuary practice are suggested by radiocarbon dates, and yet the ceramics that were recovered are of later styles. The structurally less complex burial in a wooden coffin at Yabsley Street (next to the River Thames opposite the O2 Stadium/Millennium Dome in east London), dated to around 4000 bce, is clearly extremely important. This is owing to the direct association of the burial with at least four, and possibly more, very fine carinated bowls (sherds of which had been carefully placed within the grave) that had in their manufacture been finely rubbed, or burnished, on both the inside and outside of the vessel(s).
Building in timber must have been a commonplace of Mesolithic societies, but it would appear that the multiple felling of substantial trees and the cutting of timber for significant construction was another innovation of the ‘transition’ period. This is marked by the evidence in the landscape for the swift removal of tree cover in many localities, on a scale that was hitherto possible only by controlled burning. In the Early Neolithic, dated pollen sequences from closely sampled individual locations has indicated the clearance of broad areas of, for instance, oak woodland in places such as Rough Tor on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall (see Chapter 4). In parallel, the excavation of extensive tracts of land, for instance in the river valleys draining into the southern Fens, where trees had been deliberately removed by being rendered vulnerable to wind-throw, and where the resulting hollows have contained material that has yielded radiocarbon dates, or worked flint tools from the same hollows, indicates the same phenomenon.
While it is no doubt the case that such clearance was chiefly undertaken to open up ground for grazing, the resulting crop of timber, and especially of oak wood, produced material for building in wood on a scale that previously had not existed. The final innovation to be discussed here, then, was the creation of rectangular-plan structures that were used, probably, for a variety of purposes from the venues for gathering and feasting through to places for storage of a variety of goods and substances, and the enacting of a variety of exchanges (cementing of alliances and so on). A number of buildings that were larger than would be anticipated for a single household, and that have therefore been termed ‘halls’, have been found and excavated in recent years.
Halls, migration, and complexity:
a White Horse Stone tale
What is so far the earliest known amongst such buildings, again apparently associated with small quantities of carinated bowl pottery, was, as we have noted, found a few years ago at White Horse Stone near Aylesford in Kent. This structure, with dimensions 17.5 m long by 8 m wide, featured four rows of posts and a series of foundation-slots into which the two outer rows of posts appear to have been inserted (Fig. 2.6).
The inner two lines of posts were larger and could have supported a central aisle, although some central posts may also have held up a ridgepole. Another, slightly smaller building apparently dating to this same early period was excavated at Yarnton near the River Thames north of Oxford, while a group of three potentially early halls has been excavated at Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire. We will argue that these structures played a foundational role in establishing Neolithic communities in Britain, and we will discuss their place in the proliferation of new forms of life in the earliest centuries of the fourth millennium in Chapter 3.
For the moment, we can explore the White Horse Stone structure in a little more detail, not least because of the central place that it has assumed in recent accounts of the process of Neolithization in Britain. According to the available dating evidence for this longhouse or hall, derived from samples from those of its upright posts made of oak, it was probably built at the very start of the fourth millennium bce, that is, precisely upon the threshold-point we have been considering in this chapter. Its active use ceased around three hundred years later. In The Story of the Axe, David Miles’s account of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ discussed in Chapter 1, the author points to the critical importance of the building to its time: ‘this is the earliest-known Neolithic building in Britain: the imprint of the first farmers’. And he quite properly asked (p. 228), ‘Were these people strangers in a strange land? Was the White Horse Stone house built by innovating natives or by immigrants arriving from across the sea?’ His suggestion that the White Horse Stone building bears no resemblance to anything seen before in Britain certainly appears correct, but his related statement that ‘In this part of Kent there is scarcely any evidence of late Mesolithic activity’ is more open to question. It might be more accurate to say that the prehistoric archaeology of the area is presently under-explored. However, there are at least three known individual find-spots of diagnostically Mesolithic (though not precisely dated) tranchet axes within three or four kilometres of the White Horse Stone site, and there are also several flint-scatters including Mesolithic items within a ten-kilometre radius. In contrast, the nearest site that has produced Early Neolithic finds in quantity is sixteen kilometres to the north-east at Milton-next-Sittingbourne. In general, the likelihood of discovering Mesolithic sites that have no above-ground signature and are composed principally of small flint artefacts, in a landscape that has been heavily developed, densely populated, and subject to intensive agriculture, is limited in the absence of high-quality archaeological investigation. Despite this, recent work has begun to demonstrate that Late Mesolithic activity in south-east England was considerably more intensive than previously imagined. Substantial lithic assemblages have been identified at sites that include Ranscombe Woods, Cuxton, and Westcliffe and Finglesham near Deal, some of these revealing evidence for the manufacture and maintenance of tranchet axes. More pertinently, in advance of the recent construction of the Bexhill to Hastings link road, a total of 140 scatters of Late Mesolithic artefacts were encountered. This perhaps gives us an indication of the potential density of hunter-gatherer occupation in the region.
Miles then correctly observes that ‘Jonathan Last has suggested that by 4000 bc the house was no longer so fundamental to the way farmers across the Channel saw themselves; houses were smaller, more varied in style and construction, often not built to last. By 4000 bc, northern farmers had downsized’ (Story of the Axe, p. 230). It is important to note at this point that if people were migrating to Britain and, having arrived, returned to the practice of building large houses, some explanation is required for this change in behaviour.
