Archaeologists believe that the entire settlement was composed of domestic dwellings, as there are no obvious public buildings, such as temples, palaces, or civic meeting places. Neither did the community appear to have any ruling elite or religious hierarchy, as no houses were particularly larger than others or built to a grander design. Çatalhöyük seems to have been an isolated, one-off settlement, without having extended its influence to the surrounding area or attempting to found any kind of kingdom or state. Hand-corded pottery remained simple, and Stone Age tools were no different from those used by many other Neolithic people elsewhere in the world. There was no smelting of any metals, invention of weaving, or production of fabrics. People wore animal skins, knives and cutting tools relied on obsidian or flint, and hunting appears to have been restricted to the use of the simple spear. Crops such as wheat, barley, and peas were cultivated, and various animals, such as sheep and cattle, were domesticated, but there is no evidence for the use of draft animals or beasts of burden.5 The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük may have lived more comfortably and resided together in greater numbers than their Neolithic contemporaries, but they were still a Stone Age community with none of the trappings of a civilization.
Fig. 3.1. The locations of the earliest stone monuments of Europe and Turkey.
What seems to be the world’s oldest known temple compound is also in Turkey and dates from even earlier than Çatalhöyük. Around 400 miles east of Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe is a complex of ancient structures created on a hilltop, 7 miles northeast of the modern city of Şanlıurfa. It is composed of twenty separate circular constructions, about 30 to 60 feet in diameter, consisting of enclosure walls, interspersed with between ten and twelve T-shaped stone pillars some 10 feet tall, with two much larger T-shaped standing stones, about 20 feet tall and weighing up to 20 tons, in the center of each circle; the entire area of the complex covers more than 20 acres. The pillars are carved with both abstract symbols and depictions of various animals, such as birds, snakes, lizards, lions, and foxes. Radiocarbon dating suggests that it began to be erected as early as 9000 BCE, making it the oldest artificially constructed religious site so far found anywhere on Earth.6 Yet despite its remarkable size and complexity for having been built eleven thousand years ago, there is no evidence of any accompanying cities or sophisticated settlements. Göbekli Tepe seems to have been a place of pilgrimage for people from about a 100-mile radius who lived no differently from many other early Neolithic people around the world. It was a temple complex worthy of a true civilization, though its builders never got around to developing one. Its use, expansion, and renewal continued for around two thousand years until it was abruptly abandoned around 7000 BCE.
So before the birth of civilization, there were these few isolated examples of enigmatic cultures emerging during the Late Stone Age:
9000–7000 BCE Göbekli Tepe, Turkey
7500–6000 BCE Çatalhöyük, Turkey
4000–3200 BCE Monte d’Accoddi, Sardinia
3600–2500 BCE Ġgantija, Malta
3500 BCE Sechin Bajo, Peru
But these were single temples or complexes that seemed to have served people who lived in the immediate area, then declined into obscurity; none of their builders created anything remotely similar to the Megalithic monuments of Britain, which can be numbered in the thousands and were spread over 130,000 square miles. It is fairly safe to say that the Megalithic culture of the British Isles has no connection to any of them. There, the first stone circles began to be erected around 3100 BCE. Give or take a century, this is about the same time as the first civilizations of Sumer, Ancient Egypt, and the Indus Valley began. In other words, the Megalithic culture started at the very dawn of civilization. However, there seems no direct link between the Megalithic culture of the British Isles and these earliest of civilizations. They were Bronze Age societies with skills and inventions completely absent in the contemporary British Isles, which remained in the Stone Age until around 2000 BCE, and even then the use of bronze did not become widespread until around eight hundred years later (see chapter 9). Yet the Megalithic culture lasted an extraordinarily long time. Sumer and Harappa fell centuries before the Megalithic culture stopped building its monuments; Egyptian civilization fell twice and rose again; while the Minoans, Akkadians, Mycenaeans, and many more emerged from and vanished back into the mists of time as the Megalithic people continued unabated for over three thousand years. And their culture existed well before those of the Greeks, Romans, or Mayans. So how exactly did the Megalithic culture of the British Isles begin?
