You’ll doubtless easily recall your general course in ancient history: how the Sumerian dynasties of Mesopotamia were supplanted by those of Babylonia, how the Hittite kingdom appeared in Anatolian Turkey, and about the three great phases of Egyptian history. The literate kingdom of Crete arose, and by 1500 B.C. there were splendid fortified Mycenean towns on the mainland of Greece. This was the time—about the whole eastern end of the Mediterranean—of what Professor Breasted called the “first great internationalism,” with flourishing trade, international treaties, and royal marriages between Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hittites. By 1200 B.C., the whole thing had fragmented: “the peoples of the sea were restless in their isles,” and the great ancient centers in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were eclipsed. Numerous smaller states arose—Assyria, Phoenicia, Israel—and the Trojan war was fought. Finally Assyria became the paramount power of all the Near East, presently to be replaced by Persia.

A new culture, partaking of older west Asiatic and Egyptian elements, but casting them with its own tradition into a new mould, arose in mainland Greece. I once shocked my Classical colleagues to the core by referring to Greece as “a second degree derived civilization,” but there is much truth in this. The principles of bronze- and then of iron-working, of the alphabet, and of many other elements in Greek culture were borrowed from western Asia. Our debt to the Greeks is too well known for me even to mention it, beyond recalling to you that it is to Greece we owe the beginnings of rational or empirical science and thought in general. But Greece fell in its turn to Rome, and in 55 B.C. Caesar invaded Britain.

I last spoke of Britain on page 142; I had chosen it as my single example for telling you something of how the earliest farming communities were established in Europe. Now I will continue with Britain’s later prehistory, so you may sense something of the end of prehistory itself. Remember that Britain is simply a single example we select; the same thing could be done for all the other countries of Europe, and will be possible also, some day, for further Asia and Africa. Remember, too, that prehistory in most of Europe runs on for three thousand or more years after conventional ancient history begins in the Near East. Britain is a good example to use in showing how prehistory ended in Europe. As we said earlier, it lies at the opposite end of Europe from the area of highest cultural achievement in those times, and should you care to read more of the story in detail, you may do so in the English language.

METAL USERS REACH ENGLAND

We left the story of Britain with the peoples who made three different assemblages—the Windmill Hill, the megalith-builders, and the Peterborough—making adjustments to their environments, to the original inhabitants of the island, and to each other. They had first arrived about 2500 B.C., and were simple pastoralists and hoe cultivators who lived in little village communities. Some of them planted little if any grain. By 2000 B.C., they were well settled in. Then, somewhere in the range from about 1900 to 1800 B.C., the traces of the invasion of a new series of peoples began to appear. The first newcomers are called the Beaker folk, after the name of a peculiar form of pottery they made. The beaker type of pottery seems oldest in Spain, where it occurs with great collective tombs of megalithic construction and with copper tools. But the Beaker folk who reached England seem already to have moved first from Spain(?) to the Rhineland and Holland. While in the Rhineland, and before leaving for England, the Beaker folk seem to have mixed with the local population and also with incomers from northeastern Europe whose culture included elements brought originally from the Near East by the eastern way through the steppes. This last group has also been named for a peculiar article in its assemblage; the group is called the Battle-axe folk. A few Battle-axe folk elements, including, in fact, stone battle-axes, reached England with the earliest Beaker folk,6 coming from the Rhineland.

The Beaker folk settled earliest in the agriculturally fertile south and east. There seem to have been several phases of Beaker folk invasions, and it is not clear whether these all came strictly from the Rhineland or Holland. We do know that their copper daggers and awls and armlets are more of Irish or Atlantic European than of Rhineland origin. A few simple habitation sites and many burials of the Beaker folk are known. They buried their dead singly, sometimes in conspicuous individual barrows with the dead warrior in his full trappings. The spectacular element in the assemblage of the Beaker folk is a group of large circular monuments with ditches and with uprights of wood or stone. These “henges” became truly monumental several hundred years later; while they were occasionally dedicated with a burial, they were not primarily tombs. The effect of the invasion of the Beaker folk seems to cut across the whole fabric of life in Britain.

There was, however, a second major element in British life at this time. It shows itself in the less well understood traces of a group again called after one of the items in their catalogue, the Food-vessel folk. There are many burials in these “food-vessel” pots in northern England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the pottery itself seems to link back to that of the Peterborough assemblage. Like the earlier Peterborough people in the highland zone before them, the makers of the food-vessels seem to have been heavily involved in trade. It is quite proper to wonder whether the food-vessel pottery itself was made by local women who were married to traders who were middlemen in the transmission of Irish metal objects to north Germany and Scandinavia. The belt of high, relatively woodless country, from southwest to northeast, was already established as a natural route for inland trade.

