A History of Ancient Britain by Neil Oliver

Author:Neil Oliver [Oliver, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Great Britain, Europe, History, Ireland
ISBN: 9780297867685
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-09-14T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

WARRIORS

‘War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.’

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

The Iron Age in Britain lasted from 800 BC until the arrival of the Romans in AD 43.

Archaeologists make statements like that all the time, swiftly bundling prehistory into tidy, manageable blocks – each with a name or, more often than not, an age. The billions of empty years after the Big Bang, the aeons required for the movement of tectonic plates across the face of the Earth, the millions of years spent by Mother Nature making the continents even vaguely liveable for the likes of us – someone – cosmologists, geologists, archaeologists – had to try to put it all in order.

People, of one sort or another, began making stone tools around two and a half million years ago, a few drops in the ocean of geological time but an eternity for folk. After the Stone Age – an expanse of time that found room for not one but several species of humankind – came that of Bronze, beginning in Britain just over 4,000 years ago. The iron tools that gave the Iron Age its name were commonplace in these islands by about 500 BC. One by one or in batches, the centuries could be filed neatly away.

Spend too much time thinking about ‘Ages’, however, and it is easy to overlook the seconds, minutes, hours and days of which human lives are actually made. Having contemplated billions, millions and even thousands of years, a few hundred – like those encompassed by the Iron Age – can seem like the stuff of moments. This is an unhelpful illusion, one that blinds us to the lives of individual men, women and children.

Silbury Hill, near Avebury in Wiltshire, standing 130 feet high and with a base that covers all of five acres, is one of the largest man-made prehistoric mounds in the world. It is often referred to, casually, as the work of ‘Neolithic farmers’, almost as though there were just a few of them and they all knew each other. Study of the construction process, however, has offered a variety of possibilities – most of which suggest the mound was generations in the making. Estimates vary from 100 to 500 years of work and it is at least certain the vast majority of the men, women and children who contributed to the building of Silbury Hill did not live to see it finished. If work was indeed under way there for 500 years then it is as though the Millennium Dome, the O2 now squatting by the Thames in London, had been commissioned by King Henry VIII on the day of his coronation in 1509. It can be easy to make the mistake of compressing 500 ancient years, so that we trick ourselves into believing a mortal soul could see from one side to the other of such a vast landscape of time.

Some of the most recent thinking suggests the final shape of Silbury Hill – the finished article – was never the point anyway.

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