History in a Nutshell
What happened in the Neolithic, you ask? Well, the period lasted for nearly 2,000 years in
Britain, so it’s a pretty safe bet to say that loads happened. Loads and loads and loads.
The trouble is, we just don’t know about most of it.
Because the people of this period didn’t write anything down, we’ve had to piece
together their past from the things they left behind, like monuments, burials and everyday
bits and pieces like stone tools and pots.
But let’s find out what we do know.
First off, the Neolithic period in Britain lasted from about 4,000 BC to 2,300 BC.
The people at the time wouldn’t have known they were Neolithic – it’s just the name
archaeologists use to describe the time when people began to farm.
Neolithic means ‘New Stone Age’. It was the last of three Stone Ages – the first
one, known as the Palaeolithic, began in Britain a whopping nine hundred thousand years ago.
You could say the Stone Age went on for ages and ages and ages.
But let’s stick with the Neolithic for now.
People first started farming in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago.
At this point, people in Britain were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Farming didn’t reach Britain
for another 7,000 years. Once it arrived here it spread quickly. Farming meant that people
could store food and have supplies of meat, milk and cereals that could last them through
the winter months.
To begin with, farming actually involved a lot more work, a less varied diet and more
infectious diseases. Compared with hunter gatherers, the early farmers were not just
shorter, but their lives were shorter too!
Britain underwent a total transformation in the Neolithic, and that was mostly thanks
to farming.
From about 4000 BC people in Britain grew new crops like wheat, barley and pulses, and
they herded goats, sheep, pigs and cows. They chopped down woodland and cleared scrub, making
room for fields and space to build monuments.
They began to make simple pottery, and they quarried stone to make polished axes.
From around 3,800 BC they started building communal tombs called long barrows and large
earthwork enclosures, which may have been gathering places. It’s possible that people
built the communal tombs to worship their ancestors, perhaps believing that the dead
could help the living.
Later on in the period, they built more mysterious monuments, including the massive earth mound
at Silbury Hill, and, most famously, circles from stone and wood, like Castlerigg, Woodhenge,
Avebury and Stonehenge. Stonehenge was built in about 2,500 BC – that’s 180 generations ago!
These were huge undertakings for people with limited technology. Why did they bother faffing
around with all this fancy building work when there was so much farming to be getting on with?
Again, we don’t know for certain, but it probably had something to do with how they
saw the world. The sheer amount of effort that went into them suggests that they were
deeply important places.
Some monuments, like Stonehenge, were aligned with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.
For these farming people, the changing of the seasons and the movements of the sun,
moon and stars must have played a massive part in their beliefs about the world.
Even as Stonehenge was being built, the days of the Neolithic were numbered. Bronze was
coming to Britain, and the Stone Age was drawing to a close.