Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 12

As rich as the Southwest’s seafaring heritage is, there is little doubt that the first people to arrive here did so on foot, possibly as early as 50,000 years ago, in the sub zero midst of the last Ice Age when Britain and continental Europe were connected by a land bridge. They were hunter-gatherers who no doubt came in pursuit of the giant herds of mammoth and rhinoceros that then roamed the landscape and formed a major part of the Neolithic diet. Although these chilly nomads created no permanent settlements, there is plenty of evidence, in the form of flints, arrowheads and animal bones, to suggest that they used to shelter from the bitter cold in the region’s caves. Indeed the oldest human bone (or possibly Neanderthal, the scientific jury is still out) yet found in Britain was discovered in Kent Cavern, near Torquay in the 1920s, while the oldest complete human skeleton – a mere whippersnapper at just 9,000 years old – was unearthed in one of Cheddar Gorge’s numerous caverns (see here). The large gap between these two dates reveals not a lack of human habitation in the intervening period, but rather an absence of evidence for it, which is why any description of prehistoric life and culture must necessarily be based largely on educated guesswork.

The end of the last Ice Age in around 8,000 BC, and the disappearance of the ice sheets blanketing the country, cut off the early Britons’ continental escape route, but also greatly improved the living conditions of those left behind. Now no longer condemned to trudge behind the great woolly herds, the hunters became settlers, building small villages and farming the open grassland of the newly revealed moors, where they planted crops and raised livestock. These communities grew rapidly in sophistication and by the second millennium BC had established trading links with the continent, exporting some of the region’s various metal deposits – notably the tin and copper that would make many a fortune in the millennia to come – in return for jewellery, weapons and other goods. Tellingly, the ancient Greek name for the British Isles was Cassiterides, the ‘Islands of Tin’, recognising the importance of the metal that would come to dominate the social and political life of the Southwest in the Middle Ages.

These Neolithic pioneers also developed a system of belief and built places of worship, erecting stones in various symbolic arrangements including circles, dolmens and quoits (which look a bit like giant stone tables), the most famous of which is Stonehenge, which lies just east of this region on Salisbury Plain. Exactly what these stones were used for remains a mystery. It is clear that some were laid out in reference to (and imitation of) celestial bodies in the night sky, while others may have been tombs, meeting places or sacrificial sites. No one really knows.

Their preservation – the moors of the Southwest have some of Europe’s finest extant prehistoric landscapes – is due in part to a minor climatic catastrophe that took place around 1000 BC when temperatures once again briefly plummeted, covering the moorland in impenetrable ice and forcing the settlers to leave their monuments behind and head to the milder climes of the coast.

This icy intermission coincided with the arrival of the next wave of immigrants from the continent, the Celts. The diffuse, disparate Celtic culture had its origins in the central Europe of the early Iron Age. Waves of migration took the Celts right across the continent in the first millennium BC, from Ireland all the way to Turkey, establishing them as western and central Europe’s dominant culture.

The Celts’ sophisticated use of iron for making tools and weapons gave them a significant advantage over their territorial rivals, allowing them to sweep through Britain into the Southwest where they took over the land, establishing villages and farms, which were often protected by hill-top forts. By the first century AD, Celtic tribes were spread throughout the Southwest, even in some of the most inhospitable places, such as the wetlands of the Levels where they erected their settlements on land islands, relying on the surrounding bogs and marshes for defence. Here they developed a complex hierarchical society led by druids, who controlled the sacrifices and feasts of their polytheistic religion, and warriors who utilized their people’s mastery of metal-working to adorn themselves with intricately crafted torcs and brooches and carried elaborately decorated shields and weapons, indicative of their high status.

Although they shared a common culture, each Celtic tribe was a separate entity with its own chief. There was no Celtic Empire under a single command. Rather the individual tribes constantly jockeyed for position, occasionally engaging in short-lived wars over territory. It was probably this lack of unity and inter-tribal organization that doomed the Celts to defeat when the ultra-regimented Romans arrived in the first century AD.