What’s so special about the neolithic period?

Scotland is full of fascinating history: why did I choose the oldest?

I used to think I liked the Vikings, then I read about the Picts. I used to think I liked the Picts, then I went to Orkney and saw neolithic stuff.

I’ve always liked the oldest history I could find, even when studying it at school and university. I had studied Viking Orkney a little and a few years ago finally convinced my family to come on holiday there after some years of fruitless persuasion. 

I had always loved standing stones and stone circles - come on, who doesn’t? - but paid little attention to them. They were unavoidable on Orkney, and my head was soon turned by tales of these much more ancient people.

The Stones of Stenness in Orkney - possibly the first stone circle ever built

I had never appreciated how much further back their period was than anything else I’d ever read about. Vikings were 1,000 years ago, Picts 1,500. What do you mean the stone circles were built 5,000 years ago?

I’m sorry to say I was beguiled by the glamour of grand old age and spent my days on Orkney mainland and on Papa Westray furiously visiting everything I could find. It was like a neolithic fairground - Maeshowe here, Ring of Brodgar there, here a Barnhouse, there a Skara Brae. 

I was mesmerised and vowed to come back and learn more. 

I started reading the poetic, philosophically informed works of Richard Bradley, an archaeologist bravely concerned with the questions archaeology can never fully answer: what did people believe? Why did they suddenly start building monuments in stone and wood on such a scale? How was society structured? What is the relationship between farming, settlement and monument building?

This is such a weird looking society in many ways. They burned some of their monuments down - both stone and wood - but let others stand for thousands of years. They lived what must have been a pretty tough subsistence life in the earliest days of farming yet diverted massive amounts of labour to building structures with no practical purpose.

As soon as I started seeing pictures of the rock art at Kilmartin or the remnants of paint on pottery or the walls of buildings at Ness of Brodgar I was astounded at the sophistication of the art, the obvious complexity of the inner lives of the people who made it. These were not primitive people scrabbling a meagre living and concerned only with base survival, these were status-anxious, modern-seeming powerful, wealthy people with a stratified and specialised society and an inventive culture producing objects of abiding beauty. 

And - sorry to go on about it, but - this was 5,000 years ago. I’m old enough that the early medieval period was still called the dark ages when I was growing up. I had always thought that before the Roman occupation we were just cloth-wearing savages mucking around the glens in grime and misery. 

That visit to Orkney was a complete revelation and every new thing I learn about these people makes me want to find out something else. 

So, with apologies to the Vikings and the Picts, I’m sticking with the neolithic people for now.