Prehistory

In the strict sense history is an account of the past recovered from written records. The term prehistory was coined (by Daniel Wilson in 1851 though in France Tournal had used prehistorique as early as 1833) to cover the story of man’s development before the appearance of writing. Prehistory differs from history in many other ways. It deals with the activities of a society or culture, not of the individual; it is restricted to the material evidence, and only such of that as has survived; and it is in the strictest sense anonymous, since without records we cannot know the names of people, peoples or places, and are forced to invent arbitrary labels instead.

Prehistory in Britain runs from the Lower Palaeolithic, about 700,000 year ago, to the invasion of the Romans in AD 43, though the Roman and Saxon periods in Britain are still largely known from archaeological evidence rather than written. Prehistory is divided into the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age.