The bare bones: explore the Early Neolithic chambered cairns of the North Channel
Resource type
Book
Creator (person)
Date published
2023
Abstract
The spread of farming across Europe from the Near East is an amazing story of how a new way of life was established by farmers who moved on to new land as their population grew. People were growing crops and tending domesticated animals from around 9500 BC in the Levant and by 9000 BC in Turkey. The first farmers had arrived on the near Continent from at least as early as 5000 BC, but it was not until the centuries around 4000 BC that they crossed the English Channel and came to live in Britain and Ireland. Some of the people who travelled to Scotland came from Nord-Pas de Calais, the area where the English Channel is at its narrowest, while others came from Brittany, reaching Scotland
and Ireland along the west coast. These Neolithic pioneers transformed the culture, lifestyle and landscape of our isles. They brought agricultural knowhow, domesticated plants and animals and radical new ideas about life and society. They quickly began to make clearings in the ancient wildwood for their crops and pasture. They needed space to farm and timber to build. And build they did, first constructing
huge timber communal halls and impressive monuments of stone or earth to honour and remember their dead, then building enigmatic long linear monuments of timber and earth, before finally erecting
ceremonial circles in timber and stone. You can read the story of these monuments in The First Foresters (2018). The Neolithic in Britain and Ireland spans 1500 years or about 60 generations, from around 4000 BC to around 2500 BC. Measured in years, it is an almost unimaginable length of time. But measured in generations, the Neolithic period becomes easier to grasp, and it becomes possible to place individual lives within the timeline. It also spans a wide range of different regions and landscapes, with distinct cultural traditions shaped and shared between them.
Publisher
Forestry and Land Scotland
Rights statement
In Copyright
Additional information
Full text available via the official URL