THE PREHISTORY OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND

THE OFFSHORE ISLANDS

The existence of Britain and Ireland posed a problem for the geographers of
the Classical world. Their experience was limited to the Mediterranean and
they had devised a scheme which saw the cosmos as a circular disc with the
sea at its centre. For Hecataeus of Miletus, the land extended northwards into
what is now Europe, southwards into Africa, and to the east as far as India, but
beyond all these regions there was a river, Oceanus, which encircled the earth
and marked the outer limit of the world (Fig. 1.1). Only the dead could reach
its farther shore. There were two routes communicating directly between the
inner sea and the most distant margin of the land. One was by the Arabian
Gulf, whilst the second led through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic
(Cunliffe 2001a: 2–6).
Strictly speaking, the two islands studied in this book were beyond the limits
of the world and so they could not exist, yet, as often happens, theory came into
conflict with practical experience. Long before the expansion of the Roman
Empire there were reasons for questioning the traditional cosmology. Although
it is no longer believed that Stonehengewas designed by a Mycenaean architect,
there seem to have been some connections between Britain and the Aegean
during the second millennium BC, although these links are confined to a few
portable artefacts and would have been indirect (A. Harding 2000: chapter 13).
In the first millennium, contacts between the Mediterranean and these outer
islands intensified during what is known as the Atlantic Bronze Age (Ruiz-
G´alvez Priego 1998), and, later still, there are ceramic vessels of Greek origin
among the finds from the Thames and other English rivers (Harbison and Laing
1974). Since metalwork of local manufacture has been discovered in the same
locations, there is no reason to dismiss the exotic items as spoils of the Grand
Tour.
The paradoxical status of Britain and Ireland became even more apparent
during the mid-first century BC when Julius Caesar twice invaded southern England, and again after the Roman Conquest which took place a century
later. It was a source of political prestige to have travelled to the limits of the
land, and still more to have annexed territory on the outermost edges of the
world. Perhaps that is why the emperor Agricola was so anxious to subjugate
Orkney, the archipelago off the northern tip of Scotland, and even made plans
for an invasion of Ireland (Fitzpatrick 1989).
The very existence of Britain and Ireland seemed impossible to conceive,
and yet they had actually been known to travellers for some time. Pytheas
explored the Atlantic seaways about 320 BC, but his account was not always
believed (Cunliffe 2001b). Tacitus says that it was in AD 85 that the Roman
fleet circumnavigated the entire coastline of Britain and first established that
it was an island (Rivet and Smith 1979: 93). Even then, people were unsure
of its location, and a popular view placed Britain somewhere between Spain
and Gaul. The Greek geographer Strabo supposed that Ireland was further
to the north. Still more distant was Thule, a frozen landmass that had been
described by Pytheas. This was probably Iceland. It became identified with the
Shetland Islands simply because they seemed to represent the furthest point
where human settlement was possible. Again the sheer remoteness of these
places was what impressed Roman writers (Cunliffe 2001b).
Many of these confusions were not resolved until Britain and Ireland were
mapped by Ptolemy in the middle of the second century AD. This was a scientific
project which drew on observations assembled from a variety of existing
sources. It was not the result of original exploration, and it formed only a small
part of a larger programme of mapping the then-known world. Ptolemy’s map
revealed the outlines of both the main islands, prominent capes and headlands,
the mouths of important rivers, and the positions of certain mountains and
forests. It also included a variety of significant places within the interior, but
it was never his intention to document the pattern of settlement (Rivet and
Smith 1979: chapter 3). Apart from three important features, the map was
basically correct. Following earlier practice, Ireland was still positioned too far
to the north. Smaller islands were also located inaccurately and were sometimes
shown further from the mainland than was actually the case. A more
important difficulty was the depiction of part of Scotland which seemed to
extend along an east-west axis, where the experience of early sailors showed
that it should have run from south to north. Rivet and Smith have suggested
that this arose because of confusion between two different locations
represented by the same name, Epidium (1979: 111–13). In their view the
map can be reorientated to give a better approximation of the coastline
(Fig. 1.2).
Such early accounts also provide evidence of the original names of the largest
islands. Britain was first known as ‘insula Albionum’, the island of the Albiones.
Later, that was replaced by Pretannia, which soon became Britannia. Ptolemy’s account distinguishes between Megale Britannia (Great Britain) which refers to
the larger island, and Mikra Britannia (Little Britain) which describes Ireland.
Elsewhere he refers to them as Alvion and Hivernia, respectively. Ireland was
better known by the Greek name Ierne or its Latin equivalent Hibernia (Rivet
and Smith 1979: 37–40).
Ptolemy’s map of the islands was conceived as a strictly scientific exercise,
but accounts of their inhabitants took a different form. Although these texts
are sometimes characterised as ethnography, they were conceived within a
literary genre which stressed the important differences between the civilised
populations of Greece and Rome and the barbarians with whom they came
into contact. Indeed, it seems as if geographical distance from these centres
of high culture was one way of assessing the features of different populations.
Thus those who traded with the Roman world were held in more esteem
than other groups; the British were more backward than the Gauls; and the
inhabitants of Ireland were more primitive still ( J. Taylor 2000). Such accounts
were composed according to well-established conventions. Very little of what
they said was based on first-hand observation, and many of their contents
disagree with the findings of modern archaeology. If Britain and Ireland existed
after all, it was important to emphasise that in cultural and geographical terms
they remained extremely remote.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BRITISH AND IRISH PREHISTORY
Ireland and Britain were at the limits of the Roman world, but they were also
placed on the outer rim of Europe. Much of lowland Britain was eventually
incorporated in the Roman Empire, but Ireland remained outside it altogether,
and so for significant periods of time did the area that is occupied by Scotland
today. Given their marginal position, what can the prehistory of these small
islands contribute to a series concerned with world archaeology?
