Pre-Roman
The first known settlement of Dorset was by Mesolithic hunters, who returned to Britain at a time when it was still attached to Europe by a land-bridge, around 12,500 BC. The population was very small, maybe only a few thousand across the whole of Britain, and concentrated along the coast: in Dorset, such places as the Isle of Purbeck, Weymouth, Chesil Beach and Hengistbury Head, and along the Stour valley. These populations used stone tools and fire to clear some of the native oak forest for herding prey. Genetic experiments carried out on a Mesolithic skeleton from Cheddar Gorge (in the neighbouring county of Somerset) have shown that a significant part of the contemporary population of Dorset is descended from these original inhabitants of the British Isles.
This suggests that when a wave of immigrant farmers arrived from the continent in the Neolithic, the indigenous hunter-gatherers were not wiped out, but instead most likely adopted agricultural practices. Further woodland clearances took place at this stage, and also in the Bronze Age, to make way for agriculture and animal husbandry, although where the soils were poor and made permanent cultivation difficult, clearance led instead to the creation of heathland. Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds are particularly numerous throughout much of the county.
Dorset's high chalk hills have provided a location for defensive settlements for millennia, with a large number of late Bronze Age but mostly Iron Age hill forts, such as Maiden Castle, Hod Hill, Badbury Rings and Hambledon Hill. The chalk downs were largely deforested during these times, making way for field and pasture. Some of the steeper slopes and hill tops are inaccessible or impractical for arable farming, and there the archaeology is relatively well preserved; the valley floors and broader hills have usually been ploughed, and hence do not have a good record of pre-Roman archaeology, although this does not mean that Iron Age peoples didn't settle there. Indeed, many contemporary theories postulate that hillforts may not have been the main focus of settlement, but served more as a marketplace-cum-stronghold in times of danger, and in fact most of the time, the population was concentrated in the valleys. By the Late Iron Age, the inhabitants of Dorset were minting their own coinage and thriving on trade with Northern Gaul (Armorica, now known as Brittany). However, after Armorica was conquered by Julius Caesar in 56 BC, the trade dried up; the Romans re-arranged trade with Britain to the profit of their allies, the Trinovantes, in Essex. The next century or so until the Roman conquest saw a long drawn-out period of economic retrenchment in Dorset, in parallel with a rising population and a decline in soil quality (much of it had been in cultivation for 4,000 years). By the time of the Roman Conquest, it is likely that a combination of overpopulation and impoverishment of the soil left many people starving, to which bone analysis of skeletons from Bere Regis bears witness; several of the skeletons present ample evidence of numerous distinct episodes of severe malnourishment during childhood.
The Romans record the name of the native British tribe that lived in Dorset as the Durotriges, who were also the tribe of much of Somerset and possibly the New Forest. Sometimes translated as "water dwellers", this name could mean that they were seafarers, but is more likely a reference to the marshy valley of the River Frome which they would have farmed. However, this etymology is unsound, based on the Welsh word dwr meaning water; however the earlier form of the word was dwfr, which suggests an Ancient British ancestor-word *dubro-, not *duro- (this form of the word is preserved in the place-name Dover). Another alternative is "fort-dwellers"; it is known that the Durotriges were still occupying their hillforts at the time of the Roman invasion in 43 AD, whereas in most other parts of Britain they had been abandoned around 100 BC. There is also a Cornish word dur meaning "land" or "earth"; hence the Durotriges might also be "land-dwellers", referring to their already important farming tradition: it is known that they were exporting grain to the Roman Empire in large quantities already by the first century BC. The etymology of the first element is thus far from certain, although the second element definitely means "dwellers" (Cornish tre, "town", tregez "have lived"; Welsh tref "farm").
Read more about this topic: History Of Dorset