Life in Ancient Britain

IMPORTANT DATES

HOW BRITAIN BEGAN

Some 9,000 years ago ‘Britain’ was still part of a wild, thinly populated European land mass. A marshy plain covered what is now the North Sea, and across it trekked bands of nomadic hunters. By approximately 6500 BC, rising sea levels finally flooded this plain, creating the British Isles. In this land of forests, rivers and bare hills traces of people were few and far between, yet humans had lived here for thousands of years.

The first people of Ancient Britain left little evidence of their passing, apart from a few bones, stone tools, outlines of campsites and glimpses of cave art. Later peoples marked the landscape, leaving Britain and Ireland with a heritage of remarkable Neolithic sites, such as Stonehenge. Ancient stones and mounds often conceal more secrets than they reveal, but we can deduce that Ancient Britons were people like us, with different but high-skill technologies, and beliefs and social structures that were in close harmony with the natural world.

To uncover the secrets of Ancient Britain we rely largely on scientists: archaeologists, botanists, geographers and geneticists. Science reveals our links to distant ancestors, and tells an intriguing detective story, helping us to picture life thousands of years ago from the evidence of bones, flakes of flint, deer antlers, broken pottery and rusted swords, and to people a lost landscape of brooding stones and windswept mounds.

DATING ANCIENT BRITAIN

In the 19th century, relative chronologies were established by ‘stratification’ – the study of artefacts, such as pottery, and their location in layers in the soil. Modern techniques include radiocarbon dating, accurate to about 50,000 years; it calculates the rate of decay of radioactive carbon 12 and carbon 14 in organic matter (such as wood or bone). Potassium-argon dating can help date rocks, while dendrochronology (‘tree ring dating’) can date wooden objects up to about 8,000 years old.

PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

When the Romans came to Britain 2,000 years ago, they could well dismiss the island peoples’ ancient past as ‘unknown’, because it was unrecorded, and probably as ‘barbarous’ as the rites of the Druids whose temples Roman soldiers tore down.

Prehistoric Britain remained largely unexplored until interest was shown by ‘antiquarians’ such as the writer Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), whose excavations in Norfolk revealed what he called ‘sepulchrall urnes’ (actually Anglo-Saxon burials). For most Christians at this time, ‘prehistory’ did not exist. Archbishop Ussher of Armagh (1581–1656) had calculated on biblical evidence that the world had been created by God in 4004 BC. And that was that.

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