I have been referring to the British Isles. Before continuing, it’s probably a good idea to clarify just what I mean by the name. In standard geographical terms, the name British Isles refers to the territories of both Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland and the many smaller islands that surround them. Unfortunately, the name could be construed to imply political claims by the British on the territory of the Irish. Various alternatives have been proposed, such as the Anglo-Celtic Isles and the Atlantic Archipelago, although they have not found their way into common usage. Interestingly in documents drafted between the United Kingdom and Irish governments, the term “these islands” is used. For those who are not from these parts, the United Kingdom refers to England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, all separate countries but united politically in a similar way to the United States. Southern Ireland is a completely independent republic, officially called Ireland or Éire. The status of the northern part of Ireland is a sensitive issue, and the Republic of Ireland is a self-governing nation separate from Britain as a political entity, so I would just like to make it clear that I only use the term “British Isles” for convenience, as many of my readers will be in countries where this is a familiar term, and imply no political meaning. I am simply employing the name as it is commonly used in topographical terminology.
It also might be a good idea just to jump forward a few centuries from the end of the Megalithic era to explain just how the British Isles, or “these islands,” got to be politically the way they are. By around 700 BCE all of this territory was occupied by the Celts, a people of which we will be learning much later in the book. Then, in the first century CE, the Romans invaded. They called the islands collectively Britanniae, and the part that they conquered, what is now England and Wales, Britannia. They never conquered the northern region, which they called Caledonia, and built a defensive structure across the north of Britannia called Hadrian’s Wall. Ireland (both North and South) they called Hibernia. So both Ireland and Caledonia, which we now call Scotland, remained Celtic realms. During the 400s, the Roman Empire in Western Europe collapsed, the legions left Britannia, and Britain broke up into a number of separate Romano-Celtic kingdoms. By the 900s the east of Britain was conquered by the Anglo-Saxons from northern Germany, who created their own kingdom of Angle-land, now called England, leaving the west as a separate Romano-Celtic country now called Wales (which still has its own language). In 1066 England was conquered by the Normans of northern France, who went on to conquer Wales by the late 1200s. From then on both England and Wales were ruled as the single kingdom of Britain, which went on to take over Celtic Ireland during the 1500s and 1600s. Scotland remained an independent Celtic country until it joined with England and Wales as a single kingdom called Great Britain in the 1700s. Ultimately, the primarily Catholic southern part of Ireland gained its complete independence from Britain in 1937, although the largely Protestant north opted to remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, usually referred to simply as the United Kingdom or the UK. For convenience, I shall refer to the island that is now composed of England, Scotland, and Wales as Britain and the island that is now composed of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as Ireland, and both these main islands and the many smaller islands belonging to these various countries as the British Isles.
Returning to the Megalithic culture of the British Isles, something similar also existed in northe
rn France. This culture, centered primarily in what is now the region of Brittany, is also often referred to as “megalithic,” leading to the notion that the two were linked. But were they? The ancient stone monuments of Brittany consist mainly of stone rows and individual standing stones; although there are a few small stone ovals, there are no stone circles or henge complexes anything like those found throughout the British Isles. By far the largest such monument in Brittany is Carnac, which consists of over three thousand standing stones, ranging from 2 to 13 feet high, arranged in more than thirty rows, some stretching for three-quarters of a mile. Although there are examples of small stone rows in the British Isles, there is nothing remotely like Carnac.7 Carnac actually dates from around 3300 BCE, some two hundred years earlier than the first megalithic monuments on the other side of the English Channel. So is it possible that the Megalithic tradition of the British Isles originally began in France?