One interpretation that has been proposed is that these ‘big houses’ amounted to a means of providing shelter from potentially unfriendly natives for newly arrived immigrants in a hostile land. This is possible, although if these grand structures were built as secure enclaves we would still need to ask why these new arrivals chose to reproduce a kind of structure that had not been in general use for some centuries, rather than some form of protective enclosure. David Miles preferred instead to link the builders of the White Horse Stone to their close Continental neighbours through a comparison of the building techniques and structural forms that they employed. He went on to say, ‘However, archaeologists have found houses in northern France and on the North Sea Coast as far as Denmark that bear a resemblance to White Horse Stone and other British examples,’ while nonetheless conceding that ‘The White Horse Stone building—and its companion—cannot be precisely matched in the near Continent. This is hardly surprising at a time when people did not work to a blueprint. We also seem to be looking at a pioneer site...’ (ibid.).
In order to expand on the implications of why the White Horse Stone building, with its few associated traces of fragmentary pottery and cereal grains, was nonetheless fundamental to the migration story, Miles proceeded to paint a picture of the details of the process. To begin with, he suggested, ‘scouts’ would have been sent ahead to establish the lie of the land and familiarize themselves with coastal waters. Evidently finding their way into the Thames Estuary and up the Medway, they then followed a route inland, exploring the area around modern Maidstone, to the east of which the White Horse Stone site lies. Despite the alleged near-absence of a local Mesolithic population, ‘perhaps they had local guides who saw potential advantages to be gained from cooperation with the newcomers’. Miles speculated that his ‘Neolithic arrivals’ may have comprised small kin groups, which, appearing in a handful of boats, must have had to find landfall and (again, surprisingly, given their apparent rarity) ‘negotiate with the local inhabitants’. To be fair, Miles was only suggesting that it was the Maidstone area that was devoid of resident Mesolithic indigenes, but the picture he draws of pioneers establishing themselves into the landscape is one familiar to us from the stories of the Pilgrim Fathers, told and retold to generations of Britons and Americans (and French and Germans) alike. Miles proposes that, having established their novel structure in a location hidden from view and full of sarsen stones that may have recalled their homeland, ‘The White Horse Stone people moved inland. They did not stay by the River Medway...’ (ibid., 231). This sequence of events would arguably be at odds with the longevity of the structure, and this is one of a number of inconsistencies that collectively make it harder to sustain the view that this was the dwelling of a group of pioneer settlers. These also include the location and constructional details of the hall, its relationship with a second building close by, and most importantly the presence of a series of features on the same site that appear to prefigure the Early Neolithic activity.
The White Horse Stone building is a remarkable construction, made all the more so by its early date. Its creation and use are of the greatest possible interest, but they need to be contextualized in relation to its immediate topographic setting and its longer history. This can be achieved by reviewing aspects of the excavation record, which is possible thanks to the prompt report of the site by the project director, Chris Hayden, and the availability of archive material online through the Archaeology Data Service hosted by the University of York.
The White Horse Stone structure was referred to prosaically, and for shorthand, to its excavators as ‘context 4806’. Building 4806 had a companion structure 140 metres to the south, and set at right angles to it. The temporal relationship between the two remains unclear. Hayden, the excavator, like David Miles, argued that although these buildings found no close analogues amongst contemporary European timber-built structures, they possessed broad family resemblances. On this view, we should not expect them to be identical, given that the Continental structures were themselves highly variable, although aspects of the constructional techniques employed, such as post in slot arrangements, are paralleled.
Eleven radiocarbon determinations were obtained from the post-holes that constituted the footprint of this structure. Nine of these dated samples were regarded as significant to an understanding of the date of the initial construction and subsequent use of the building. The dates indicate that the raising of the hall was undertaken in the period 4065–3940 bce, and that it continued in use potentially until 3745–3635 bce: in other words, for at least 200 years. These dates were mostly obtained from samples of oak wood from the post-holes. However, two of the other features among the 60-odd post-holes making up the structure also yielded carbon that successfully returned dates. Remarkably, these samples (from post-holes 5113 and 4834) produced dates of 8530–8250 bce and 7600–7520 bce, that is, at two different times in the Early Mesolithic period. These samples were therefore dismissed as being from residual charcoal: as such they were deemed to be unrelated to the hall. Structurally, given the length of time that appears to have elapsed between these early dates and the building of the hall, it is without doubt the case that these posts could hardly have still been standing when the Early Neolithic hall building was created.
Nonetheless, the setting aside of this evidence for precedent activity, and especially the possibility that posts had been raised to mark the site (although not to form a coherent structure), means that the significance of one further detail that is crucial to an understanding of the time-depth of activity at the site was consequentially omitted. This is that the charcoal concerned was of pine, a tree that no longer existed locally by the fourth millennium. Because of this identification, it was assumed that the charcoal concerned must have been residual, given that there was no other demonstrable Mesolithic presence at the site: the pine charcoal had to have simply been lying about in the area where the later building was constructed, becoming swept into two of the post-holes. Yet this conclusion may have been premature, because there were actually five post-holes that contained recognizable quantities of pine charcoal. It follows that although the posts concerned had no connection with the structure itself, they might potentially alert us to the character of earlier activity on the site.
The presence of pine uprights here in the Medway valley echoes closely in date the pine posts erected in a row found close to Stonehenge, and those raised at Hambledon Hill, which we have already discussed. Post-hole 4834, moreover, arguably had a ramp to one side to enable a tall post to be raised, just as at least one of the Stonehenge posts had. What are we to make of this? If two of the posts present were actually raised several centuries before the Early Neolithic house/hall was built, it is possible that more of the posts evident in plan might have actually belonged to a setting of timber uprights of pine that marked the place as having been of some significance to Mesolithic communities over a long period. It may not be irrelevant that the two dated pine posts form an alignment similar to, but not precisely the same as, the orientation of the Early Neolithic hall. They might therefore have established a practice of marking place, and an orientation, that was subsequently recalled and referred back to by the builders of the hall long afterwards. This might even explain why the building was fully 1.5 m higher at its northern end than at its southern end. Even with the kind of plank-flooring that we now know (from the Dorstone Hill excavations, see Chapter 4) was present in at least some examples of this kind of structure, it was surely somewhat inconvenient to have to raise up the southern end of such flooring and attach it to the side-walls if the users of the structure wanted an approximately level floor (there was no indication of levelling down into the chalk of the hill for this purpose)?
