Part 13

Iron--once the know-how of reducing it from its ore in a very hot, closed fire has been achieved--produces a far cheaper and much more efficient set of tools than does bronze. Iron tools seem first to have been made in quantity in Hittite Anatolia about 1500 B.C. In continental Europe, the earliest, so-called Hallstatt, iron-using cultures appeared in Germany soon after 750 B.C. Somewhat later, Greek and especially Etruscan exports of _objets d’art_--which moved with a flourishing trans-Alpine wine trade--influenced the Hallstatt iron-working tradition. Still later new classical motifs, together with older Hallstatt, oriental, and northern nomad motifs, gave rise to a new style in metal decoration which characterizes the so-called La Tène phase.

A few iron users reached Britain a little before 400 B.C. Not long after that, a number of allied groups appeared in southern and southeastern England. They came over the Channel from France and must have been Celts with dialects related to those already in England. A second wave of Celts arrived from the Marne district in France about 250 B.C. Finally, in the second quarter of the first century B.C., there were several groups of newcomers, some of whom were Belgae of a mixed Teutonic-Celtic confederacy of tribes in northern France and Belgium. The Belgae preceded the Romans by only a few years.

HILL-FORTS AND FARMS

The earliest iron-users seem to have entrenched themselves temporarily within hill-top forts, mainly in the south. Gradually, they moved inland, establishing _individual_ farm sites with extensive systems of rectangular fields. We recognize these fields by the “lynchets” or lines of soil-creep which plowing left on the slopes of hills. New crops appeared; there were now bread wheat, oats, and rye, as well as barley.

At Little Woodbury, near the town of Salisbury, a farmstead has been rather completely excavated. The rustic buildings were within a palisade, the round house itself was built of wood, and there were various outbuildings and pits for the storage of grain. Weaving was done on the farm, but not blacksmithing, which must have been a specialized trade. Save for the lack of firearms, the place might almost be taken for a farmstead on the American frontier in the early 1800’s.

Toward 250 B.C. there seems to have been a hasty attempt to repair the hill-forts and to build new ones, evidently in response to signs of restlessness being shown by remote relatives in France.

THE SECOND PHASE

Perhaps the hill-forts were not entirely effective or perhaps a compromise was reached. In any case, the newcomers from the Marne district did establish themselves, first in the southeast and then to the north and west. They brought iron with decoration of the La Tène type and also the two-wheeled chariot. Like the Wessex warriors of over a thousand years earlier, they made “heroes’” graves, with their warriors buried in the war-chariots and dressed in full trappings.

The metal work of these Marnian newcomers is excellent. The peculiar Celtic art style, based originally on the classic tendril motif, is colorful and virile, and fits with Greek and Roman descriptions of Celtic love of color in dress. There is a strong trace of these newcomers northward in Yorkshire, linked by Ptolemy’s description to the Parisii, doubtless part of the Celtic tribe which originally gave its name to Paris on the Seine. Near Glastonbury, in Somerset, two villages in swamps have been excavated. They seem to date toward the middle of the first century B.C., which was a troubled time in Britain. The circular houses were built on timber platforms surrounded with palisades. The preservation of antiquities by the water-logged peat of the swamp has yielded us a long catalogue of the materials of these villagers.

In Scotland, which yields its first iron tools at a date of about 100 B.C., and in northern Ireland even slightly earlier, the effects of the two phases of newcomers tend especially to blend. Hill-forts, “brochs” (stone-built round towers) and a variety of other strange structures seem to appear as the new ideas develop in the comparative isolation of northern Britain.

THE THIRD PHASE

For the time of about the middle of the first century B.C., we again see traces of frantic hill-fort construction. This simple military architecture now took some new forms. Its multiple ramparts must reflect the use of slings as missiles, rather than spears. We probably know the reason. In 56 B.C., Julius Caesar chastised the Veneti of Brittany for outraging the dignity of Roman ambassadors. The Veneti were famous slingers, and doubtless the reverberations of escaping Veneti were felt across the Channel. The military architecture suggests that some Veneti did escape to Britain.