There are several answers to this question, and these will serve to introduce
some of the main themes of this book. The first point follows from what
has been said already. The inhabitants of Britain and Ireland do not seem to
have experienced the drastic changes that characterised other parts of prehistoric
Europe, and they remained largely beyond the influence of societies in
the Mediterranean. In a recent paper Patrice Brun (2004) has considered the
emergence of social stratification over the period from 2500 BC. He follows the
conventional distinction between ‘chiefdoms’, ‘complex chiefdoms’, and ‘early
states’ and studies a series of regions extending from the Aegean to Scandinavia
and from the Balkans to Spain. All these areas underwent major social changes.
Itwas only ‘England’ that seems to have remained largely unaffected. Here what
he calls simple chiefdoms existed continuously from the mid-third millennium
BC until the Roman period. Brun acknowledges that there are problems with
this kind of scheme, but he also makes an important point. It seems as if the
sequence in Britain and Ireland followed a different course from other parts
of prehistoric Europe. For that reason their distinctive character deserves to be
investigated in detail.
Within that lengthy sequence certain periods and regions have featured in
wider discussions of theoretical archaeology. The artefact record has supplied
some influential case studies concerned with production and exchange. Ian
Hodder (1982a) investigated the distribution of Neolithic axes, and so did
Sylvia Chappell (1987) in a study carried out from the United States. The
exchange of fine metalwork has also played an important role in archaeological
writing. The contents of certain exceptionally rich burials in Wessex are
considered in discussions of prehistoric chiefdoms by Colin Renfrew (1973)
and Timothy Earle (1991), and during later periods the production and distribution
of metalwork provided the basis for Michael Rowlands’s influential
study of kinship, alliance, and exchange in ancient society (Rowlands
1980).
The early monuments of Britain and Ireland have also inspired some studies
with a wider application. These include Colin Renfrew’s accounts of monument
building and social organisation in southern England and in Orkney
(Renfrew 1973; 1979) and Ian Hodder’s discussion of the relationship between
Neolithic houses and more specialised monuments (1982b: 218–29). Michael
Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1982) have investigated Neolithic mortuary rites in southern Britain, and Tilley himself has published widely quoted interpretations
of several prehistoric landscapes inWales and England (Tilley 1994).
The ‘royal sites’ of Iron Age Ireland have also attracted international attention
(Wailes 1982).
These examples are well known, but each of them has been selected to
illustrate a particular thesis, and there is a risk of viewing them in isolation. Thus
the archaeology of Stonehenge and the surrounding landscape may be very well known, but it is rarely considered in relation to the other developments
that happened during the same period. The same applies to the archaeology
of megaliths, whether these are the passage tombs of the Boyne Valley in
Ireland, the monuments on the Scottish island of Arran, or their counterparts
in Orkney. All too often such examples are divorced from their chronological
and regional settings and their distinctive character is lost in the search for
general principles. Many of these studies were published as short papers in
which it was impossible to develop these ideas in any detail. This book sets
such research in a wider context.
Those studies were concerned with theoretical issues and simply drew on
Britain and Ireland for examples. There is another way of thinking about
their distinctive archaeology. It has four outstanding features which deserve
investigation in their own right. The first is the extraordinary abundance of
monumental architecture in both these islands. Structures like Newgrange,
Maeshowe, Avebury, and Stonehenge are very famous, and the same applies
to later prehistoric monuments like Navan Fort or Maiden Castle, but they
are all too rarely considered in their local settings. Instead they are treated as
instances of a wider phenomenon and investigated in terms of general processes.
These may involve such apparently practical issues as prehistoric engineering,
territorial organisation, and ancient warfare, or more abstract ideas about the
importance of ancestors, cosmology, and ritual. The megaliths of Neolithic
Ireland have featured in a Darwinian model of mating behaviour, on the one
hand, and in discussions of shamanism, on the other (Aranyosi 1999; Lewis-
Williams and Pearce 2005: chapter 8). Sometimes it is the details of these
structures that have attracted the most attention. The chambered tombs in
the Boyne Valley contain roughly half the megalithic art in Western Europe
(G. Eogan 1999), and the layout of Stonehenge and allied monuments has
been studied by archaeoastronomers for nearly a hundred years (Ruggles 1999:
136–9).
A second feature of prehistoric Britain and Ireland is their exceptional
material wealth. This is partly due to the distribution of natural resources –
copper is quite widely available, there is tin in southwest England and gold in
Ireland – but it also depends on the distinctive manner in which finished artefacts
were deposited (Bradley 1998a). Discoveries of high-quality metalwork
do not provide a representative sample of the artefacts that were once available,
for their raw material could easily have been recycled. Instead these objects
were deposited in graves and in natural locations such as rivers and bogs. That
is why they have survived to the present day. Nor were all these objects of local
manufacture, for many of them were made from foreign ores and deposited
far from their sources. The Thames, for example, is nowhere near any deposits
of copper or tin, and yet it includes one of the highest densities of prehistoric
weapons anywhere in Europe. Both Britain and Ireland participated in the
circulation of metalwork over considerable distances, and they are not alone in containing an exceptional number of votive deposits. It is the range of contacts
illustrated by these finds which makes them so remarkable.
