The Neolithization of Britain and Ireland: The 'big picture'
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... The transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain in the centuries around 4 000 cal. BC is a key period in British prehistory, involving significant socioeconomic, cultural, and genetic changes, including the introduction of domesticated plants and animals from the Continent and a range of associated dietary practices (Balasse et al., 2019;Richards, 2003;Sheridan, 2010;Sheridan & Whittle, 2023). Scotland represents a crucial area for investigating the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition due to its rich archaeological record, ranging from the Mesolithic shell middens of Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides to the Neolithic caves in and around Oban and the megalithic chambered cairns of Caithness. ...
... BC (Armit et al., 2016) at Distillery Cave, Oban. Due to the paucity of evidence for marine food consumption, some have suggested that marine foods were culturally prohibited during the Neolithic (Cramp et al., 2014;Montgomery et al., 2013;Sheridan, 2010;Thomas, 2003). ...
Numerous isotopic studies of Scottish Mesolithic and Neolithic diets suggest a shift from marine‐based to terrestrial‐based subsistence strategies. However, bulk collagen isotope analysis may overlook low‐level marine food consumption. This study combines bulk collagen stable isotope data from four Neolithic sites (Quanterness, Rattar East, Ness of Brodgar, and Knap of Howar) with nitrogen compound‐specific isotope analysis (CSIA‐AA) from one Late Mesolithic and five Neolithic sites. CSIA‐AA, applied here for the first time to Scottish material, reveals limited but detectable aquatic resource use by some Neolithic individuals in Orkney. These findings highlight the complexities in identifying marine contributions to diet and underscore the value of CSIA‐AA in distinguishing direct marine consumption from other sources of elevated nitrogen isotope values, such as seaweed or animals with marine‐influenced diets.
... from or with the continent in the middle or later fifth millennium cal BC. In Alison Sheridan's much published but little varying model of successive strands of Neolithisation(Sheridan 2003;2010), that episode is indicative ofthe prevailing isolation of Britain and Ireland in the Final Mesolithic, and was succeeded by a Breton, Atlantic strand of probably small-scale movement from Brittany at a time of perceived social disruption, manifested in the building of a scatter of Breton-style monuments with polygonal chambers in parts of western Britain (cf. F. Lynch 1975), including at Achnacreebeag in Argyll; there, a secondary phase of the simple monument contains a decorated pot claimed to be of Late Castellic style, potentially either later fifth or earliest fourth millennium cal BC in date. ...
I sketch notes towards the outline of a possible model for the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in Britain, with reference also to the Early Neolithic sequence in Ireland. I propose an overall gradualist model, in the context of a resetting of debate and research questions in the wake of recent game-changing isotopic and aDNA investigations. I envisage enhanced connections between Britain and Ireland on the one hand and the adjacent continent on the other in the later fifth millennium cal BC, rather than distinct episodes of contact. This was the bow wave for sustained migration and colonisation from the forty-first century cal BC onwards. I caution against seeing a single migration event, and the process may have played out over a period of time. Within an overall gradualist framework, I note various proposals in the literature for some kind of minimal earliest Neolithic, but I think these suggestions can be over-played, with differences in scale mistaken for absence. The pace and visibility of things seem to pick up further by the thirty-eighth century cal BC, at a time when there are still varied possible signs of individual and group migration.
... The precise nature and timing of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming in western Scotland has been the subject of longstanding debate (e.g., Bonsall et al., 2002;Schulting & Richards, 2002;Sheridan, 2010;Schulting & Borić, 2017;Sheridan & Whittle, 2023). This debate significantly reflects the wider archaeological discourse on the spread of farming across Europe. ...
In this paper, we revisit the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in western Scotland and the links between early European farmers and middens in light of new aDNA, radio-carbon, and stable isotopic evidence. New carbon and nitrogen stable isotopic data for food sources (plant and animal remains) from a Mesolithic site are presented, and dietary FRUITS models are recalculated based on these data. We also respond to recent criticisms of the Bayesian approach to diet reconstruction. Results support the view that Neolithic people had at most a minimal contribution of marine foods in their diet and also point to a dual population model of transition in western Scotland. A significant aspect of the transition in coastal western Scotland is the co-occurrence of Neolithic human remains with shell-midden deposits, which appears to contradict stable isotopic evidence indicating a minimal contribution of marine resources to the diet of early farming communities in the region. Finally, we highlight the need for further research to fully address these issues, including (1) targeted isotopic analyses of potential plant and animal resources, (2) single-entity radiocarbon and ZooMS analyses of animal bones and artefacts from shell middens, and (3) further aDNA analyses of the remains of Late Mesolithic and Neolithic people.
... Their genetic ancestry can be traced back to early farmers who migrated from Anatolia through the Mediterranean and the Aegean (Brace et al. 2019). By 4000 bc they were capable of moving cattle and other livestock by boat not only across the English Channel but also across the Celtic Sea to southern Ireland (Kinnes 1988;Sheridan 2010). ...
