ABSTRACT
This book is for the layman, seeking a first introduction to the story of Britain before the Roman conquest. When I first began to take an interest in prehistory in my early teens the choice of books available to me was limited. There were a number of detailed studies by professional prehistorians like Gordon Childe and Christopher Hawkes but few introductory volumes for those taking their first steps into the subject. Prehistoric Britain by Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes was a fine introduction, supplemented on methodology by Graham Clarke’s Archaeology and Society. The book that had the greatest influence in my formative years was Stuart Piggott’s British Prehistory, and it has seldom been far from my mind in producing this new volume. Piggott had the knack of telling his story in a way that appealed to schoolboy, student, layman and university don alike. He reminded us continually that prehistory is about people, and that whilst our vocabulary is
dominated by monuments and artefacts, behind those words were people with emotions and feelings as real as ours. By the very nature of its evidence prehistory is stifled by thousands of unknown factors that we can never hope to retrieve. We may describe flint mines or burial mounds but we are rarely able to see what really took place there. For example, archaeology allows us few glimpses of prehistoric childhood with its toys and games, entertainment with music and singing, leisure spent in sporting activities or with loved ones and pets, or sickness with its medical care and herbal remedies. In this book I have presented an outline of the story of our island’s first inhabitants. It is for the reader to fill in the flesh and blood; I have tried to give the clues where they exist. It is not the story of great lives and deeds: that is the realm of history. It is a simple account of our state of knowledge of life in Britain before the arrival of the Romans in AD 43.