A third element is perhaps the product of an exceptionally long history
of landscape archaeology in these islands. In Britain, this began with the
work of antiquarians like John Aubrey and William Stukeley (Sweet 2004),
and, in Ireland, it intensified with the topographical records collected by the
Ordnance Survey a hundred and fifty years ago (Herity and Eogan 1977:
7–9, Waddell 2005: 97-103). Both countries shared a tradition of documenting
surface remains, especially those of earthworks. This first drew attention to
a feature that still distinguishes their archaeology from that of other regions. It
seems as if the landscape was subdivided by fields and boundaries at an earlier
date, and sometimes on a larger scale, than any other part of prehistoric Europe.
In the later years of the nineteenth century the tradition of topographical survey
extended to settlement excavation, and the early twentieth century saw
the development of aerial survey. In England, this revealed new features of the
prehistoric landscape at a time when similar methods were rarely used in other
countries.
The final characteristic of Britain and Ireland is the most obvious of all,
for both are islands located some distance from Continental Europe. Each is
accompanied by a series of much smaller islands with a distinctive archaeology
of their own (Fig. 1.3). A number of them provide important evidence of
prehistoric activity, such as Rathlin Island and Lambay Island off the Irish coast,
both of which include stone axe quarries, or the Isle of Man midway between
Ireland and England, with its distinctive chambered tombs. Just as important
are the archipelagos where many monuments and settlements survive. These
include the Inner and Outer Hebrides to the west of Scotland, and Orkney
and Shetland which are usually referred to as the Northern Isles. The list could
be much longer, but in each case the archaeological record has some unusual
features.
This raises a wider issue, for it is sometimes supposed that island societies
develop a peculiar character of their own. They can build extraordinary
field monuments. This argument has been influential in the archaeology of
the Mediterranean (Broodbank 2000) and has been applied to Polynesia, too
(Kirch 2000). It could certainly account for such remarkable phenomena as the
megalithic tombs of Neolithic Orkney or the Iron Age towers of the Hebrides
and the Northern Isles, but on a larger scale it might also characterise Britain
and Ireland as a whole, for they include unusual forms of architecture which
are not known in Continental Europe. Perhaps the most distinctive are the
henges and cursus monuments of the Neolithic period.
Two of these observations help to set the limits of this account. In a sense
this study cannot commence until both these regions were islands. Before
that time the area occupied by England, Wales, and Scotland was continuous
with Continental Europe and should not be considered in its own terms. This investigation begins when their geography assumed more or less its present
form, although the territories of present-day Scotland and Ireland may have
been uninhabited. This is also an account of their prehistory, and, although it is
not an entirely satisfactory term, it helps to define where this account should
end. It concludes with their discovery by travellers from the Mediterranean
and their incorporation in a wider world.
THE SENSE OF ISOLATION
Britain and Ireland did not assume their present forms simultaneously, and
this had serious consequences for their ecology and for the hunter gatherers
who lived there. Ireland was cut off by the sea at a time when Britain was still
attached to the European mainland. That happened well before Ireland had any
inhabitants and certainly before a number of animal species could have become
established. They include wild cattle, elk, red deer, and roe deer, none of which
formed part of the native fauna. Britain, on the other hand, was continuously
settled from the end of the Ice Age and had already been colonised by these
species before itwas separated from the Continent. Because this happened quite
late in the development of postglacial vegetation, it also had thirty percent
more plant species than its western neighbour (Bell and Walker 2004: 167–
8). The time interval is extremely significant. It seems as if Ireland became
detached from southwest Scotland by a narrow channel. This had happened by
about 12,000 BC as the polar ice cap melted and sea levels rose. The English
Channel had formed by 8000 BC, and the fertile plain that linked what is now
eastern England to northern France, the Low Countries, and Denmark was
gradually reduced in size between about 10,000 and 6000 BC, when Britain
was completely cut off from the Continent (Shennan and Andrews 2000;
Fig. 1.4). Finds from the bed of the North Sea show just how important this
area had been (B. Coles 1998; Flemming, ed. 2004).
The earliest settlement of Ireland seems to have taken place by boat around
8000 BC (Woodman 2004). By this stage the North Sea plain was already
threatened by the rising water, but it was before large areas of territory had
been lost. The earliest dates from Scotland are of the same order. They begin
around 8500 BC and increase in frequency after a thousand years. They are
similar to those from west and north Wales (David and Walker 2004). The
Isle of Man was separated from Britain and Ireland by about 8000 BC and
may also have been colonised by sea. It appears that this took place sometime
before 6500 BC (McCartan 2004). Some of the islands off the west coast of
Scotland were also used from an early date. Orkney was eventually settled by
hunter gatherers, and there are other early sites in the Shetland Islands (Melton
and Nicholson 2004). It is uncertain whether the Outer Hebrides were occupied,
although the results of pollen analysis do raise that possibility (Edwards
2004). Ireland was obviously colonised long after any land bridge had been severed,
and there are points in common between the material culture of its first
inhabitants and the artefacts found in Britain. That connection seems to have
been quite short lived, and from about 6000 BC it seems as if their histories diverged. Significantly, there is no evidence for the movement of raw materials
between these islands. In fact, the Irish Mesolithic developed a distinctive
character of its own which it shared to some extent with the Isle of Man. It had a
distinctive settlement pattern, too. The occupation sites of the later Mesolithic
period concentrate along rivers and the shoreline, and there are indications that
fishingwas particularly important. That is hardly surprising since wild pigswere
the only large animals that could have been hunted (Woodman 2004).
