Around 2000 BCE there was a new influx of people into Britain, this time from what is now Belgium. Known as the Wessex culture, after the region of south-central England where their remains were first identified, they brought with them the beginnings of the British Bronze Age. Bronze is made by mixing copper with a small amount of tin, forming an alloy that is much harder and more useful than either metal alone. It seems to have first been made in Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE, leading to the rise of the Sumerian civilization shortly after, and was soon adopted in Egypt and the Indus Valley (see chapter 3). Knowledge of bronze manufacturing had spread northwestward into Europe, and it was being produced by the Wessex culture at the time they came to Britain. However, unlike the first civilizations of the Middle East and India, they had not developed the technology to make the alloy in the quantities necessary to revolutionize daily life. Bronze was a rare and valuable commodity, and its use was pretty much restricted to the making of ritual objects. Although bronze axes, arrowheads, and even swords have been found dating from the late Neolithic period in Britain, these seem to have been made for a privileged few, probably the tribal leaders. For the most part implements continued to be Stone Age items made from flint, bone, and wood. The British period from around 2000 BCE is often referred to as the Early Bronze Age, but for all practical purposes the Bronze Age did not really begin in Britain until the widespread use of the alloy for the regular making of tools occurred around 1200 BCE.8
It was the ornamental bronze artifacts that the Wessex culture made that distinguish their graves. The Beaker People interred their dead with simple pottery vessels, whereas the newcomers’ burials included a variety of bronze grave goods, such as decorative knives, bowls, pots, bracelets, and various amulets. The richest of them included items also made from gold. These grave goods, along with the human remains, were buried in what is called a cist or cistvaen, a simple rectangular box dug into the earth and lined with flat stone slabs, with a capstone placed over the top. The more lavish examples also had a mound built over them. Such tombs were nowhere near as large as the dolmens of a thousand years before. The word cist comes from the Latin cista, meaning “chest,” which is basically what these small constructions were, rather than actual burial chambers. Although these cistvaens were first identified in south-central England, they are found all over Britain.
One such tomb, called Bryn yr Ellyllon (Goblins Mound), near the town of Mold in North Wales, dates from about 1900 BCE. It contained a single skeleton buried with about three hundred amber beads, various sheets of bronze, an ornate urn, and, most spectacular of all, a shoulder adornment made from pure gold. Known as the Mold Cape, the item is a collar adornment designed to fit over the shoulders, upper arms, chest, and back. It was beaten out of a single piece of gold and intricately decorated with rings of abstract ornamentation. Because of its shape and size, it is thought that the person buried there was a high-ranking woman, possibly a priestess. Now in the British Museum, it is one of the most magnificent pieces of prehistoric art yet found in the British Isles.9
Another such cist tomb, dating from around 1700 BCE, in the far southwest of England, is Rillaton Barrow on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor. In its little stone compartment, measuring about 6 feet long and 3 feet wide, which survives almost intact, human remains were found, along with a bronze dagger, stone beads, pottery, and a handled gold cup about 3.5 inches high.10 These are particularly rich cistvaens, but many others, with less luxurious grave goods, have been found all over Britain, dating from 2000 to 1200 BCE.
As with the arrival of the Beaker people over five hundred years earlier, there is no evidence of fighting between the Wessex culture and the indigenous population. The practices of native pit burials, Beaker tumuli, and Wessex cistvaens continued alongside one another in communities all over the country. Just like the Beaker people before them, the Wessex culture seems to have embraced the stone circle tradition, though, once again, retaining their own religious customs, as evidenced at megalithic complexes created after their arrival. One such undertaking at Merrivale, on Dartmoor in the southwest of Britain, consisting of a stone circle, stone avenues, and an artificial hill, is surrounded by a number of contemporary cistvaens, as well as Beaker tumuli and native pit burials. An example from the far north of England is the Moor Divock megalithic complex in Cumbria, which includes a primary circle and two smaller rings originally joined by avenues. A nearby settlement has been excavated to reveal all three types of burials, dating between 2000 and 1500 BCE. And during this same period in Scotland, the Callanish Stone Circle (see chapter 5) was transformed into an elaborate complex consisting of stone rows, avenues, and an artificial hill. As well as both Beaker barrows and pit burials, some of the largest cistvaens in the British Isles have been excavated there. These, and many similar sites, provide pretty conclusive evidence that all three cultures, although continuing with their distinctive funerary practices, worked together on the megalithic monuments, which continued to be created right up until around 1200 BCE.11 But with the next wave of migration into Britain, things drastically began to change.
Fig. 9.1. Migrations to the British Isles between 2600 and 700 BCE.
The Beaker people and Wessex culture migrations seem to have been driven by rising sea levels affecting their homelands in the low-lying coastal areas of the Netherlands and Belgium. Since the end of the Ice Age, the waters had been continuously rising, slowly but surely, due to higher temperatures. However, the migration of a new people, originally from an area that now includes Austria and Germany, seems to have been triggered by the sudden onset of colder weather. Until around 1200 BCE the British climate was warmer than it is today, more like we would now find in the South of France. But then, quite quickly, the overall climate changed from what is known as the Subboreal to the sub-Atlantic climatic age, when temperatures dropped significantly. This has been determined by the remains of vegetation unearthed by archaeologists from the relevant levels of human occupation, showing at that time the local extinction of certain warm-weather flora and a marked increase in the kind of plants and trees that favor colder conditions.12 Various theories have been proposed for this climatic change, involving shifting ocean currents, volcanism, and an alteration in the sun’s activity. Whatever the cause, it was to have dramatic consequences for the inhabitants of northern Europe.
