I want first to say that I have been held up over the last
six months by doing a large amount of coursework. Many of the political related
books that I am going to review or make an entry about were read at the back
end of last year. Britain BC however, is a book I finished about a month back
which was contained in my pre-Anglo-Saxon reading list; a list which has
changed so drastically that I have created another entry to display the
definitive version.
I don’t believe I have ever had a keen interest in Britain prior
to the Roman invasion, and aside from a growing interest in the Celts thanks to
recently reading some Tolkien related work I still don’t have much of an
interest in this period. This is mainly because the evidence is almost entirely
made up of archaeology and interpretation; mainly the interpretation that every
action ancient people took was influenced by mysticism. Regardless of this I
felt the need to read the history of England chronically from the earliest
period, before I can eventually start on my collection of books on the
Anglo-Saxons. When I read “Without an informed understanding of our origins and history, we will
never place our personal and national lives in a true context. And if we cannot
do that, then we are prey to nationalists, fundamentalists and bigots of all
sorts, who assert that the revelations or half-truths to which they subscribe
are an integral part of human history” In the first page of the book; I knew I
was in for a heavy read.
Despite this I still have a great respect for Francis Pryor, which
has probably been ingrained from a childhood of watching his appearances on Time
Team, in which he always had the most kindly and respectful manor. The book
itself was actually relatively entertaining for the most part, with Pryor mixing
in some occasional anecdotes and experiences which both keep the reader
interested and provide help to grasping some of his concepts. It is very
concise containing the sort of information one wants to know, like the estimations
of population in each Age, buildings of stone circles and crafting of implements.
One of my favourite and most memorable parts of the book was about the
Neanderthal inhabitants of Britain, which until recently was thought to be
non-existent. There is one unique subject that Pryor discusses known as the
‘Lagar Velho boy’ who was a cross between a Neanderthal and a Homo sapiens. He
proposes the interesting theory that these mixed species may well have been sterile,
like a mule. There is so much to discuss about the Neanderthals that I thought I may as well just display
a couple of Pryor’s quotes from the book here:
“Neanderthals
had a larger brain than modern man, not just in relation to their somewhat
larger body mass, but absolutely. I suppose we’re bound to say this, but there
is no evidence that this larger brain gave them more intelligence. Indeed, the
bare fact that they failed to survive the evolutionary rat-race – given no help
whatsoever from Homo sapiens – tends to support this view. It has been
suggested that the principal difference in the way the two species thought was
that modern man was able to lump his thoughts together. He was more of a
generalist, whereas Neanderthals were ‘domain specific’.”
“It
would appear that the children of Neanderthal parents grew up faster, and
achieved their independence more rapidly, than their Homo sapiens equivalents.
Maybe this was a result of their large brains and focused way of thinking, but
it could have had a downside, too. Without prolonged exposure to their parents’
acquired experience and wisdom, the younger generation would have been forever
reinventing and rediscovering things that their parents knew perfectly well.”
The prehistoric
ages are separated into four rough categories; the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze
Age and Iron Age. The Mesolithic and Neolithic are frequently grouped together
as ‘The Stone Age’. These ages are primarily named after the materials that
were widely used in these eras. Different metals have different metaling
points, and as the temperature furnaces could reach increased, so did the number
of metals which could be utilised by prehistoric man. The melting point for lead
is low (328°C) in comparison to Iron and Bronze, but it is also a soft
metal and so is useless for crafting tools. Bronze has a melting point of 950°C
and was occasionally cast with a furnace shaped like the body of a woman, with
a spout coming from the lower section. Weapons and tools held great spiritual
significance in prehistoric Europe, and this type of furnace symbolised giving
birth to these tools. The melting point of iron was much higher and so it was
heated up until it was malleable and then beaten into shape.
The concluding
chapters deal with the Roman invasion, which was a breath of fresh air as there
was evidence based on roman sources instead of just pure archaeology. Thanks to
the written records by the romans, combined with physical evidence such as
coins, we start to discover several names of prominent Celts. These include Caractacus,
who was the king of the Catuvellauni tribe and fought an underground war with the
Romans for almost ten years. When he was beaten in north of Wales, he fled to
the Brigantes tribe and was betrayed by queen Cartimandua and handed over to Publius
Scapula. He was then taken to Rome in which he delivered an impressive speech
to the senate, and was thus pardoned by Emperor Claudius. The book is brilliant
for identifying alternate routes of research, which made me look for a book on
some of these figures of Celtic Britain. I could not find a book on Caractacus,
or his father king Cunobeline, who is known for having an unusually long reign
of around 30 years as well as having many surviving coins. However, I did find
a book on the Catuvellauni tribe which is wrote by respectable historian Keith
Branigan, and will undoubtedly contain all the available sources on these two
figures.
One of the great things about
Britain BC is that Pryor openly admits that the book would have to be much
longer to include everything that he wanted to discuss. This allows him to
focus on trying to make the reader build an interesting in the subject;
supplying him with the skeletal structure and chronology of Britain BC while
simultaneously pointing him in the right direction towards more comprehensive literature
on the subject. Barry Cunliffe for example is mentioned numerous times
throughout the part of the book that deals with the Iron Age, bringing to my
attention how much of an authority the man is on that period while also making
me extremely pleased that I had accidently picked up a gem for £1 from the charity
shop in ‘Iron Age Communities of Britain by Barry Cunliffe’. A book which I
will get round to reading once I have finished Prehistoric Cumbria by David
Barrowclough.
There is much more that I want to
say about this book, and I may use it for reference in the future on a piece
about primitive mystical beliefs.
“One
reason why British culture proved so resilient in the face of the greatest
politico-military machine of the ancient world is that its roots went back
thousands of years. And as any forester or gardener will tell you, deep roots
make for strong trees.” – Francis Pryor