The material culture of Mesolithic Ireland gradually diverged from that
found in England, Scotland, andWales. A similar process seems to have affected
relations between Britain and Continental Europe from about 7500 BC, and
again new artefact types came into use. Roger Jacobi (1976) has suggested that
this resulted from the formation of the English Channel and the loss of a land
bridge joining Britain to the mainland. This raises chronological problems, for
at that stage some links were still possible, although the rising sea made direct
communication increasingly difficult. At all events this was the first time when
what happened in Britain assumed a distinctive character of its own.
That introduces another theme of this book. To what extent were developments
in prehistoric Britain independent from those in Continental Europe,
and how far were they simply a continuation of them? How much evidence is
there for the establishment of local identities in different parts of both islands,
and, in particular, did events in Ireland and Britain follow a different course
from one another? One way of defining local practices is to compare the
archaeological records on either side of the Irish Sea.
THE LIE OF THE LAND
Such local traditions first emerged during the lengthy period in which Britain
and Ireland were separated, first from one another, and then from Continental
Europe. They were also influenced by the physical character of both islands
and the pattern of communication within them.
At this point it is essential to say more about their geography. That immediately
raises the problem of names (Fig. 1.5). It would be easy to write this
account in terms of current political boundaries, which divide the two islands
between England, Scotland, andWales, on the one hand, and Northern Ireland
and the Irish Republic, on the other. That would be misleading. Although
England, Wales, and Scotland occupy almost the same territories as they have
since the middle ages, a similar argument does not apply to Ireland. Six of the
modern counties formpart of the United Kingdom, whilst the remainder comprise
a separate nation state. As Ulaid, Ulster was one of the ancient kingdoms
of Ireland, but it was more extensive than the area that is under British rule
and called by that name today. Thus it is best to refer to Ireland as a whole
except where the archaeological evidence requires a different procedure. The
other geographical unit is the island of Britain which was accepted as a distinct
entity from the time of the first explorers. It is no longer accurate to talk of the ‘British’ Isles since most of Ireland is an independent country. In recent
years, Scotland and Wales have achieved a measure of political autonomy, and
in this account they are treated simply as topographical units. There is nothing
to suggest that they possessed any cultural cohesion during the prehistoric
period.
These points are important, for scholars have been careless in writing about
the two islands. They have sometimes treated Ireland as a dependency of its
neighbour, even in periods when this was not the case. They can also use the
name England as a synonym for the island of Britain. Quite often this conveys
the unconscious idea that certain areas were at the centre of events and that
others were largely peripheral. Norman Davies (1999), who devoted many
pages to documenting this confusion, eventually called his account of insular
history by the neutral title ‘The Isles’. The two main islands have a different physical structure from one another.
Britain has been divided by prehistorians into a Highland Zone towards the
north and west and a Lowland Zone to the south and east (C. Fox 1932).
That does not do justice to the complexity of the situation. Even within
the Lowland Zone, there are significant differences of elevation which have had a major impact on the distribution of settlement; and large tracts of land
which form part of the Highland Zone include sheltered, well-drained soils
as capable of supporting farmers as regions further to the south (Fig. 1.6). For
example, many areas along the east coast of Scotland have the characteristics conventionally associated with southern Britain. In the same way, some of
the exposed chalkland along the English Channel coast may have been less
hospitable than parts of northern England. Human activity often focused on
the valleys of major rivers, extending up the east coast from the Medway to
the Dee and along the west coast from the Severn to the Solway. This was not
recognised by archaeologists until aerial survey extended into these regions.
That is not to say that the distinction between upland and lowland regions
was unimportant, but it could probably be expressed in a better way. England
and the southern part of Scotland are bisected by a spine of hills and mountains
which run from south to north before they broaden out into larger areas of
raised ground, the Southern Uplands and the Scottish Highlands, respectively.
These are separated from one another by a system of valleys extending across
country between the Forth and the Clyde. There are other regions of high
ground along the shores of the Atlantic and the Irish Sea. Western Britain is
often more exposed than the land along the North Sea, and this difference may
have had a greater influence over the distribution of early settlement than the
conventional division between Highland and Lowland Zones.
No such distinction would be appropriate in Ireland, where discontinuous
areas of high ground extend around considerable sections of the coast and
enclose the Central Lowland, parts of which contain poorly drained raised
bogs. Although there are many local exceptions, the best land is found to the
south and east, and much of the poorest is towards the north and west. A band
of particularly favourable soils follows the coastline of the Irish Sea. The west
coast is exposed to the full force of bad weather coming in from the Atlantic.
These distinctions are clearly illustrated by the sizes of modern farms, which
are generally larger to the east and south. Again there are a number of fertile
river valleys (Aalen, Whelan, and Stout 1997).
There are important differences between land use in the two islands. These
are largely the result of differences of temperature and rainfall. In Britain,
southern England experiences most sunshine; northern and western Scotland
have the least. Today the areas with lower precipitation are more suitable for
growing crops. The crucial threshold is about 90 cm of rain a year. This permits
cereal growing across most lowland regions and allows it to extend up the North
Sea coast into Scotland (Coppock 1976a, 1976b). By contrast, rainfall is rather
higher to the west of the mountains which divide the island in half, and here
there is a greater emphasis on livestock. A similar distinction can be observed
in the pattern of settlement, with larger groups towards the east and south, and
smaller, more dispersed settlements to the north and west.