Finally, it is worth noting in passing that although the White Horse Stone building went out of use by 3635 bce, the idea that the people concerned ‘moved on’ fairly quickly is open to question, and not only in relation to the use-life of the building itself. More broadly, the site produced enough evidence to make a reasonable case for continuous (or at least recurrent) activity there throughout the Neolithic period, in the form of the presence of pits containing Decorated Bowl pottery dating from the middle of the fourth millennium, Peterborough Ware from slightly later, and Grooved Ware from a variety of contexts dated to the third millennium (see, especially, Chapters 3 and 5 for the relevant chronologies and histories). It could, perhaps, be argued that the Early Neolithic occupants of this site above the Medway valley sent some of its earliest (or even later) occupants to colonize adjacent areas of Britain. Yet it nonetheless appears that this was a favoured location for activity across a broad span of time, from the Mesolithic through into the Bronze Age. The existence of traces of habitation relating to a series of different periods could be argued to be coincidental, but we would choose to place this alongside the numerous examples of the spatial coexistence of Mesolithic and Neolithic remains that we have already cited. This was clearly a place that had been persistently, or at least recurrently occupied over the long term, whether by the same people or by successive groups who acknowledged its accumulated history. In some cases, this process would doubtless have involved the incorporation of ‘outsiders’, perhaps with connections across a wide span of Britain and Europe, into an existing community with a long history and a strong folk attachment to the distinctive locality on the rolling hills to the north of (modern-day) Maidstone that can still be visited today, together with the ‘White Horse Stone’, itself a massive sarsen boulder, just up the lane.
New preoccupations, new histories... new people?
What we hope to have demonstrated in this extensive excursion into the archaeology of a single site, albeit standing as exemplar and metaphor for aspects of the ‘transition’ more widely, is that the evidence for the earliest Neolithic presence in Britain is highly malleable. This evidence can easily be read in a variety of different ways, often underwritten by quite different philosophical and methodological preoccupations. Most archaeologists are agreed that the various innovations that made up the Neolithic way of life were transmitted from the European continent to Britain towards the end of the fifth millennium bce, but they differ in imagining very different mechanisms by which this may have been achieved. To the non-specialist the differences between the three main competing ‘models’ of change may not appear especially great, since all three find a role for both ‘new people’ from the Continent and the established Mesolithic population. Moreover, all agree that from some time before 4000 bce the people living in Britain shared a new set of preoccupations, in terms of subsistence practice and diet; and that the process either of adopting or of insinuating a Neolithic way of being in(to) these islands meant the creation of new histories. Yet the respective roles of two communities involved, and the character of relations between them, differ considerably in the competing readings of the evidence.
One influential perspective is that offered by Alison Sheridan, which emphasizes the comparative isolation of Britain after the flooding of the English Channel in the period following the retreat of the ice sheets, and the submerging of the large island of Doggerland in the North Sea. British Mesolithic people had different material traditions from their European counterparts, and none of the innovations of the Neolithic appeared precociously before the arrival of groups of colonists, in contrast to the situation in southern Scandinavia. Small communities of pioneer agriculturalists, who would have had little or no prior contact with the indigenes, introduced the Neolithic assemblage to the ‘northwest European archipelago’. These groups arrived by boat, bringing all the necessary paraphernalia of farming settlement with them: seed corn, trussed-up animals, pots, and axes. Sheridan proposes a series of discrete episodes of colonization, each having a separate place of origin and destination, and each occasioned by a specific set of causal factors. The first of these was an abortive attempt on the part of people from western France to establish agricultural settlement in the west of Ireland, manifested in a group of bones of domesticated cattle found at the mid-fifth-millennium bce Mesolithic site of Ferriter’s Cove in Co. Kerry. Sheridan reasons that the animals concerned must have escaped or been pilfered from a Neolithic farmstead that has left no other material trace. A second burst of migration issued out of the Morbihan region of Brittany in the period 4300–4000 bce, and is represented by a number of small tombs with simple polygonal megalithic chambers, dispersed in coastal regions surrounding the Irish Sea. One such chamber, at Achnacreebeag in Argyll, contained a small, closed, carinated bowl bearing incised decoration in the form of a series of sets of nested arcs, which Sheridan compares with the ‘late Castellic’ pottery of north-west France, and suggests may be ancestral to the Beacharra-style ceramics of Scotland. Yet a number of authors have noted that the similarity of these tombs to those of Brittany is general rather than diagnostic, that none have produced particularly early radiocarbon determinations, and that if the pottery vessel were indeed of Castellic type this tradition continued until a time when Neolithic activity had in any case spread northwards into western Scotland. Sheridan argues that the scattering of groups of Breton farmers around the Irish Sea basin was a facet of a period of social dislocation in which a cultural order that was represented by large standing stones and massive long mounds was eclipsed by a new pattern of tombs containing megalithic chambers accessed by long stone passages.
