Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

Viewed from here, Goat’s Hole Cave ‘appears as a south-facing cave clearly visible from some distance and set into the high cliffs of a promontory defined, on either side, by slades or valleys’.37 It’s a very striking landmark, and there are anthropological accounts of shamanistic mythological beliefs that link caves in such striking positions with, for example, the creator of mountains, or the spirits of mountains. In one wonderful Siberian account, caves are seen as the holes left by the great mammoth who created the mountains; caves in mountain or hillsides are particularly interesting because they can be seen as a stage or resting place on a mythical ladder between Heaven, earth and the Netherworld. Shamans would have performed the ceremonial tasks of climbing and solemnising the various stages of this symbolic ladder.38 Given this context, the Red ‘Lady’ burial can be seen to fit into an established sequence of possibly regular visits to a very special place.

Clive Gamble has already been mentioned as a prehistorian with an extraordinary ability to stand back from the detail of a subject and see things from an unusual or unexpected angle. Writing about the social context of Upper Palaeolithic art, he pointed out that societies may have been organised in small groups, but this did not mean that their concerns were entirely parochial. Far from it. In a paper written in 1991 he provided convincing evidence that people at this time were in communication over extraordinarily long distances.39 Those three bone spatulae, with their close parallels on the plains of Russia, surely reinforce his theory. The physical expression of this communication would have been in the form of ceremonial exchange of important objects, such as the spatulae. These ceremonies would have served to reinforce social ranking within the various societies that took part. I would imagine that the spatulae were given to an important person, most probably a senior shaman. It’s worth noting that such long-distance communication would have been very much more difficult had Britain not been physically united with mainland Europe.

Earlier I said that the Upper Palaeolithic was the period in which many of the defining characteristics of modern civilisation first become apparent. In his 1991 paper Clive Gamble showed how art in the Upper Palaeolithic was far more than just a matter of beauty, whether of carved objects or painted cave walls. This, of course, was the period of the famous cave paintings at places like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain.40 Sadly, in Britain we still lack such extraordinary finds, but we do know from smaller, portable carved objects (such as those spatulae) that people here used, appreciated and made art. What did art and its appearance in the Upper Palaeolithic signify? To quote from Clive’s paper:

Art for me is…a system of communication and includes a wide range of mediums and messages. As an act of social communication it is defined by style which…has its behavioural basis in a fundamental human cognitive process: personal and social identification through comparison. Consequently [art] style is not just a means of transmitting information about identity but is an active tool in building social strategies.41

This is very important, because it dismisses commonly heard simplistic views such as, for example, that cave art was merely something done to give good luck in the hunt – the equivalent of tossing a coin in the fountain. That’s rather like saying that Michelangelo’s masterpiece was painted simply to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – classy, hand-painted wallpaper. In part it was, but it was also a great deal more than that: among many other things it was a profound restatement of the aspirations that lay behind the later Renaissance – and that’s just scratching the intellectual surface.

What we’re witnessing in the Upper Palaeolithic is very complex, but it probably includes the elaboration, if not the development, of languages that were sufficiently sophisticated to express the ideas and symbolism lying behind the art, because an image devoid of any written or spoken textual reference is hard to comprehend. This is particularly true if the image is being introduced to people who are not familiar with the culture or part of society in question. As a European, for example, I can admire the execution of Japanese art, but I find much of its meaning and the philosophy behind it incomprehensible. In such circumstances explanation is essential. Recently the newspapers carried a story of how an installation by Damien Hirst was collected up and thrown away, along with the rubbish, by the gallery’s cleaners on the morning after the opening party. It consisted of empty Coca-Cola cans and other debris and, according to the newspaper I read, had a market value of £40,000. The artist, to his credit, thought it all very amusing. The point is that the textual reference, whether written or explicit, was missed by the cleaners. The art had lost its context, and with it its meaning and distinctiveness. Whichever way one looks at it, there had been a failure in communication. So into the bin it went.

The Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland belonged to the first or earlier part of the Upper Palaeolithic, which is separated from the later part by the last (and hopefully final) great glacial cold period, which began around twenty-five thousand years ago. During its coldest phase, about eighteen thousand years ago, large areas of northern Europe (including what was later to become Britain) were uninhabited. About thirteen thousand years ago, occupation of the areas abandoned to ice and freezing-cold tundra was resumed.

CHAPTER THREE Hotting up: Hunters at the End of the Ice Age

I’D LOVE TO TRAVEL to the moon. In stellar terms it’s so near, but I know it’s somewhere I’ll never visit, no matter how much I’d like to. True, I’ll probably never visit the Australian Outback either, or certain suburbs of Torquay – but then again, I might. Such journeys aren’t impossible, in the way that a trip to the moon is. And that, in a rather roundabout way, is where we find ourselves now, in the later part of the Upper Palaeolithic, with the final glacial maximum just behind us. We’re on the archaeological moon, looking out towards earth, with the planets and stars of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic light years behind us.

We ended the last chapter with the glacial conditions that prevailed eighteen thousand years ago. The best evidence now suggests that the area later to be known as the British Isles was reoccupied around 12,600 years ago, about five hundred years later than nearby parts of the continent.1 The climate suddenly reached a warm peak around thirteen thousand years ago, when it was actually slightly warmer than today. Then it grew colder again, reaching another near-glacial period which began around eleven thousand years ago and ended a thousand or so years later. This final colder period was by no means as severe as the last glacial maximum, and is known as the Loch Lomond sub-phase. When it ended, around ten thousand years ago, our own, postglacial or Flandrian, period began. During the Loch Lomond sub-phase, glaciers covered areas of the Scottish Highlands. So it was pretty cold, but not nearly as bad as the earlier glacial maximum, which peaked around eighteen thousand years ago, and ultimately took Paviland Cave out of the picture.

Most late glacial or Later Upper Palaeolithic sites in Britain predate the Loch Lomond sub-phase, and many are from caves (although open sites are known) which are found in England south of the Humber and in south Wales. Although Britain has yet to produce the quantities of superb art found on the continent, there are one or two examples of carving on bone, ivory and stone. My personal favourite is a very confident yet delicately executed horse’s head on a fragment of horse rib, found in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.

The Late Upper Palaeolithic is a field that has seen a great deal of recent activity, with many exciting new excavations; but I shall confine myself to just one site, Gough’s Cave, in Somerset.2 In a way it selected itself, because what it has revealed is both extraordinary and, frankly, a little bizarre.

Gough’s Cave is in that spectacular tourist attraction the Cheddar Gorge, on the southern slopes of the beautiful Mendip Hills. It has been excavated twice, in the 1890s and the 1980s. The earlier excavations brought the site to public attention, but in the process they removed most of the important archaeological deposits. Other chance discoveries were made in the early years of the twentieth century as Gough’s Cave was converted into what it is today, a show cave for visitors. As a result of this earlier activity, the dig of the 1980s was of necessity small, and was partly undertaken to assess the reliability of the earlier work and the extent to which ancient deposits still survived intact within the cave.

I remember the first time I came across a modern account of Gough’s Cave. It was in the archaeological journal Antiquity for March 1989, which I read from cover to cover for the vainglorious and slightly embarrassing reason that I had published a paper in the same issue on my efforts to turn my own site at Flag Fen, Peterborough, into a visitor attraction.3 Normally I’d have skipped over the short report on the Natural History Museum’s dig at Gough’s Cave as being outside my own particular field of study. I’m glad I didn’t, because it rekindled a flame that was almost extinguished within me. I don’t believe that anyone, least of all a prehistorian – even a specialist in the later periods of prehistory – can ever afford to lose sight of our Palaeolithic roots.

