A History of Ancient Britain

by Neil Oliver

Farmers are at the centre of a cycle of life and death.

concept of ownership

Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire is primarily famous as the site of an Iron Age hill fort.

Neolithic farmers armed with axes of polished stone found reasons to settle ...

timber palisade

Sometime around 3550 BC a body of armed intruders attacked the settlement with lethal force.

a watershed in our history: the arrival of armed conflict.

All the archaeological evidence from Crickley Hill suggests longbows were decisive on the day of the battle.

Stonehenge Cursus

A quite different experience is to be had, however, in one of the many so-called causewayed enclosures scattered across southern Britain.

Windmill Hill in Wiltshire

So rather than places in which to live, the first houses were places in which to be dead.

Edmonds took me to see some recently discovered rock

The Langdales: Landscape and Prehistory in a Lakeland Valley.

Orkney

For people travelling around the North

Orkney is not at the edge of things but at their centre.

Maes Howe,

Those ancient architects had therefore sited the tomb in direct alignment with a single sunset,

Durrington Walls,

Farmers from hundreds of miles around were seemingly in the habit of gathering at Durrington Walls for the mother of all hog roasts.

social hierarchy for the very first time.

So the spiral is about time, and the lives it governs. Individual lives begin and end but life flows through us, from one to another down the generations so that together we are something more, something infinite. Sun and Moon rise and set in an endless cycle of light and dark, life and death.

The most credible estimates suggest as many as 100 billion people have already lived and died,

500th generation to have walked the Earth since people first recolonised northern Europe after the melting of the ice 10,000 years ago.

150,000 generations since the very first hominid stood upright three million years ago.

we are now finally and undeniably too many.

Even the most generous estimates of the hunter-gatherer population of Britain in the centuries after the final retreat of the ice run to no more than the many hundreds, or at most a few thousand souls.

metal

Wayland’s Smithy

lame smith

Hephaestus,

flint mines known as Grime’s Graves,

(Flint is a mysterious material in its own right, chiefly found as nodules

or larger masses within sedimentary rocks like chalk and limestone.

bronze

Bronze is an alloy – a mixture of around 90 per cent copper and 10 per cent tin – and tin is hard to come by.

scarcity,

modern Germany and the Czech Republic, in Spain and in Brittany.

Cornwall and Devon

Unlike copper, pure tin does not occur naturally anywhere on Earth.

cassiterite.

Greek historian Herodotus

fifth cen...

Cassiterides,

often in association with igneous rocks like granite;

entrepreneurial

‘supply and demand’.

personal wealth.

Now there was an importance and a value placed upon practical, natural features like harbours, river routes and valleys.