4 - The Neolithic
(Note: Dates from now on will be quoted as BC rather than BP dates)
The most important event in the period in Britain after about 4500BC was the appearance of farming. Before that time people gained their living by hunting and gathering, a way of life that in Britain would only have supported a limited number of people. After people took up farming the population began to grow. This period of early farming is referred to as the Neolithic period.
It seems that the early attempts at farming were tentative and certainly have left few traces on the landscape. In the archaeological record, the farming settlements are very elusive and agriculture may have played only a minor part in people's life-style at first. No doubt many continued the hunting and gathering way of life which had been the traditional way for hundreds of thousands of years, others may have taken up farming part-time; perhaps simply keeping animals and only planting crops at irregular intervals.
What made people turn to farming? This is a question that has been much discussed. Farming is a much more labour-intensive activity than hunting and gathering. Nobody who liked an easy life would have chosen to take up full-time farming as the sole means of support at the time. 'Scratching a living from the soil' would probably have been a very apt description of the activity.
As with most fundamental changes in life-style, people were probably forced into it by circumstances. These involved a number of factors, most of which we cannot determine at this remove in time but it is probable that pressure on the available food resources was one of the major causes of change. It could have been brought about by an increase in the birth rate as people settled down in one place.
In hunting-gathering societies, the intervals between child-births is determined by the need for the previous child to be able to walk considerable distances unaided. This control keeps the population down to a uniform level. However in the latter part of the Mesolithic, people began to be more static, spending longer periods of time at sites like shore settlements where there was a continuous supply of food throughout the year from the sea. This could well have encouraged a higher birth-rate as people were not moving about as often as they had in the earlier Mesolithic. More people meant more food and one can see how this trend would tend to gather pace.
The pre-farming landscape of Britain was one that was considerably more wooded than it is today. It has been suggested that some Mesolithic people cleared some of the woodland by the use of fire and their tranchet axes to create glades for grazing deer. This is a form of domestication of animals and may have been one of the factors in the 'settling-down in one place' process.
Apart from woodland there was a good deal of wetland. We are accustomed to a drained landscape and perhaps would be surprised at the amount of marsh and boggy land that would have been found in every valley in the country. The upshot was that, facing the challenges of clearing woodland and draining marshland, early farmers naturally opted wherever possible for the lightly wooded, well- drained areas on which to farm.
Unfortunately, these areas, from the archaeological point of view, are the worst possible areas for the survival of evidence, because the Neolithic soils there were usually thin and easily eroded and in most cases have disappeared and replaced many times over, taking with them a good deal of the original archaeological evidence.
This means that only where the Neolithic farmers dug pits or ditches or postholes deep enough down into the subsoil so that the bottoms of these features survive uneroded or where they have piled soil or stones on top of their soil surface so that it has been protected from subsequent erosion that evidence still exists for us to study today.
Lightly wooded and dry areas are to be found on chalk and limestone hills and it is no accident that Salisbury Plain, for example, is an region where a great many Neolithic monuments created by the earliest farmers are to be found.
In order to investigate the way of life of these earliest farmers, we need to know a little of the environment in which they lived. Climate and ecology are the major factors and these can be approached through a study of snail-shells and pollen.
During the early Neolithic period, farming became the predominant activity in the Avebury area of Wiltshire and was concerned with cereal growing and stock raising but people were still hunting and gathering as the discovery of auroch, wild pig, red and roe deer bones on every site together with remains of hazelnuts, crab apples and sloes on Windmill Hill, Hemp Knoll and where the later West Kennet Avenue was built proves.
It may be that a combination of raising pigs and cattle and hunting and gathering was the earliest economic activity for pigs and cattle can graze in an uncleared landscape but sheep require the shorter grass that comes with clearance and cultivation. Under South Street and Horslip long barrows, evidence for sheep bones and cereal-growing have been found while under the Beckhampton Road barrow and the banks on Windmill Hill cattle bones and wild food remains have been found which date from a time before people started to grow cereals.
It has been possible to suggest how land was utilised for cultivation. It was first ploughed by a rip-ard, an implement designed to remove the turf and break up the root mat. This was followed by phases of cultivation by hoes or spades for cereal growing. After this came a reversion to pasture. Clearly, this was arduous labour and the areas farmed (? the fields) must have been very small, probably near the size of our modern gardens.
Later, by the third millenium BC, cereal growing had spread to the Windmill Hill and the Beckhampton Road areas but in the second millenium BC, cereals seem to have declined in production and the indiscriminate hunting of deer was increasing. One of the problems facing farmers at this time may have been that their land was being invaded by bracken which would swamp growing crops and is poisonous to sheep, cattle and horses. However pigs can cope with it and it is probably no coincidence that they are found to be increasing all over the southern chalklands at this time.
