Pagan Britain

He was especially inspired by the idea, currently most strongly propounded by French scholars, that rocks contained the remains of extinct species of animal and plant.

DURING THE CENTURIES around 4000 BC, Britain passed into the New Stone Age, or Neolithic. As a concept, this is a Victorian creation.

The word ‘ritual’ has been the subject of equally extensive and complex debate.

The second outstanding site is Creswell Crags, a gorge just over half a mile long upon the border between the counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Buckland made cave-digging, in search of human prehistory, an enthusiasm among British scholars, and the caves of the Creswell gorge were emptied in a series of campaigns between the 1870s and 192

The first is whether it is possible to have either an archaeology or a history of prehistoric and early historic British religion, in view of the extreme limitations of the evidence.

The vegetation, however, had not caught up with the change, so that the region still consisted of open grasslands with spruce, birch, pine and juniper growing in sheltered places.

For most of that period, the land concerned was a peninsula of the European mainland, representing a remote hilly margin to the great plains which now lie under the North Sea and to which archaeologists have given the name ‘Doggerland’.

Dates from the Creswell caves range between 13,700 and 10,600 BC, a period when the climate had warmed again to a point at which temperatures were similar to those of today.

The same project revealed much about the environment in which the depictions were made. Around 20,000 BC a new Ice Age began, rendering the land mass which became Britain too cold for human habitation for over five thousand years.