A History of Ancient Britain (18 page)

Violence is as old as humanity. For early populations, as for us, jealousy, anger, hurt and the like would regularly have exploded into fights between individuals, sometimes with deadly
consequences. Isolated incidents of violence among groups are to be expected and are also manageable. Members of groups understand that frictions and passions will often end up with people getting
hurt, and occasionally killed. Such violence is unplanned and spontaneous, an instant reaction to a perceived wrong. It is sometimes even forgivable.

But the real problems for society start when violence is planned and carried out in cold blood. Premeditated attacks by one group upon another, with a specific objective in mind, are the basis
of war. They have something we do not . . . they have more young women than us . . . they have bigger stores of food . . . they are different from us – all of these and more will motivate
some people to kill, with a view to redressing the balance. The battle of Crickley Hill, 5,500 years ago, would have been deeply upsetting for all those who experienced and witnessed it – not
just its bloodied victims. Violence and the threat of violence undermine everything worthwhile.

And so for the greater good of the many – inspired by the desire to live lives free from fear – those farmers had to set about creating nothing less than society itself. It had been
better for the hunters, so few and far between, the different groups seldom if ever meeting one another. Once farming led to population increase, however, the empty space dwindled. Bigger tribes
needed to expand their territories. Contact between groups was happening more and more until the wiser, cooler heads among them understood that they needed to find ways for people to get along with
the minimum of skull-splitting.

This, then, was in large part the inspiration for the creation of monuments on a grand scale. By coming together in the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands to co-operate in great works,
Neolithic society would literally have bound itself together. Some of the results of those efforts were so vast they remain fixed in our landscape to this day, despite the ravages of millennia of
ploughs, wind and rain.

The Stonehenge Cursus in Wiltshire – sometimes called the Greater Cursus – is so big it can barely even be perceived up close. As you walk towards it, it seems like the product of
natural rather than human forces.
On the ground there is little to see of the thing at any one time except a wide, shallow ditch. It stretches towards the horizon in both
directions and anyone coming across it on a walk would be more likely to think it a feature eroded by water or just a natural ripple in the grass.

It is only from the air that the form of the cursus reveals itself. It consists in fact of two ditches running parallel about 450 to 500 feet apart and stretching for well over two miles. The
ditches, which may have had banks along their inside edges, therefore enclose a long, narrow lozenge shape and when freshly cut through to the chalk – bright white lines against the green of
the grass – must have been visible for miles.

Their function and meaning remain unclear. They were given their name by the eighteenth-century English antiquarian William Stukeley, who imagined they might have been race courses
(
cursus
is Latin for course), and the largest of them, the Dorset Cursus on Cranborne Chase, is well over six miles long. Sometimes they incorporate other, earlier monuments like long
barrows within their great lengths but they are essentially vast, empty shapes, best seen by a god. They may have been boundary markers, places to contain some of the dead, processional ways
– or all of those and more besides. Perhaps the act of making them mattered as much or even more than using them.

There is something about the apparent emptiness of the cursus monuments that makes them strangely lifeless. Perhaps it is hard to picture people in them because they were always spaces set
aside, from which life itself was excluded. For that reason they seem to have less to say and are somehow forbidding, certainly less than welcoming.

A quite different experience is to be had, however, in one of the many so-called causewayed enclosures scattered across southern Britain. They are found in river valleys as well as on hilltops
and other high ground. Incomplete, roughly circular ditches enclose spaces that are sometimes huge. At Windmill Hill in Wiltshire the outermost of three concentric ditches, draped casually around
the summit like necklaces, is well over a thousand feet across. In some the enclosure is formed by a single circle, in others by as many as four; but always the ditches are interrupted by
causeways, bridges to let people and animals come and go. The causeways are effectively the point of the exercise: the ditches may define special areas but there are ways in and ways out. As with
the lines of stones at Carnac, the barrier is permeable and only symbolic.

Today there is seldom anything to see at any of them other than the
shallow traces of the ditches, but excavation has shown there were sometimes banks or even timber
palisades as well. Crickley Hill had, by the time of the Neolithic battle, evolved into a settlement with permanent buildings inside; but in their original form they were never places in which
people lived year-round. Nonetheless, from time to time all of the causewayed enclosures were scenes of intense and deeply meaningful activity.

Professor Alasdair Whittle of Cardiff University excavated Windmill Hill in the late 1980s and found that, while many of the Neolithic features had been reduced to shadows by centuries of
ploughing – not to mention decades of excavation by earlier archaeologists – more than enough survived to reveal ancient minds at work, struggling to make sense of their world.

Between 1925 and 1929 Alexander Keiller spent five summers excavating there, systematically digging sections through the ditches to reveal how they had originally been cut and what, if anything,
had gone into them as they gradually silted up. In fact the site was stuffed full of archaeological riches including huge quantities of Neolithic pottery and flint tools. There were also large
quantities of animal bone – sometimes whole skeletons – as well as small amounts belonging to humans. In all, Keiller’s excavations recovered sherds from over 1,300 separate
pottery vessels and the best part of 100,000 pieces of worked flint.

By any standards it was a vast and complicated assemblage and should have enabled him to put together a comprehensive report on the site. But Keiller was an heir to the vast fortune amassed by
his family in the Dundee marmalade business that still bears their name (he had actually bought Windmill Hill in its entirety before starting to dig holes in it) and had a taste for women and fast
cars, preferably taken together. On the last day of the 1929 season of excavation, 9 July, he was driving his secretary, a Miss Duncan, in his Targa Florio Bugatti racing car along a stretch of the
A4, the main Bath road towards Savernake near Marlborough, when he smashed the thing into the side of a railway bridge.

