Stonehenge (Wiltshire). Britain’s most famous prehistoric monument remains a powerful testimony to the sophistication of Neolithic and Bronze Age society, erected between 3000 and 1600 BC.
Britain is a cluster of islands off northwest Europe. It is easy to forget how fundamentally this fact has characterized everything about Britain's geography and history. Despite covering only a small area, Britain features a phenomenal array of landscape and environmental conditions, but escapes the worst extremes the Earth is capable of imposing. There is no desert or frozen tundra. Instead, much of the south and east is fertile agricultural land, and the abundant rivers and streams make viable human habitation possible almost evernvhere. Bathed in the Gulf Stream, Britain benefits from the warmth of tropical seas, thereby cheating the consequences of a latitude that places it as far north as Calgary and Moscow. It is, of course, the sea that defines Britain, just as much as
Its landscape does. It provides Britain with a natural security, as important thousands of years before as it was in 1940. The crossing might be short, but it is also dangerous, the sea being impetu (Uqncrtpmo,‘boisterous and openV Conversely, the sea is neither wide enough nor cold enough to prevent it being a thoroughfare for those sailing past Britain or to her. The sea protects Britain, but it does not isolate her.
Caesar’s arrival was not the first time that the Britons had encountered the inhabitants of Continental Europe. There had been movement and contact as long as people could move about at will over land and sea. This much we can infer from prehistoric artifacts and structures that resemble those found on both sides of the English Channel. They tell us nothing substantive about the personalities or events that characterize a historical period, but they do tell us that the Britons were organized into complex societies capable of sophisticated production and management of resources. We might know little about how they did this, but the results are there for all to see to this day, in sites ranging from countless small settlements and henge monuments to Stonehenge |3].
The ability of Neolithic peoples in Britain to coordinate the movement of stone into monumental tombs and circles by the fourth millennium BC, quite apart from the cultural and religious motivations to do so, shows that societies in Britain had already evolved into communities capable of sustained cooperative activity. The production and migration of pottery and stone axes is evidence for active trade and gift exchange, as well as for the expression of status through possessions. By the late Iron Age, it becomes possible to look at the archaeological evidence of settlements, graves and prestige goods in the context of written observations by travellers and geographers from the classical world. Clearly Iron Age Britain was made up of many different communities whose settlements, artifacts and practices differed widely from one another and from communities on the Continent, while at the same time showing common influences [4]. By the first century BC, of all the influences and factors that affected Britain, the Roman Empire was the most pervasive and decisive.
World History
