Unraveling the Mysteries of the Ritual Landscape: From Mesolithic Times to the Early Bronze Age
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Many academic phrases are too awkward, verbose and cumbersome to find their way into common usage. Indeed, the jargon of archaeology often leaves me speechless with frustration. But once in a blue moon, terms coined in the Ivory Towers do manage to filter into informed general writing. And ‘ritual landscape’ is one of these. It’s something that makes people frown and look interested, in the hope that somebody might explain. Anyhow, that’s my intention now.
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The period that mostly concerns us is the two and a half millennia from 4000 to 1500 BC. It’s a long time, but a great deal happened. The last Ice Age gradually ended around 10,000 BC. There was then a sudden warming of about ten degrees Celsius at 9600 BC. By 8000 BC the climate may even have been slightly warmer than it is today. The warmer temperatures caused North Sea levels to rise quite rapidly and people were forced to move away from the game and fish-rich low-lying pastures of Doggerland (the name given to the once undulating plain beneath the southern North Sea basin) and move to what had been the distant and less hospitable hinterland of Britain, and north-western Europe. This meant that the population rose quite rapidly at the time when Britain was becoming an island – a process that was complete by about 6000 BC. The population subsisted by hunting, fishing and foraging. They had domesticated dogs (from wolves), and while some adapted a semi-migratory lifestyle, following traditional routes, others settled down permanently, often around lakes and streams. The earliest known family houses in Britain are from Star Carr in Yorkshire and date to about 9000 BC. Two millennia after Britain finally separated from the continental mainland, the first farmers arrived. By now, the British population was about 200-300,000 (the same as modern Belfast or Newcastle).
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Farming was introduced by an influx of about 25% new people, many of whom arrived on the south coast. But this was not a Cowboys and Indians confrontation. It would seem the indigenous hunter-forager population was eager to accept the new way of life. The arrival of farming brought with it not just permanent settlement, but fixed burial sites and new forms of ceremonial monuments. There was an unstated implication that the post-Ice Age hunters had bigger things to worry about than creating new religions. All of that came with the greater leisure afforded by food-production. We now realise that this was all rubbish. Far from having less time to ponder the eternal verities of life, hunters of the recent past had ample leisure in which to create extraordinarily rich spiritual realms, that they passed down to their children – a process, surely, of education.
Recent research in the landscape surrounding Stonehenge shows that there were at least three places that were venerated from early Mesolithic times, around 8000 BC. We also now know that the area continued to be populated for another 4,000 years until the introduction of farming. In other words, the diverse spiritual origins of what was to become the Stonehenge ritual landscape have roots that were very ancient indeed. The term ritual landscape is used to describe concentrations of funerary and ceremonial monuments that were constructed in the Neolithic (4000- 2500 BC) and Early Bronze Age (2500-1500 BC).
