Transcript LECTURE 1 EARLIEST TIMES

GREAT BRITAIN:
EARLIEST TIMES
Для добавления текста
щелкните мышью
PLAN
 1.
Britain’s Prehistory
 2. The Celts
 3. The Roman Conquest
Britain’s Prehistory
Для добавления текста
щелкните мышью
 250,000
BC
The earliest evidence of human
occupation of Britain
 Around
10,000 BC, the end of
the Ice Age
The wanderer-hunter culture
About 3000 BC
Neolithic (or New Stone Age) people
 These people kept animals, grew corn
crops and knew how to make pottery.
 They probably came from either the
Iberian Peninsula or even the North
African coast.
 They settled in the western part of Britain
and Ireland.
What did these people leave
to posterity?
Barrows, or burial mounds
 Henges – great circles of earth banks and
ditches, inside which they built wooden
buildings and stone circles
 Stonehenge


This beaker from the
West Kennet long
barrow in Wiltshire is
typical of the finely
decorated pottery which
gave its name to the
“Beaker Folk” who
invaded Britain from the
Rhineland and Brittany
in the second
millennium BC.
The Beaker People
replaced animal skin clothes with woven
textiles
 contributed to the building of Stonehenge
 used copper and its alloy with tin – bronze


Many early
settlements have
been found on Chalk
Hills in the southwest.
Maiden Castle, or Mai
Dan in Dorset, is the
largest surviving IronAge hill-fort in Britain,
with a perimeter of
two miles.

An Iron-Age farm settlement has been
reconstructed at Buster, near Petersfield in
Hampshire.
The Celts
Для добавления текста
щелкните мышью
The Celts
 They
came from central Europe or
Southern Russia from around 700 BC
onwards
 Brythons (Britons) settled in England
and Wales
 Gaels settled on Ireland
 Picts settled in Scotland
The Celts
 They
continued the same kind of
agriculture as the Bronze Age people
but used iron tools
 They continued to built hill-forts
 They were good warriors and used
war-chariots
Celtic Society
 Chief
(King)
 Learned Men (Druids)
 Nobles (warriors)
 Freemen (farmers)
 Slaves

Boadicea’s monument on the Thames
Embankment
What is your origin, Britons?
 The
Blood of
the Isles (2006)
by Bryan Sykes

The Origins of
the British: a
Genetic
Detective Story
(2006) by
Stephen
Oppenheimer
The Roman
Conquest
Для добавления текста
щелкните мышью
 55
BC
The
Proconsul of Gaul, Gaius
Julius Caesar
Cassivellaunus
 AD
43
Claudius
 AD
410
Hadrian’s Wall
Roman Britain
 Its
society was literate
 It was a world dominated by the rule
of law, which closely regulated the
relations between the individual and
the State and between one man and
another, however corruptly or
inefficiently it might often have been
administered.
Roman Legacy

Towns
 20 large towns (over 5,000 inhabitants)
 100 smaller towns
 London=Londinium
 Manchester=Mamucium
 York=Eburacum
 “castra” – “chester, caster, cester”
Roman Legacy






Roads
Water supply, sanitation and sewage
systems
Villas
New vocabulary
Christianity
A new diet

Chi Rho Cross
Constantine the Great.