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* Chapter 3*


      Environment and Landscape

The most important event in British archaeology occurred after about
4500BCE and was the appearance of farming. As we have seen, before that
time people gained their living by hunting and gathering, a way of life
that in Britain could only have supported a limited population. After
people took up farming the population began to grow. This period of
early farming is usually referred to as the Neolithic period.

It seems that the first attempts at farming were tentative and certainly
have left few traces on the landscape so early farming settlements are
very elusive and agriculture may have played only a minor part in
people's life-style. No doubt many continued the hunting and gathering
way of life that had been the traditional way for hundreds of thousands
of years, others may have taken up farming part-time; simply keeping
animals and planting crops at irregular intervals.

What made people turn to farming? This is a question that has been much
discussed. Farming is a much more labour-intensive activity than hunting
and gathering. Nobody who valued an easy life would have taken up
full-time farming as the sole means of support at the time. /'Scratching
a living from the soil'/ is a very apt description of the task at the
time. As with most fundamental changes in life-style, people were
probably forced into it by circumstances.

These circumstances probably involved a number of factors, many of which
we cannot determine at this remove in time but it is probable that
pressure on the available food resources was one of the major causes of
change. This could have been brought about by an increase in the birth
rate.

In hunting-gathering societies, the intervals between child-births is
determined by the need for the previous child to be mobile. This control
keeps the population down to a uniform level. However, in the latter
part of the pre-Neolithic period, known as the Mesolithic, people began
to be more static, spending longer periods at sites like shore
settlements where there was a continuous supply of food from the sea 
throughout the year.  This could well have encouraged a higher
birth-rate as infants did not have to be carried around the countryside
as often as they had in the past. Children could be born at more
frequent intervals since it was not necessary to wait until the previous
child could walk the distances necessary in a hunting-gathering way of
life. More people needed more food and one can see how this trend would
tend to gather pace.

The pre-farming landscape of Britain was one that was considerably more
wooded than it is today. We have already suggested that some Mesolithic
people cleared some of the lighter woodland by the use of fire and their
tranchet axes to create glades for grazing deer. This perhaps is a form
of domestication of animals and may have been one of the factors in the
'settling-down in one place' process. But there was also forest, not
impenetrable but not able to be cleared with the tools available at the
time.

Alongside the woodland there was a good deal of wetland. We are
accustomed nowadays to a drained landscape and perhaps would be
surprised at the amount of marsh and boggy land that would have been
found in every valley in the country in the past. The upshot was that,
facing the challenges of clearing forest and draining marshland, both
insurmountable, early farmers opted wherever possible for the lightly
wooded, well-drained upland areas on which to farm. Unfortunately, these
areas, from the archaeological point of view, are the worst possible
areas for the soils there were usually thin and easily eroded and in
most cases have disappeared taking with them a good deal of the original
agricultural evidence. What we have in these areas today are soils that
have been replaced many times over.

This means that only where the Neolithic farmers dug pits or ditches or
postholes deep enough into the subsoil so that the bottoms of these
features survived uneroded or where they piled soil or stones on top of
their soil surface so that it has been protected from subsequent erosion
that evidence still exists for us to study today. Such areas, lightly
wooded and dry, are to be found on chalk and limestone hills and it is
no accident that Salisbury Plain, for example, is such a region where a
great many monuments are to be found that are the creations of the early
farmers.

In order to investigate the way of life of these farmers, we need to
know a little of the environment in which they lived. Climate and
ecology are the major factors and these can be approached through a
study of snail-shells and pollen.

Snails, believe it or not, are very sensitive creatures. Particular
species can only exist in very restricted habitats and it is snails that
live in a) woodland, b) part-woodland, part meadow and c) meadowland
that are of interest to us. They can be distinguished from each other by
the patterns on their shells that are found in Neolithic ditches and
under banks where  topsoil has survived. The various species tell us
what the vegetation was like at the time at that particular spot.

