Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

As the term Old Stone Age implies, stone was the main material from which tools were made. Having said that, there is evidence for wooden spears, and bone was certainly used and fashioned. But for present purposes I want to concentrate on stone, and particularly on flint. Most of the flint found in northern Europe formed in the geological Upper Cretaceous Period (one hundred to sixty-four million years ago), usually at the same time as the chalk. When it formed, the chalk was a deep, lime-rich mud on the seabed. In it are countless fossils, including the bones of marine dinosaurs, but more often one finds straight and spiral shells of squid-like creatures, which must have been extraordinarily abundant. Flint is found in the chalk both as nodules, which are often rounded and knobbly (to my mind they closely resemble Henry Moore sculptures), and as a near-continuous tabular deposit which was mined in later prehistory at places such as Grimes Graves in Norfolk (see Chapter 6). It is also frequently found in much later Ice Age gravels, which are composed of stones that have been worn down from much earlier rocks, including the chalk. It’s probably fair to say that most prehistoric flint tools in Britain were made from flint pebbles found in gravel deposits at or close to the surface.

The stone tools used by the earliest people in Africa were fashioned from flakes and pebbles, and were probably used as choppers to break bones and to sever tendons to remove the meat. They are simple but effective, with a series of sharp cutting edges which were formed by removing flakes of flint from one side of a rounded pebble, using a hard stone as a hammer. The part of the pebble that was to be gripped when it was in use was left smooth and unworked. They may have been simple tools, but they weren’t that simple: if I were to ask an educated modern person with no experience of such things to make one, I strongly suspect that he or she would fail. For a start, the stone-toolmaker must know how to select the right sort of stone for both the tool and the hammer. If the stone for the tool isn’t flint, it should be as fine-grained as possible. The hammer should be hard, but not brittle; plainly, it should be resilient too. It’s also important to check that the stone to be used for the tool isn’t run through with hidden planes of weakness, perhaps caused by heat, compression or severe Ice Age frost, as these will cause it to disintegrate when struck even a light blow.

Now we come to the process of removing flakes. Again, this is far from straightforward. Put yourself in the toolmaker’s position: in one hand is a rounded, fist-sized pebble, and in the other is a hammerstone of similar size. Both are rounded, with no obvious points, bumps or protuberances. So how do you knock a flake off? A hard hit at the centre will either achieve nothing, or will simply break the stone in half. A softer blow around the edge will just glance off, rather like a bullet striking the rounded edges of a Sherman tank. I know that first blow is far from straightforward, because I’ve delivered it many times myself. I’ve spent hours and hours trying to perfect and then replicate its force and angle. It’s not easy to detach those all-important initial flakes cleanly. After that, it gets a little less difficult, because the removal of the first flakes leaves behind ridges, which make better targets and result in larger flakes that are simpler to remove.

Flint-working – or knapping, to use the correct term – is an art, a craft.5 Even the crudest of pebble chopping-tools require considerable skill to make. Tools of this, the earliest tradition of flint-working, are remarkably similar from one site to another, which would suggest that the people who made them told each other about good sources of potential raw material, and passed on technological improvements as they happened. Alternatively, perhaps they communicated by example. Either way, the communication took place, which is all that really matters, because these tools were not only extraordinarily effective, they were important.

To my mind there is a vast divide between our earliest hominid ancestors and the closest of our African great ape cousins, the chimp and the bonobo.6 It is true that apes can learn to use and even fashion tools; it is also true, as I have noted, that we arose from a common genetic stock. But the widespread adoption of something as complex as a stone-using technology could only have been accomplished by creatures who were both physically adaptive and who possessed mental capabilities that bear comparison with our own. Make no mistake, the earliest tool-using hominids were almost fully human: cross-bred ape-men they were not.