To a large extent the same is true in Ireland, where there are similar contrasts
in natural conditions. The main areas which are suitable for growing crops are
towards the south and east coasts which experience more hours of sunshine
than other areas. Dairy farming is important in the north and west of the island.
The character of settlement varies from one region to another, but again it ismore dispersed towards the west where it is cooler and damper (Aalen, Whelan,
and Stout 1997).
Having said this, another observation is important. The Classical authors
quoted at the beginning of this chapter made much of the remote position of
Britain and Ireland. They even persuaded themselves that Shetlandwas the most
distant place in which human beings could live. They were able to make such
claims because the early travellers were able to establish their locations by the
position of the sun. It is certainly true that in terms of modern geography, Land’s
End is on the same latitude as Newfoundland, and Edinburgh is as far north as
Moscow, but such observations are deceptive because of the effects of the Gulf
Stream. This warms the land from southwest England to the Northern Isles
and makes it considerably more hospitable than would otherwise be the case.
The natural environment changed significantly during the postglacial period
(Huntley and Birks 1983). A few species were present from the outset, notably
hazel, birch, and pine. Oak began to colonise England and Wales by about
8500 BC and was present in Ireland by 8000 BC. The latter period also saw
the appearance of elm in England andWales, and over the next thousand years
it established itself in Ireland and then in Scotland. After that, other species
assumed an increasing significance. Alder was growing in England around 6300
BC, and over time it spread toWales and Ireland and finally to Scotland. Lime
became important in Wales and England from approximately 5000 BC, and
ash appeared roughly simultaneously.
This might give the impression that what had been a rather open landscape
was colonised by dense woodland, and this is a stereotype which has been hard
to eradicate. In his famous book The Personality of Britain Cyril Fox declared:
Southern Britain presented an illimitable forest of “damp oakwood”, ash
and thorn and bramble, largely untrodden. The forest was in a sense unbroken,
for without emerging from its canopy a squirrel could traverse the
country from end to end. (1932: 82)
That may not be true. There are several reasons for believing that the vegetation
cover was less uniform than environmentalists once supposed. It is clear that it
formed a complex mosaic which was sensitive to the local topography, climate,
and soils. There were regional differences in its composition even over quite
small areas, and different species predominated from one region to another.
For example, by the end of the Scottish Mesolithic only the southern half of
the country was actually dominated by oak. Parts of the North Sea littoral
and much of the west coast had a significant component of hazel, and this
pattern extended as far as the Inner Hebrides. The Outer Hebrides, Caithness,
and the Northern Isles were dominated by birch, whilst pine flourished in the
mountainous interior (Tipping 1994a).
There are problems in understanding this evidence because certain species
produce much more pollen than others. This could mask the evidence for  areas of open ground. In any case there were many breaks in the canopy.
Perhaps the most obvious were at the coast and beside lakes and rivers, but
there were regions which were above the treeline altogether. These included
high ground in Wales, northern England, and the north of Scotland. In each
case the more open conditions would have attracted concentrations of grazing
animals which could have had a further impact on the vegetation. The same
was true along the paths which they followed through the landscape. Other
breaks in the cover might have formed quite naturally as trees died or as areas
of woodland were affected by storms or lightning strikes (T. Brown 1997).
Once this had happened, these clearings could have been maintained or even
enlarged by herbivores. Naturally created breaks in the forest cover might also
be exploited by burning (Simmons 1996), but there is uncertainty whether
this was deliberate. Nor can scholars agree on how far Britain and Ireland were
covered by closed forest (Vera 2000). Recent work on the English chalk even
suggests that some areas were never colonised by woodland in the way that had
always been supposed (French and Lewis 2005).
THE WATERWAYS
Grazing animals may have moved along the rivers. The same must surely apply
to the paths followed by prehistoric people, and yet this simple idea is seldom
taken seriously. There is a long-standing assumption in British archaeology that
the main patterns of communication followed what are known as ridgeways:
long-distance routes extending across the high ground. It is difficult to appreciate
how tenacious such ideas can be. Avebury, for example, is thought to
be located at one end of a long-distance path that extends to the flint mines
of eastern England. Hillforts of later date were built at roughly equal intervals
along this track.
Some of these routes did play a role as drove roads during the historical
period, but their relevance to prehistoric archaeology is doubtful. They are
cut by ancient boundary ditches which take no account of their existence.
The same applies to early field systems and to excavated settlements. There
is a simple reason why this idea became so popular. Before very much was
known about the natural environment of Britain, archaeologists had assumed
that the hills were free of vegetation and that the lowlands were forested and
sparsely settled (C. Fox 1932). Nothing could be more misleading, but it was
true that many low-lying monuments had been levelled by the plough whilst
their counterparts on the higher ground survived. In the end it took the
development of aerial photography to redress the balance.
This first raised the possibility that it was the major valleys that saw most
prehistoric activity. It also suggested that the rivers would provide a more
likely system of communication than a network of upland paths. That was
also implied by numerous finds of logboats dating to every period from the Mesolithic onwards. Andrew Sherratt (1996) has drawn attention to the way
in which a number of English rivers share exactly the same names, often ones
of considerable antiquity. It had been supposed that this happened because
communities were so isolated that they were unaware of the duplication, but
there is such striking evidence for the long-distance movement of artefacts
that this seems most improbable. Perhaps certain rivers shared the same name
because theywere connected in people’s minds; they formed distinct sections of
more extensive routes. In fact Sherratt’s argument goes considerably further, for
he postulates two major sources of origin for these patterns of communication.
