The Prehistoric Populations of Britain

The first humans to occupy Britain arrived more than half a million years ago, but these events consisted of sporadic visits by small and often isolated communities that were not able to become fully established and survive continuously in Britain in the fluctuating climates of the last ice age. Following the end of the last ice age, Britain saw more or less continuous inhabitation by peoples practising different ways of subsistence, ranging from hunting, fishing and gathering, through subsistence farming to more extensive market-oriented farming and the establishment of proto-urban communities by the time the Romans occupied Britain 2000 years ago. We already know a lot about the locations and densities of sites occupied and the range of activities undertaken by these past communities, but the sizes of the populations and their demographic properties (including birth and death rates, capacity for population growth and the extent of migration) are still largely unknown. The intention of my proposed research is to collate information from as wide a range of relevant sources as possible, including genetic studies of modern and past populations; studies of settlement distribution and usage of resources; and studies of skeletal remains from archaeological sites. From this information I intend to develop models for past population structures and processes so that I will be in a position to investigate the relationship of humans to their natural environment and plot their demographic development over an extended time scale.

The review will take account of differences in life history variables (e.g. rates of maturation and length of life span) that are now believed to characterise the different species of hominins that occupied Europe prior to the arrival of anatomically modern humans. The earliest inhabitants of Britain were probably sensitive to environmental change, and there is some emerging evidence for correlations between broad-scale environmental conditions and hominin population density during the Middle and Upper Pleistocene in Britain. The pace of colonisation and re-colonisation of Britain by modern humans during the late Pleistocene and into the early and middle Holocene can be tracked by analysing distributions of radiocarbon dates, an important 'proxy' for the extent of human activity during this time period.

A key feature of this research will be the breadth of materials and methods that will be brought to bear on questions concerning prehistoric demography, enabling a fully interdisciplinary approach to be adopted. For example, through projects such as the Beaker Isotope Project (a large-scale reanalysis of British Beaker period skeletons to examine diet and mobility through stable isotope analysis) we now have available a large dataset with which questions of migration and mobility in the Late Neolithic can be investigated. The project will require an appraisal of a wide range of research in palaeoanthropology, palaeodemography, biomolecular archaeology, funerary archaeology and osteoarchaeology, as each of these disciplines can make an important contribution to our understanding of past populations.