In Austria and Germany a cultural revolution was already taking place. This was the beginning of the true Bronze Age, when the alloy was being produced in sufficient quantities to make a real difference to daily life. Bronze tools, such as more efficient spades, axes, knives, and farming implements, were replacing more fragile Stone Age ones. On the one hand this was fortunate, because the longer, colder winters meant that producing enough food was becoming ever more problematic. But with harsher conditions came protectionism. In order to safeguard their precious resources, settlements began to be fortified, and the new bronze tools made it easier to build much bigger earthen structures, such as defensive ditches and embankments, and to work lumber into wooden stockades.13 Around 1200 BCE fortified hilltop settlements were replacing the open communities of the lowlands. Generally referred to as hillforts, these new communities consisted of a cluster of dwellings on a relatively flat-topped hill around which a ditch was dug, together with an internal embankment surmounted by timber ramparts and fortified gatehouses to guard the entrance. Inevitably, this siege mentality, together with the new bronze technology, led to the development of weapons of war, such as swords, battle-axes, daggers, and metal-tipped arrows and spears.14 A completely new kind of warrior culture was being born, a people the Greeks later referred to as the Keltoi. Today we know them as the Celts. The Celts proper, with their distinctive art, customs, and tribal structure, did not come into being until a few centuries later, in the Iron Age, when they came to occupy large parts of central and northeastern Europe. But their culture began with the peoples of Austria and Germany at the end of the second millennium BCE. The kind of tumuli and cist burials p
revalent before this time were obviously too much of an extravagance for the sort of pragmatic society that had emerged. Instead, the dead were cremated and their ashes placed in pottery urns buried in fields, leading to the name by which archaeologists refer to these early Celts: the Urnfield culture.
Regular crop failures and food shortages, due to the climate change, impelled the Urnfield people to push westward into Belgium and the Netherlands, and from there they mounted raids across the English Channel to pillage the coastal settlements of southeastern England. Initially the people of Britain were totally unprepared for such incursions. The raiders were armed with bronze weapons from which the Britons had almost no defense. What began as raids soon turned into a mass migration by disparate warrior bands that brought to an end the peaceful, two-thousand-year-old Megalithic age.
By around 1000 BCE the whole of mainland Britain had changed. The building of megalithic monuments had ceased, and hillforts and fortified settlements appeared in every part of the land. What happened cannot really be described as an invasion, however, as the Urnfield culture consisted of numerous separate tribes. Besides which, the Britons swiftly adapted to the new situation and soon copied the bronze-making skills of the newcomers. They also created hillforts. Although Urnfield cemeteries are found in parts of Britain, the majority of graves excavated from this period are those of the preexisting population. Modern DNA analysis has shown that by this time the Neolithic, Beaker, and Wessex people had, for all intents and purposes, merged into a single culture that no longer buried their dead in a lavish way. For the most part, funerary customs had been reduced to simple graves and pit burials for all the inhabitants of Britain.15 Moreover, their lifestyle became almost identical to that of the Urnfield culture, apart from the Germanic mode of urn burials, which continued for a while in parts of eastern Britain. Even this had changed by 900 BCE. British culture during this era is classified as Late Bronze Age, a period when ethnic groups are virtually indistinguishable from one another. Most Britons, no matter what their ancestry, were simply being buried in the ground, cremated or otherwise, without cists, grave goods, or identifying mounds. Archaeologically visible burial rites had all but disappeared. Times were harder; the new way of life just didn’t lend itself to time-consuming and costly burials. A divisive ethos had descended on Britain. Local areas were controlled from hillfort settlements, and small regional clans covetously guarded what they possessed.
