Neolithic Farmers and livestock:
managing the land
The first signs that people
were settling around the Moss or were changing the
surrounding landscape occur around 5520 years ago
(220 cm). These come from the first farmers to
settle in this area.
Archaeologists
refer to this as the Neolithic period, which lasted
from around 6000-4500 years ago - the time of the
first farmers when pottery also first came into use.
Lifestyles gradually changed during this time. People
no longer relied only on wild resources, obtained
through hunting and gathering, and by living a mobile
or at least semi-nomadic lifestyle. Cereal crops and
domesticated animals now had to be looked after and
protected from wild animals, so settlement patterns
became more permanent. Metals were still unknown, so
tools were still made of stone, bone and wood.
The most famous
archaeological discovery dating to this period is the
village of Skara Brae in Orkney. This survived
because the houses were built of durable stone,
rather than wood, and because a huge storm covered
the village with sand which preserved it until storms
in AD 1850 revealed it again.
Skara Brae: a time capsule of
Neolithic life>
www.orkneyjar.com/history/skarabrae/index.html
Chambered
cairns, burial mounds (also called barrows) and stone
circles also date from the Neolithic. These suggest
that ceremonies may have been an important part of
Neolithic life.
A Neolithic burial
landscape>
www.kilmartin.org/
At Greenhead Moss we see the farmers
mainly through the effects that their animals were
having on the vegetation. Because of their influence,
the whole landscape was changing. Grasses and herbs
gradually spread because they can keep on growing
even if they are repeatedly eaten and trampled on.
Fen plants are sensitive to this type of treatment,
so some disappeared and others became less common. On
the bog, grazing might have helped tough, relatively
unpalatable sedge plants to replace some heather,
which is one of the few plantsthat doesn’t lose
its leaves over winter and so can still be grazed.
The pollen record cannot tell us what
types of animals were grazing around the Moss, but
bones from prehistoric archaeological sites in
Scotland show us that farmers had cattle, sheep,
goats and some pigs. These animals looked quite
different to modern ones - they were much like their
wild relatives of today.
Ancient animal breeds>
www.flagfen.freeserve.co.uk/
To start, grazing didn’t have a big
effect on the woods, but from around 4990 years
ago (188 cm) woodland cover was becoming more
open, probably because animals kept nibbling the
tasty, tender buds off young trees. Oak was still the
main tree, but the woods were light enough for more
hazel, birch and ash to grow. These are trees that
need light and disturbed ground, both of which were
probably provided by animals grazing in the woods.
In these openings, bracken and grass
spread, replacing woodland ferns which grow best
under shade. At the edges of the bog, some alder was
also replaced by more adaptable, opportunistic birch
trees.
Bracken and grasses
growing in open oakwoods © SNH
This gives us a picture of animals
grazing under the trees and in clearings, gradually
making the woodland lighter and more open, and
probably straying onto the bog.
The
Neolithic farmers around Greenhead Moss seem to have
relied on animals, using the land around the Moss
mainly for grazing rather than growin food plants.
Cereal crops, like barley, oats and wheat, have quite
big, heavy pollen grains (in pollen terms!). Because
of their size, these don’t travel very far and
tend to fall near the parent plants. Plus cereal
grass flowers are self-pollinated so they are not
designed to release much pollen into the atmosphere.
So cereal pollen grains do not often travel far from
the fields where they grow. The two cereal pollen
grains recorded at 4990 and 4970 years ago (188 -
184cm) suggest that there was some cultivation
nearby for a short time, but otherwise, there
don’t seem to have been fields near to the Moss.
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