One was the Thames Estuary and the other was the south coast of Wessex. By
following major rivers, travellers might have been able to avoid some of the
most difficult waters along the coast and pass safely from the English Channel to
the Irish Sea. A third major focus surely existed in northeast England and linked
the Humber Estuary to the midlands and the west coast of Britain. Sherratt
did not take his model any further, merely suggesting some points of contact
along the Irish Sea. Carleton Jones has taken a similar approach to prehistoric
Ireland, although here some of the major rivers may have been less suitable
for transport than their counterparts in Britain (C. Jones in press). In this case
more use may have been made of higher ground. Figure 1.7 combines both
these schemes so that they link eastern England to the Atlantic. Sherratt argues
that the nodal points in this system of communication were selected for major
monuments, from the first ceremonial centres to late prehistoric hillforts.
These routes were only a part of a wider pattern. Sherratt (1996) observes
that one of their sources, the Thames Estuary, was ideally placed for contacts
with Continental Europe by the Rhine and the Seine. Similarly, the coast
of Wessex was easy to reach from Brittany and Normandy. He calculates the
distances between significant parts of the European coastline. Many different
areas are within a hundred kilometres of one another. This suggests links not
just between western Britain and the east of Ireland, but also between parts
of southern England and northern France (Fig. 1.8). Even more areas are
within two hundred kilometres of one another, suggesting potential connections
between the entire coastline of southern England and the area between
Finist`ere and the Rhine. That zone also extends northwards into East Anglia.
Towards the Atlantic, it links western England, Wales, and southwest Ireland.
There are other potential connections between the north of Ireland and the
west coast of Scotland. The North Sea is the one exception, cutting Britain
off from Scandinavia, but even those areas could be linked by following the
shoreline by way of Belgium and the Netherlands.
The important point is that different regions of Britain and Ireland could
have been in contact with parts of mainland Europe that had few connections
with one another. The principal contrast, and one which will be discussed
throughout this book, is between an axis based on the English Channel and
the North Sea, and another which extended from Britain and Ireland into Atlantic Europe. The first linked England and Scotland to an enormous area
extending from France to south Scandinavia. The second joined southwest
England, Wales, and Ireland to western France and the Iberian peninsula.
Sherratt’s scheme does not take into account the practicalities of travelling
by water, but there have been important studies of ancient routes across the
English Channel (McGrail 1977: 207–22 and 265–88). A little-known paper
by Margaret Davies (1946) took a similar approach to navigation in the Irish
Sea (Fig. 1.9).
McGrail’s research was specifically concerned with the sea routes documented
by Classical writers in the immediate pre-Roman period. This is
important because it explains some of the premises of his argument. It is concerned with trade in bulky commodities including wine amphorae and
tin. It also presupposes that ships were equipped with sails. This is a reasonable
proposition and is supported by depictions of late prehistoric vessels, but it
is likely that earlier boats were rowed or paddled. He confines his attention
to the routes suggested by written accounts and compares their suitability for
long-distance voyages in relation to sea conditions, visibility, prevailing winds,
and currents.
McGrail concludes that the most dependable sea routes were those crossing
the English Channel towards its narrowest point at the Straits of Dover. They
were a little more reliable than the passage from the River Rance in northwest
France to the mouth of the Hampshire Avon, yet all of them were significantly
better than the longer crossing between Finist`ere and the southwestern peninsula
of Britain. The most favourable route had a ‘reliability factor’ of 100; the
least suitable scored 43. McGrail’s figures also suggest that a sensible procedure
would have been to use one of the easier routes from the Continent to Britain
and then to sail along the coast. The coastal route betweenWessex and different
parts of southwest England scored between 81 and 100.
McGrail’s analysis does not extend far beyond the English Channel, nor is it
directly concerned with earlier prehistory. Davies’s paper does both, although
it actually investigates the distribution of megalithic tombs. It is concerned
mainly with the Irish Sea, although her study area extends from southwest
Wales to the coast of Scotland. She draws attention to a number of important
factors, not all of which are relevant to the area considered by McGrail. Like
the Mediterranean, the Irish Sea is partly enclosed. It is rather more open to
the south, but to the north it is entered through a narrow channel. There
are powerful tides which converge on the Isle of Man from both directions.
Thus they provide a series of sea routes from northwest and southwest Wales
and create potential links between Ireland, southwest Scotland, and Cumbria
(Waddell 1992). There is slack water from the southern tip of the Isle of
Man westwards towards the Irish coast, and it would have made that region
particularly accessible by sea.
There were also certain hazards to avoid. These included whirlpools and
eddies in the areas with the strongest tides. On the other hand, in good weather
travellers in these waters would never have been out of sight of land, for the
Irish Sea is ringed by a series of distinctive peaks which can be recognised from
the water (E. Bowen 1972: 40–1). All were more than six hundred metres
high, which means even the lowest of them could have been identified under
optimum conditions from a distance of ninety kilometres. Further to the north,
navigation would have been easier since it was possible to travel from one
offshore island to another without venturing far into open water. The same
could have been true along the less sheltered northern and western coasts of
Ireland and the north of Scotland. People could also have travelled up the
North Sea coast of Britain, between estuaries like those of the Humber and
the Tees and the drowned valleys known as firths along the Scottish shoreline THE MENTAL MAP
This account raises important questions of perception. Are Britain and Ireland
to be regarded as extensions of Continental Europe which were readily accessible
by boat? If so, then which of these routes was most important, and did the
pattern change at different times? Were the strongest links between particular
parts of Britain and Ireland and separate regions of the Continent, or were
there periods in which either or both of these islands were unaffected by outside
contacts? Is it correct to study their prehistory as that of two areas of land,
or would it be more appropriate to think of them in relation to the sea? Not
surprisingly, nearly all these options have been investigated in earlier research.