... Toutefois, leur utilisation courante en mer reste très douteuse dans ce milieu souvent très mouvant, et plus encore pour des navigations longues, comme celles qui sont attestées au IV e millénaire av. J.-C. entre l'archipel britannique et le continent (Pailler et Sheridan, 2009 ;Sheridan, 2010) ou dans une liaison, éventuellement directe, entre Bretagne et Galice dans le courant du V e millénaire av. J.-C. (Cassen, 2011, p. 30 ;Cassen et al., 2016, p. 294-295). ...
On the European Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, as well as on rivers and lakes, the use of water transport is not in doubt, from at least the beginning of the 9th millennium BC, to judge both from direct evidence (paddles and wrecks) and from the evidence of coastal and island movements. Research into earlier, Late Pleistocene, island mobility is hindered on the Atlantic side of Europe (in contrast to the Mediterranean) by the loss of the Ice Age coastlines, as well as of the huge territory that extended along the Channel River and across Doggerland (North Sea), through flooding by eustatic sea level change. However, it is very likely that groups used boats in Europe as early as the upper Palaeolithic, if we bear in mind the global picture of pioneering maritime colonizations. Therefore, in all likelihood, the lands and coasts of Western Europe will have experienced a long and complex nautical history, of which only very faint traces remain.
In envisaging these first journeys, and particularly in considering the boats then used, logboats dominate the scene. These boats are well represented among the wrecks excavated in estuaries, river basins and lakes. Since the 9th-8th millennium BC, when the first example in the archaeological record in Western Europe was used, this same basic “construction principle” (i.e. the architectural design of the boat) has been in use throughout the ages to the present day, where a tradition of expanded logboats is still alive in Slovenia. Over many generations, construction methods have progressively integrated a number of innovations, mainly with the aim of increasing the boats’ load capacity (expansion, raising, etc.). A monoxylous base can even be identified in some of the early plank boatbuilding traditions that were used in historical times.
The number of wrecks resulting from these long-lasting traditions is high: in Europe, the inventory total stands at over 3,500 examples, which gives us a unique signal in the archaeological record of nautical remains. In this field, only a few examples of “architectural families” can be identified for the pre-industrial periods, bringing together a group of boats related by morphology, structure and technical attributes, as well as by historical filiation. None of these “families” even remotely approaches the number of logboats known.
However, within this substantial corpus, fewer than 20% of the specimens have been dated by radiocarbon or dendrochronology. Because of their dependence on the raw material, it is not easy to identify typo-chronological trends among these monoxylous vessels, many of which were very simply fashioned as close to the shape of the log as possible. Their chronological attribution is therefore a matter of absolute dating alone, and thus only this small proportion can be taken into account for study. There is a predominance of logboats dating from the Middle Ages to the present day: these represent between 45% and 60% of the corpus. Logboats from the prehistoric and protohistoric periods remain few in number. There are only 17 examples in a Mesolithic context, half of which belong to the Danish Final Ertebølle, with a strong LBK influence. There are fewer than 30 Neolithic logboats, and Chalcolithic and Bronze Age examples are similarly sparse. For the Iron Age, fewer than 20 are known. Across seven millennia and over a geographical area on the scale of Europe, we therefore have only about 100 examples. As with other organic archaeological remains, the number of examples decreases with the passage of time, making it more difficult to contextualize them.
In estuaries, logboats remain the only type of pre-2nd millennium boat that has survived to us, and on inland waters (except in the Danube basin), they are currently the only boat type to survive prior to the Roman conquest. While logboats will no doubt have been common from the beginning of the Holocene period, when primary forests proliferated, they were probably not the only type of boat to be used, nor were they necessarily the commonest. There are good grounds to hypothesize that diverse types of watercraft existed, using various construction principles, alongside or even pre-dating monoxylous vessels. These will have included various kinds of light boat featuring a frame made from plant or animal elements, their hulls covered by skins or bark (i.e. curragh-, coracle- and kayak-like vessels), and it may be that vessels made using reed bundles were also in use. To this range, from the 2nd millennium BC at least, several types of plank-built boat were added, and these increased in number and complexity over time. On inland waters, numerous types of raft and ferry made from linked trunks or reed bundles probably coexisted with these boats. The great scarcity of remains from these boats could be due to multiple causes, including the differential conservation of perishable materials, the recycling of components and the breakdown of the assembled structures. In contrast to logboats, all these craft are the result of an assembly of individual elements that can, once abandoned on the shore, become detached and degrade into fragments too far removed from their original architecture to be easily recognisable: a fragment of raft shaft, a structural rib or lath of a skin boat, or a single plank. In contrast, thanks to their compact woody mass offering good resistance to burial, and to the common practice of deliberately sinking them during periods of unemployment in order to ensure their longevity, logboats have ended up much better preserved than their assembled counterparts, thereby making this particular vessel design “hyper-visible” and over-represented in the archaeological record.
What might be the contours of this nautical diversity that is only partially revealed to us? The purpose of this paper is to open up and delimit the field of possibilities, starting, with all due respect, with an interest in the majestic barrel which, in contrast to the invisibility of the others, becomes the “tree that obscures the forest”.