Pollen is a most important ecological indicator but, unfortunately,
cannot very often be associated directly with Neolithic sites that are
on chalk and limestone. The difficulty is that pollen does not survive
very well in alkaline contexts which are, of course, what chalky and
limey soils are. Where, the soil is acid or neutral the pollen is a
wonderful indicator as it is at sites like Ballynagilly (Co. Tyrone) in
Northern Ireland (Apsimon) where a farming settlement of the earlier
Neolithic period was discovered on a glacial hillock with adjoining bogs
from which palaeo-botanical cores could be taken. These showed a phase
of woodland removal by burning which represents a /Landnam/ or period of
temporary clearance for agriculture that was undertaken by these folk on
the hill.

Pollen sequences in the cores displayed a decline in oak trees with
plants becoming the dominant vegetation as the land was cleared. In some
sequences there is evidence for cereal pollen from the grain grown by
the farmers. Where the clearance was temporary, this was followed by a
phase of agricultural abandonment when weeds of cultivation like
plantain dominated the area and this would be succeeded by a birch phase
and a return to oak dominance as the woodland regenerated. Similar
conclusions drawn from other pollen studies of the early Neolithic
period indicate other temporary clearances like those at Fallohogy, Co.
Derry, also in Northern Ireland. (Smith and Willis)

Other areas may have experienced permanent clearances as in central East
Anglia (the Breckland) and in south-west Cumberland or may have been the
result of a general elm decline or habitual hazel coppicing as in the
Somerset Levels. There the coppiced timber was used to build wooden
trackways across the marshland to link islands of higher ground and have
provided us with super-accurate dendrochronological dates like ?in the
spring of 3707 or 3706BCE? for some of the work.

So far the area where the best evidence for early farming has been found
is in the Windmill Hill/Avebury area of Wiltshire at the head of the
valley of the River Kennet. (Evans) Various excavations there have
uncovered spots where neolithic contexts are still available for study.
These include areas that lay beneath the Windmill Hill causewayed
enclosure built later on in the Neolithic period that sealed the
evidence in the earlier neolithic ground surface beneath its banks, a
useful service that was also performed by various long barrows. The
evidence consists of snail shells and a little pollen from the buried
surfaces and ditch fills together with sediments, seeds, charcoal and
faunal remains.

During the early Neolithic period, farming gradually became the
predominant activity in the area and was mainly concerned with stock
raising and some cereal growing but people were still hunting and
gathering which is proved by the discovery of auroch, wild pig, red and
roe deer bones on every site together with remains of hazelnuts, crab
apples and sloes on Windmill Hill, Hemp Knoll and on the land where the
later West Kennet Avenue was constructed.

It may be that a mix of raising pigs and cattle and hunting and
gathering was a common early farming combination for pigs and cattle can
graze in an uncleared landscape. The sheep that nowadays populate the
Wiltshire downs require the shorter grass that came with clearance and
cultivation and this was the same during the earlier Neolithic period.
Under South Street (Smith and Evans) and Horslip (Ashbee and Smith) long
barrows, evidence for sheep and cereal-growing have been found but under
the Beckhampton Road barrow (Smith and Evans) and the banks on Windmill
Hill (Smith) cattle bones and wild food remains have survived suggesting
that an alternative farming strategy was in use.

New research indicates that people were boiling milk to make cheese,
butter and yogurt, foods that would survive for a period without
refrigeration. This conclusion is the result of the study of degraded
fats embedded in thousands of cooking pot sherds discovered in
excavations. Stearic acid, common to animal fats predominated, and it is
suggested that the milk commonly used was milk from cows that were kept
for their milk long after adulthood. It is thought that the British
farmers were using a starter culture to produce fermented products like
buttermilk and yoghurt that are easier for lactose-intolerant people to
digest,

We can suggest how land was prepared for cultivation. It was first
ploughed by a rip-ard, an implement designed to remove the turf and
break up the root mat. This was followed by a phase of cultivation by
hoes or spades for cereal growing. After this came a reversion to
pasture. Clearly, all this was arduous labour and the areas farmed (?
the fields) must have been very small, probably closer to the size of
our modern gardens. A perfect neolithic plough or rip-ard has been
excavated in the waterlogged ditch of a henge at Pict?s Knowe, near
Dumfries in Scotland. Henges, enclosures that are usually circular or
nearly so, consisting of a bank and ditch with one or two entrances,
belong to the latter part of the Neolithic period so the rip-ard dates
to between 4000 and 5000 years ago.