MORE INVASIONS

About 1500 B.C., the situation became further complicated by the arrival of new people in the region of southern England anciently called Wessex. The traces suggest the Brittany coast of France as a source, and the people seem at first to have been a small but “heroic” group of aristocrats. Their “heroes” are buried with wealth and ceremony, surrounded by their axes and daggers of bronze, their gold ornaments, and amber and jet beads. These rich finds show that the trade-linkage these warriors patronized spread from the Baltic sources of amber to Mycenean Greece or even Egypt, as evidenced by glazed blue beads.

The great visual trace of Wessex achievement is the final form of the spectacular sanctuary at Stonehenge. A wooden henge or circular monument was first made several hundred years earlier, but the site now received its great circles of stone uprights and lintels. The diameter of the surrounding ditch at Stonehenge is about 350 feet, the diameter of the inner circle of large stones is about 100 feet, and the tallest stone of the innermost horseshoe-shaped enclosure is 29 feet 8 inches high. One circle is made of blue stones which must have been transported from Pembrokeshire, 145 miles away as the crow flies. Recently, many carvings representing the profile of a standard type of bronze axe of the time, and several profiles of bronze daggers—one of which has been called Mycenean in type—have been found carved in the stones. We cannot, of course, describe the details of the religious ceremonies which must have been staged in Stonehenge, but we can certainly imagine the well-integrated and smoothly working culture which must have been necessary before such a great monument could have been built.

“THIS ENGLAND”

The range from 1900 to about 1400 B.C. includes the time of development of the archeological features usually called the “Early Bronze Age” in Britain. In fact, traces of the Wessex warriors persisted down to about 1200 B.C. The main regions of the island were populated, and the adjustments to the highland and lowland zones were distinct and well marked. The different aspects of the assemblages of the Beaker folk and the clearly expressed activities of the Food-vessel folk and the Wessex warriors show that Britain was already taking on her characteristic trading role, separated from the European continent but conveniently adjacent to it. The tin of Cornwall—so important in the production of good bronze—as well as the copper of the west and of Ireland, taken with the gold of Ireland and the general excellence of Irish metal work, assured Britain a trader’s place in the then known world. Contacts with the eastern Mediterranean may have been by sea, with Cornish tin as the attraction, or may have been made by the Food-vessel middlemen on their trips to the Baltic coast. There they would have encountered traders who traveled the great north-south European road, by which Baltic amber moved southward to Greece and the Levant, and ideas and things moved northward again.

There was, however, the Channel between England and Europe, and this relative isolation gave some peace and also gave time for a leveling and further fusion of culture. The separate cultural traditions began to have more in common. The growing of barley, the herding of sheep and cattle, and the production of woolen garments were already features common to all Britain’s inhabitants save a few in the remote highlands, the far north, and the distant islands not yet fully touched by food-production. The “personality of Britain” was being formed.

CREMATION BURIALS BEGIN

Along with people of certain religious faiths, archeologists are against cremation (for other people!). Individuals to be cremated seem in past times to have been dressed in their trappings and put upon a large pyre: it takes a lot of wood and a very hot fire for a thorough cremation. When the burning had been completed, the few fragile scraps of bone and such odd beads of stone or other rare items as had resisted the great heat seem to have been whisked into a pot and the pot buried. The archeologist is left with the pot and the unsatisfactory scraps in it.

Tentatively, after about 1400 B.C. and almost completely over the whole island by 1200 B.C., Britain became the scene of cremation burials in urns. We know very little of the people themselves. None of their settlements have been identified, although there is evidence that they grew barley and made enclosures for cattle. The urns used for the burials seem to have antecedents in the pottery of the Food-vessel folk, and there are some other links with earlier British traditions. In Lancashire, a wooden circle seems to have been built about a grave with cremated burials in urns. Even occasional instances of cremation may be noticed earlier in Britain, and it is not clear what, if any, connection the British cremation burials in urns have with the classic Urnfields which were now beginning in the east Mediterranean and which we shall mention below.

The British cremation-burial-in-urns folk survived a long time in the highland zone. In the general British scheme, they make up what is called the “Middle Bronze Age,” but in the highland zone they last until after 900 B.C. and are considered to be a specialized highland “Late Bronze Age.” In the highland zone, these later cremation-burial folk seem to have continued the older Food-vessel tradition of being middlemen in the metal market.

Granting that our knowledge of this phase of British prehistory is very restricted because the cremations have left so little for the archeologist, it does not appear that the cremation-burial-urn folk can be sharply set off from their immediate predecessors. But change on a grander scale was on the way.