Also, through Caesar, we learn the names of newcomers who arrived in two waves, about 75 B.C. and about 50 B.C. These were the Belgae. Now, at last, we can even begin to speak of dynasties and individuals. Some time before 55 B.C., the Catuvellauni, originally from the Marne district in France, had possessed themselves of a large part of southeastern England. They evidently sailed up the Thames and built a town of over a hundred acres in area. Here ruled Cassivellaunus, “the first man in England whose name we know,” and whose town Caesar sacked. The town sprang up elsewhere again, however.

THE END OF PREHISTORY

Prehistory, strictly speaking, is now over in southern Britain. Claudius’ effective invasion took place in 43 A.D.; by 83 A.D., a raid had been made as far north as Aberdeen in Scotland. But by 127 A.D., Hadrian had completed his wall from the Solway to the Tyne, and the Romans settled behind it. In Scotland, Romanization can have affected the countryside very little. Professor Piggott adds that “... it is when the pressure of Romanization is relaxed by the break-up of the Dark Ages that we see again the Celtic metal-smiths handling their material with the same consummate skill as they had before the Roman Conquest, and with traditional styles that had not even then forgotten their Marnian and Belgic heritage.”

In fact, many centuries go by, in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe, before the archeologist’s task is complete and the historian on his own is able to describe the ways of men in the past.

BRITAIN AS A SAMPLE OF THE GENERAL COURSE OF PREHISTORY IN EUROPE

In giving this very brief outline of the later prehistory of Britain, you will have noticed how often I had to refer to the European continent itself. Britain, beyond the English Channel for all of her later prehistory, had a much simpler course of events than did most of the rest of Europe in later prehistoric times. This holds, in spite of all the “invasions” and “reverberations” from the continent. Most of Europe was the scene of an even more complicated ebb and flow of cultural change, save in some of its more remote mountain valleys and peninsulas.

The whole course of later prehistory in Europe is, in fact, so very complicated that there is no single good book to cover it all; certainly there is none in English. There are some good regional accounts and some good general accounts of part of the range from about 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1. I suspect that the difficulty of making a good book that covers all of its later prehistory is another aspect of what makes Europe so very complicated a continent today. The prehistoric foundations for Europe’s very complicated set of civilizations, cultures, and sub-cultures--which begin to appear as history proceeds--were in themselves very complicated.

Hence, I selected the case of Britain as a single example of how prehistory ends in Europe. It could have been more complicated than we found it to be. Even in the subject matter on Britain in the chapter before the last, we did not see direct traces of the effect on Britain of the very important developments which took place in the Danubian way from the Near East. Apparently Britain was not affected. Britain received the impulses which brought copper, bronze, and iron tools from an original east Mediterranean homeland into Europe, almost at the ends of their journeys. But by the same token, they had had time en route to take on their characteristic European aspects.

Some time ago, Sir Cyril Fox wrote a famous book called _The Personality of Britain_, sub-titled “Its Influence on Inhabitant and Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times.” We have not gone into the post-Roman early historic period here; there are still the Anglo-Saxons and Normans to account for as well as the effects of the Romans. But what I have tried to do was to begin the story of how the personality of Britain was formed. The principles that Fox used, in trying to balance cultural and environmental factors and interrelationships would not be greatly different for other lands.

Summary

In the pages you have read so far, you have been brought through the earliest 99 per cent of the story of man’s life on this planet. I have left only 1 per cent of the story for the historians to tell.

THE DRAMA OF THE PAST

Men first became men when evolution had carried them to a certain point. This was the point where the eye-hand-brain co-ordination was good enough so that tools could be made. When tools began to be made according to sets of lasting habits, we know that men had appeared. This happened over a half million years ago. The stage for the play may have been as broad as all of Europe, Africa, and Asia. At least, it seems unlikely that it was only one little region that saw the beginning of the drama.

Glaciers and different climates came and went, to change the settings. But the play went on in the same first act for a very long time. The men who were the players had simple roles. They had to feed themselves and protect themselves as best they could. They did this by hunting, catching, and finding food wherever they could, and by taking such protection as caves, fire, and their simple tools would give them. Before the first act was over, the last of the glaciers was melting away, and the players had added the New World to their stage. If we want a special name for the first act, we could call it _The Food-Gatherers_.

There were not many climaxes in the first act, so far as we can see. But I think there may have been a few. Certainly the pace of the first act accelerated with the swing from simple gathering to more intensified collecting. The great cave art of France and Spain was probably an expression of a climax. Even the ideas of burying the dead and of the “Venus” figurines must also point to levels of human thought and activity that were over and above pure food-getting.