Later, by the third millenium BCE, on Salisbury Plain, cereal growing
had spread out to the Windmill Hill and the Beckhampton Road areas but
in the second millenium, cereals seem to have declined in production and
the indiscriminate hunting of deer was increasing. One of the problems
facing farmers at this time may have been that their land was being
invaded by bracken that swamps growing crops and is poisonous to sheep,
cattle and horses. However pigs can cope with it and it is probably no
coincidence that they are found to be increasing all over the southern
chalklands at this time.

We can relate the agricultural activity to the materials used for
building the neolithic monuments of the area. Turves, up to 0.60 metres
long mattocked off the ground in rolls, were used in the building of the
mounds of South Street and Beckhampton Road long barrows together with
brushwood, withies cut from pollarded willows and local sarsen stones.
The timber posts beneath the mound were made from coppice poles which
could only have come from managed woodland. Turves were also used in the
earliest mound built on the site of Silbury Hill (Atkinson) but this was
not constructed until the middle of the third millenium BCE.

A picture of the area as it might have been during this early period is
of clearings in the scrub/woodland linked together by corridors of
clearance that mostly ran along the dry valley bottoms. In each
clearing, crops were being grown or animals pastured while long barrows
(see below) had been constructed as family or sept territorial
markers/cenotaphs at Horslip, South Street and Backhampton Road.

During the following period, clearings on the periphery of the valley
corridors were expanded while there is some evidence of land previously
cleared growing over again (regenerating). This raised for the farmers
the problem of combating weed infestation. As we have said, pigs were
useful in clearing the bulk of the weeds while sheep could cope with the
minor ones. It seems as though soils that had been yielding crops were
becoming exhausted and overgrown with weeds and bracken while clearings
that had been used mainly for pasture were being expanded. Alongside
these developments, fresh clearings were being made.

In the third millenium BCE, woodland appears to have contracted to a
point where in the investigative cores there is a distinct reduction in
the pollen from trees. One farming area around South Street seems to
have been well-managed with sheep rearing and the rip ard in use but in
other places mentioned above little was apparently grown. Pigs were
common, most common in the areas around Avebury henge, the West Kennet
Avenue and the Sanctuary (Smith).  This is the period of henge
construction and the building of timber structures either inside or
outside the henges. It has been suggested that the labourers who worked
on these monuments were fed mainly on pork! Certainly from the latter
half of the third millenium BCE there must have been an extra call on
food resources to provide for the workers on the great monuments and for
full-time specialists who were involved in the new copper artefact
production and distribution trades. This was on top of the surplus that
was already needed for the flint-mining and stone-quarrying workers. The
fact that this was possible does suggest a definite improvement in
agricultural efficiency by the early Bronze Age (last years of the third
millennium BCE).

But we still need a good deal more evidence of agricultural settlements
in the period before the Middle Bronze Age. What we have is a number of
structures that, apart from those at Ceide (Co. Mayo, Ireland) and
possibly Runnymede (Thames valley) are not associated with identifiable
farmland. At Cčide (Caulfield) the six-metre diameter timber round hut
was surrounded by fields, some as large as two hectares, perhaps used
for grazing, and much smaller fields that were presumably cultivated
like gardens. A radiocarbon date on material taken from a hearth beside
the hut is from a couple of centuries before 3000BCE. 

Rectangular huts have also been found in Ireland. In Co. Mayo is the
timber building (13m by 6m) uncovered at Ballyglass.  At Ballynagilly in
Co. Tyrone a timber hut was built, at least in part with plank walls,
and at Site A beside Lough Gur, Co. Limerick evidence indicates a
structure measuring 14m by 4.5m, post-built with a central hearth
inside. This compares with 6.5m by 6m for Ballynagilly which also
produced an internal hearth and the radiocarbon date of c3200BCE.  A
recent discovery at Loughbrickland in Co Antrim beside the A1 is of
three huts and they reinforce the evidence from Ballynagilly for the use
of planks split from tree-trunks with the aid of stone wedges and
smoothed off with adzes  It seems increasingly clear that in general a
large hut was one of the components in the mosaic of early agriculture
and used for the variety of tasks that were involved in mixed farming.
Ballynagilly is a little unusual in that it was almost square rather
than long as other examples are but it was still a capacious structure.

