Stone Age Britain

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 634.

Ancient Britain

The first people on the British Isles. The Neolithic Age in Britain: people of Scara Brae in the Orkneys; Windmill and Beaker people: long barrow in West Kennet, Megalithic monuments. Wessex culture: circles of stones of Stonehenge, Avebury. Arbor Low – “Stonehenge of the North”.

Questions

1. What were the first people on the British Isles?

2. What sources do we get information from about the culture of the Stone and Neolithic Ages?

3. What was found in Scara Brae and Rinyo in the Orkneys?

4. What was the main occupation of the Windmill people?

5. Give examples of the megalithic monuments.

6. What was the purpose of stone circles?

7. What are the grave goods of the Wessex culture?

8. What material monuments of pre-Celtic population culture still exist on the British territory?

The earliest archaeological remains found in Britain are tools thought to have been made before 12000 BC, when Britain was still attached to the rest of Europe. At a site of Boxgrove in Sussex the earliest human remains, thought to be 500 000 years old, were discovered in the 1990s. Before that the earliest human bones found in Britain were those of a woman from Swanscombe, Kent, who lived about 325 000 years ago. In 1912 a scull that had characteristics of both human and apes had been found in a gravel pit in Sussex. This became known as Piltdown man. From geological evidence it was calculated that the scull belonged to somebody who lived more than two million years ago. Later scientific tests showed that it was not genuine and that the jaw of an ape had been attached with glue to a human scull and then treated to make it look very old.

Most Stone Age remains in Britain are much later and date from after 4000 BC, the Neolithic period. There is evidence of woodland being cleared for farming, and polished stone axes and fragments of pottery have been found. The remains of a Stone Age village built about 3100 BC can be seen at Scara Brae in the Orkneys. The houses were buried in sand after a storm in about 2000 BC and only found when another storm in 1850 blew the sand away.

Other Stone Age remains include long barrows, piles of earth up to 300 feet long, found mainly in England and Wales. They were used as burial mounds and sometimes have several rooms inside containing human and animal remains and pottery. Henges, circular areas surrounded by a ditch and a bank, may have been built as meeting places. One of the most impressive is at Avebury. It is large enough to contain the modern village of Avebury. A stone circle made of upright megaliths up to 20 feet/ 6 meters high was added inside the henge in about 2400 BC, at the end of the Stone Age. The henge at Britain's best known prehistoric monument, Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, also dates from the Stone Age, though the circle of huge stones inside it date from about 2100 BC, the beginning of the Bronze Age.