Archaeology is changing the nation’s history
Mike Pitts has been editing BritishArchaeology for 16 years: 2020 will see his 100th edition. In this essay about ancient Britain he explores a theme that has emerged from unprecedented amounts of new research and discoveries that have accumulated during that time
We have featured a lot of new archaeology since 2003, when I started to edit this magazine – new ideas, research technologies, excavations and discoveries. The pace of research is so great that it can be easy to miss how much has changed in what we know about Britain’s early history. Helped especially by development-led excavation (News Jan/Feb 2016/146) and the scientific trio of increasingly precise radiocarbon dating (feature Sep/Oct 2019/168) and the analysis of isotopes and ancient dna (adna; feature Nov/Dec 2016/151), there’s been a revolution in archaeology, and the way we think about ourselves.
At the broadest level, we can see nearly a million years of an astonishing variety of practices and achievements, of economies and belief systems, of individuals making their mark and of societies adapting to changes in climate, technologies and events. A particular theme is that of people on the move: of trade and social exchange, of journeys around Britain and across the seas, and of significant migrations. Between the first signs of people, at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast (feature Sep/Oct 2010/114) and now, there may have been as many as 20 occasions when the existing human population entirely or substantially disappeared, and was replaced.
The most dramatic of these changes saw new species, from Homo antecessor (perhaps), to neanderthalensis and sapiens (feature Mar/Apr 2014/135). Significant changes in stone technology at Barnham (feature this edition) suggest the possibility of three different groups of early humans arriving during a single interglacial around 400,000 years ago. On several occasions long periods of extreme cold drove people out: modern humans had come and gone before people used Gough’s Cave 14,000 years ago (feature May/Jun 2011/118) and their immediate descendants were again forced south. And whenever the climate warmed enough and people returned, thousands of years later, there could have been no memory of having been here, and the land was discovered anew.
The uninterrupted era of humans in what are now islands began when hunter-gatherers were at Star Carr 11,300 years ago (News Jul/Aug 2018/161) – but that needn’t mean that population change stopped. Cheddar Man died a few centuries later. Not
long ago research using modern dna was said to show that some inhabitants of modern Cheddar were directly descended from this Early Mesolithic individual. We now know things were more complex. Cheddar Man’s adna tells us he probably had dark hair and black skin. Ancient dna research appears to indicate that when huntergatherer lifeways disappeared some 4,000 years later, the Mesolithic population of the British Isles also largely, possibly entirely faded away.
New farming peoples not only brought new ideologies, technologies and ways of earning a living – and the domesticated animals and plants they needed for that (feature Jul/Aug 2011/119) – but they were lighter skinned (though not what we would call white) and genetically distinct too. Their genome replaced that of the hunter-gatherers (feature Sep/Oct 2019/168).
Up to the Mesolithic era, everyone living in Britain arrived, or had immediate ancestors who arrived, on foot. If the sea level was high and Britain was isolated from the continent, nobody came. From around 8,000 years ago, relatively late in the Mesolithic and after a tsunami had swept across what remained of Doggerland (News Mar/Apr 2005/81 and Jul/Aug 2013/131) the North Sea and the English Channel finally took their modern shape. Walking ceased to be an option. This is the meaning of island Britain: facing a long and varied coast from Norway to Spain and Portugal, the British Isles have been directly accessible to a wider range of people and cultures than would ever have been possible were they landlocked.
Archaeology and adna suggest that Neolithic lifeways were carried westwards by people from the Near East via two routes: to the south along the Mediterranean and up through Spain, and through central Europe following the Danube river valley. As the archaeology would predict, Neolithic adna in Britain shows both of these streams, especially the former. There is a small and constant amount of older hunter-gatherer dna in the Neolithic genome, but it’s the same, and no more, as seen in continental populations, and it’s quite possible that it was brought by the new immigrants – who barely mixed with huntergatherers here at all.
The new adna evidence appears to settle a long debate about whether farming was introduced by migrants or copied and adopted by native people. To go beyond bald support for the former, however, and to begin to understand the forces at work and the impacts on peoples’ lives, requires
new archaeological research and discoveries. Genetics appears to support archaeological suggestions that early migrants arrived in the south-east and the south-west from different parts of the continent, and pottery, for example – one of many things brought over by the new farmers – shows stylistic differences between east and west Britain that persist for generations. A study in Dorset throws suggestive light on that divide some 5,500 years ago – between 3650 and 3350bc.
Migration story
The remains of a woman and four men excavated at Hambledon Hill had isotope signatures suggesting they came from the far south-west, where some of the rarer and finer artefacts at the site had been made. They may not all have been there to trade. Most of the 22 people studied could have grown up locally. Of the five who certainly did not, three demonstrably died when the hill was assaulted – and it’s not impossible that the other two did too (feature Jan/Feb 2019/164).
