Life for the first people to settle down to farm in Britain was far more violent than previously supposed, research suggests.

Far from a peaceful expansion into empty and fertile lands, the transformation from hunter-gatherer to farming society was riven with conflict and change. New techniques have allowed archaeologists to pinpoint ages of Early Neolithic, long-barrow burial mounds more accurately, forcing them to revise virtually every assumption about Britain’s first farmers.

Early Neolithic society, dating about 3,900BC to 3,300BC, was much more diverse than previously realised, with differences between rites and beliefs noticeable in communities only a few miles from each other.

Long barrows have until now been regarded as burial places that were used for several hundred years as the resting places of chieftains and Neolithic VIPs. New dating on six barrows shows that they were open for only a few decades and were likely to have been used by everyone in the community, making them Neolithic village graveyards.

One barrow, Wayland’s Smithy, near the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire, could have been opened and closed in a day to hold the remains of villagers killed in a raid. Three of the 14 bodies were found with the arrowheads that are presumed to have killed them and the other 11 are now thought likely to have died at the same time. The new evidence, with revised dates for five other burial barrows, means that archaeologists will have to spend the next 20 years reassessing their understanding of the period when farmers took over from hunter-gatherers in Britain.

Four of the barrows assessed by the new dating were contemporaneous yet were all shut up in different ways, suggesting much more diverse beliefs during the era of how “ghosts and spirits” should be treated.

Previously, the different methods of depositing bodies and closing the barrows were held to be indicative of customs and beliefs changing over time.

The new findings suggest that rather than commemorating long-dead tribal chieftains or heroes, the people were keeping alive memories of their friends and families. At Hazleton North in Gloucestershire, offerings of meat were placed in chambers 20 years after burials ceased, suggesting that people were visiting their parents’ graves. Archaeologists were able to provide precise dates for the six barrows by using a new technique that combines radiocarbon dating with Bayesian statistics.

Radiocarbon dating, callibrated by dendrochronology, is accurate to about 250 years with Early Neolithic remains but when combined with Bayesian statistical analysis, in which artefacts are assessed by such things as the soil they were found in, dates accurate to a decade can be reached.

Alex Bayliss, a radiocarbon dating expert with English Heritage, said: “Maybe the idea of an egalitarian, peaceful land is not as true as we thought.” Of Wayland’s Smithy, she said: “Maybe this is the result of an epidemic of collective violence. Maybe there was a cattle raid where most of the women and children fled to hide in the woods and the men stayed to fight and lost the battle.”

Michael Wysocki, of the University of Central Lancaster, said that the period appeared to have been one “of increasing social tension and upheaval”.

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