There was certainly a stone-monument-building culture in Brittany before one existed in the British Isles. Its oldest monument is the Cairn of Barnenez, an artificial mound, approximately 240 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 26 feet high. Built from around 14,000 tons of stone and containing eleven chambers entered by separate passages from the outside, it is a multiple burial mausoleum created in stages between 4500 and 4000 BCE.8 Such monuments were common in Brittany until around 3500 BCE, but although the British Isles also had chambered tombs before and during the Megalithic period, they were of a very different design; for example, having single, not multiple, entrances. Furthermore, the Brittany tombs were decorated with simple glyphs, such as wavy lines and representations of axes and bows, which were completely absent in Britain or Ireland.9 While it does indeed date from before the stone-circle-building society in the British Isles and its monuments are often confusingly described as “megalithic,” there is little evidence that this culture in Neolithic Brittany had any influence on the Megalithic culture across the sea. Indeed, it seems to have been in decline well before the first stone circles were erected in the British Isles.
There was a tradition of building stone monuments in the British Isles just prior to the actual Megalithic period—the era of the stone circles. But this was confined to burial structures or tombs. Although modern humans have been burying their dead for at least one hundred thousand years, often along with grave goods, such as animal bones and various stone tools, until around twelve thousand years ago, interment was a simple procedure of burial in the ground, in a pit or trench. This may have been for reasons of hygiene, but the inclusion of grave goods implies additional motives such as religious practices, spiritual beliefs, and respect for the dead. Grave markers, such as small piles of stones or mounds of earth, didn’t appear to any extent until the beginnings of agriculture —the deliberate cultivation of crops and domestication of animals as food sources—which started at the end of the last Ice Age, made possible by the warmer, wetter conditions that then occurred.10
The causes of ice ages, when global temperatures drop significantly, are still not fully understood, but they are thought to be due to various conditions, such as atmospheric composition altered by volcanic activity, comet or asteroid impacts, changes in ocean currents, and variations in solar output. The last ice age lasted from around 110,000 to 12,000 years ago, and at its height, some 20,000 years ago, permanent ice sheets, as much as 2.5 miles thick, covered much of northern Europe, Asia, and North America to below the Great Lakes; the British Isles were almost completely engulfed. The severe cold meant that even places such as the modern United States and southern Europe, which remained free from glaciations, were reduced to the kind of tundra conditions now found in northern Canada and Siberia. Not only were temperatures lower throughout the world, so was rainfall: a large part of the world’s fresh water was tied up in ice. So during this long, cold, dry period, food supplies were scarce throughout much of the world, and put simply, Homo sapiens just didn’t have the luxury to develop farming techniques. Humans remained as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Paradoxically, although the tropics remained warm, the plentiful food and game meant that the incentive to develop agriculture never really existed in those areas of the world. It was only when the Ice Age ended fairly abruptly around 12,000 years ago and the glaciers retreated above the Arctic Circle that the impetus to invent farming was initiated at higher latitudes.11
Large parts of the world that had been either uninhabitable or were places to barely eke out a living not only became vast new locations to live but also were highly fertile. The melting glaciers had left behind rich soils of sand, silt, and clay, deposited by the ice. Humans rapidly migrated into these areas, where fresh fauna and flora offered a new kind of life. Unlike in the tropics, where ecosystems were generally uniformly rich, with rain forests and savannas, the fertile areas of higher latitudes tended to center around water systems and coastal regions. This led inevitably to settlements, and while living together in larger numbers people began to work collectively, and the invention of farming soon followed. This was the birth of the Neolithic era (see chapter 2).12
Unlike the invention of bronze, the conception of agriculture occurred separately in various parts of the world, and with larger, permanent settlements came the more elaborate burials. Higher-status individuals tended to have their graves marked in various ways, by stones or earthen mounds, but these remained small and simple. Although Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük in Turkey are remarkable early examples of the creation of stone-built temples and a brick-built town, they are enigmatic, isolated cases of sophisticated constructions that were both abandoned by 6000 BCE. Interestingly there is no evidence that the Göbekli Tepe structures were used as tombs, although the residents may have honored the dead in some way, while in Çatalhöyük the deceased were buried in simple graves. The next known man-made structures appear in France from around 4500 BCE—the elaborate, chambered burial mounds discussed above—almost all in Brittany.