Judging by artefacts, and enclosure and funerary-monument architecture, Wessex seems to have bridged two culture zones, and may have been the area where descendants of immigrant farmers who crossed the sea in the east, and ultimately came up the Danube, met those from the west and the Mediterranean. In later centuries this border zone featured four of the country’s largest henges, each surrounded by monumental baubles of which Stonehenge is the greatest. Isotopic research suggests a significant number of people buried at Stonehenge in its early history were not local, with possible origins across southern England and Wales at the nearest (News Nov/Dec 2018/163). Pigs too were brought to the great henges from, in some cases, great distances (News May/Jun 2019/166).
Does this mean that Wessex, and Stonehenge in particular, was a draw from across the British Isles and even beyond? Perhaps, but until similar studies are done elsewhere, we have no wider context. Henges like the three at Thornborough in North Yorkshire, recognised as being at the centre of natural routeways, might have been way stations for great pilgrimages – or attractions in their own right (feature Mar 2004/75). We cannot yet say that no pigs travelled from Wiltshire to Orkney.
There does, however, seem to have been a remarkable amount of movement within the British Isles. There are affinities between things made across Britain at this time, notably pottery, and the monumental variations on themes of henges and timber architecture imply shared visions. But this needn’t mean, as is sometimes claimed, that Britain was then some kind of nation. There are endless shared cultural traits, for example, across Europe at any time in history, with its distinct polities, languages and identities. Late Neolithic Britain would have been a place of many peoples, with local traditions and understandings, and those great henges may have had their roots in warring, alliances and trading between different groups. But longdistance journeying is quite different from something that brought it all to an end: another major population change across the uk.
Around 2450bc new technologies and styles (Beaker pottery, a new prominence of archery, metallurgy, new religions and more) appeared at the same time as a dramatic change in adna that is again directly traceable to the continent, from where the cultural changes also came (feature May/Jun 2018/160). As 1,500 years before, the new people had lighter skin and
paler eyes than those already living in Britain. Typically, it seems, they would have looked different (since the 19th century it’s been known they had differently shaped heads, though the explanation for that remains elusive) even without the effects of their dress, behaviour and speech. There is regional variety – Beaker people in Scotland were doing some things differently from Beaker people in Wessex (feature Jan/Feb 2017/152) – and considerable movement within the uk (feature Sep/Oct 2016/150). On the face of it natives and immigrants mostly kept themselves apart. Again, however, archaeological research is needed to address questions raised by the genetics. There is often apparent continuity of rituals, or at least of ritual interest, at old monuments at this time of change. To what extent the genetically sampled individuals are representative of the entire population is currently difficult to address.
No sign of a subsequent genomic change so dramatic has been identified (although we await large studies of later prehistoric individuals), and it may be that the total population reached a level where it would have been unthinkable. There is, however, much evidence of continuing movements linking Britain with the rest of Europe.
At Cliffs End, Kent, many of the people who had been buried in a large hollow between around 900 and 300bc had come from outside Britain, remarkably apparently either from the western Mediterranean or from Scandinavia (feature Jul/Aug 2013/131). The Bronze Age Dover boat, thought by some archaeologists to have been used to cross the Channel, was found nearby (feature Sep/Oct 2012/126).
Cliffs End may have been exceptional, and the bay opposite France is said to have drawn notable migrants in early historic times, from Julius Caesar’s army to the likes of Hengist and Horsa, St Augustine and Cnut. But the idea of travel in later prehistory was certainly not unique. Throughout the Bronze and Iron ages there are strong archaeological suggestions of trade and contact across the North Sea and the Channel.
Some think of the English as AngloSaxons, the outcome of close contact with the European continent and of settlement by Germanic peoples – though adna research suggests less than half of the modern British genome can be described as “Anglo-Saxon”, itself an elusive concept (see feature, this edition). And unusually, and in contrast to the Garden of Eden story adopted by Christianity, the surviving British origin myth is based on migration, not creation: the primeval Briton was what we would today call a Mediterranean refugee.
He was called Brutus. His story survives in a retelling by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a medieval bishop, and in older texts said to have been compiled around ad800 by a Welsh monk called Nennius (feature Sep/Oct 2017/156). Brutus was descended from Aeneas, a Trojan hero. Having accidently killed his father, he fled Italy, was chased into France and eventually settled in a previously uninhabited Britain, which is named after him.
It’s only a story. But should we ever have the good fortune to find Brutus’s grave, we have the sciences to test the theory.