What even is ‘neolithic’?

It’s simpler than you think

There are a lot of ‘-lithics’ when you start looking at old stones. It can seem confusing, but the one that’s really easy to get your head around is the neolithic, as I found when researching my podcast about neolithic sites in Scotland, Stone Me.

This period (4000BC to 2000BC[ish] in Scotland) is an important and fascinating moment in our history, it is the moment we stopped being hunter-gatherers and became farmers, staying in one place for the first time. It’s hard to think of a more significant change in our lives, in what it means to be human, than that change from nomad to farmer. 

Before this we led a nomadic life, probably cycling between fairly established seasonal haunts but living in temporary buildings and moving to look for food and shelter.

Then we decided to stop moving and pick one place to live. Buildings, made of wood and mud and in some rare cases stone, became bigger, more permanent. And, crucially, we started farming, cultivating plants and animals to become plentiful and substantial enough to meet our needs all year round. 

Barnhouse in Orkney, a neolithic settlement that I won’t be featuring at all in Stone Me!

This changed so much – it meant labour had to be organised, which probably led to some stratification of society: somebody has to make decisions and somebody has to dig lots of rough ground into ploughable soil, and they probably weren’t the same person. 

But it also created surpluses: of materials and of time. Material surpluses meant that some people could be fed and housed who weren’t working full time on the land. Surplus of time meant that they could create culture. 

And the neolithic period gave us a huge explosion of culture – ever more elaborate items have miraculously survived for 5,000 years to show us how sophisticated and complex these people could be. 

Grooved ware pottery was probably invented in Orkney and spread as a style throughout Britain and Ireland. Stone carvings in elaborate, elliptical, abstract styles decorated passage tombs in the Boyne Valley in Ireland and the bare rockface of Argyll in Scotland. 

Different times, different places

The neolithic happened at different times in different places – it was earlier in Europe and travelled westwards over time as people settled further west and ideas came with them. 

It’s a weird notion to us now, but of course we can think of plenty of ideas and culture that are commonplace in one part of the world and are only adopted later in other countries or regions. 

The end of the stone age

The neolithic period is the end of the stone age, and it came to a close once people discovered and started using metal. A brief copper age (chalcolithic – I told you about the -lithics) gave way to the bronze age and then the iron age as those metals took over from stone and bone as the basis of tools. 

The culture changed and some of the ancient sites we will look at in Stone Me were abandoned, such as the Ring of Brodgar, while others were broken up and re-used, such as like Cairnpapple Hill.