Writing Neolithic Britain: an interpretive journey

It is just over sixty years since Stuart Piggott published his major work, Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles. This was the first comprehensive account of what was then known and assumed about the ‘New Stone Age’ in these islands, and it surveyed discoveries and summarized debates that had occurred over the previous century. This process of gradual accumulation of data and ideas has continued apace since Piggott was writing, not least owing to the precision with which we can now date much of the activity that characterizes the Neolithic. When Piggott was writing his book in the early 1950s an American, Willard Libby, was experimenting with the technique of radiocarbon dating as a by-product of the development of nuclear technology. This dating method uses the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes to measure the time that has elapsed since a sample of organic matter last exchanged carbon with its environment—in short, the time since an organism died. Application of the method has cumulatively transformed our understanding of prehistoric chronology. To illustrate the impact upon the study of Neolithic Britain, we have only to appreciate that in Neolithic Cultures Piggott imagined a British Neolithic period that lasted for around five hundred years, beginning in about 2000BCE. This estimated span was based on a series of assumptions about the rate of cultural change, and the affinities between artefacts in Britain, continental Europe, and further afield. However, over the past half-century this inherited chronology has been swept away as radiometric dating has gradually been refined, and huge numbers of dated samples have accumulated. These now suggest that the Neolithic period began in Britain shortly before 4000 BCE, and ‘ended’ with the advent of a variety of objects made of metal instead of stone, from around 2400 BCE. The implications of this transformed appreciation of the duration of the Neolithic are profound, for while Piggott and his contemporaries were dealing with periods of historical time that were comparable with those with which we are familiar from recorded history (the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the emergence and spread of Islam, the development of capitalism), we now have evidence for human activity in the Neolithic of Britain that is dispersed across an expanse of time as much as three times longer than these major historical episodes.