THE SECOND ACT

The second act began only about ten thousand years ago. A few of the players started it by themselves near the center of the Old World part of the stage, in the Near East. It began as a plant and animal act, but it soon became much more complicated.

But the players in this one part of the stage--in the Near East--were not the only ones to start off on the second act by themselves. Other players, possibly in several places in the Far East, and certainly in the New World, also started second acts that began as plant and animal acts, and then became complicated. We can call the whole second act _The Food-Producers_.

THE FIRST GREAT CLIMAX OF THE SECOND ACT

In the Near East, the first marked climax of the second act happened in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The play and the players reached that great climax that we call civilization. This seems to have come less than five thousand years after the second act began. But it could never have happened in the first act at all.

There is another curious thing about the first act. Many of the players didn’t know it was over and they kept on with their roles long after the second act had begun. On the edges of the stage there are today some players who are still going on with the first act. The Eskimos, and the native Australians, and certain tribes in the Amazon jungle are some of these players. They seem perfectly happy to keep on with the first act.

The second act moved from climax to climax. The civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt were only the earliest of these climaxes. The players to the west caught the spirit of the thing, and climaxes followed there. So also did climaxes come in the Far Eastern and New World portions of the stage.

The greater part of the second act should really be described to you by a historian. Although it was a very short act when compared to the first one, the climaxes complicate it a great deal. I, a prehistorian, have told you about only the first act, and the very beginning of the second.

THE THIRD ACT

Also, as a prehistorian I probably should not even mention the third act--it began so recently. The third act is _The Industrialization_. It is the one in which we ourselves are players. If the pace of the second act was so much faster than that of the first, the pace of the third act is terrific. The danger is that it may wear down the players completely.

What sort of climaxes will the third act have, and are we already in one? You have seen by now that the acts of my play are given in terms of modes or basic patterns of human economy--ways in which people get food and protection and safety. The climaxes involve more than human economy. Economics and technological factors may be part of the climaxes, but they are not all. The climaxes may be revolutions in their own way, intellectual and social revolutions if you like.

If the third act follows the pattern of the second act, a climax should come soon after the act begins. We may be due for one soon if we are not already in it. Remember the terrific pace of this third act.

WHY BOTHER WITH PREHISTORY?

Why do we bother about prehistory? The main reason is that we think it may point to useful ideas for the present. We are in the troublesome beginnings of the third act of the play. The beginnings of the second act may have lessons for us and give depth to our thinking. I know there are at least _some_ lessons, even in the present incomplete state of our knowledge. The players who began the second act--that of food-production--separately, in different parts of the world, were not all of one “pure race” nor did they have “pure” cultural traditions. Some apparently quite mixed Mediterraneans got off to the first start on the second act and brought it to its first two climaxes as well. Peoples of quite different physical type achieved the first climaxes in China and in the New World.

In our British example of how the late prehistory of Europe worked, we listed a continuous series of “invasions” and “reverberations.” After each of these came fusion. Even though the Channel protected Britain from some of the extreme complications of the mixture and fusion of continental Europe, you can see how silly it would be to refer to a “pure” British race or a “pure” British culture. We speak of the United States as a “melting pot.” But this is nothing new. Actually, Britain and all the rest of the world have been “melting pots” at one time or another.

By the time the written records of Mesopotamia and Egypt begin to turn up in number, the climaxes there are well under way. To understand the beginnings of the climaxes, and the real beginnings of the second act itself, we are thrown back on prehistoric archeology. And this is as true for China, India, Middle America, and the Andes, as it is for the Near East.

There are lessons to be learned from all of man’s past, not simply lessons of how to fight battles or win peace conferences, but of how human society evolves from one stage to another. Many of these lessons can only be looked for in the prehistoric past. So far, we have only made a beginning. There is much still to do, and many gaps in the story are yet to be filled. The prehistorian’s job is to find the evidence, to fill the gaps, and to discover the lessons men have learned in the past. As I see it, this is not only an exciting but a very practical goal for which to strive.

List of Books

BOOKS OF GENERAL INTEREST

(Chosen from a variety of the increasingly useful list of cheap paperbound books.)