Pebble choppers were the main component of the earliest tool-using groups, but around 1.6 million years ago a new style of tool began to appear in Africa. Very soon it would be the tool of choice across the world. Possibly the best-known of all ancient archaeological artefacts, it’s known as the ‘hand-axe’. Like many archaeological objects it acquired its name early on, and we’ve been regretting it ever since. These tools may have been used in the hand, but they were never used for chopping down trees. So they weren’t axes as we know them. Perhaps the closest modern equivalent would be the light steel cleaver that’s used with such skill by chefs in Chinese kitchens.

Hand-axes come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most are roughly heart-shaped. Their most distinctive characteristic is that flakes have been removed across the entire surface of both sides. This gives them a far thinner profile than a pebble chopper, and instead of one jagged cutting edge there are two, and they’re finer – and very much sharper. There’s also a very useful angle or point at the end opposite to the more rounded butt, which was the part that was gripped. These versatile tools, which were commonplace in the Palaeolithic, take great skill to produce: I could make a fairly convincing Bronze Age arrowhead out of flint, but I could never achieve a hand-axe. In addition to hand-axes, people at this time also made tools for scraping flesh off bone or hide. These scrapers had strong, angled working surfaces, and were also highly effective.

These earliest traditions of stone tools gave rise to a series of descendants of ever-increasing sophistication. Stone tool technologies in production gave rise to tens of thousands of waste flakes that litter the floor of Palaeolithic habitation sites to this day. Viewed in one way, it was a very wasteful technology. Then, about forty thousand years ago, some anonymous genius (I use the word advisedly) had the idea of fashioning a new range of tools from the flakes that had often previously been discarded as rubbish.7 The new technology soon evolved ways whereby long, thin, sharp blades could be removed from a specially prepared piece of stone or flint, known as a core. These blades were razor sharp, but they lacked the strength and durability of hand-axes. They were, however, the appropriate tool for the job at hand, and could be produced with just one, very carefully directed blow. Mankind was taking the first tentative steps towards specialisation, and also – perhaps more worrying – he was acquiring a taste for lightweight, disposable implements. Our throwaway culture has roots that extend back a very long way indeed.

The final stages of the long prehistoric tradition of flint-working happened in Britain a mere six thousand years ago, with the introduction of polishing in the earlier Neolithic. This technology was very labour intensive. First, a rough-out for the axe or knife was flaked in the conventional way, then the cutting edge and any other surfaces that seemed appropriate were polished using a sand-and-water grinding paste or a finely grained polishing stone, known as a polissoir. Flint is very hard, and the process of grinding took a long time. The end result was, however, very decorative, and there can be little doubt that many polished flint axes were produced to be admired rather than used. Some indeed are made from beautiful ‘marbled’ or veined flint, which polishes up superbly but is so full of internal planes of weakness that it shatters on impact. An axe that broke when it first encountered a tree would not be selected by even the most inexperienced prehistoric lumberjack.

In Britain, the half-million-year-old tradition of making stone tools came to an end around 500 BC, in the first centuries of the Early Iron Age. By then the long, thin blades of the Neolithic to Palaeolithic periods had long gone out of use. Indeed, I suspect that the ability to produce them started to die out rapidly after about 1200 BC. The last flint tools reflect the widespread adoption of metal, which supplied people’s need for cutting implements. So flint was used to provide scrapers and strange faceted piercing implements, which were produced by bashing gravel flint of poor quality that partially shattered, leaving a series of hard, sharp points. These points were probably used to score bone and scour leather. At first glance these odd-looking tools of bad flint seem strangely ‘degenerate’ when compared with the hand-axes and blades of much earlier times. But in fact they were good tools for certain purposes – and they were cheap (in terms of effort) and easy to produce.

I’m often asked how effective flint tools were, possibly because many people, especially those used to working with sharpened steel edge-tools such as axes, billhooks and knives, cannot believe that a flint blade could be of much practical use. I recall an incident in the early 1970s, when I was directing a large excavation at Fengate, on the eastern side of Peterborough. It was in the days before the planning regulations changed, and there was no friendly developer waiting to fund us, so we were working on a very tight budget indeed. One of our main costs then, as now, was staff, and in order to keep expenses down I came to an agreement with the authorities at North Sea Camp Prison, at that time a training establishment for young offenders, close by The Wash. They supplied me with labour, and I supplied them with work and training.

