Castleden Britain 3000 BC

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80399-559-5
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 258 Seiten

Were prehistoric people like us? How did they live, what did they think and how did they see their world? 3000 BC was a moment of great significance in the British Isles: Avebury, Stonehenge and many other major monuments were at vital stages in their construction and use, and writing - often regarded as the ultimate hallmark of civilisation - made its first appearance in Europe. In this revised and updated edition of Britain 3000 BC, Rodney Castleden uses the evidence of archaeological investigations to recreate the society, customs, economy, religion and ritual of Britain 5000 years ago, and to reveal the lost world of prehistoric people. From the well-built stone houses of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands to the more primitive wooden huts of Honington in Suffolk, Castleden enters the dwellings and lifestyles of neolithic communities and delves into the nature of their society, their trading networks and positive obsession with death. Britain 3000 BC will be fascinating reading for everyone who is interested in prehistory, archaeology and the magnificent monuments our ancient ancestors left behind.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Castleden, Rodney

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

BRITAIN: A NEWLY FORMED ISLAND

Ten thousand years ago the glaciers that had for thousands of years covered the mountains of Wales and Scotland melted away. Temperatures rose steeply and small bands of hunter-gatherers became established on the lowlands and round the coasts.1 Not that the coasts of 8000 BC would be recognisable today. Huge volumes of ocean water were still locked up in land-ice in Canada, and the level of the sea was still 100ft (30m) lower than it is today. A huge area of what is now shallow sea off the south and east coasts of England was exposed as a dry treeless plain.2

People and animals were able to walk to and fro between Britain and the European mainland, crossing the exposed and dried-out floor of the English Channel and southern North Sea, until as late as 5000 BC. Only then did Britain become an island. To the east, like stepping stones between the Netherlands and Norfolk, an archipelago of five small islands remained, together with one large island in the middle of the North Sea, later submerged to form the Dogger Bank. The fast-rising sea had swamped those stepping stones by 3000 BC, making a North Sea coastline recognisably like today’s. The sea crept in like a slow but relentless rising tide, drowning many of the hunter-gatherers’ settlements – which is one reason why we know relatively little of the background to the neolithic transformation.3

When the neolithic began, in 4100 BC, the first farmers must have ferried their livestock and seed to Britain by water across the Channel or the southern North Sea.4

In 3000 BC the climate reached its optimum. In the English Midlands summers reached their warmest ever (17.4°C on average) and winters their mildest ever (5.0°C);5 both summer and winter temperatures were to drop by at least one degree by 2000 BC. It was the warmest it would get – a degree warmer than today. There were even so big contrasts in weather from year to year, just as there are now.6

The sea by then had risen to within 13ft (4m), perhaps even 6ft, of its present level.7 In south-east England the rising sea created a ragged submergent coastline with many headlands and islands, such as Sheppey, Thanet, Wight and Selsey, separated from one another by winding estuaries, inlets, backwaters and broad shallow bays. Subsequent wave action has eroded away many of the headlands, trimmed back the islands and silted up the estuaries, inlets, bays and creeks to make the coastline smoother and straighter. Flooded river mouths that were long fingers of the sea in the neolithic have silted to become broad floodplains (such as the Arun, Adur, Sussex Ouse and the Stour in Kent), while shallow bays have become expanses of alluvial plain: Pevensey Levels and the Romney and Walland Marshes.8 Along the coast of the Fens, Firth of Forth and Somerset Levels there were large areas of marshland with reed-beds. The reeds were both a refuge for wildfowl and a valuable resource in themselves – for roof thatch.

The unresistant cliffs of glacial sediment that stretch along the North Sea coast from Holderness south to Suffolk stood significantly further to the east in 3000 BC. In many places the coastline is still retreating by around 6ft per year, and in some, like Covehithe, by nearly 20ft. The mid-neolithic coastline of eastern England probably lay 3 miles or more to the east of the present shore.

Christchurch harbour. The rising sea drowned the Avon valley to make a perfect natural harbour.

The west coast of Britain is made of more resistant rocks and rates of both erosion and silting have been much slower. The main changes there have been caused by the land rising as a result of glacial unloading. Although the ice caps covering Wales and Scotland melted away long ago, the recovery still continues. In Scotland the coastal flooding caused by rising sea level reached a maximum in 3000 BC, creating a drowned coastline. Since then the rising land, freed of the weight of the ice, has outstripped the rising sea, so the Highland coastline has emerged from the sea and the neolithic coastline is stranded inland, but there are many local variations. Loch Lomond was a sea-loch in 3500 BC, but by 3000 BC the rising land level had cut it off from the sea, turning it into a huge freshwater lake. Loch Sheil remained a sea-loch for a time and did not become a lake until 2200 BC.9

Timeline: environment and culture.

