- no, there was no time to mess around, every living second was dedicated to subsistence activities essential to the community, or
- yeah, they had so much more free time that we do, inevitably people would make shit just for the hell of it. That's probably how we got the wheel, after all.
This said, you'd expect the "for the lulz" stuff not to end up buried with someone, which is how this was found; nor you'd expect them to travel to nearby settlements, as this one supposedly did (two more were found in England).
There’s also a happy middle ground, which is that life had a variable pace over the seasons and years, depending on the availability of game, forage, and crops, and the ease of travel depending on the weather.
I live very much off-grid and have come to appreciate the rhythm of the year, and the times when you have nothing but idle hands, and hours to fill. The summer days when it’s too hot to venture beyond your shaded home, the winter days when the rain drives you to shelter, and the rare times when there’s simply nothing that needs doing today.
The thing that has defined humans since there have been humans is our capability and desire to create, just for the hell of it. Our oldest known artefacts seem to have been made for no purpose other than to have been made, and our history is littered with art for art’s sake, fabulous ornamentation where austerity would have sufficed, and Brobdingnagian works which defy any direct practical purpose, such as henges and pyramids.
We have pretty much always had time for the unnecessary, but engaging.
I find the certainty with which archeologists speak about Iron Age cultures and mores to be amusing. In fact they are at best plausible just-so stories that don't conflict with patterns of artifacts that have been discovered. I understand that they are doing their level best, and trying to draw the most likely logical inferences, but I think there is so little hard information, and falsifiable hypotheses are nearly impossible, biased speculation and groupthink seems destined to dominate the theory.
An awful lot of archaeology is rooted in Victorian and Edwardian ideas of “primitive man” - and as the core of the literature is what all else is built upon, there is a tendency towards orthodoxy and conservatism in the field. If it doesn’t fit, it’s ritual.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not talking ancient aliens or whatever - rather that people several thousand years ago are our contemporaries, and are more or less just like us, but for whatever acculturation is going on this century. We vastly underestimate them based on what little survives of them, and due to a paucity of documentary evidence of any value. We talk of iron and bronze ages, when the reality was that it was all the wood age, in which we still largely reside, and yet we define them by the artefacts which most commonly survive.