Childe, V. Gordon _What Happened in History._ 1954. Penguin. _Man Makes Himself._ 1955. Mentor. _The Prehistory of European Society._ 1958. Penguin.

Dunn, L. C., and Dobzhansky, Th. _Heredity, Race, and Society._ 1952. Mentor.

Frankfort, Henri, Frankfort, H. A., Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Wilson, John A. _Before Philosophy._ 1954. Penguin.

Simpson, George G. _The Meaning of Evolution._ 1955. Mentor.

Wheeler, Sir Mortimer _Archaeology from the Earth._ 1956. Penguin.

GEOCHRONOLOGY AND THE ICE AGE

(Two general books. Some Pleistocene geologists disagree with Zeuner’s interpretation of the dating evidence, but their points of view appear in professional journals, in articles too cumbersome to list here.)

Flint, R. F. _Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch._ 1947. John Wiley and Sons.

Zeuner, F. E. _Dating the Past._ 1952 (3rd ed.). Methuen and Co.

FOSSIL MEN AND RACE

(The points of view of physical anthropologists and human paleontologists are changing very quickly. Two of the different points of view are listed here.)

Clark, W. E. Le Gros _History of the Primates._ 1956 (5th ed.). British Museum (Natural History). (Also in Phoenix edition, 1957.)

Howells, W. W. _Mankind So Far._ 1944. Doubleday, Doran.

GENERAL ANTHROPOLOGY

(These are standard texts not absolutely up to date in every detail, or interpretative essays concerned with cultural change through time as well as in space.)

Kroeber, A. L. _Anthropology._ 1948. Harcourt, Brace.

Linton, Ralph _The Tree of Culture._ 1955. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Redfield, Robert _The Primitive World and Its Transformations._ 1953. Cornell University Press.

Steward, Julian H. _Theory of Culture Change._ 1955. University of Illinois Press.

White, Leslie _The Science of Culture._ 1949. Farrar, Strauss.

GENERAL PREHISTORY

(A sampling of the more useful and current standard works in English.)

Childe, V. Gordon _The Dawn of European Civilization._ 1957. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. _Prehistoric Migrations in Europe._ 1950. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning.

Clark, Grahame _Archaeology and Society._ 1957. Harvard University Press.

Clark, J. G. D. _Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis._ 1952. Methuen and Co.

Garrod, D. A. E. _Environment, Tools, and Man._ 1946. Cambridge University Press.

Movius, Hallam L., Jr. “Old World Prehistory: Paleolithic” in _Anthropology Today_. Kroeber, A. L., ed. 1953. University of Chicago Press.

Oakley, Kenneth P. _Man the Tool-Maker._ 1956. British Museum (Natural History). (Also in Phoenix edition, 1957.)

Piggott, Stuart _British Prehistory._ 1949. Oxford University Press.

Pittioni, Richard _Die Urgeschichtlichen Grundlagen der Europäischen Kultur._ 1949. Deuticke. (A single book which does attempt to cover the whole range of European prehistory to ca. 1 A.D.)

THE NEAR EAST

Adams, Robert M. “Developmental Stages in Ancient Mesopotamia,” _in_ Steward, Julian, _et al_, _Irrigation Civilizations: A Comparative Study_. 1955. Pan American Union.

Braidwood, Robert J. _The Near East and the Foundations for Civilization._ 1952. University of Oregon.

Childe, V. Gordon _New Light on the Most Ancient East._ 1952. Oriental Dept., Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Frankfort, Henri _The Birth of Civilization in the Near East._ 1951. University of Indiana Press. (Also in Anchor edition, 1956.)

Pallis, Svend A. _The Antiquity of Iraq._ 1956. Munksgaard.

Wilson, John A. _The Burden of Egypt._ 1951. University of Chicago Press. (Also in Phoenix edition, called _The Culture of Ancient Egypt_, 1956.)

HOW DIGGING IS DONE

Braidwood, Linda _Digging beyond the Tigris._ 1953. Schuman, New York.

Wheeler, Sir Mortimer _Archaeology from the Earth._ 1954. Oxford, London.

