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food: fish and shellfish in winter, birds’ eggs in spring and summer, hazel and other nuts in the
autumn – and red deer at any time they could be killed. The Mesolithic life in England was no
different from that in the rest of the Isles, and is nowhere more completely documented than at Starr
Carr in the Vale of Pickering in North Yorkshire, 5 miles to the west of the seaside resort of
Scarborough.
At the marshy edge of a lake, this was a site where, 9,500 years ago, the elusive Mesolithics
brought their kills from the nearby high ground of the North Yorkshire Moors to be butchered and
distributed. Thanks to the marshy, waterlogged conditions, all sorts of things have been preserved
which on dry sites would have been lost. Pollen, insects, charcoal, wood and animal bones are all
preserved in the damp and airless peat. From an analysis of the bones left at Starr Carr, most of the
meat came from wild cattle, the enormous aurochs which roamed through the dense woods. There
were elk and red-deer bones too, sometimes with marks to show where a flint-tipped arrow had
cut through the skin on its way to the beast’s heart. Badger, red-fox and pine-marten bones show
that even smaller mammals could be killed, perhaps for food, perhaps only for their skins. The
Mesolithic occupants of Starr Carr were extremely skilled in working deer antler, making not only
large objects like spearheads, but also smaller, but still deadly, arrowheads. The flints they used to
work the antlers lie all around the site. But perhaps the most remarkable revelation at Starr Carr is
the evidence of domestic dogs. The hunters, we can assume, used these dogs to round up deer and
wild cattle or to pursue a wounded animal if an arrow had failed to find the heart.
Farming arrived in England a little before it did in the rest of the Isles. Bit by bit the wild
woods were cleared. The Mesolithics already knew how to kill trees by ring-barking, so they
created glades to encourage the growth of hazel bushes. The Neolithic farmers killed trees in the
same way, and may have been descendants of the same people. They targeted elms in particular,
because they understood that they grew in the most fertile soils. Gradually, more food was grown
than was strictly necessary for survival, which meant that not everyone had to spend all their time
looking for food. Thus began the social revolution that culminated in the rise of chieftains and then
minor kings, each battling it out for supremacy and ownership of land. Megalithic monuments, like
the stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, took pride of place in a landscape rich in burials and
tombs. The newly discovered metals of copper, bronze and iron, in that order, replaced bloodstone
and flint as the principal materials for axes, knives and other agricultural implements. They also
found their uses as weapons, cast or beaten into daggers, swords and spears as warfare became
endemic. Iron tools, much stronger than bronze and with a much sharper cutting edge, made
woodland clearing easier. The increase in the acreage of agricultural land led to a big rise in the
population of the Isles.
By the fourth century BC, the archaeological evidence points to an increase in inter-tribal
warfare. Hill forts became more numerous and their defences more elaborate. Swords replaced
daggers in a sign of more organized fighting. By the third century BC, the style of metal-working for
both weapons and jewellery had changed to the second Celtic phase of La Tène, but always with a
distinctive British dialect. The export of Cornish tin, an essential ingredient in the manufacture of
bronze, continued apace, with the export trade to the Mediterranean dominated by Phoenicians.
One of the very first accounts of the Isles of the time, by Pytheas from the Greek colony of
Massilia (now Marseilles) in southern France, was written around 320 BC. His original work, On
the Ocean, has not survived and we only know of his remarkable journey through references to it