REVERBERATIONS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE

In the centuries immediately following 1000 B.C., we see with fair clarity two phases of a cultural process which must have been going on for some time. Certainly several of the invasions we have already described in this chapter were due to earlier phases of the same cultural process, but we could not see the details.

Around 1200 B.C. central Europe was upset by the spread of the so-called Urnfield folk, who practiced cremation burial in urns and whom we also know to have been possessors of long, slashing swords and the horse. I told you above that we have no idea that the Urnfield folk proper were in any way connected with the people who made cremation-burial-urn cemeteries a century or so earlier in Britain. It has been supposed that the Urnfield folk themselves may have shared ideas with the people who sacked Troy. We know that the Urnfield pressure from central Europe displaced other people in northern France, and perhaps in northwestern Germany, and that this reverberated into Britain about 1000 B.C.

Soon after 750 B.C., the same thing happened again. This time, the pressure from central Europe came from the Hallstatt folk who were iron tool makers: the reverberation brought people from the western Alpine region across the Channel into Britain.

At first it is possible to see the separate results of these folk movements, but the developing cultures soon fused with each other and with earlier British elements. Presently there were also strains of other northern and western European pottery and traces of Urnfield practices themselves which appeared in the finished British product. I hope you will sense that I am vastly over-simplifying the details. The result seems to have been—among other things—a new kind of agricultural system. The land was marked off by ditched divisions. Rectangular fields imply the plow rather than hoe cultivation. We seem to get a picture of estate or tribal boundaries which included village communities; we find a variety of tools in bronze, and even whetstones which show that iron has been honed on them (although the scarce iron has not been found). Let me give you the picture in Professor S. Piggott’s words: “The ... Late Bronze Age of southern England was but the forerunner of the earliest Iron Age in the same region, not only in the techniques of agriculture, but almost certainly in terms of ethnic kinship ... we can with some assurance talk of the Celts ... the great early Celtic expansion of the Continent is recognized to be that of the Urnfield people.”

Thus, certainly by 500 B.C., there were people in Britain, some of whose descendants we may recognize today in name or language in remote parts of Wales, Scotland, and the Hebrides.

THE COMING OF IRON

Iron—once the know-how of reducing it from its ore in a very hot, closed fire has been achieved—produces a far cheaper and much more efficient set of tools than does bronze. Iron tools seem first to have been made in quantity in Hittite Anatolia about 1500 B.C. In continental Europe, the earliest, so-called Hallstatt, iron-using cultures appeared in Germany soon after 750 B.C. Somewhat later, Greek and especially Etruscan exports of objets d’art—which moved with a flourishing trans-Alpine wine trade—influenced the Hallstatt iron-working tradition. Still later new classical motifs, together with older Hallstatt, oriental, and northern nomad motifs, gave rise to a new style in metal decoration which characterizes the so-called La TÈne phase.

A few iron users reached Britain a little before 400 B.C. Not long after that, a number of allied groups appeared in southern and southeastern England. They came over the Channel from France and must have been Celts with dialects related to those already in England. A second wave of Celts arrived from the Marne district in France about 250 B.C. Finally, in the second quarter of the first century B.C., there were several groups of newcomers, some of whom were Belgae of a mixed Teutonic-Celtic confederacy of tribes in northern France and Belgium. The Belgae preceded the Romans by only a few years.

HILL-FORTS AND FARMS

The earliest iron-users seem to have entrenched themselves temporarily within hill-top forts, mainly in the south. Gradually, they moved inland, establishing individual farm sites with extensive systems of rectangular fields. We recognize these fields by the “lynchets” or lines of soil-creep which plowing left on the slopes of hills. New crops appeared; there were now bread wheat, oats, and rye, as well as barley.

At Little Woodbury, near the town of Salisbury, a farmstead has been rather completely excavated. The rustic buildings were within a palisade, the round house itself was built of wood, and there were various outbuildings and pits for the storage of grain. Weaving was done on the farm, but not blacksmithing, which must have been a specialized trade. Save for the lack of firearms, the place might almost be taken for a farmstead on the American frontier in the early 1800’s.

Toward 250 B.C. there seems to have been a hasty attempt to repair the hill-forts and to build new ones, evidently in response to signs of restlessness being shown by remote relatives in France.

THE SECOND PHASE

Perhaps the hill-forts were not entirely effective or perhaps a compromise was reached. In any case, the newcomers from the Marne district did establish themselves, first in the southeast and then to the north and west. They brought iron with decoration of the La TÈne type and also the two-wheeled chariot. Like the Wessex warriors of over a thousand years earlier, they made “heroes’” graves, with their warriors buried in the war-chariots and dressed in full trappings.

