years later – for we are still at the stage where change happens slowly – the clearings were bigger. Something like regular farmland was appearing, particularly in the south of what is now England, ploughed and no doubt fertilized and weeded.
The people were growing primitive varieties of wheat and barley and maybe flax. They seem to have grown no vegetables, but added berries and nuts to their diets. They ploughed with oxen, reared cattle, pigs and some sheep, and from very early on had domesticated dogs – the bones of some dogs looking like those of modern Labradors and some like terriers’ have been found. Dogs, among the first domesticated animals, contributed vital help for guarding and hunting. But the historian Rodney Castleden has noted that from their bones it is clear that ‘some dogs lived to be old, beyond their useful working lives, so their owners kept them out of affection’. 16
The doggy people themselves did not live to be old. An analysis of bones from one community in Orkney, which was then an advanced part of the British Isles, shows that 70 per cent were either teenagers or in their twenties. Just 1 per cent were over fifty. This was a young society, evidently. The skulls suggest they were delicate, fine-featured people, nothing like the heavy, glowering early Britons of popular legend. We do not have their clothes, of course: a culture existing in a warm, moist Britain that mostly built and carved out of wood, and wore woven wool, leather and possibly flax capes, hats and tunics, leaves very little behind. But by looking at the tiny remnants of similar cultures on mainland Europe, and studying buckles, pins and tools that have survived, it is possible to plausibly posit the kinds of tightly sewn and comfortable clothes the British wore.
Though we call this the Neolithic or ‘new stone’ age, we might asaccurately call it the age of wood and leather. People started by living in rectangular wooden homes wearing leather clothes (made supple and smooth using disgusting techniques apparently involving copious amounts of urine, cow dung and raw animal brains). They went on to wear woven clothes and to live in larger, communal houses and in villages centred on cleverly built roundhouses, where hundreds could sleep under the same roof.
Speaking of the people living at Skara Brae, the beautifully made stone village started around five thousand years ago on a curving bay in Orkney and uncovered by a storm in 1850, Castleden says the overall impression is of a high level of domestic comfort: ‘Living conditions for ordinary people were apparently at least as good as they were in medieval Britain over four thousand years later: at Skara Brae probably rather better.’ 17 Walking through some of the homes and passages of Skara Brae today vividly recalls the domestic cosiness of Catalhoyuk – the same family rooms with dressers and places to sleep and corridors, all made in stone, rather than mud and plaster. There may or may not have been chieftains and priests, but this was not a war-torn culture.
In the Middle and Late Stone Age, the Orkneys and Shetlands were, far from being marginal archipelagos, advanced places. Their pottery circulated around Britain, and their stone circles, burial places and villages were unusually large and complex. They were way ahead, for instance, of the damp southern bog now known as London.
For centuries historians have found it impossible to believe that early British culture could have developed so impressively, leading up to the great monument of Stonehenge itself, just by gentle evolution. There must, surely, have been a warrior or priestly elite directing things, and perhaps having arrived as invaders from the continent? Yet there is no evidence of any such elite, nor of a cultural migration. There seems no reason not to believe that the British developed more like the people of Catalhoyuk had, in communities of a rough equality, scattered in their hundreds across
The people were growing primitive varieties of wheat and barley and maybe flax. They seem to have grown no vegetables, but added berries and nuts to their diets. They ploughed with oxen, reared cattle, pigs and some sheep, and from very early on had domesticated dogs – the bones of some dogs looking like those of modern Labradors and some like terriers’ have been found. Dogs, among the first domesticated animals, contributed vital help for guarding and hunting. But the historian Rodney Castleden has noted that from their bones it is clear that ‘some dogs lived to be old, beyond their useful working lives, so their owners kept them out of affection’. 16
The doggy people themselves did not live to be old. An analysis of bones from one community in Orkney, which was then an advanced part of the British Isles, shows that 70 per cent were either teenagers or in their twenties. Just 1 per cent were over fifty. This was a young society, evidently. The skulls suggest they were delicate, fine-featured people, nothing like the heavy, glowering early Britons of popular legend. We do not have their clothes, of course: a culture existing in a warm, moist Britain that mostly built and carved out of wood, and wore woven wool, leather and possibly flax capes, hats and tunics, leaves very little behind. But by looking at the tiny remnants of similar cultures on mainland Europe, and studying buckles, pins and tools that have survived, it is possible to plausibly posit the kinds of tightly sewn and comfortable clothes the British wore.
Though we call this the Neolithic or ‘new stone’ age, we might asaccurately call it the age of wood and leather. People started by living in rectangular wooden homes wearing leather clothes (made supple and smooth using disgusting techniques apparently involving copious amounts of urine, cow dung and raw animal brains). They went on to wear woven clothes and to live in larger, communal houses and in villages centred on cleverly built roundhouses, where hundreds could sleep under the same roof.
Speaking of the people living at Skara Brae, the beautifully made stone village started around five thousand years ago on a curving bay in Orkney and uncovered by a storm in 1850, Castleden says the overall impression is of a high level of domestic comfort: ‘Living conditions for ordinary people were apparently at least as good as they were in medieval Britain over four thousand years later: at Skara Brae probably rather better.’ 17 Walking through some of the homes and passages of Skara Brae today vividly recalls the domestic cosiness of Catalhoyuk – the same family rooms with dressers and places to sleep and corridors, all made in stone, rather than mud and plaster. There may or may not have been chieftains and priests, but this was not a war-torn culture.
In the Middle and Late Stone Age, the Orkneys and Shetlands were, far from being marginal archipelagos, advanced places. Their pottery circulated around Britain, and their stone circles, burial places and villages were unusually large and complex. They were way ahead, for instance, of the damp southern bog now known as London.
For centuries historians have found it impossible to believe that early British culture could have developed so impressively, leading up to the great monument of Stonehenge itself, just by gentle evolution. There must, surely, have been a warrior or priestly elite directing things, and perhaps having arrived as invaders from the continent? Yet there is no evidence of any such elite, nor of a cultural migration. There seems no reason not to believe that the British developed more like the people of Catalhoyuk had, in communities of a rough equality, scattered in their hundreds across
Similar Books
