‘Brilliant Black British History,’ an Archaeologist’s Perspective

Bloomsbury has put out a work entitled Brilliant Black British History. In this illustrated book, the popular children’s author Atinuke purports to set the record straight about the identities of the most dynamic movers and shakers in past millennia of what we today call the United Kingdom.

As reported in the Daily Mail and elsewhere, the book’s claims are extravagant indeed. Atinuke posits that the first Britons were black and that Stonehenge was the work of their descendants in a nation properly thought of as having a white majority “for a lot less time than it has been a mostly black country.”

Though such notions stand widely held beliefs on their head, much of the mainstream press has rushed to endorse Brilliant Black British History. Without putting its claims through a ringer or subjecting them to any scrutiny at all. On September 22, the Guardian proudly included the work in a roundup of the best new picture books and novels.

Black people were the architects of Stonehenge and the heroes and achievers of much of British history, the book claims, and if you persist in believing otherwise, you must hold a degree from White Nationalist College. Shame on you.

An Archaeologist’s Perspective

But armchair speculation is of little use to anyone. In search of insight on the highly specialized historical and archaeological issues involved here, Book and Film Globe reached out to Thomas Booth, a senior laboratory research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute and the author of many scholarly papers on early and Roman Britain.

Booth’s thoughts on the subject are nuanced. Of course, there is no reason to think that diversity was absent from that part of the world in past millennia. In Booth’s view, the presence of fairly high variations in skin pigmentation in the British Isles during the period in question is not especially controversial. He described rising levels of diversity within the population as the influx of people from the continent proceeded apace.

“Between 6,000 and 4,500 years ago, during which time Stonehenge was built, migrations from continental Europe—but with distant origins in Anatolia—meant that a new population came to predominate in Britain,” he said.

The best estimates that researchers today make about the skin tone of such people hold that it varied more than among those living during the Mesolithic period which preceded it, he said.

What is the upshot? Booth acknowledged that the pigmentation was “generally lighter” than in Mesolithic times, yet in some cases “still darker” than the skin tones most common in Britain and Northern Europe in 2023.

“Some people would have been slightly lighter than this and some slightly darker, comparable to what we see in the earlier groups,” Booth stated.

Anatolia lies in what we today know as Turkey, and the well-documented migrations through Europe to what is now Britain hardly lend much support to any theory of a black-majority Britain.

In all likelihood, there were people in the Britain of the time who had a skin pigmentation classifiable as black. But enough of them to support Atinuke’s generalizations?

“It was probably true of only a minority of people who lived in Britain 6,000 to 4,500 years ago, certainly not most people,” said Booth.

Booth’s position finds support in the work of scholars such as Stuart Piggott (1910-1996). In his 1965 work Ancient Europe: From the Beginnings of Agriculture to Classical Antiquity, Piggott traces the cultural diffusion by which various forms of agriculture and primitive economy spread throughout the continent and offshore isles, and identifies the Rhine River as a significant cultural barrier in the world of 2,000 B.C. Britain partook of a high degree of cultural insularity west of this line of demarcation, he states, and during this period some of its strongest ties may well have been with Northern Europe. Cultural transmission set the north and west significantly apart from other regions.

“On the north European plain, variants of a different settlement-pattern, with shifting agriculture and long houses implying social units of the undivided or great family type, can be uniformly traced,” writes Piggott (emphasis added).

One of the images on Atinuke’s book’s cover is a young man with an Afro giving a Black Power salute. Here is a perfect illustration of how Brilliant Black British History warps a complex question, and the real probability of diversity among the populations of millennia past, into a contemporary political agenda.

It’s important not to discount the real likelihood of a diverse population or the presence of some people with markedly darker skin than members of today’s white U.K. population. But Atinuke does far more than ask pertinent questions and raise legitimate points about the amount of work that researchers of early Britain still have ahead of them. Instead, she shoehorns these questions into the much more recent narrative of Afro-Caribbean migration into the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s, one whose tropes and definitions are familiar, instantly recognizable, and not particularly relevant to the subject at hand.