... The Irish Neolithic, c. 4000-2400 BC, is often characterised by a predominance of domestic buildings and burial monuments (Smyth 2014), with little evidence for the characteristic monumental architecture of the causewayed enclosure or cursus traditions found in Britain. Recent Bayesian modelling (Cooney et al. 2011) and ancient DNA studies (Cassidy et al. 2016: 372;2020) have revealed that Neolithic groups had begun to migrate into Ireland by the end of fifth millennium BC (Woodman et al. 1999: 90;Sheridan 2010), bringing with them cultural and technological innovations such as farming, pottery, new forms of stone tools and an emerging focus on tomb building and the dead. Curiously, until recently it seemed that the tradition of causewayed enclosures did not migrate en masse with these groups. ...
Clusters of Neolithic cursus monuments are attested in several parts of Britain but have so far not been recorded in Ireland, where only isolated or pairs of monuments are known. A recent lidar survey of the Baltinglass landscape of County Wicklow, Ireland, has now identified a cluster of up to five cursus monuments. Here, the author explores this group of monuments and their significance within the wider setting of Neolithic Ireland and Britain. Their unique morphology, location and orientation offer insights into the ritual and ceremonial aspects of the farming communities that inhabited the Baltinglass landscape and hint at the variability in the form and possible functions of these monuments for early farming communities.
... For the British Isles the initial diffusion of agriculture (emmer wheat and barley, with cattle, goats, sheep and pig, with limited evidence for tetraploid free-threshing wheat and flax), has largely been dated to the last century of the 5th and the first three centuries of the 4th millennium BCE. These farming populations, associated with the Chasséen, Castellic, and Michelsberg cultures (Ray and Thomas, 2018;Sheridan, 2010), were present in regions of Belgium, northern France and Western Germany some 500-1000 years before agriculture dispersed north across the channel. Studies of ancient genomes supports that these agriculturalists largely descended from peoples originating within Anatolia/the Aegean, with low inputs from Western hunter-gatherers (Brace et al., 2019;Patterson et al., 2022). ...
Archaeological data provide a potential to investigate the diffusion of technological and cultural traits. However, much of this research agenda currently needs more formal quantitative methods to address small sample sizes and chronological uncertainty. This paper introduces a novel Bayesian framework for inferring the shape of diffusion curves using radiocarbon data associated with the presence/absence of a particular innovation. We developed two distinct approaches: 1) a hierarchical model that enables the fitting of an s-shaped diffusion curve whilst accounting for inter-site variations in the probability of sampling the innovation itself, and 2) a non-parametric model that can estimate the changing proportion of the innovation across user-defined time-blocks. The robustness of the two approaches was first tested against simulated datasets and then applied to investigate three case studies, the first pair on the diffusion of farming in prehistoric Japan and Britain and the third on cycles of changes in the burial practices of later prehistoric Britain.
... The planning of the causewayed enclosures was probably initiated by the elite within Michelsberg Culture societies, who competed with one another for land and territories. During times of continuous conflict and stress, some of these communities would have undertaken pioneering migrations towards different locations in Northern Europe that were populated by resourceful hunter-gatherers (Sheridan 2010;Sørensen 2014, 267-268). It was these Central European pioneering farmers who brought agriculture to southern Scandinavia through immigration. ...
While recent aDNA and other scientific analysis has served to underline the recurrent role of migration in the process of Neolithisation right across Europe, there remains plenty of scope for better integration of archaeogenetic and archaeological interpretations and for detailed narratives of local and regional trajectories. This paper focuses on relations between Britain and Ireland in the early Neolithic, in the first part of the 4th millennium cal BC. I argue that direct connections between Britain and Ireland have been overlooked and underplayed — hidden in plain sight — in the search for perceived common sources in continental Europe. I advance four propositions for debate: that the first Neolithic people in Ireland came mainly from Britain, perhaps from several parts of western Britain; that subsequent connections, long described but curiously not much further interpreted, constitute an intense set of interactions; that such links were probably spread over time through the early Neolithic, coming thick and fast near the beginning and perhaps even intensifying with time; and that such relations were maintained and intensified because of the concentrated circumstances of beginnings. The latter arguably contrast with those of the relationship between the Continent and southern Britain. The maintenance of connections was political, because a remembered past was actively used; lineage founders, concentrated lineages and other emergent social groupings may have developed through time as part of such a process.
The demographical history of France remains largely understudied despite its central role toward understanding modern population structure across Western Europe. Here, by exploring publicly available Europe-wide genotype datasets together with the genomes of 3234 present-day and six newly sequenced medieval individuals from Northern France, we found extensive fine-scale population structure across Brittany and the downstream Loire basin and increased population differentiation between the northern and southern sides of the river Loire, associated with higher proportions of steppe vs. Neolithic-related ancestry. We also found increased allele sharing between individuals from Western Brittany and those associated with the Bell Beaker complex. Our results emphasise the need for investigating local populations to better understand the distribution of rare (putatively deleterious) variants across space and the importance of common genetic legacy in understanding the sharing of disease-related alleles between Brittany and people from western Britain and Ireland.
