DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

The Development of the Celtic Peoples: The Significance of Agriculture From the Neolithic Era Through the Bronze Age
(v.2.0)
by Áine MacDermot

**[Note: It is helpful to keep in mind that the dates of these various eras (Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc.) were not the same exact dates everywhere in the span of measured time, but only that they are useful as general guidelines to the various developments that took place - at differing times in different geographical areas. In illustration of this, the Bronze Age was just beginning, in what is now the United States, just prior to the discovery of the New World near the end of the 15th century AD.]

From Hunter-Gathers To Herding and Farming: The Neolithic Era (approximately 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC)

One of the most fascinating changes in the history of humankind was the transition from mobile hunting and gathering to settled herding and farming, during what is called the Neolithic era - from approximately 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC. The beginnings of this monumental change can be traced to the food-producing cultures that evolved on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea in Southwest Asia. This is an area comprising modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Iran & Iraq (which later were to be called Mesopotamia).

The warmer climate that developed at the end of the last Ice Age (or Pleistocene Era around 12,000 years ago), brought about great environmental changes in the biogeography of the earth. Prior to this time, the English channel and the Irish Sea were dry land; the sea levels were much lower in those days due to the water being locked up in glaciation. With the increasing temperatures, the glaciers melted and the sea level rose by as much as a meter per century; Britain and Ireland (over a span of several thousand years) became islands cut off from the mainland. In southern England, for example, insect remains dated to 11,500 years ago show that average July temperatures increased from 48 to 63 degrees Fahrenheit in a little more than a century. (1) Some geographic areas dried out and became arid steppes or desert, with subsequent shifts in the types of animals and plants that would survive in a given area. However, in Southwest Asia where open woodlands with nuts that could be harvested flourished, grasslands and grains such as barley and emmer (a wheat) grew and could be gathered. These relatively rapid changes decisively altered the patterns of human life.

As the climate in western Europe improved somewhat rapidly and the ice edge retreated, the herds of reindeer, horses, and other game gradually moved north to continue to access the vegetation they needed to survive. The impact of these climatic changes to the hunter-gatherers, who during the previous 100,000+ years depended upon large game and horses for survival, was a choice of adapting to the new conditions, or drastically changing their sources of food. Some groups of people followed the big game animals north and spread throughout the continent even as far as Scandinavia, while others adjusted to the new conditions where they were, hunting smaller game and adapting their diets to include more vegetation and fish. Many of them concentrated on shores of rivers, lakes or seas. We know this because paleoethnobotanists and archaeologists have developed methods to establish what people ate and where their foods came from by analyzing pollen, fossilized and preserved plants and seeds, the remains of human and animal bones, and archaeological artifacts that have been found in the various regions.

On no account should we assume that hunter-gatherers willingly and immediately switched to farming; farming is and was hard work! The modern phrase “the daily grind” was literally true in reference to the grinding of grains into flour.

“Agriculture was apparently forced on them by a short sharp period of drought, which threatened the productivity of the wild resources they had been collecting. One response was to replant seeds of the wild grasses people had been collecting, in the hope that this would assure supplies. It was their bad luck that harvesting and replanting caused a genetic change in the grasses - a non-shattering seed head. Once this happened the plants could no longer reproduce by themselves, but for ever had to be replanted by humans - an unforeseeable catastrophe.” (2)

However, it cannot be assumed that these people simply gave up their mobility and settled down to the sedentary life of farming. There is evidence that foragers can go in and out of cultivation and herding with some ease, even in the modern world (1, Leakey, & Bogucki); and that cultivation does not in itself have to tie populations down to one geographic spot. Most scientific models of Neolithic culture emphasize an agricultural economy, but animals may have been at least as, if not more, important than crops as providers of food.

“Our traditional view of the Neolithic is that it was the period in which people first learned to grow cereal crops, such as barley, in order to make bread and porridge. In a recent article in British Archaeology, however, the archaeological scientist Mike Richards wrote that, on the evidence of bone analysis, meat was more important than grain in the British Neolithic diet. (’First farmers with no taste for grain’, March, 1996)” (3)

Even among the same group of people, it is doubtful that hunting and foraging were ever given up entirely in favor of cultivation of crops. Surely, this transition from a foraging culture to an “agri-” culture was slow and, at best, geographically sporadic in its evolution. Probably the most important result of this very slow transition from hunter-gatherer to herder-farmer was the gradual establishment of settled communities. The trees and grasses and the animals that ate them, which provided human food and later, transportation, only grew in areas that could support the environmental needs (temperature, rainfall, and soil) of these plants and animals, and so mankind lived within these food-producing areas, moving on to other areas only when production or resources began to dwindle.

Near the end of the Neolithic period, after cereals had been domesticated and cultivated, and stock-breeding was established, people had developed farming methods geared to open up landscapes. The harvesting of grain, in turn, stimulated the development of tools such as stone sickle blades and grinding stones, and also the building of storage facilities; all of these developments gradually and eventually led to the emergence and growing use of agricultural settlements. It also gave rise somewhat later to the establishment of relatively urban settlements and a consequential increase in the population of mankind. “This shift from nomadic to sedentary life led to the growth of population and village settlement, the development of crafts such as pottery and metallurgy, and eventually to centralized city states which institutionalized social inequalities - in a word to ‘civilization’.” (4)

At that time (5000 BC to 3000 BC), metals, such as copper and gold, came into regular use and technology advanced to the stage that large numbers of tools were being made by the methods of crude smelting and hammering.

“A Bronze Age ard, thought to be the oldest known in Britain, has been found in a prehistoric channel of the River Thames at Eton in Berkshire. The ard - an early form of plough - was found with a small deposit of charred cereal grains close to a system of contemporary Bronze Age fields. The arrow-shaped maple-wood ard has been radiocarbon dated to 900-760BC in the Late Bronze Age. Earlier Bronze Age ards are known from Poland and Denmark, but the next earliest dated British examples were made in the Iron Age. An ard found at Pict’s Knowe near Dumfries in 1994 was originally thought to be Neolithic (see BAN, November 1994) but later radiocarbon dating suggested it was Iron Age. Ard marks, on the other hand, have been found preserved in ancient land surfaces in Britain from as early as the Late Neolithic. The Eton ard, although broken, has very little wear on its tip, and is thought to have been deposited in the river `fairly new’ as an offering. There appears to have been a tradition of ritual deposition in this stretch of the river, according to the excavation director, Tim Allen of the Oxford Archaeological Unit, and several complete Bronze Age pots and a number of human and animal bones have also been found. The deposits lie close to the remains of timber posts which could have been a jetty or platform from which the objects were thrown. Few plant remains have been found in the river and it was `very interesting’, Mr. Allen said, that the cereal grains were found next to the ard, as though they too were a ritual offering thrown into the river along with the ard. ” (5)

From this, we can see that these people had already developed some sort of ritualistic system by this time. The offering of grain and the “ard” in the river seem to be indications of an early fertility ritual.

While archaeological evidence shows that most hunter-gatherers performed certain rites or ceremonies in connection with fertility and death, the funereal rituals generally took place wherever the group happened to be at the time; and these people rarely buried their dead below ground, nor did they erect lasting monuments above ground. Instead, the dead were placed on overhead wooden platforms in the wilderness (much like some Native American tribal traditions) and they were left to scavenging birds of prey. The very first grave fields, and also western Europe’s first megaliths or standing stones, appeared around 4700 BC during the late Neolithic era, which testifies to agriculture’s impact on social development and settlement patterns.

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