The third and most significant of the incursions that Sheridan has hypothesized was the ‘Carinated Bowl Neolithic’, originating in north-east France and Belgium in an area influenced by the Chasséen and Michelsberg cultural groupings. From this region came people bearing the eponymous carinated pots, leaf-shaped arrowheads, polished flint and jadeitite axes, and timber buildings, as well as cereals and livestock, to settle along the coasts of eastern and southern Britain, and ultimately to penetrate into Ireland. These groups crossed the Channel and the North Sea around 4000 bce, propelled by growing population pressure in the Paris Basin and a disruption and displacement of settlement that followed the emergence of the Michelsberg group in the Low Countries after 4300 bce. Finally, Sheridan has proposed that in the period between 4000 and 3750 bce, another wave of colonists left Normandy, bringing pottery of Chasséen affinity and building cairns containing megalithic or drystone chambers. This she saw as demonstrated at the small round cairn at Broadsands in Devon, and in the ‘rotunda’, which (if indeed they existed as separate primary structures) represent the earliest elements of some long cairns in the Cotswold and Severn regions. These movements are explained as being the consequence of some form of depopulation taking place in north-west France at this time.
Sheridan’s arguments are generally based on the apparent similarities between individual artefacts and structures identified in different regions. Those between pots and stone tools found in Britain and the Continent are often striking, but the European examples generally form elements of more extensive assemblages, other aspects of which are not represented in Britain at all. This suggests that specific material forms were being selected by the first Neolithic generations from more extensive repertoires rather than simply being transferred as a whole. By contrast, the earlier Neolithic monuments of Britain and Ireland have more of a general ‘family resemblance’ to those on the Continent. While Sheridan is undoubtedly correct that where similar items occur in different regions it is reasonable to infer that there was some connection between the two, she also relies on the reverse argument: that where two areas do not share artefactual forms, there can have been no contact between them. Yet this is harder to sustain: different communities often maintain their separate identities by dressing differently and using different styles of objects, irrespective of the degree of contact between them. So the ‘isolation’ of Mesolithic Britain from the mainland may be a chimera.
Alasdair Whittle, Frances Healy, and Alex Bayliss, arising from their evaluation of the dating evidence presented in Gathering Time, propose a second point of view. They are sceptical of Sheridan’s multistranded view of the Neolithic transition, and reject the notion of separate movements of population into the Irish Sea area or south-west England in favour of a single episode of migration into the area surrounding the Thames Estuary (Kent and Essex) towards the end of the fifth millennium bce. This they see as being composed of a small founder pool of population which fissioned from a parent community in the Low Countries or north-east France over a period of only one or two generations. Thereafter a pattern of chain migration was established, with a stream of movement back and forth between the colony and its homeland gradually building up the scale of the Neolithic presence. While the earliest generations of farmers were exclusively migrants, more mixed populations would have begun to develop later on, as local people began to be integrated into the new way of life. The consequence of this pattern was that the beginning of Neolithization was slow and small- scale, but the process gradually gathered pace, and Neolithic things and activities began to penetrate into Sussex, Wessex, the Cotswolds, and the Upper Thames Valley. From around 3800 bce there was an abrupt shift in the tempo of change, as Neolithic activity spread more quickly into northern England, southern Scotland, the south-west peninsula, and Ireland. This may have constituted a ‘domino effect’ in which indigenous communities swiftly gave up their resistance to change and were integrated into new patterns of social relations and economic practices.
Both Sheridan on the one hand and Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss on the other propose that indigenous hunter-gatherers would eventually have been absorbed and assimilated into Neolithic social networks and ways of life, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from the incomers. But both perspectives identify the earliest Neolithic communities as enclaves that were internally homogeneous, having come from specific locations on the Continent, and existed completely separately from the native Mesolithic groups. David Miles’s description of a ‘White Horse Stone people’ powerfully evokes this sense of a group that shared a common origin and perhaps an ethnic identity. For Alison Sheridan, these founder communities were diasporic in character, linked both to each other and to their respective homelands.
It is this notion of the homogeneous founder enclave of pioneers in an unknown land that we question within these accounts of the earliest Neolithic in Britain. We would suggest that it tacitly relies on a parallel with the European colonization of the New World, and that it implies that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers had world views and ways of life that were as incommensurate as those of Native Americans and Pilgrim Fathers. The maritime colonization of an unfamiliar landscape by agriculturalists is at the least an extremely dangerous pursuit. Early colonies in the Americas, supported by the technology of iron, steel, and gunpowder and with galleons full of supplies, nonetheless often died out during their first winter. In recent years, archaeologists and anthropologists have stressed the notion of landscape learning, the importance of acquiring an understanding of soils, vegetation, wild animals, prevailing winds, precipitation, water sources, growing seasons, and communications routes before transferring one’s way of life into a new environment. Hunter-gatherers are good colonizers, flexible and adaptable in the way that they can accommodate their way of life to new conditions. But this is less the case for farmers, for whom minor variations in ecological conditions can mean the difference between life and death. Having first made landfall on an unknown coast, through unknown currents, and avoiding submerged rocks and other hazards, and having found a suitable location for settlement, Neolithic pioneers would then have had to construct shelters and create gardens while living off the land until their first harvest, if it came at all. Various writers, from Humphrey Case in the 1960s onwards, have suggested that ‘scouts’ may have reconnoitred target areas prior to colonization, but it is unclear whether they could have acquired the necessary information without protracted experience of a given landscape.