The excavations by the Natural History Museum took place between April and July 1987, following a shorter project the previous year by one of the team, Roger Jacobi, who was then a lecturer at Nottingham University. As I’ve already noted, Gough’s Cave had been a popular visitor attraction for a long time. The basis of its appeal was as a vast, echoing cave rather than an archaeological site, and its preparation for visitors in the early twentieth century involved a great deal of cleaning up and general prettifying, during which numerous human bone fragments and archaeological artefacts were unearthed.4 All the bone was superbly preserved in the calcareous environment of the limestone cave, which was to prove extremely important when it came to the running of DNA analyses in the 1990s. When I first studied the Palaeolithic in the sixties, Gough’s Cave was generally thought to have been rendered archaeologically sterile – or nearly so – by this preparation work. Accordingly, there was much professional interest when Roger Jacobi carried out a short programme of research into a deposit that seemed to have survived the depredations of the last century relatively intact.

Jacobi’s dig in 1986 was in a small pocket of archaeological deposits which lay hidden behind a massive fallen rock on the floor of the cave. The meticulous excavation revealed fragments of flint and several isolated human teeth, making it clear that the deposit was indeed archaeological and seemed to have survived intact, and was generally undisturbed – at least in modern times, if not in antiquity. These results, as happens with most good excavations, posed more questions than they answered, and a larger dig was planned for the following year. The aims of the 1987 project were to decide whether the deposit really was undisturbed, how it got there in the first place – and therefore what it signified – and to map its full extent. If it was shown to be at all extensive, measures would be taken to ensure its survival in the future. I’m happy to report that it’s still there, and likely to remain there, intact, for a very long time indeed.

I mentioned that bone at Gough’s Cave was superbly preserved. In fact it was in such good condition that even the lightest, tiniest of surface scratches survived. These proved extraordinarily revealing. The excavations uncovered the remains of at least three adults and two children, aged from eleven to thirteen and three to five years. The bones at Gough’s Cave differed from those at Paviland in that they weren’t from deliberately placed or arranged burials. Instead they were loose, disarticulated bones that probably derived from a midden, or refuse deposit, as they were found jumbled in amongst flint tools, pieces of antler, bone and mammoth ivory. Does this mean that human remains in the Later Upper Palaeolithic were treated as mere debris, like the animal bones that lay with them on the floor of the cave? The answer is an emphatic no. And the justification of that denial lies in those light scratches on the bones’ surfaces.

The bones were from modern humans: Homo sapiens sapiens, to give us our full scientific name. The surface scratches were studied under the microscope by Jill Cook.5 There was absolutely no indication of healing, so the marks had been made post mortem, but probably not very long after death. They had been made by flint knives wielded by a person, or persons, who knew what they were doing and what they meant to achieve. I recall press headlines at the time screaming the case for cannibalism, and there have been better-founded and more considered such claims subsequently.6 Certainly the marks suggested that the corpses had been carefully dismembered. There was even evidence for skinning, and for the careful removal of a tongue from the mouth. Cannibalism is and has been a widespread phenomenon all over the world, and there’s no reason why Britain should not have experienced it several times over in its half-million-year-long prehistory. Maybe it did happen at Gough’s Cave. I don’t think it matters very much if it did, because this wasn’t the casual consumption of human flesh as a lazy substitute for, say, a haunch of venison when the larder was empty. No, it was something ceremonial, symbolic and special. It could have been an act of hostility to a vanquished foe, but more likely it was an act of respect to a departed relative.

What happened to the corpses after their dismemberment? Sadly, we don’t know for certain. We do know that they weren’t broken open to extract marrow, nor were they smashed, burnt and broken like many of the animal bones found in the cave, which surely are the residue of food preparation and consumption. Perhaps soft parts of the head – especially the brain – could have been eaten, as still happened very recently in New Guinea, where it is believed that ceremonial cannibalism of this sort is a means of transferring experience and wisdom from the dead to the living. Maybe. We just don’t know.