He wrote afterwards: ‘We were climbing this hill at a reasonable speed, but not by any manner of means, I consider, an excessive one, viz. some 84 miles an hour, when my back axle broke
and, the car turning round rising into the air, we hurtled ourselves onto the angular portion of the bridge. It is fortunate that we hit the angle, since otherwise, considering the speed at which
we were travelling, we must have burst through the brickwork and
fallen another 40 feet onto the railway line below. It is of course miraculous that either of us lived
through the experience.’

As a result of the crash – proof if proof were needed that archaeologists are not all dusty academics – Keiller published little of his findings. The job of writing it all up, making
sense of the huge assemblage of artefacts, was taken up in part by another legendary figure in twentieth-century archaeology, Professor Stuart Piggott, who concluded that the enclosure had been
operated primarily as a cattle market. He imagined animals from the wider area being herded across the causeways into Windmill Hill by farmers keen to buy and sell.

Subsequent radiocarbon dating of some of Keiller’s finds placed most of them between 3600 and 3300
BC
. While some of the pottery had likely been made on Windmill
Hill itself, much of it had come from elsewhere – often from considerable distances. Some of the pots had been made from clay sourced on the Lizard in Cornwall, more than 100 miles away.
There were also stone axes from Cornwall and even from quarry sites as far away as north Wales and the Lake District.

Such was the allure of Windmill Hill that it drew yet more archaeologists. And so when Whittle arrived in 1988 it was at the end of quite a line of investigators. Armed as he was with new
techniques and new thinking, his analysis has allowed the site to shed a whole new light on the Neolithic in Britain.

For all the talk of a ‘Neolithic Revolution’, its agitators are strangely absent from the scene, if truth be told. Farmers came and changed the world, shaped it in their own image,
and then mostly disappeared like mist in the sunshine. We find relatively few of their homes, or even of their bones. Given that their efforts laid the foundations of the world in which we live
today, they have remained elusive to the end.

Despite Piggott’s assessment of Windmill Hill as a corral, Whittle and others have arrived at a much less prosaic interpretation of all that pottery and bone. First of all, Whittle points
out, there is the sheer physical effort of the construction of a causewayed enclosure like Windmill Hill. A large number of people had to agree to gather there at the same time, to begin the job of
digging those huge ditches that loop around the summit. They had to agree the design – and what it represented – and then, working with tools of stone, antler and bone, they had to
excavate countless thousands of tons of material. Just that coming-together to complete the task is significant. It speaks of co-ordination and co-operation – people spread
over a wide area communicating with each other and agreeing to a plan and a schedule. The practice of building such monuments began around 3700
BC
and the
impact of their sudden appearance across the landscape must have been profound. Where before there had been bare hilltops, now the green of the grass was etched with great circles of shimmering
white chalk, visible for miles around.

The circle is the shape that has mattered to people for the longest time. The Moon is round, as is the sun. The more observant might have noticed that the crescent forms of the Moon’s
phases are made by the shadow of our planet – and that our world must therefore be round as well. There was the passage of the Moon and other bodies across the night sky – regular and
predictable, cyclical. For farmers, people concerned with the coming and going of seasons, the year itself would eventually have suggested a circular shape. Life itself is the ultimate circle, from
birth to death and back again, endlessly repeating. So the significance of the circle would have registered early on, inspiring people to see in its symmetrical completeness the continuity that
kept everything going. Life was a circle and the circle was life. ‘Round like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel/Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel.’

Having created their ditches, the builders of the Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure made a point of gathering at the site on a regular basis. They slaughtered animals and feasted on the meat
and while the fires burnt and the carcasses roasted there was time for talk. Marriage partners could be sought, luxury items like stone axes could be admired, shown off, exchanged or traded.

After the feasting was over, some of the animal bones were placed into or even buried within the ditches, along with pottery from the eating and drinking vessels. From time to time human remains
were interred there, giving even more significance to the place. Perhaps people, especially children and babies who had died during the year, were carefully stored until it was time for the
gathering on the hill. Rather than being left behind they were taken to the enclosure and made a permanent part of it. Now, whenever the family was inside the circle, its living members were
reunited with the one lost.

‘Such deposits seem to celebrate various dimensions of the social world: subsistence, eating, sharing and gift-giving, relations with neighbours and others, and dealings with the
dead,’ said Whittle. Excavations at Windmill Hill, Whittle’s own and others besides, have accumulated a huge resource
of this material. Compared to the paucity of
finds at settlement sites, the picture painted is one rich in meaning and imagination. What archaeologists do not find of the Neolithic elsewhere, they find in the causewayed enclosures.

By gathering every year – year after year – scattered populations were able to remind themselves they were not alone. There was a unifying identity to be had from minding what was
done inside those circles. People could keep track of what the majority deemed it right to do, to eat and to make. In this way was a society formed and by the repeated visits to the communal sites
it could also be maintained. ‘Causewayed enclosures, like barrows, may have evoked the past,’ said Whittle. ‘But above all they brought people together in their construction,
enhanced attachment to place and seem to have celebrated relations among the living, near and far.’

Five and half thousand years ago people living scattered through the Wild Wood in their clearings, settlements and homesteads realised it was not enough. More than just for living, life was
about other people. They needed to find ways and places to meet those others, those they knew to be out there but whom they could not see.

At Windmill Hill and other similar places they were making sense of a journey their species had begun as hunters but which they were now continuing as farmers. They had travelled a great
distance, in terms of both geography and time. By choosing a site on high ground, with dominion over the land below, they were making a statement about their position in the world. By digging
ditches, gathering inside circles for feasting and ceremony, they were reminding themselves about who they were and what they had become. And also what they had ceased to be.