Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

At night the fishing grounds were a floating city of a thousand disembodied lights that stretched between the invisible horizons. There were hundreds of trawlers from all European nations, and massive Russian factory ships. Even the crew of our ship, some of whom stood to lose their jobs if the ‘Cod War’ went Iceland’s way, admitted that it was absurd, and couldn’t continue for long. On our way back I felt excited and hugely invigorated by my first experience of an undiluted adult world. Just outside the Humber Estuary we hit a storm, and perhaps because the sea is relatively shallow there, we had to contend with waves as high as the vessel’s bridge. I didn’t know it then, but had we been at that precise spot just before Star Carr and Thatcham, around say 8000 BC, we wouldn’t have needed a ship. We’d have been on foot, standing on dry land, and perhaps looking anxiously towards the storm raging around the North Sea coast some ten miles to the north.

When I first learned about the relatively recent formation of the southern North Sea I was incredulous – partly, I suppose, because of my trawler experience. How on earth, I wondered, could something as huge, grey and brooding as the North Sea just swamp dry land and swallow it up forever? Even now my head accepts the fact, but something deep inside me retains irrational doubts. Today we have hard and fast proof of the relatively recent advance southwards of the North Sea, in the form of offshore borehole records and other scientific data.

A recent paper by a team assembled by Professor Ian Shennan of the Department of Geography at Durham University has collated all this information with some sophisticated computer wizardry, and produced a sequence of authoritative – I hesitate to say definitive – maps showing how and when the process of inundation happened.1

The root cause of the sea’s triumph over land is ultimately the rise in sea level consequent upon postglacial warming, but there are many other factors that Ian, his team and their computers have had to contend with. For example, as the burden of ice was removed, the land beneath tended to rise, thereby counteracting some of the effects of increasing sea level. It was like taking one’s finger off a cork in a glass of water: it (the land) bobbed up. But this bounce-back, or to use the correct term, this ‘isostatic recovery’, was not a universal or even a homogeneous effect: in some places it didn’t happen at all, whereas in others the land actually began to sink.

So the relationship of land to sea level is by no means a simple picture, and as we will see, its consequences in human terms, too, were to prove far from predictable. This is because these important developments in the shrinking geography of the north-western European Plain coincided with what was to be a hugely significant long-term change in the way people gained their livelihoods, after which our world would never be the same again.

Archaeology is the study of past human societies from artefacts and other material remains found in or on the ground. But it’s also rather more than that: it is profoundly concerned with the processes of cultural change. We must now confront what has always been considered one of the biggest changes in human history, namely the switch from food acquisition, in the form of hunting, fishing and gathering, to food production, in the form of arable farming and animal husbandry.2 With hindsight – of course something fundamental to archaeology – this switch looks more dramatic than in fact it was. Its consequences were indeed revolutionary, but the original processes of change probably weren’t. In fact, they were remarkably gradual. This confusion between cause and effect, plus an imperfect appreciation of the timescale involved, has led archaeologists in the past to view the period of the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition as somehow special, and even traumatic to people living at the time. Personally, I doubt this.

The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers belonged to the Middle Stone Age, and the farmers to the Neolithic or New Stone Age. It is important not to lose sight, however, of the lithic, the ‘Stone Age’ suffix of their labels. To my mind both were the same Stone Age people whose roots lay back in the Upper Palaeolithic, at sites like Paviland or Gough’s Caves. The fact that they decided to adopt the techniques of farming did not make them culturally different – at least not at first. What it did do was allow them to populate the landscape far more densely, because farming is a vastly more efficient means of producing food calories than hunting or gathering.3 It allows many more people to live in the landscape, and that in turn means that communities have to live alongside each other. So they must find ways of settling disputes, coping with individual and tribal rivalries, moving goods, animals and people, and dealing with the emergence of what later we would recognise as politics.

All of these social transformations took time: from the beginning to the end of the process, right across Britain, it took centuries – as long as two millennia before the farthest-flung areas acquired a fully Neolithic lifestyle. Despite what some earlier authors would have had us believe, the arrival of farming was not the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.4 It was certainly not comparable with the Industrial or Agricultural Revolutions of recent times, which happened rapidly and had immediate as well as long-term effects. It was a process of change, not a revolution.

Let’s examine what was probably going on as the waters of the North Sea spread relentlessly south. To do this I must return to the decks of the trawler in the North Sea that opened this chapter. That trawler was built in 1954, and was powered by a marine-oil engine. It was noisy and smelly, but it was powerful, capable of hauling a large trawl through high seas. But until quite recently, trawlers that worked closer to the shore than my ship from Grimsby were not powered at all. One such vessel was the sailing trawler Colinda.

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