Index

Abbevillian, 48; core-biface tool, 44, 48

Acheulean, 48, 60

Acheuleo-Levalloisian, 63

Acheuleo-Mousterian, 63

Adams, R. M., 106

Adzes, 45

Africa, east, 67, 89; north, 70, 89; south, 22, 25, 34, 40, 67

Agriculture, incipient, in England, 140; in Near East, 123

Ain Hanech, 48

Amber, taken from Baltic to Greece, 167

American Indians, 90, 142

Anatolia, used as route to Europe, 138

Animals, in caves, 54, 64; in cave art, 85

Antevs, Ernst, 19

Anyathian, 47

Archeological interpretation, 8

Archeology, defined, 8

Architecture, at Jarmo, 128; at Jericho, 133

Arrow, points, 94; shaft straightener, 83

Art, in caves, 84; East Spanish, 85; figurines, 84; Franco-Cantabrian, 84, 85; movable (engravings, modeling, scratchings), 83; painting, 83; sculpture, 83

Asia, western, 67

Assemblage, defined, 13, 14; European, 94; Jarmo, 129; Maglemosian, 94; Natufian, 113

Aterian, industry, 67; point, 89

Australopithecinae, 24

Australopithecine, 25, 26

Awls, 77

Axes, 62, 94

Ax-heads, 15

Azilian, 97

Aztecs, 145

Baghouz, 152

Bakun, 134

Baltic sea, 93

Banana, 107

Barley, wild, 108

Barrow, 141

Battle-axe folk, 164; assemblage, 164

Beads, 80; bone, 114

Beaker folk, 164; assemblage, 164-165

Bear, in cave art, 85; cult, 68

Belgium, 94

Belt cave, 126

Bering Strait, used as route to New World, 98

Bison, in cave art, 85

Blade, awl, 77; backed, 75; blade-core, 71; end-scraper, 77; stone, defined, 71; strangulated (notched), 76; tanged point, 76; tools, 71, 75-80, 90; tool tradition, 70

Boar, wild, in cave art, 85

Bogs, source of archeological materials, 94

Bolas, 54

Bordes, François, 62

Borer, 77

Boskop skull, 34

Boyd, William C., 35

Bracelets, 118

Brain, development of, 24

Breadfruit, 107

Breasted, James H., 107

Brick, at Jericho, 133

Britain, 94; late prehistory, 163-175; invaders, 173

Broch, 172

Buffalo, in China, 54; killed by stampede, 86

Burials, 66, 86; in “henges,” 164; in urns, 168

Burins, 75

Burma, 90

Byblos, 134

Camel, 54

Cannibalism, 55

Cattle, wild, 85, 112; in cave art, 85; domesticated, 15; at Skara Brae, 142

Caucasoids, 34

Cave men, 29

Caves, 62; art in, 84

Celts, 170

Chariot, 160

Chicken, domestication of, 107

Chiefs, in food-gathering groups, 68

Childe, V. Gordon, 8

China, 136

Choukoutien, 28, 35

Choukoutienian, 47

Civilization, beginnings, 144, 149, 157; meaning of, 144

Clactonian, 45, 47

Clay, used in modeling, 128; baked, used for tools, 153

Club-heads, 82, 94

Colonization, in America, 142; in Europe, 142

Combe Capelle, 30

Combe Capelle-Brünn group, 34

Commont, Victor, 51

Coon, Carlton S., 73

Copper, 134

Corn, in America, 145

Corrals for cattle, 140

“Cradle of mankind,” 136

Cremation, 167

Crete, 162

Cro-Magnon, 30, 34

Cultivation, incipient, 105, 109, 111

Culture, change, 99; characteristics, defined, 38, 49; prehistoric, 39

Danube Valley, used as route from Asia, 138

Dates, 153

Deer, 54, 96

Dog, domesticated, 96

Domestication, of animals, 100, 105, 107; of plants, 100

“Dragon teeth” fossils in China, 28

Drill, 77

Dubois, Eugene, 26

Early Dynastic Period, Mesopotamia, 147

East Spanish art, 72, 85

Egypt, 70, 126

Ehringsdorf, 31

Elephant, 54

Emiliani, Cesare, 18

Emiran flake point, 73

England, 163-168; prehistoric, 19, 40; farmers in, 140

Eoanthropus dawsoni, 29

Eoliths, 41

Erich, 152

Eridu, 152

Euphrates River, floods in, 148