A History of Ancient Britain

- Season 1

(2011)

Archeologists find footprints (in one case literally) of prehistoric people in Britain from different ages, waves and paleontological qualifications, as early as 5000,000 BC, including Neanderthals and even an earlier, distinct species. Homo sapiens arrived only the latest 31,000 years, but also in different waves, due to extremely variable climatological and geological conditions, mainly the stages of the latest Ice Age.

In the last 10,000 years, after the Ice Age, the rising sea turned the British regions into islands, largely covered with woods. Only some thousands Mesolithic hunters-gatherers roamed around. However, apparently in several waves and at several coasts, neolithic people invaded, importing sedentary life. The superior productivity of agriculture and other technology, as i tool-making, enabled the start of many aspects of civilization, such as ownership, socio-political structures and armed violence. They left the first monuments, still hard to read.

In the Iron Age the productivity of agriculture and social buildup allowed people to invest in know-how, such as astronomy, and monumental constructions, of daunting scale, such as Stonehenge, such stone circles being numerous in and almost unique to Britain. Their assumed significance is multiple, partially reflecting social status f priest and nobility, partially (religious) efforts to give people a place in a cosmological context.

The discovery of tin and its amalgamation with copper to produce bronze kicked off a continental trade explosion which put the previously peripheral British isles, rich in both metals, at the center. The organizational requirements of mining and resulting wealth stirred the emergence of a rich, leading class which presided over the erection of major monuments, some even as personal tombs. Bronze became the reference commodity, measure as well as medium of wealth and prestige beyond its practical use.