The Neolithic Era
In about 4500 BC, men with knowledge of rather advanced farming techniques started to filter into Britain, ushering in the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.
The “Windmill Hill” culture, with its raised causeways and other innovations, represents a flowering of early thought in this country, during a time popularised erroneously as an aeon of primitive ape-men.
It was during this period that pottery started to be produced. In the Middle Neolithic period (c. 4000-3100 BC), a native pottery type known as PETERBOROUGH WARE was common in Britain.
Neolithic sites in Lancashire include:
• OVER WYRE
• PILLING MOSS
• ST. MICHAEL’S ON THE WYRE
• LITTLE HAWESWATER
• STORRS MOSS
• PIKESTONES, ANGLEZARKE (see below)
• DELPH RESERVOIR
• PORTFIELD CAMP
• WORSTHORNE MOOR
In about 3100 BC, a new group arrived in the west of Britain – probably those responsible for the Boyne Valley Complex sites in Ireland. Commonly, this group can be called the “Long Barrow” people.
The only definite site which can be placed in this period isPIKESTONES, a Megalithic chambered tomb situated on the moors above Anglezarke, near Chorley.
It can be inferred that other sites await discovery, and two possible tombs are to be found in Rossendale and Bowland.
The henge-and-megalith-building people are associated with a new type of pottery – GROOVED WARE (formerly known as RINYO-CLACTON WARE), which seems to have moved south from the Orkney Isles, meeting the native Peterborough Ware bearers in the Late Neolithic era. Grooved Ware is associated with the use in farming of pigs.
The settled landscape at that time is recorded in the Lancashire Neolithic Floor, preserved in peat deposits. It was at this time that people started moving to the valley floors, a process not complete until the Middle to Late Bronze Age, more than a millennium later.
Their lifestyle is briefly described here, in a quote from “The History of Mellor in Lancashire”, by Neil Summersgill, p.9:
“The Neolithics built settlements on hill-tops, made and used implements with great skill, and constructed burial mounds for their dead. They also kept domestic animals for use as food and lived in pit dwellings, or crude turf structures surrounded by ditches. The term ‘sod huts’ was colloquially applied to Mellor Moor for many years and possibly the site was previously one of those hill settlements. That Neolithic man once stood on the heights of Mellor is undoubted.”
A new wave of people started appearing in Britain during the middle of the third millennium BC, who, it seems, brought with them new, advanced technologies, as well as their own funerary customs.
These are commonly known as the “Bell Beaker” folk, and, at a slightly later period, were probably the dominant part of the population at the advent of the Bronze Age here.
