Let's turn our attention now to the farmingtechnology available at that time.Before the cerealcrops could be planted,it would have been necessaryto clear the forest and to break the ground byploughing.The stone blade of a plough has beendiscovered during excavation in County Mayo inwestern Ireland.The body of the plough would havebeen of wood and could have been drawn bypeople,but it's also likely that cattle wwere used.
Now,the cultivation of crops and the husbandry oflivestock brought about changes in people's lifestylesuch as the type of shelters they made.For one thing,instead of moving from place to placethey needed permanent dewllings.The stone axes used to chop down trees to make thesedwellings were far superior to any that the Stone Age hunter-gatherers used.
To make the axes,sources of suitable stone had to be foud and systematically exploited.Theseso-called 'axe factories' were really quarries rather than factories,as the manufacture of theaxes wasn't regularly performed on the quarry site.However,after the axe had been chippedinto shape,they needed water and sand for grinding and polishing,so a high mountainsidewouldn't have been an appropriate place for this.So this final stage of the manufacture musthave been carried out close to water and sure enough,there's ample evidence of this at coastalsites.