In The Birth of Neolithic Britain, one of the present authors outlined a third view of the what happened around 4000 bce, which proposed that the British Neolithic was a ‘co-creation’ achieved through contact and interaction between Continental Neolithic people and the indigenous British population. Rather than one group of people immediately and comprehensively replacing another, the principal process involved was one of transformation, in which one kind of society evolved into another. It was recognized that this was not simply a matter of Mesolithic people acquiring a set of innovations from a distance and ‘becoming Neolithic’, and that there would have been an appreciable exchange of personnel: population movement perhaps, but not simply between parent and founder communities. It is important to note at once that the model of Britain cut off from the Continent during the Mesolithic, and of Neolithic pioneers arriving on a mysterious, mist-shrouded shore is one that has been increasingly eroded in recent years. We have seen that Mesolithic mariners found their way from the Low Countries to the Scilly Isles, as well as accessing the offshore islands of Britain by boat. Recently, the DNA of wheat was identified from a palaeosol containing Mesolithic artefacts and dated to around 6000 bce at the offshore site of Bouldnor Cliff near the Isle of Wight. This, and the cattle bones from Ferriter’s Cove, are perhaps best attributed to the activity of Garrow and Sturt’s ‘maritime culture’, neither exclusively Mesolithic nor Neolithic. Similarly, it is possible that some of the jadeitite axes found in Britain, of styles made centuries before the start of the local Neolithic, were not heirlooms brought from the Continent by colonizing groups (where they were often taken out of circulation by burial when they went out of fashion and were replaced by new forms) (Fig. 2.7). Instead, their exchange may have represented a means of establishing or maintaining relationships between communities on either side of the Channel during the later fifth millennium. Significantly, few of the British examples have been found in contexts that were unambiguously Neolithic in date. Finally, as we have seen, the decorated oak timber found at Maerdy in Wales may represent evidence of Mesolithic people in Britain emulating the designs found engraved on the stones of megalithic tombs in Brittany.
It seems reasonable to deduce, therefore, that there was at least sporadic contact across the Channel and the North Sea before, during, and after 4000 bce. Mesolithic communities in southern coastal Britain would have been at least vaguely aware of the existence of domesticated plants and animals, and of new forms of material culture across the sea, once a Neolithic presence had been established in Normandy in the earlier fifth millennium, and in the Pas-de-Calais around 4300 bce. This knowledge may, of course, have taken the form of travellers’ tales, describing monstrous animals, magical seeds, and enchanted artefacts. Nonetheless, we suggest that the beginning of the Neolithic in Britain is as likely to have involved the overcoming of a resistance to innovation on the part of indigenous populations as it is the sudden appearance of groups of people bearing new species, artefacts, and practices. However, as we have already noted, this is not to say that the movement of population had no part to play in this process. In The Birth of Neolithic Britain, reference was made of Continental people ‘filtering in’ to indigenous British societies through a variety of mechanisms, bringing new knowledge and skills with them, and perhaps achieving social advancement of various kinds as a result. Here, we would like to expand on the role that such people might have played, whom we might be happier to describe as migrants rather than as pioneers, and still less as invaders.
In the contemporary world, migration is a more or less constant process that we are all familiar with. On the nightly television news we see images of mass population movements caused by wars, droughts, and famines. But far more common is the steady trickle of individuals and family groups moving in multiple directions, seeking new opportunities for innumerable reasons. Our view of migration in the past has perhaps been coloured by the European colonization of the Americas, already noted, and the great invasions that coincided with the collapse of the Roman Empire. Massive geopolitical forces that arguably had no parallel in prehistoric Europe occasioned both. Abrupt folk migrations of the kind imagined by the prehistorians of the 1930s may be quite uncommon, and Stefan Burmeister has argued that it is often necessary to ‘replace the supposition of prehistoric mass migrations with the recognition of a process of infiltration that took place over centuries’. The outcome of this kind of process might be equally significant in genetic terms, but the way in which it might have been lived and experienced at the time is another question.
The initial arrival of agricultural societies north of the Alps and the Carpathians in the late sixth millennium bce, in the form of the longhouse communities that are referred to as the Linearbandkeramik (after their pottery, decorated with incised bands), almost certainly did involve the displacement of entire communities. These probably spread by ‘leapfrog migration’ up the valley systems of central Europe, seeking out plateau-edge locations on the light, wind-blown soils of the loess. Thereafter, things became more complex, and the degree and form of migration, and the extent of indigenous involvement in Neolithization varied from region to region. As David Anthony has argued, ‘cultures don’t migrate, people do’, and in general it is only a very restricted and self-selecting subgroup within any population that is motivated to leave home and change its circumstances. In non-state societies, people are only rarely forced to relocate en masse by environmental catastrophes, resource crises, or conflicts. Far more often they fission or fragment owing to interpersonal conflicts: disputes over marriage partners or inheritances, killings, thefts, witchcraft accusations, feuds, and rivalries. The number of people who opt to leave a community for these reasons may be quite small: individuals, pairs of siblings, family groups, or aspiring leaders and their immediate followers. They will often represent the disaffected and disgruntled, outcasts and adventurers, or low-status persons seeking to establish themselves and acquire wealth. These episodes of leave-taking may be sporadic but ongoing, rather than forming large synchronized waves.
Migrants of this kind rarely travel to places that are entirely unknown to them: they generally exit from one familiar set of social relationships and enter into another. It is possible that this is the form that much of the movement of people in late-fifth-millennium north-west Europe will have taken. Individuals or small groups will have moved between communities amongst whom relationships had already been established. The most obvious example of this kind of movement would be the exchange of marriage partners between British and Continental societies and vice versa. Such people may have brought with them the skills of potting, cultivation, and animal herding, and this may have given them positions of authority and esteem in the groups that they joined. Some may simply have sought to attach themselves to indigenous groups in an opportunistic way, exploiting the possibilities offered by a society on the cusp of profound change. Others may have travelled in order to establish flint mines, drawing on local labour. Yet others again may have set themselves up as leaders or household heads, recruiting followers from the local population by offering the novel attractions of the Neolithic way of life. In some cases, the skills and resources that the newcomers brought with them will have facilitated the transformation of indigenous societies. In others, these arrivals may have been a catalyst for change. It follows that the beginning of the Neolithic in Britain may have been a time of upheaval, when social groupings were in flux, and communities were being refounded from disparate fragments. Describing the contemporary situation in southern Scandinavia, Douglas Price conveys this well, by saying that the Neolithic transition was a time of chaos and disorder, in which new social and economic options were being ‘auditioned’. The social groups that emerged from this turmoil differed from the hunting bands that preceded them in being more bounded and defined, and exercising exclusive rights to collective property in the form of cultivation plots, animal herds, and prized artefacts. They may have understood themselves as households, and we argue that timber halls such as that at White Horse Stone were both the symptom of this new kind of collective identity and the means by which it was established. Building the house was in part the mechanism by which house-based groups were brought into being, labouring together to produce the material symbol of their shared selfhood. Later, the construction of monumental tombs containing the remains of a community’s ancestral dead expressed the same idea in a more enduring fashion.