One day we discovered a multiple burial in a pit dating to the Neolithic period, and I took a party of North Sea Camp trainees to erect a scaffold shelter over it.8 In the distance to the north-west the clouds were growing darker, and I knew that rain would be with us soon; I also knew that the fragile bones in the pit – which included the remains of children – would be seriously damaged by the heavy thunderstorm that was heading our way. So we had to move fast. Six lads headed off to collect scaffold poles and the shackles that held them together, while I and the others went to choose a small used tarpaulin from the stock I kept on site for such emergencies. We soon had an A-frame erected, using the poles and shackles, then it came to fitting the tarpaulin cover.

By now a thin scatter of those warm, large drops that so often precede a thunderstorm was just starting to hit the ground. Already the wind was beginning to get up, and there were occasional squalls of much heavier rain. We dragged the tarpaulin over the frame, but it was far too large, and there was no way we could secure all of its billowing folds in place. The rest of the team had taken shelter in the site huts two hundred metres away, so we couldn’t summon help. I felt in my pocket for my knife, but it wasn’t there. I asked the lads if any of them had a knife, which of course they hadn’t.

After a very short pause, one of them sarcastically suggested I make one from flint. Stung by this, I reached down and happened to find a largish pebble at the edge of the grave. I rapped it firmly on one of the steel shackles, and it broke cleanly in half. I then gave it a series of lighter taps with the long handle of the wrench we’d used to tighten the shackles. These taps removed half a dozen sharp blades, and in no time at all we’d cut the tarpaulin to size and trimmed the long rope we’d used to tie it to the A-frame. After that there were no more sarcastic remarks.

Any discussion of northern Europe in the Old Stone Age has to approach the question of Ice Ages. The term was coined by the geologist Edward Forbes in 1846, when writing about the Pleistocene period of geological time. Victorian books on geology sometimes refer to the Pleistocene as the Glacial Epoch. As this name implies, the Pleistocene was marked by a series of extremely cold phases, which are known as glacials; these are separated by periods when the climate became very much warmer, known as interglacials. During the warmest of the interglacials it was actually somewhat hotter than it is today. Perhaps I should add here that our own epoch, known as the postglacial or Flandrian, can be seen as a sub-phase within the Pleistocene: it began when the last glacial ended, around ten to twelve thousand years ago. Some (actually most) specialists in the Pleistocene reckon that the postglacial is nothing of the sort, that we’re living in an extended interglacial, and that there are cold times waiting in the future. There were also smaller oscillations of temperature within the major advances and retreats of the great ice sheets, and the whole cycle of cooling and warming began (with the Pleistocene period itself) around 1.8 million years ago – at least a million years before man penetrated into northern Europe.

When I was at university in the 1960s, study of the Pleistocene period was beginning to be enriched by a series of new sources of information, such as deep-sea core samples. I recall well how analyses of the temperature-sensitive plankton preserved in the Mediterranean muds off the North African coast showed a complex succession of warm and cold phases. Other information, such as deep cores through the Arctic ice, was also coming on stream. Today there are many more science-based sequences of past climates, and it is now clear that although general, global trends can indeed be discerned, the impact of individual glaciations and interglacials varied enormously in both strength and character from one area to another. I’ll focus on the area of northern Europe that was later to become Britain, and restrict myself to the last half-million years or so.

