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.
[6] The British authors use the term “Beaker folk” to mean both
archeological assemblage and human physical type. They speak
of a “... tall, heavy-boned, rugged, and round-headed” strain
which they take to have developed, apparently in the Rhineland,
by a mixture of the original (Spanish?) beaker-makers and
the northeast European battle-axe makers. However, since the
science of physical anthropology is very much in flux at the
moment, and since I am not able to assess the evidence for these
physical types, I _do not_ use the term “folk” in this book with
its usual meaning of standardized physical type. When I use
“folk” here, I mean simply _the makers of a given archeological
assemblage_. The difficulty only comes when assemblages are
named for some item in them; it is too clumsy to make an
adjective of the item and refer to a “beakerian” assemblage.
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.
[Illustration: BEAKER]
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.
[Illustration: SLASHING SWORD]
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.
[Illustration: CELTIC BUCKLE]
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.