This argument implies that the first Neolithic societies in Britain were hybrids, composed of a mixture of ‘new people’ (perhaps initially modest in number) and indigenes. Moreover, the newcomers within any such group need not all have come from the same parent community. The movement of people between communities is a normal feature of social life, and they would have brought with them diverse cultural traditions, skills, technological know-how, and social expectations. In our view it may be hard to define a particular moment when the Neolithic ‘arrived’ in Britain and there may have been no clear period during which ‘pure’ Neolithic societies stood apart from ‘the locals’. Instead, the process may have been one of Continental and British societies progressively interpenetrating. The British Neolithic became archaeologically visible at the point where new kinds of community were brought into being, adopting a new material assemblage, new social relationships, and new subsistence practices. We believe that this interpretation best explains two of the most significant aspects of the Neolithic transition in Britain: the combination of continuity and change that we have already dwelt on at length, and the conspicuous pattern of cultural mixing and syncretism, what the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss referred to as bricolage.
Numerous previous accounts of the beginning of the Neolithic have pondered the problem that it is impossible to identify a single Continental homeland from which all of the cultural elements found together in Britain could be derived. A famous exchange on the subject took place many years ago between the archaeologists Jacquetta Hawkes and Stuart Piggott, debating whether the origins of the ‘Windmill Hill culture’ should be sought in the east or the west, central Europe or Iberia. Much more recently, Hugo Anderson-Whymark and Duncan Garrow have contemplated the earliest Neolithic ceramic and lithic assemblages of Devon and Dorset. Here, pottery shows affinities with both the carinated bowl tradition of eastern England and the baggy, lugged, and knobbed vessels of contemporary north-west France (see Chapter 3). Yet the tranchet arrowheads and decorated vase supports (cylindrical ceramic objects with dished upper surfaces, which may have been incense burners) commonly found with the latter are missing. Similarly, the earthen long barrows of eastern and southern Britain have close (if not precise) parallels in Denmark, but the pottery associated with them is quite different from the early funnel beakers found in the latter. The long cairns of the Cotswolds and south Wales have structural similarities to the passage tombs of Lower Normandy, but their chambers are more like those found in Brittany, while the presence of deep forecourts is perhaps borrowed from the earthen long mound tradition. And again, they are often associated with the ‘wrong’ pottery and stone tools. Chris Scarre has put it rather well in stating that the relationship between Continental and British megalithic structures is one of translation rather than transmission. These patterns of mixing, matching, and selective rejection are ones that can be better explained in terms of social flux, reformulation, and interaction than the simple transfer of populations from one region to another.
Genes and migrants
For some while it has been maintained by some archaeologists that the debate between these three models of Neolithization (broadly, ‘multistranded colonization’, ‘chain migration’, and ‘interaction and migrant exchange’) will eventually be resolved through the building up of a sufficient database of reliable aDNA (ancient, ‘preserved’ DNA, extracted from the bones and teeth of past people) samples, and their believable linkage to ‘modern’ populations defined using mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) from present-day populations. One of the first successful examples of this kind of work in the context of the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland was the reporting in 2016 of genome data for the remains of a woman from a passage tomb at Ballynahatty in Co. Down, dated to 3343–3020 cal bce. Her ancestry appeared to be of predominantly Near Eastern origin, but what proved remarkable and unexpected was that her closest affinities appeared to be with Spanish Neolithic groups, rather than those of central Europe. More recently, in a paper that is primarily concerned with rather later Beaker-age populations and their genetic relationships by Iñigo Olalde and colleagues (discussed further in Chapter 5), it is suggested that this pattern may be more widespread. This study compares Beaker-associated genetic material with that of various Neolithic groups in Europe, and indicates that the available sample of remains of British Neolithic people is genetically distinct from existing results drawn from Mesolithic people. These people also show a greater biological affinity to Iberian Neolithic groups than to central European ones, and it is argued that some portion of the ancestry of Neolithic communities in Britain must have been derived from the Atlantic zone. The extent of any contribution from either native Mesolithic people or central European Neolithic groups is not quantified. It is perhaps premature to comment in too much depth on the limited evidence presented in the Olalde publication, but as a kind of ‘thought experiment’ we seek here to demonstrate how the emerging pattern might articulate with the arguments that we have been discussing in this chapter.
The Ballynahatty result and the Olalde paper are challenging for all three existing models of Neolithization in Britain, since they imply that there was at some point a significant influx of population into Britain from the west, presumably ultimately connected with the spread of Neolithic things and practices westwards along the Mediterranean basin from the Near East. There are indications that this strand of dispersal had had some impact on the west of France during the fifth millennium bce, manifested in the presence of Cardial and Epicardial styles of pottery, and perhaps connected with the first emergence of megalithic funerary structures. This process was quite separate from the spread of Linearbandkeramik communities and their successors through central Europe from the Hungarian Basin, ultimately into Belgium, Holland, the Paris Basin, and Normandy.
For Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss, it is north-east France and Belgium that are identified as the probable source of a founding migrant population in south-east England, who might be expected to carry a genetic signature connected to this central European route, while for Sheridan the same area was the origin of the Carinated Bowl Neolithic, dispersed over much of Britain and Ireland. The aDNA results are potentially at variance with this: even in the Paris Basin, according to recent aDNA analysis by Maïté Rivollat and colleagues, a central European genetic element was present throughout the Early and Middle Neolithic. There are, however, several reasons to treat the existing results with a degree of caution at this stage. First, it appears that the findings are based on quite a small data set, since the Olalde study mentions a total of eighty individuals (nineteen of them of Beaker date) sampled in Britain for the entire period between 3900 and 1200 bce, from the start of the Neolithic until well into the Bronze Age. Those that date to the Early Neolithic are presumably derived principally from chambered tombs, earthen long barrows, caves, and causewayed enclosures. As will be made clear in Chapter 4, these represent only a very small minority of the people who lived and died in Neolithic Britain, and the means by which the majority of the dead were disposed of throughout the period remains a mystery to us. It is entirely possible that burial in funerary monuments was the prerogative of privileged lineages of Continental origin (while cave burial may have been reserved for people who were in some way ‘aberrant’), and that a more diverse population is not registering in the data set. Secondly, the available skeletal material is likely to be skewed toward particular periods, with something of a gap over the period of ‘transition’ itself. Mesolithic burials in Britain are concentrated in the ninth to seventh millennia bce, while those human remains attributable to the fifth millennium are found principally in western Scotland, and may not provide a representative picture of cross-Channel interactions in the south of England. Those of Neolithic date are likely to be more numerous after the proliferation of funerary monuments of various sorts, from 3800 bce onwards. In other words, it is probable that the aDNA evidence will present us with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ picture and that, as with other categories of archaeological evidence, it will be possible to read this in a number of different ways. For instance, it may be difficult to demonstrate whether any genetic change was sudden or gradual.
However, if, for the sake of argument, future work demonstrates that the population of Neolithic Britain had a genetic profile primarily similar to that of Neolithic Iberia, and contained a significant component ultimately derived from western Asia, then one straightforward explanation would be that such a population entered Britain at the start of the Neolithic, bringing a full suite of novel resources and artefacts with it, and swiftly displaced the indigenous hunter-gatherers. Nevertheless, we submit that such a model cannot easily account for several aspects of the evidence that we have been emphasizing in this chapter: the various forms of continuity from Mesolithic to Neolithic that we have identified, most notably the enduring significance attached to particular locations; the selectivity involved in the creation of British Neolithic artefactual assemblages, in contrast to those on the Continent; and the mixing and merging of multiple Neolithic cultural traditions of diverse geographical origins from the start of the period.
Can our focus on interaction and ‘co-creation’ provide an alternative perspective? We believe that it can. The points that we continue to emphasize are: that particular economic practices and forms of material culture were not necessarily the exclusive prerogative of people with a specific genetic signature; that Mesolithic and Neolithic people were essentially similar in their capacities and achievements, and that the former were sufficiently sophisticated and organized to have not been immediately displaced by an incursion of modest size; that it would be difficult for maritime pioneers to establish a Neolithic way of life in Britain without the active cooperation of indigenous people; that there appears to have been a transmission of cultural knowledge and understandings of various kinds across the boundary between Mesolithic and Neolithic; and that the British Neolithic was, for whatever reasons, materially distinct from its Continental counterparts from the beginning.
In one possible scenario, the first few generations of Neolithization in Britain were messy and complex, with new kinds of hybrid community forming predominantly in the south-east of England, drawing on both indigenous people and incomers from diverse points of origin. In this chaotic situation, local and exotic traditions were mixed together, and new social relationships and patterns of exchange began to fall into place. If the indigenous component of this formation was modest in size, the number of incomers from north-east France, Belgium, and other regions may also have been limited, so the composition of these groups may have changed over time. In this initial period, pottery assemblages were small, and contained few vessel forms. The use of domesticated plants and animals may have been quite limited in extent. Very few if any monuments were constructed, but flint mines may have been a focus of considerable interest and activity.
As a stable pattern of Neolithic societies began to emerge, external contacts shifted toward the west, bringing new cultural influences (manifested in western French pottery forms progressively added to existing assemblages, and megalithic architectural devices) and establishing an enduring migration stream. Ceramic assemblages now became larger and more diverse, cereal cultivation became more common, and labour began to be invested in large monumental structures. In this version of events, migration was not synonymous with Neolithization; rather, it was the consequence of the foundation of hybrid Neolithic societies that served as attractors for external migrants, who progressively swelled their numbers. Equally, migration was not a discrete event, but a protracted process played out over many generations, which may have begun to escalate toward the thirty-eighth century bce. This might explain why Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss identify an abrupt acceleration in the spread of Neolithic things and practices through Britain and Ireland from 3800 bce onwards. In their argument, this was the point where indigenous people were drawn into the expanding Neolithic network, but we are effectively suggesting the opposite. As the number of incomers increased, indigenous people may have been progressively squeezed out and marginalized: perhaps deliberately excluded, but equally perhaps as a population of finite size, simply genetically out-competed by one that was being continually ‘topped up’ from outside over a period of centuries. By the mature stages of the Early Neolithic, the population of southern Britain may have been predominantly similar to groups in Atlantic Europe in biological terms. Nonetheless they had been fundamentally transformed by their encounter with the Mesolithic societies that they had gradually displaced. Indeed, they may even have understood themselves to be ‘native’ to their regions, able to cite connections and continuities back to a distant past. Even if the indigenes had now wasted away, they had left an indelible mark on their successors, in the same way that North Americans of European descent today use Native American place names, eat beef jerky and pot roast, play lacrosse, wear parkas and buckskins, and use snowshoes, canoes, and lassoes.