Our story starts with a memorial plaque in the chancel of the church at Finningham, a small village in Suffolk. Most tablets of this sort are erected shortly after the person’s death, but this one is very different.9 It commemorates the life of John Frere (1740-1807), and it was dedicated at a special service on Sunday, 8 August 1999. It is plain, uncluttered, but beautifully made. And its message is simple:

JOHN FRERE FRS.FSA who from his discoveries at Hoxne was the first to realise the immense antiquity of mankind

1740.1807

The plaque was erected by the local archaeological society, with the aid of money raised from archaeologists and others all over Britain. All involved were agreed that it was high time that the man who has been called the father of scientific archaeology was given some form of public recognition. The decision to place the memorial in the church followed a visit to the villages of Hoxne and Finningham by the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History on 22 June 1997,10 commemorating the reading of a famous paper by Frere to the Society of Antiquaries of London exactly two hundred years before. This paper concerned Frere’s observation of flint hand-axes in the brick pit at Hoxne, which he reasoned had been made by people ‘who had not the use of metals’, and who lived in a very remote period, ‘even beyond that of the present world’.11 These were extraordinarily prophetic words, given the stranglehold of religious orthodoxy that prevailed in Britain at the time.

Archaeology has given rise to some very disturbing ideas, and certainly there were few people in the late eighteenth century who were prepared publicly to support Frere’s radical notion. So life continued much as before. As a profession, archaeologists tend not to make a fuss: we’re generally polite and restrained. The 1997 visit to Hoxne and Finningham was no exception. It was organised – indeed inspired – by John Wymer, the leading specialist in the Lower Palaeolithic in Britain, who has himself excavated extensively at Hoxne.

There’s one other thing I’d like to mention about that memorial in Finningham church. Above the inscription is a replica of a flint hand-axe found at Hoxne in 1797. It’s a superb piece of craftsmanship, made by Phil Harding, who is better known as the member of television’s Time Team with the broad-brimmed hat and the rich West Country voice. During the early and mid-1990s Phil and John Wymer travelled the roads of southern Britain, carrying out an extraordinary and comprehensive survey of Lower Palaeolithic finds from the river valleys of the region. This survey resulted in seven specialised reports, which were given to local authorities to help them with planning applications, and an authoritative two-volume overview, published in 1999.12 This report reflects its author: it is both erudite and remarkably down-to-earth.

From the very outset of the great survey, John Wymer decided on a landscape-based approach. He wanted to see how sites and so-called ‘stray’ finds (hand-axes and other flint implements that were found on their own, without any other archaeological context) could be related to their ancient surroundings. River valleys were a crucially important component of the ancient landscape – as they are of the present-day one – and they provided a natural framework for the survey. We tend to think of the inhabitants of the Old Stone Age as ‘cave-men’, but in reality, although caves were indeed used, they don’t occur naturally in lowland river valleys, so it is likely that most people constructed shelters in the open air, probably using wood, bone and hides. Convincing archaeological evidence for such shelters has so far eluded us, but this is hardly to be wondered at: ancient equivalents of the New Agers’ bender – temporary houses made from hoops of steel pipe or green wood covered with plastic – would leave very few clues to their existence after several hundred thousand years. The uprights used to build such structures would not need to be sunk into the ground, so they would leave no trace of that commonest of all archaeological features, the post-hole. By the same token, there would be no wall foundation trenches. These shelters would not have been occupied over an extended period, as the community, which relied entirely on hunting and gathering their food, would move around the countryside, probably following well-trodden routes.

The earliest period of human settlement in what were later to become the British Isles predates the most extensive glaciation of Britain, known as the Anglian glaciation, which began around 480,000 years ago. Anglian ice covered all of Britain north of a line drawn from south Essex and the Thames estuary, due west across the country to Bristol; thereafter it hugged the southern shore of the Bristol Channel, but never truly penetrated inland into Somerset, Devon or Cornwall.

Happisburgh (pronounced ‘Hazeborough’) is about seventy kilometres east of Holme-next-the-Sea, where the so-called ‘Seahenge’ timber circle was found in 1998. Like Holme, Happisburgh is a very exposed beach, and subject to serious erosion. It has an outcrop of the so-called Cromer Forest Bed, a Pleistocene deposit which was laid down well before the Anglian glaciation. Recently, Palaeolithic flints, including a hand-axe, were found on the beach, and they appeared to be very closely associated with the Cromer Forest Bed. This would place them about 150,000 years earlier than the earliest flints yet found in Britain – i.e. around 650,000 years ago. The site is under such grave threat of destruction by erosion that any passing archaeologist should make a visit, recover anything he sees, and carefully record its position. It’s not far from where I live, and it will make an excellent spot for weekend winter expeditions – there’s something magical about finding ‘the earliest’ of anything that appeals to me enormously.