The metal work of these Marnian newcomers is excellent. The peculiar Celtic art style, based originally on the classic tendril motif, is colorful and virile, and fits with Greek and Roman descriptions of Celtic love of color in dress. There is a strong trace of these newcomers northward in Yorkshire, linked by Ptolemy’s description to the Parisii, doubtless part of the Celtic tribe which originally gave its name to Paris on the Seine. Near Glastonbury, in Somerset, two villages in swamps have been excavated. They seem to date toward the middle of the first century B.C., which was a troubled time in Britain. The circular houses were built on timber platforms surrounded with palisades. The preservation of antiquities by the water-logged peat of the swamp has yielded us a long catalogue of the materials of these villagers.

In Scotland, which yields its first iron tools at a date of about 100 B.C., and in northern Ireland even slightly earlier, the effects of the two phases of newcomers tend especially to blend. Hill-forts, “brochs” (stone-built round towers) and a variety of other strange structures seem to appear as the new ideas develop in the comparative isolation of northern Britain.

THE THIRD PHASE

For the time of about the middle of the first century B.C., we again see traces of frantic hill-fort construction. This simple military architecture now took some new forms. Its multiple ramparts must reflect the use of slings as missiles, rather than spears. We probably know the reason. In 56 B.C., Julius Caesar chastised the Veneti of Brittany for outraging the dignity of Roman ambassadors. The Veneti were famous slingers, and doubtless the reverberations of escaping Veneti were felt across the Channel. The military architecture suggests that some Veneti did escape to Britain.

Also, through Caesar, we learn the names of newcomers who arrived in two waves, about 75 B.C. and about 50 B.C. These were the Belgae. Now, at last, we can even begin to speak of dynasties and individuals. Some time before 55 B.C., the Catuvellauni, originally from the Marne district in France, had possessed themselves of a large part of southeastern England. They evidently sailed up the Thames and built a town of over a hundred acres in area. Here ruled Cassivellaunus, “the first man in England whose name we know,” and whose town Caesar sacked. The town sprang up elsewhere again, however.

THE END OF PREHISTORY

Prehistory, strictly speaking, is now over in southern Britain. Claudius’ effective invasion took place in 43 A.D.; by 83 A.D., a raid had been made as far north as Aberdeen in Scotland. But by 127 A.D., Hadrian had completed his wall from the Solway to the Tyne, and the Romans settled behind it. In Scotland, Romanization can have affected the countryside very little. Professor Piggott adds that “... it is when the pressure of Romanization is relaxed by the break-up of the Dark Ages that we see again the Celtic metal-smiths handling their material with the same consummate skill as they had before the Roman Conquest, and with traditional styles that had not even then forgotten their Marnian and Belgic heritage.”

In fact, many centuries go by, in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe, before the archeologist’s task is complete and the historian on his own is able to describe the ways of men in the past.

BRITAIN AS A SAMPLE OF THE GENERAL COURSE OF PREHISTORY IN EUROPE

In giving this very brief outline of the later prehistory of Britain, you will have noticed how often I had to refer to the European continent itself. Britain, beyond the English Channel for all of her later prehistory, had a much simpler course of events than did most of the rest of Europe in later prehistoric times. This holds, in spite of all the “invasions” and “reverberations” from the continent. Most of Europe was the scene of an even more complicated ebb and flow of cultural change, save in some of its more remote mountain valleys and peninsulas.

The whole course of later prehistory in Europe is, in fact, so very complicated that there is no single good book to cover it all; certainly there is none in English. There are some good regional accounts and some good general accounts of part of the range from about 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1. I suspect that the difficulty of making a good book that covers all of its later prehistory is another aspect of what makes Europe so very complicated a continent today. The prehistoric foundations for Europe’s very complicated set of civilizations, cultures, and sub-cultures—which begin to appear as history proceeds—were in themselves very complicated.

Hence, I selected the case of Britain as a single example of how prehistory ends in Europe. It could have been more complicated than we found it to be. Even in the subject matter on Britain in the chapter before the last, we did not see direct traces of the effect on Britain of the very important developments which took place in the Danubian way from the Near East. Apparently Britain was not affected. Britain received the impulses which brought copper, bronze, and iron tools from an original east Mediterranean homeland into Europe, almost at the ends of their journeys. But by the same token, they had had time en route to take on their characteristic European aspects.

Some time ago, Sir Cyril Fox wrote a famous book called The Personality of Britain, sub-titled “Its Influence on Inhabitant and Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times.” We have not gone into the post-Roman early historic period here; there are still the Anglo-Saxons and Normans to account for as well as the effects of the Romans. But what I have tried to do was to begin the story of how the personality of Britain was formed. The principles that Fox used, in trying to balance cultural and environmental factors and interrelationships would not be greatly different for other lands.

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