Pagan Britain

During the 1970s, improvements in dating techniques (based on the analysis of radioactive carbon in ancient deposits) revealed that it lasted about two thousand years, and that its monuments rank among the most impressive achievements of humanity at that period.

At a point where a pocket would have been was a collection of perforated periwinkle shells, presumably either decorations for clothing or a necklace, or objects to be cast as some kind of divinatory process.

Richard Bradley set the pattern for this exercise in a series of studies which emphasized the novelties, rather than the continuities, which the adoption of farming has commonly brought to attitudes to the land. Farmers exploit nature rather than belonging to it, and enclose and own resources, rather than making paths through them and using them.

The fourth concerns the extent to which a broad-sweep study such as this enables useful comparisons to be made between approaches to the study of religious activity in different periods, the specialists in which do not normally converse with each other.

Finally, this book needs a definition of ‘paganism’, a word central to its being. There is an obvious one: that the term refers to the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East.

HUMAN-LIKE BEINGS have been occupying the land which has become Britain, on and off, for almost a million years, and probably longer.

The third is how much changing cultural patterns in the present, and very recent past, have influenced scholarly reconstructions of ancient paganism.

With him were placed hoops of mammoth ivory which seem to have been bracelets or castanets, and ivory structures like wands or batons, which were broken before being placed with the corpse.

This would suggest that farming had originally been brought from Europe by colonists who arrived in the Thames, and that it had swiftly been adopted by the natives: but none of this is securely proved by the better dating. All told, the problem of how the Neolithic arrived in Britain does not seem to have been solved at the time of writing; and wit