New scientific techniques reveal how large tribal gatherings swept neolithic Britain
Hambledon Hill, in Dorset, hosted
stone-age festivals at a causewayed enclosure before the construction of
its iron-age hill fort. Photograph: Mark Bauer/Alamy
They were the stone-age equivalent of Glastonbury festival.
People gathered in their hundreds to drink, eat and party every summer
at revelries lasting several days and nights. Young men met women from
nearby communities and married them. Herds of cattle were slaughtered to
provide food.
These neolithic carousals even had special sites.
They were held on causewayed enclosures, large hilltop earthworks built
by our forebears after they brought farming to Britain from the
continent 6,000 years ago.
This picture of ancient British
bacchanalia has been created by researchers led by Professor Alasdair
Whittle of Cardiff University and Dr Alex Bayliss of English Heritage.
Using a revolutionary technique for dating ancient remains, they have
built up a detailed chronology of the first farmers' arrival in Britain
and have shown that agriculture spread with dramatic rapidity. In its
wake, profound social changes gripped the country, culminating in the
construction of causewayed enclosures where chieftains or priests held
revelries to help establish their power bases.
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