The complexity of the population dynamics that may have been involved in the beginning of the Neolithic period in Britain is well illustrated by a recent analysis of strontium isotopes in human remains from two long cairns in the Black Mountains of Wales. At Ty Isaf, all the skeletons investigated belonged to people who had apparently spent their childhood in the immediate vicinity, ingesting water containing the local strontium signature. But at Penywyrlod, ten bodies were of people who had grown up a little distance away, perhaps in modern Herefordshire or Worcestershire. This might be an indication that the community had migrated locally during their lifetime, but more likely it suggests that the two areas were linked by habitual patterns of movement. The final skeleton from Penywyrlod, radiocarbon-dated to 3770–3630 cal bce, had potentially been born in a rather more distant location, perhaps north-west France. The Penywyrlod burials were not a founder community that had come directly from the Continent. The single person of exotic origin was somewhat later in date than any of the colonizing movements that have been hypothesized. This therefore vividly demonstrates that the large-scale processes of transformation were punctuated by periodic comings and goings that may have been more personal and intimate in character.
Into fourth-millennium ‘history’
The story of what has come to be known, inelegantly, as ‘the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition’ has preoccupied prehistorians for several decades, as reflected in the lengthy discussion of the question in this chapter. The divide between what are routinely seen as two highly divergent economic systems, or at least lifeways, has, as we noted in Chapter 1, arisen to some extent from the existence of two contrasting traditions of research into prehistoric peoples, arguably exacerbated by the nature and history of modern ethnography. There have traditionally been those anthropologists who study ‘hunter-gatherers/foragers’, those who study agriculturalists (including so-called ‘shifting’ agriculturalists and horticulturalists), and those who study pastoralists and nomads. We need now, for the purposes of the present book at least, to lay these questions aside and to begin to trace the history of these new Neolithic communities forward from the earliest centuries of the fourth millennium bce. Before doing so, however, we want to conclude this chapter with a renewed emphasis on what was different, that is, what was truly transformational, from the period of ‘transition’. This of course comes down to more than a matter of how livings were made.
We have noted the variety of innovations in material culture that occurred at or near the beginning of the fourth millennium bce, and how these innovations represented a subtle change in both indigenous and ‘imported’ practices. While milk residues in pottery point to one of the consequences of the adoption of animal husbandry, the wholesale change in lifestyle that came with the keeping of domesticated animals was not simply innovative—it was transformational. While pigs, sheep, and goats could be ‘run’ in areas beyond the living-places of each Neolithic human community provided that they were protected from predators, it was the keeping of cattle that most tied those communities to their animals. And cattle provided a source of accumulation of social and economic capital—of wealth—that no Mesolithic community had enjoyed. Archaeological deposits right from the start of the fourth millennium reflect the new preoccupation with cattle, and not only in the sense that these animals became ubiquitous and demanded so much caring for. Finds of cattle bones are both pervasive and often numerically dominant in early fourth-millennium (as well as in many later) deposits, such that it is clear that they were regarded as a, or perhaps even the, dominant individual food source in certain situations, and especially for feasting. So, for example, while red deer bones were present in the Coneybury pit, near the later site of Stonehenge, and roe deer bones were abundant, there were more bones of cattle in the deposit than of any other species.
But it is not only how numerous such bones were, but also how they were treated, and with what other materials they were associated, that provide an indication of a different aspect of human preoccupation with cattle. Time and again the bones of cattle are associated with human remains in a wide range of contexts, and this association continues throughout the Neolithic period. While such repeated associations could simply be symbolic of the centrality of cattle to the new farming economy, and there could be aspects of the keeping of cattle and the intimacy with which it was necessary to coexist, as a social resource they also had some other important potentials. These latter will be explored further in Chapters 4 (concerning capital) and 6 (concerning history).
Equally, the creation of buildings that were large enough to be used collectively signalled a fundamental change in the way that societies were ordered. ‘Being Neolithic’ involved more than the use of new classes of material item and subsistence resources and the performance of new practices. Rather, it concerned different ways of behaving, socially, and different conceptions of social and material value. New kinds of social relations became possible, expressed through new ways of creating and sustaining obligations, including the formation of alliances. Investment in more permanent, or at least more labour-intensive, constructions meant an investment also in place and in the marshalling of physical resources that were of a different order than hitherto. And yet there is evidence—if only we are able to look adequately closely, with an eye to the importance of too-easily dismissed observations—that the communities concerned were well aware of the importance of their own histories as communities.
This phenomenon of a Neolithic awareness of history and its unfolding is only just beginning to be recognized, and to explore its implications we shall return to a further very brief discussion of Warren Field, Crathes (see Fig. 3.2). The recutting of the tops of the ‘Mesolithic’ pits either side of 4000 bce was not an isolated act, because just over 100 m to the east a timber hall some 22 m long by 8 m wide was built very close to 3750 bce. Associated with this hall that was deliberately burnt down less than fifty years after its construction was a small but striking assemblage of open carinated bowls. Intriguingly, the hall shared a broadly similar orientation to the pit alignment, and it is difficult to see how this represents anything other than direct continuity of tradition and awareness of ancestral presence and place. And on final reflection, it is noting the way that a Mesolithic presence had shaped the way in which Neolithic people inhabited the same locality, even though by this time their mode of existence had become quite different.