In Britain there are unusually large huts (Darvill and Thomas) at
Balbridie south of Crathes that measured  24m in length by 12m wide, at
Crathes Castle Estate, south-west of Aberdeen, where a hut has been
found that measured 24m by 9m dating to around 3800-3700BCE, at
Callender, Perthshire, measuring 25m by 10m, at Claish, Stirling
measuring 25m by 10m wide (Barclay, Brophy and Macgregor), one at
Yarnton near Oxford which was some 12m by 20m, built of posts and
divided into two rooms with a line of thicker posts running down the
centre perhaps to support a roof, and one at White Horse Stone in Kent
 of much the same size with both wall slots and postholes.
Peterborough-style pottery on both these last sites dates from c3000BCE.
It may be significant that the Oxford structure was narrower at one end
like a long barrow. Apparently it is similar to another at Lismore
Fields in Derbyshire.  The latest find is of a building at Kingsmead
Quarry, Horton in Berkshire where the construction trenches measure 10m
by 5m with probable plank walls and a partition dividing the interior
into two unequal parts. Dating is suggested within the range of 3800 to
3650BC. Finds at the Scottish sites included burnt wheat and barley.
flax seeds and apple pips while burnt hazelnut shells were found at all
three which date from between 4000 and 3,500BCE. Similar large
structures are found in the Netherlands at Geleen and Sittard (Piggott)
and are a link between the agricultural communities on both sides of the
North Sea. Smaller huts are at Carn Brea in Cornwall, stone and
timber-built, Fengate in Northants, Clegyr-boia in Dyfed, and Mount
Pleasant, Nottage, in mid-Glamorgan.  But none of these seem to be part
of settlements. Are they isolated farms? Even so, one would expect more
than one structure on even the smallest farm.

However, in the north, particularly in Orkney, there are a number of
stone-built settlements  (Inv Ork) that set the pattern for domestic
building in the region for the next three thousand years. The earliest
example is at Knap of Howar on Papa Westray in Orkney but the
best-preserved iis at Skara Brae on the Orkney mainland (Childe) dating
from around 3000BCE. Also by the seashore, it is a small settlement of
seven houses with covered passages serving as lanes between the houses
that are all walled with natural stone slabs.   These stone slabs were
used to construct ?built-in? furniture within the houses: beds,
cupboards and storage areas, while the environmental evidence
demonstrates that the inhabitants fed on a variety of foodstuffs
including cereals, beef, mutton, pork, goat, fish and shellfish. They
also employed dogs. Similar settlements were still being built in the
area during the Iron Age.

Evidence for small groups farming individually in a restricted area also
comes from Lough Gur, south of Limerick, in Ireland (Ó Riordáin). In the
area of the lake, investigation has identified on Geroid Island evidence
for seasonal grazing of pigs, Knockadoon where scattered houses and
fields have produced evidence for mixed farming, Rockbarton which has
hearths in an area of fenland where wild foods could be collected in
summer and Rathjordan, also on the edge of marshland, where a hunting
site has been found that was probably used in autumn.

Scatters of flint found in fieldwalking are the usual markers of
neolithic settlements and these have been identified around Stonehenge
on Salisbury Plain. Excavation has confirmed their identity and also
shown that the commonest feature accompanying them is the pit, either
single or in small clusters. These used to be thought to be rubbish pits
or storage-pits but the latest thinking suggests that they may be linked
to a cult of the underworld and similar to those associated with
causewayed enclosures (see below).

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* Mesolithic Times <chapter02.htm>* 	* <chapter02.htm>*
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* The Monuments of Early Farmers in the Landscape <chapter04.htm>* 	*
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