Whatever is, or is not, found at Happisburgh, there are only a handful of sites belonging to this very remote period of prehistory. There are also ‘stray’ finds of hand-axes and pebble chopping-tools along many of the river valleys of southern Britain, but these cannot always be dated with accuracy.

At this point some readers may query the presence of pebble chopping-tools in Britain, a mere half-million years ago, of a type that supposedly ceased to be made in Africa about a million years ago. Does the existence of these tools indicate that Britain was occupied over a million years ago? I don’t think it does. It’s inconceivable that large areas of a region so far into northern Europe could have been occupied at so early a date, and there’s no other independent evidence to support such an idea. Many pebble choppers are unearthed as ‘stray’ finds in river gravels, especially in Essex, which is why this British tradition of pebble tools was named the Clactonian.

Most specialists in this field are today agreed that the Clactonian is not a ‘tradition’ in its own right; in other words, these tools (if that’s indeed what they were) were not produced by a separate group of people with their own distinctive culture and identity. Most probably the choppers were made because the gravels routinely produce nice fist-sized, rounded pebbles which were too small to be made into hand-axes, but whose shape simply demanded that they be fashioned into a tool. Some fist-sized and -shaped flints can have that effect when one’s brain is in flint-knapping mode. Put another way, Clactonian choppers are examples of local adaptation and inventiveness. It’s easy to forget that people in the past weren’t aware that their toolmaking activities would later be examined in minute detail by archaeologists. So occasionally they depart from what we expect them to do. Personally, I find this explanation for British pebble tools pretty satisfying, but still a tiny doubt niggles away at the back of my brain: Clactonian-like tools do occur occasionally on later sites of the Palaeolithic, which tends to support the ‘local adaptation and inventiveness’ theory; but having said that, in general they are very early. Even if it is only a half-mystery, it’s an intriguing one, and I wonder when, or if, it will be resolved.

It’s time now to turn our attention to the south coast of England, and the site at Boxgrove, West Sussex, which is undoubtedly the most important Palaeolithic discovery ever made in Britain. It’s hard to exaggerate its significance. When one talks to Palaeolithic archaeologists their eyes light up at the mention of the quarry at Eartham, and their enthusiasm becomes infectious.

Although I only managed to go to the site once, it was almost like a religious experience. To reach the quarry one has to walk down a long, gradually sloping road. Beside me was the then Chairman of English Heritage, Jocelyn Stevens (now Sir Jocelyn), who was visiting Boxgrove to see how his organisation’s money was being spent. I was there as a member of the committee which provides English Heritage with independent advice on all sorts of archaeological matters.

Sir Jocelyn is a very snappy dresser: trousers with knife-edge creases, shoes that glisten in the sun, double-breasted coats with a rose at the lapel. He is also a rapid walker, and likes to get to the point in all manner of ways. He was very keen to see the site, which had often featured on the national news. I was keen too, but I was also in the throes of a nasty cold, and was not feeling 100 per cent up to scratch, which is why I found myself stumbling over the small cobbles in my efforts to keep pace with the great man. My shambling gait did little to improve the impression given by my less than immaculate tailoring, which owed rather more to Skid than to Savile Row. We made a strange pair. Around us were the other members of the committee, and various archaeologists and administrators from English Heritage head office in London. It was a fabulous summer morning, crisp and fine, with larks on the wing in the clear coastal air. I was almost feeling better.

I wasn’t aware of it as we walked, but the hill leading into the quarry was actually a smoothed-out ancient cliff, and it was this cliff which provided the key to the dating of the finds at Boxgrove. Most archaeological discoveries are associated with a single person. True, he or she almost invariably works with and leads a closely knit team, but it usually requires one person to provide the fire and enthusiasm which fuels the project. At Boxgrove that person was, and is, Mark Roberts.