We can relate the agricultural activity to the materials used for building the neolithic monuments of the area. Turves, up to 0.60 metres long, mattocked off the ground in rolls, were used in the building of the mounds of South Street and Beckhampton Road long barrows together with brushwood, withies cut from pollarded willows, and local sarsen stones. The timber structures beneath the mounds were made from coppice poles which could only have come from managed woodland. Turves were also used in the earliest mound built on the site of Silbury Hill but this was not until the middle of the third millenium BC.
The picture that has been drawn of the area as it might have been during this early period is of clearings in the scrub/woodland linked together by corridors of clearance most of which ran along the valley bottoms. In each clearing, crops were being grown or animals pastured while long barrows had been constructed as territorial markers and/or cenotaphs at Horslip, South Street and Backhampton Road.
During the period following, clearings on the periphery of the valley corridor were expanded while there is some evidence of land already cleared growing over again. This raised the problem of combating weed infestation. Pigs would have been useful to clear the bulk of the weeds while sheep chobbled up the minor ones. It seems as though clearings that had been yielding crops were becoming exhausted and overgrown with weeds and bracken while clearings that had been used mainly for pasture were being expanded. Alongside this process, fresh clearings were being made.
During the third millenium BC, woodland was contracting to a point where there is a distinct reduction in the pollen from trees found in the investigative cores. One area around South Street seems to have been well-managed with sheep rearing and land cultivated with the rip ard but in other parts little was apparently grown. Pigs were common, particularly in the areas around Avebury henge, the West Kennet Avenue and the Sanctuary.
This is the period of henge construction and the building of timber structures either inside or outside the henges. It has been suggested that the labourers who worked on these monuments were fed mainly on pork! Certainly from the latter half of the third millenium BC there would have an extra call on food resources to provide for the workers on the great monuments, for full-time specialists who were involved in the new copper artifact production and distributive trades on top of the surplus that was already being used for feeding the flint-mining and stone-quarrying workers. The fact that this was possible does suggest a definite improvement in agricultural efficiency by the early Bronze Age.
But we still need a good deal more evidence of agricultural settlements in the periods up to the Middle Bronze Age. All we have is a number of houses which, apart from Ceide (Co. Mayo) and possibly Runnymede, are not associated with identifiable farmland. At Ceide the six-metre diameter timber round hut was surrounded by fields, some as large as two hectares, perhaps used for grazing, and much smaller fields that were presumably cultivated. A radiocarbon date on material taken from a hearth beside the hut is from a couple of centuries before 3000BC.
Rectangular houses have also been found in Ireland. In Co. Mayo is the timber house (13m by 6m) uncovered at Ballyglass. At Ballynagilly in Co. Tyrone the timber house was built, at least in part, with plank walls and at Site A beside Lough Gur, Co. Limerick, the house measured 14m by 4.5m, post-built with a central hearth inside. This compares with 6.5m by 6m for Ballynagilly which also produced an internal hearth and the radiocarbon date of c3200BC.
In Britain there are unusually large houses at Balbridie near Aberdeen which measured over twenty metres in length and fifteen wide and at Yarnton near Oxford some 20m by 12m postbuilt with a double row of heavier posts running down the middle perhaps to support the roof. One end of was narrower so that it resembled the trapezoidal shape of a long barrow which may be significant. Peterborough pottery in the interior dates from c3000BC. The house is said to resemble a Neolithic building at Lismore Fields in Derbyshire.
But most other Neolithic huts are small. They include a house at Carn Brea in Cornwall, stone and timber-built, Fengate, Northants, Clegyr-boia in Dyfed, and Mount Pleasant, Nottage, in mid-Glamorgan.
In the north, particularly in Orkney, there are a number of stone-built settlements which set the pattern for domestic building in the region for the next three thousand years. The earliest is at Knap of Howar on Papa Westray in Orkney but the best-preserved example is at Skara Brae on the Orkney mainland dating from around 3000BC. It is a small neolithic village of seven houses with covered passages serving as lanes between the houses which are built of stone slabs. These stone slabs were used to construct built-in furniture inside the houses: beds, cupboards and storage areas while the environmental evidence demonstrates that the inhabitants fed on a variety of foodstuffs including cereals, beef, mutton, pork, goat, fish and shellfish. They also employed dogs. Similar settlements were still being built in the Iron Age.
Scatters of flint found in fieldwalking are the usual markers of neolithic settlements and these have been identified on Salisbury Plain around Stonehenge. Excavation has confirmed their identity and also shown that the commonest feature on these sites is the pit, either singly or in small clusters. They used to be thought to be rubbish pits or storage-pits but the latest thinking suggests that they may be linked to a cult of the underworld and similar to pit deposits associated with causewayed enclosures.
| 3 - The Late Upper Palaeolithic (Epi-Palaeolithic) and the Mesolithic periods |  |
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| 5 - Conspicuous evidence for Early Farmers in the Landscape |  |
