Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor

one of the biggest changes in human history, namely the switch from food acquisition, in the form of hunting, fishing and gathering, to food production, in the form of arable farming and animal husbandry.² With hindsight – of course something fundamental to archaeology – this switch looks more dramatic than in fact it was. Its consequences were indeed revolutionary, but the original processes of change probably weren’t. In fact, they were remarkably gradual. This confusion between cause and effect, plus an imperfect appreciation of the timescale involved, has led archaeologists in the past to view the period of the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition as somehow special, and even traumatic to people living at the time. Personally, I doubt this.

      The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers belonged to the Middle Stone Age, and the farmers to the Neolithic or New Stone Age. It is important not to lose sight, however, of the lithic, the ‘Stone Age’ suffix of their labels. To my mind both were the same Stone Age people whose roots lay back in the Upper Palaeolithic, at sites like Paviland or Gough’s Caves. The fact that they decided to adopt the techniques of farming did not make them culturally different – at least not at first. What it did do was allow them to populate the landscape far more densely, because farming is a vastly more efficient means of producing food calories than hunting or gathering.³ It allows many more people to live in the landscape, and that in turn means that communities have to live alongside each other. So they must find ways of settling disputes, coping with individual and tribal rivalries, moving goods, animals and people, and dealing with the emergence of what later we would recognise as politics.

      All of these social transformations took time: from the beginning to the end of the process, right across Britain, it took centuries – as long as two millennia before the farthest-flung areas acquired a fully Neolithic lifestyle. Despite what some earlier authors would have had us believe, the arrival of farming was not the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.⁴ It was certainly not comparable with the Industrial or Agricultural Revolutions of recent times, which happened rapidly and had immediate as well as long-term effects. It was a process of change, not a revolution.

      Let’s examine what was probably going on as the waters of the North Sea spread relentlessly south. To do this I must return to the decks of the trawler in the North Sea that opened this chapter. That trawler was built in 1954, and was powered by a marine-oil engine. It was noisy and smelly, but it was powerful, capable of hauling a large trawl through high seas. But until quite recently, trawlers that worked closer to the shore than my ship from Grimsby were not powered at all. One such vessel was the sailing trawler Colinda.