By around 700 BCE the new Britons may have felt relatively safe from one another in their hillforts, but an external and far more powerful foe was arriving in the southeast of England. For a hundred years or so, the Urnfield culture in continental Europe had been transformed by the Iron Age, when iron replaced bronze for the making of most common utensils, tools, and weapons. The melting point of iron is just over 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,732 degrees Fahrenheit): around 1,300 degrees higher than tin and nearly 500 degrees more than copper, the primary components of bronze. Its industrial production therefore occurred much later than that of these other metals. It is generally thought to have begun in the Hittite Empire, centered on what is now Turkey, although this is still a matter of scholarly debate. One way or the other, the Iron Age by 800 BCE had reached Austria, where it rapidly changed the entire nature of the Urnfield culture and initiated a new period of Celtic expansion.16
Although steel (a later-developed alloy made from iron and other elements, primarily carbon) has vastly superior tensile strength than bronze, the kind of iron used during the Iron Age was no harder and had no greater capacity to hold an edge. The reason for iron’s superiority is that once the process of its smelting has been mastered, it can be produced in much greater quantities: iron-ore-bearing rocks are considerably more common than those of copper and tin. The kind of skirmishes and armed conflicts that occurred during the Bronze Age involved only a few participants actually wielding metal weapons; the majority were still fighting with Stone Age paraphernalia. Once the Iron Age took hold, most warriors could be armed with iron weaponry. A further disadvantage of bronze is that it was made from two metals rarely found in the same place. Tin and copper mines were usually miles apart. In Britain, for example, the main tin-mining area was in the southwest of England, while the primary copper mines were far away in northern Wales. Bronze production required continued trade between separate tribal regions. Once an Iron Age enemy had severed these trading routes, the supply of bronze was cut off. It was for these reasons that once the Urnfield culture in Austria and Germany had mastered the secrets of iron production, they quickly assumed control of much of central and northwestern Europe.17 This new Celtic phase is known as the Hallstatt culture, named after a site near Salzburg in Austria, close to the modern border with Germany, where a huge cemetery of the period was excavated during the nineteenth century.
From around 700 BCE, metal farming implements, such as the iron-tipped ploughshare, made the cultivation of heavy soils possible in areas previously difficult to farm. The advances in metalworking also brought about a huge increase in the number of household utensils, decorative objects, and various ritual items being produced, such as bracelets, brooches, torcs (neck rings), amulets, cauldrons, and other artifacts, along with more lavish ornamentation of weapons belonging to high-status individuals, such as daggers, shields, and swords. Celtic art is typified by gold, silver, and bronze artifacts decorated with intricate designs incorporating scrolling, cording, and elaborate maze-like patterns, as well as lifelike representations of fauna and flora, which have survived to be seen today. Other advances during the Iron Age included the introduction of the potter’s wheel, the lathe for woodworking, and the rotary quern for grinding grain. All of this resulted in larger communities where society was divided into factions: smiths, artisans, farmers, and manufacturing workers, together with the full-time armed defenders needed to keep them safe. Inevitably this led to social stratification and the emergence of a rigid cultural hierarchy previously unseen in northern Europe.18
The transformation of Britain from the Bronze to the Iron Age began with the Hallstatt culture settling virtually unopposed in the East of England. However, once the knowledge of iron working reached this country, the practice quickly spread and the native population rapidly adopted the ways of the invaders. During the early Iron Age, the people of Britain were effectively absorbed into the new form of Celtic culture that had developed on the Continent (mainland Europe), largely without a fight. The new technology was of benefit to all, and enhanced food production resulted in a substantial population increase, reaching a million for the first time. Somewhere around fifty separate tribal regions seem to have existed throughout Iron Age Britain, each controlled by a series of hillforts.19
Fig. 9.2. Prehistoric British sites discussed in this chapter.
To protect these additional people, many new fortifications were built, but often existing Bronze Age hillforts were expanded and reinforced, sometimes with multiple ditches and embankments. The earthen remains of around 2,500 Iron Age hillforts exist throughout mainland Britain, most having two such ramparts, but some, probably the tribal capitals, having more. Maiden Castle, in the county of Dorset in southern England, for example, developed from a 16-acre, single-rampart Bronze Age settlement into a triple-ringed stronghold with ditches and embankments about 30 feet deep and high surrounding a central plateau nearly 50 acres in size. Some hillforts, such as Old Oswestry in the county of Shropshire in central Britain, were protected by four such earthworks. The immediate countryside in the protective shadow of these fortified settlements was peppered with small farming communities set within an ordered landscape of fields and livestock compounds and joined together by trackways. The standard Iron Age dwelling was the roundhouse, a circular building with low walls made from timber or stone, with a wooden-framed thatched roof. In the hillforts, many of these buildings served as workshops, and larger ones acted as both the residence and court for chieftains or district rulers.20
The common funerary practice for most peo
ple in Iron Age Britain seems to have been cremation; inhumation (the burial of bodies) was reserved for the higher-ranking members of society, who were interred in pits along with their possessions, such as jewelry and weapons, as well as household and ritual objects. These high-status individuals seem to have been buried clothed, as textiles have been found remarkably well preserved in graves dug in the anaerobic conditions of peat bogs. From such finds, it is thought that women wore dresses, tunics, and skirts, and men wore breeches with lower-leg wrappings, all made from woven wool, often multicolored. People kept warm with woolen shawls and capes made from animal hide worn with the fur facing inward, and footwear was laced and made from leather. Even hair has been preserved in such graves, showing that the preferred style seems to have involved braiding and top knots for both genders.21
The domestication of horses had begun during the Bronze Age, as trappings used to harness the animals to wagons have been found at various archaeological sites dating from 1200 BCE. There is, however, a lack of bridle gear, which would be evidence for horses being ridden, before the Iron Age. Horses were not only ridden in Britain after the arrival of the Hallstatt culture, but chariots also make an appearance. Small, light, wickerwork versions have been found in many graves from the Iron Age, having been dismantled and buried with their owners.
To recap, no fewer than five different cultures had merged to become the ancient Britons the Romans would eventually encounter:
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