Again the discussion depends on certain assumptions inherited from the
past. The British have always had an ambivalent attitude to the place that they
call ‘Europe’. It is a view which they share with other nations on the outer
edges of the continent, including Denmark and Sweden. There is an implicit
assumption that Europe is somewhere else: a distinct entity to which certain
countries are only marginally attached. It is a way of thinking that is deeply
entrenched in English culture and one which is exacerbated simply because
Britain is an island. It is supposed to have preserved its cultural integrity from
outside influence.
These beliefs have coloured approaches to the prehistory of both islands
which is often written in terms of modern political divisions. This tendency
can be identified at a variety of scales and has made the work of archaeologists
unnecessarily difficult. It is normally done for convenience, but the question
is rarely asked whether these distinctions had any relevance to social identities
in the past. The main division is between books on Britain and books about
Ireland. There are also scholarly and persuasive accounts of prehistoric England,
the pre-Roman archaeology of Wales, and Scottish prehistory. There is even
one which is specifically concerned with Ulster. Few studies consider both the
islands together. That is quite extraordinary when they can be seen from one
another and the geographical distance between them can be as little as thirty
kilometres (see the Frontispiece).
That procedure makes it doubly difficult to think in terms of other regional
alignments. For example, during the second millennium BC there may have
been closer connections between Ireland and the north and west of what is
now called Scotland than there were between the Scottish Highlands and the
southern part of that country. Nor is it necessary to limit these connections
exclusively to Britain and Ireland. Between about 1500 and 800 BC southeast
England had strong links with what is now northern France (Marcigny and
Ghesqui`ere 2003: 164–74), and before the Roman Conquest there were many
features in common between Brittany and southwest England.
At the same time prehistorians in both islands have exhibited a sense
of cultural insecurity. There are different reasons for this. One is purely methodological. Before the advent of radiocarbon dating, insular archaeologists
were almost entirely dependent on chronologies developed on the mainland.
Normally these were based on events in the Mediterranean or Egypt.
Such schemes could be extended to the outermost margins of Europe only
by emphasising connections between these areas. There was no alternative to
this procedure, but it raised a problem, for it was necessary to say why those
connections were possible and how they had occurred. They were generally
explained by the movement of people and ideas from the complex societies
of southern and central Europe towards the edges of the Continent. It was a
method that had its strengths and weaknesses. Thus Stuart Piggott (1938) could
suggest what still seem plausible links between a few artefacts from Bronze Age
burials in southern England and the contents of the shaft graves of Mycenae.
Richard Atkinson (1956) took the view that Stonehenge had been designed
by a Mediterranean architect, a theory which can be rejected in the light of
radiocarbon dating.
This procedure had unexpected side effects. One was the assumption that
Britain and Ireland occupied such a peripheral position in Europe that artefacts
of Continental affinities would have been adopted only after a significant interval
of time. That is why so many phenomena have proved to be significantly
older than was first supposed; there have been few chronological adjustments
in the opposite direction. The other feature was a predilection for naming
insular phenomena after well-defined sites or cultural groupings on the Continent.
Thus Gordon Childe’s Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles refers to
Mesolithic traditions as ‘Tardenoisian’, after a site in France, and ‘Azilian’, after
another in Spain. There were ‘West Alpine’ settlements in lowland England
during the Bronze Age, and Iron Age groups were named after places or
regions in Austria, Switzerland, and France (Childe 1949). This process seems
to have operated in only one direction, and, with the exception of the ‘Wessex
Culture’, British and Irish terminology was rarely employed on the mainland.
The influence of this way of thinking is illustrated by the title of one of the
most famous books on insular prehistory, Cyril Fox’s monograph The Personality
of Britain. It subtitle is revealing, for it considers ‘Its influence on inhabitant
and invader in prehistoric and early historic times’. It concludes with a list of
twenty propositions. Among them are these statements:
The position of Britain adjacent to the Continent renders her liable to
invasion from any point on some five hundred miles of the European coast.
The portion of Britain adjacent to the continent being Lowland, it is easily
overrun by invaders and on it new cultures of continental origin tend to
be imposed. In the Highland, on the other hand, these tend to be absorbed
(emphasis in the original) (C. Fox 1932: 77).
Although these ideas were first published in 1932, Fox’s book was reissued in
successive editions until 1959. It blends artefact studies and historical geography so adroitly that it is difficult to remember why so many migrations were postulated
in the first place. That was because arguments about chronology had
become entangled in questions of explanation. Writing in 1966, Grahame
Clark questioned the ‘invasion hypothesis’. It was used uncritically and had
been applied to almost every archaeological problem (Clark 1966).
Irish archaeologists had experienced the same difficulties in working out a
chronology, and resorted to similar methods to those of their British colleagues,
but in this case there was another problem This was because of the origin myth
set out in Lebor Gaba´la E´ rren, the ‘Book of the Taking of Ireland’ (Waddell
2005a: 18-23). It describes five successive invasions which were responsible for
the settlement of the country. Timothy Champion (1982) has pointed out that
some of their sources seem to come from the Bible and others from universal
histories composed in the late Roman period. The invaders appear to have
originated in Greece and the east Mediterranean. Although this account was
never taken literally, it had an influence on the way in which Irish prehistory
was studied, and it is surely significant that its translator and editor, Robert
Macalister, was the professor of archaeology at University College, Dublin.