But what was occurring in the British Isles? Geologists have determined that at the end of the Ice Age Britain was joined to continental Europe by a land bridge referred to as Doggerland, which stretched from southeastern England to the Netherlands and part of Germany. Humans are thought to have reinhabited the now ice-free Britain by following migrating herds of reindeer and then settling once they crossed Doggerland. Then around 6500 BCE rising sea levels submerged Doggerland, cutting off Britain to this day. At the time there were estimated to have been around five thousand hunter-gatherers living scattered throughout this newly created island. Some of these people also crossed to Ireland by dugout log boats and settled in small coastal communities, depending for much of their livelihood on the sea. The remains of such simple boats have been found conserved in mud and peat bogs in various parts of the British Isles.13 Scientific examination of ancient pollen and vegetation preserved in prehistoric soil layers has determined that Britain and Ireland were much warmer and sunnier than they are today. In fact, the climate would have been more like that we would now find in parts of southern Europe: the kind of decent weather that so favored the development of Roman civilization millennia later. Indeed, this was the climate still enjoyed by the Megalithic culture that emerged some three thousand years after Britain was divided from the rest of Europe.14
The term “Neolithic” refers to the period when hunter-gatherers and people in simple fishing communities began to adopt farming techniques, deliberately growing and cultivating plants and domesticating animals. In some parts of the world this began soon after the end of the Ice Age, but in the British Isles this didn’t really get going until around 4000 BCE, once the population had grown to around one hundred thousand people in Britain and forty thousand in Ireland. (The term often used for the period between the end of the Ice Age and the Neolithic is Mesolithic, meaning Middle Stone Age.)
It was not long after the Neolithic period commenced that the first tombs were built. They began with what have been called long barrows (“barrow” being an early English word for a mound). The olde
st to survive is thought to be the West Kennet Long Barrow in south-central England, which dates from around 3600 BCE. It is an earthen and chalk mound approximately 330 feet long and 80 feet wide, rising to a height of over 10 feet. From one end, a passage, well over 6 feet high, with two pairs of alcoves off to the sides, leads to a 10-foot-square chamber about 40 feet inside the mound. The structure, still intact after 5.5 millennia, was made from large monoliths, standing upright or laid one above the other and joined by heavy lintel stones, before being covered with earth and rubble to form the grassy mound. Outside, the single entrance is flanked by further huge megaliths, the largest over 12 feet tall and weighing more than 20 tons. The barrow is thought to have contained the remains of around fifty people and was probably in use for many generations.
Such long barrows are found throughout much of southern Britain, like Wayland’s Smithy, about 20 miles to the southwest of the West Kennet barrow. Dating from around 3500 BCE, it is smaller but of similar construction to that barrow: a rock-chambered tomb covered with earth, its entrance flanked by four shaped standing stones, the tallest over 10 feet high. The barrow is 43 feet wide and 185 feet long and is thought to have contained the remains of as many as fourteen bodies. (Its present name dates from the Anglo-Saxon period, over four thousand years after it was built, when legend told how it was created by Wayland the Smith, a mythical Anglo-Saxon figure who forged weapons for the gods.) There were many such long barrows, thought to have been built between around 3600 and 3300 BCE, scattered throughout southern Britain. Archaeologists have determined that the outside perimeters of such barrows were originally supported by drystone walls, but of particular interest is that for some unknown reason the burial chambers were limited to only one end of the barrow. About four times longer than wide, the mounds sloped away from the entrance to the lower end, and around two-thirds of the structure mysteriously contained no further chambers or evidence of burials or grave goods.15 Long barrows seem to have been created as tombs for individuals of a special status. As they contained the remains of children as well as male and female adults, they were probably reserved for tribal leaders and their families.
Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge Page 5