Everything You Wanted To Know About British Prehistory

Everything You Wanted To Know About British Prehistory | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"There's been quite a lot publish, especially in America in recent years implying that once we went over to farming, the diet became rather poor and unhealthy. Although it provides more calories, more energy, if you like per acre, it results in a rather monotonous and boring diet. And in some cases, it's also been suggested that along with that you got new diseases rather like we’re suffering from now, new diseases that were caught from animals, domestic animals. So a lot of people sort of said, oh, the Neolithic was a really bad thing. And the diet was to be bloody awful. Everybody had to live on porridge. In contrast, the Neolithic diet, actually, you said, it sounds quite interesting. You've got, you've got nuts and berries and salmon and wild deer and so on and so forth.

But the point was, is that the Neolithic diet, the farming diet, was if you like,  more reliable. You could live in one place and you could get more out of the ground in terms of calories that allowed for a bigger settled population. And to have more children. One of things that's very striking at this time and we know this from, from the study of teeth, is that the farmers, the farming spread across Britain very quickly. In probably about two to 300 years it spread from, let's say, Kent, right across into Ireland into northern Scotland. But right across Britain, there seems to have been a taboo on eating the products of the sea. So nobody's eating fish. Even people who are living close to the sea are still not eating fish, which seems rather odd. That's at the beginning early on in the Neolithic, so that affects the diet. And the hunter gatherer way of life disappears very rapidly. So, the diet does change. I don't think you would have necessarily enjoyed the farmers’ diet more, but it allowed you to build up your population...

[There’s] been lots and lots of speculation about the white horse at Uffington. That's the one that is a rather abstract shape. It looks like it's flowing across the hill in segments. And it looks, it's got a rather beaked head. And it's a very impressive piece of design, I think. And we know it's old  because there are Anglo Saxon charters 1000 years old, that record it being there 1000 years ago, but people have speculated as to how old and anyway, we decided to take a look at it. And at the time in Oxford, I was based in Oxford, the laboratory in Oxford was just developing a new dating technique called optical stimulated luminescence. And that meant that we could potentially date silt buried in the ground, rather than needing, you know, a piece of my arm or a lump of wood or something organic, which is what you need for radiocarbon dating. So we thought in principle, this is how the dating might help us date the horse.

So when we excavated the horse at Uffington, we ended, we discovered that it actually was, was built at the end of the Bronze Age or the beginning of the Iron Age. Let's say, best part of 3000 years ago, and it was built about the same time as the hill fort as well. Now, it's the only one that we know that is really ancient. Most of the other white horses that you see in Wiltshire and up into Yorkshire, they were built in the late 18th, early 19th century. Very often in the reign of George the Third, who was identified with the, with white horses, and was a very popular monarch, despite losing America. But our horse. The question then is, well, why did they build it? Make it 3000 years ago?

Well, the latest theory we've been looking at is the idea that the horse was not positioned to be seen for maximum effect from below, but was positioned so that when the sun rose, it looked like the horse was pulling the sun. Because we know that in the Bronze Age, the sun was an incredibly important religious symbol. There’re many, many examples of of this. And there's a particularly famous object called the Trundholm Sun Chariot, which shows horses drawing a cart on which there is a huge model sun. And the sun is gold on one side, and on the other side, it's dark. So in other words, the, the horses are pulling, the horse, the sun through the sky, and then at night, pulling it back, to start again at dawn. And actually the way that the White House is situated, it does that incredibly effectively. And it's almost like a little piece of theater. If you go there the right time in the morning, you see the sun rise right over the horse, and they look like they're floating across the sky. So that's a theory… it's quite a fragile thing. It means that every 20 or 30 years, people had to look after it. And so for 3000 years, local people have looked after that horse. And in all that time, I think its meaning must have changed quite a lot. So that it, but one thing you can say to it is always important for local people, for whatever reason, and they've looked after it from the Bronze Age right through to now. There are not many things you can say that about"