1.   Long-term average temperatures for central England, derived from various sources.

2.   Mainly from the work of Mike Baillie.

3.   The names for cultural phases are by no means definitive. Others could be proposed, but they underline the growing dissatisfaction with the names on the first column.

Watersmeet.

Then, as now, the people of Britain were living in an environment that was changing and new. The forces of nature were gradually wearing away hills and mountains and building up valley floors, but in most places these changes were imperceptibly slow. Over most of Britain, especially inland, the land surface was very close to its present shape, within a metre. The broad features of the landscape, the shapes of the hills and vales, the views and the lines of intervisibility would have been just as they are today. We live in very much the same landscape as the builders of Stonehenge.

Large-scale climatic and ecological shifts were nevertheless under way. Britain shared in a continent-wide change in vegetation. This was partly the result of human impact, partly the result of external causes. There were several big volcanic eruptions, at least nine in the twenty-eight years beginning in 3201 BC, and those are likely to have brought on serious environmental changes.10 Water levels in African lakes dropped abruptly, which led on to other disastrous ecological changes in Africa.11 By 3000 BC there was a huge drop in methane levels in the atmosphere (about 8 percent), which resulted from a reduction in the tropical wetlands. It is not clear if this was a result of the eruption sequence or, as has been suggested, the collapse of the system of ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean, which also led to a large-scale expansion of the Sahara.12 Environmental systems around the world were in upheaval. It looks as though a spate of major volcanic eruptions was directly responsible for ecological problems in Britain, in the shape of three phases of impeded tree growth, in 3200–3191, 3183–3176 and 3172–3161 BC. Around 3193 tree growth came to a virtual standstill.13

THE WILDWOOD

The wildwood that covered Britain was nevertheless still the richest ecological resource imaginable. The hunter-gatherers had colonised a meagre subarctic tundra. A few birch trees crept in and then, as the climate warmed, a few pine trees, then an open pine wood. By 4000 BC woodlands covered much of Britain with a leafy canopy at about 15m, except for a few patches of grassland in infertile areas like the Norfolk Breckland. By 3000 BC the woodlands had reached their most complete development, but even then the clearance had begun.14 Wherever there were settlements, the woodland was cleared to make space for houses and create grazing for livestock. The early neolithic was dominated by pastoral not arable farming.

Mountains rising above 1600ft (500m) peeped out above the sea of trees, the summits of Snowdonia, the Pennines, Cumbria, the Cheviots and the Scottish Highlands were bald, bleak and bare. Some landscapes now windswept and treeless, like Shetland, were then wooded. Coastal wetlands like the Fens were covered with pine, oak and yew woods.15 Orkney seems never to have been wooded, though specimens of yew, oak and hawthorn grew there, providing a skimpy supply of firewood; dried seaweed was probably the main fuel.16 When the great tomb of Maes Howe was raised in 2900 BC, it was built on heathland; only later was the surrounding land turned over to agriculture.17

The wildwood was richly varied. In the highlands generally, the sessile oak dominated. Along the Great Glen and on the mountains on either side lay the already ancient Caledonian Forest, a relic of the pine forest that had briefly covered Britain in older, colder times. The birchwoods in Caithness were similarly left over from a colder past. Blanket bog had begun to develop on the Welsh mountains, but only in small areas; it did not dominate the moorland landscape as it later would.

The wildwood is often described as an oakwood, but over large areas of poorly drained lowland, such as the Lowlands of Scotland and the waterlogged clay areas of the English Midlands, the wet-loving alder was dominant. Alders grew in East Anglia and south-east England too, but there warmth-loving lime was dominant. In the West Country mixed oak forest covered everything except the high moors where only cotton-grass and sphagnum moss grew on blanket-peat.18 In the Fens great bog-oaks were drawn up like rhubarb in the forests with their 30m canopies, to make abnormally tall, straight oak trunks – forest giants such as are seen nowhere today, and ideal for making timber circles.

Remnant of the ancient Caledonian Black Forest at Glenlyon (Jean Williamson/Mick Sharp).

When an old tree died or blew down in a gale, sunlight reached the otherwise dark forest floor to make a small woodland glade where low-growing plants could flourish: scabious, cuckoo-flower, bugle. This was important in maintaining biodiversity because, apart from these clearings, the forest covered large swathes of landscape. In the English Midlands even the river floodplains were wooded. The Nene floodplain at...