Like the British scholars criticised by Grahame Clark, Irish archaeologists were
tempted by the invasion hypothesis, and it was not until 1978 that its usefulness
began to be questioned (Waddell 1978).
There are two ways of resolving this confusion. The more radical is simply
to assert that the present-day notion of Britain and Ireland as self-contained
entities is itself an anachronism. It has no relevance to the prehistoric period,
and the differences between separate communities may have been less clearcut
in the past. For example, Caesar records that the same kings ruled territories
on either side of the English Channel (Bello Gallico II 4, 6–7). Ewan
Campbell (2001) has expressed a similar idea in discussing the relationship
between early medieval Ireland and the kingdom of Dalriada on the west
coast of Scotland. The sea may not have been a barrier but a connecting
link.
Another approach is to explain the movement of artefacts and ideas by an
ill-defined notion of ‘trade’, but again this runs a certain risk of anachronism.
It seems likely that the exchange of artefacts had more to do with diplomacy
than economics (Sahlins 1974: chapters 4 and 5). The movement of goods and
services may actually have been a way of forming and maintaining alliances,
but once that possibility is raised, prehistorians face another problem. They
may be captivated by the diffusion of fine pottery and metalwork, but such
evidence may be only the visible residue of an exchange of personnel. Instead
of long-distance trade in swords and spears, perhaps they might consider the
circulation of marriage partners. Peoplewere always on the move. The question
is how frequently this happened and how many of them settled in new places
as a result. Much of the trouble is created by the language of archaeology.
The movement of people overland is seen as settlement or migration; their relocation by sea is regarded as an invasion. That is hardly appropriate when
the island of Britain is nearly a thousand kilometres long and is separated from
northern France by a twentieth of that distance.
OBSERVING WHAT HAS VANISHED
There are many ways of writing about the prehistory of these two islands.
What does this version have to offer?
The first point to make is that it attempts to cover the prehistory of Britain
and Ireland on equal terms, and in each case it is informed by the results of
commercial archaeology, many of which have yet to enter the public domain.
They represent a vital resource for future scholars, but one which is too little
known. At many points they have provided information which is radically
different from conventional wisdom about the past. They have identified new
kinds of monuments and have extended the work of archaeologists into areas
that had hardly been investigated before. They also suggest unexpected links
between developments in different regions.
This book is intended as a contribution to social archaeology, and the main
approach is to concentrate on settlements, monuments, and landscapes rather
than portable artefacts. To some extent this is a matter of personal taste, but
it is more than that. For many years the prehistory of Britain and Ireland had
been studied through material culture, even though little was known about its
original contexts. The work of recent years has helped to redress the balance so
that the deposits of valuables which had normally been discovered by chance
can be investigated in relation to other less spectacular phenomena. It is an
approach that not only builds on the results of field archaeology, but also can
take into account research on the prehistoric environment.
Chronology still presents a problem, and is likely to do so until AMS dating
becomes a standard feature of any excavation. It is also important to extend
current programmes concerned with the analysis of individual objects. The
difficulty is exacerbated by questions of terminology. Wherever possible, this
account refers to calibrated radiocarbon dates, as the period labels that are in
common use were devised during the nineteenth century at a time when the
importance of technological innovation was taken for granted. It would be
helpful if the terms Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age could be abandoned
altogether, but that might lead to problems of communication. In any case
attempts to devise more flexible schemes have not been altogether successful.
For example, in his book The Age of Stonehenge Colin Burgess (1980) defined a
series of periods named after excavated sites, but there were problems with this
procedure. Some of those excavations had not been published at the time and
one of the sites has since been redated. Burgess admitted this rather ruefully
when the book was reprinted twenty years later, but he did not alter its contents
(Burgess 2001: 13–14). The chapter divisions do not follow the conventional framework laid down
by the Three Age Model. Thus the end of the Mesolithic period is considered
together with the first half of the Neolithic. The Later Neolithic is treated
together with the Earlier Bronze Age, for whilst there is a clear distinction
between these periods in some areas, in others that does not apply. Major
changes happened halfway through the Bronze Age, and this is acknowledged
by treating the later part of this period in a chapter on its own. The same
applies to the earlier Iron Age.
There has been a tendency to write at length about periods where the
available material is plentiful and varied and to devote less space to phases when
the archaeological record is more homogeneous. That does not do justice to the
realities of prehistoric life where a human generation would have remained the
same from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age. To try to provide a more-rounded
account of prehistoric Britain and Ireland the length of each chapter is roughly
proportional to the length of the period that it studies. It also means that
periods that are rarely discussed as a whole are treated on the same terms as
those which have textbooks written about them.Within the word limit set by
the publisher, this account observes a ratio of roughly two thousand words a
century.
Lastly, this book is only one account of a remarkable series of phenomena and
is conceived as an interpretation, not a manual. The archaeological literature is
overwhelmingly descriptive, whether it consists of accounts of artefacts, field
surveys, or excavations, and it is essential that the student master the details of
this material. But it is even more important to achieve a sense of perspective,
and this has been difficult because so many studies are limited to particular
areas and periods of time. There is a need for a bolder treatment, even if it
eventually proves to be mistaken. That risk is well worth taking, and it applies
not just to this particular version, but to every attempt to come to terms with
the past.