It is clear, however, that the bones at Gough’s Cave were expertly and carefully treated, and this suggests that the way in which the body was disposed of may have involved more than one stage. In many human societies the transition from the world of the living to the next world is a gradual process.7 There are many reasons for this: it allows the bereaved immediate family more time to mourn their loss, it gives far-flung relatives time to reach the funeral, and it provides a prolonged period of ceremonial during which the myths and legends that bind the community together can be learned, rehearsed and repeated by everyone. Death, like other so-called rites of passage such as birth, puberty and marriage, was a time when societies, tribes and families could meet, celebrate or commiserate, just as we do to this day.

There are many forms of multi-stage burial, cremation or exposure. The latter is the process, sometimes known as excarnation, whereby the flesh is removed by birds or other natural means. The removal of the flesh symbolises the soul’s journey to the next world, and the clean bones are often ignored, piled together in ossuaries or, as happened in later prehistoric times, in purpose-built communal tombs. In the case of Gough’s Cave, the careful dismemberment of the cadavers suggests that the detached limbs were placed in a special area reserved for bodies or souls that were still in a transitional state, either in the cave or perhaps on a platform outside, in the open. Again, we don’t know precisely what was going on, but the general picture – of a two-stage funerary process – seems fairly clear.

What is also abundantly clear is that prolonged and elaborate funeral rites didn’t suddenly appear six thousand years later with the arrival of the Neolithic period around 5000 BC. This is when we have the introduction of farming and houses and a more settled style of life; it is also when we find the first large communal tombs, barrows and other evidence for people coming together to mark or celebrate rites of passage. But the social processes, and in particular the human need to mark a person’s passing in this special way, have roots which go down very deep. As we will see in the next two chapters, there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that the hard-and-fast barrier that archaeologists have traditionally erected between the distant world of hunter-gathering and our world of farming and settled life simply isn’t there.

The Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland provided evidence for contacts over enormous distances. Of course, those contacts need not have been direct. I’m not suggesting that the people who used the Paviland caves commuted to the plains of Russia; what I am suggesting is that they may well have met people who knew people who did – just as I have met people who knew someone who was a friend of another person who died in the World Trade Center disaster of 11 September 2001. Both are examples of contacts within societies where people move around a great deal.

Gough’s Cave also provided evidence for long-distance contact, although this time the distances were not quite so massive; but the evidence was also much stronger, and not based on something as hard to pin down as the style of art used to decorate those three bone spatulae.

So far in this book I have concentrated more on people than on the flint tools they left behind them. This is not because I dislike flint – on the contrary, writing reports on flint artefacts has been my bread and butter for many years. However, to a non-specialist the technological differences between the various types and styles of flint can be hard to remember. Indeed, it took me a long time to master them with any degree of assurance, and when I eventually did so, I found I knew very little extra about the people behind the technology – and that, surely, is what our story is about. But now I have no alternative, because the extraordinary rapidity with which styles of flint-working start to change in the Upper Palaeolithic and subsequent Mesolithic periods surely reflects the hotting up of social evolution that was predicted in the last chapter. It must also reflect increasing opportunities for contacts between different groups, and perhaps too a gradually increasing population. Certainly a warming climate after the cold Loch Lomond sub-phase would have helped, but that was only part of the picture. It was human beings, not the climate or some other external stimulus, who were the main engines of change.

The most important innovation of Upper Palaeolithic flint-working technology was the widespread adoption of tools fashioned from blades that had been struck off a larger block of flint, known as a core. In Chapter 1 I described the person or persons who invented this process as a ‘genius’, and I stand by that: it takes a very special way of thinking to turn technology back to front in this way. I can see nothing very clever in inventing the wheel, which seems to me a perfectly logical progression from the log rollers that had always been used to move large timbers and rocks. But to work out how to prepare a specially shaped core that would allow the removal of long, thin, razor-sharp blades – now that took real intelligence.

The style of flint-working found in the warmer times before the cooler Loch Lomond sub-phase is known as Creswellian, after cave finds at Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire borders. (Incidentally, one of the pleasures of being a specialist in the Palaeolithic must surely be the location of the sites: the Gower Peninsula, Cheddar Gorge, Creswell Crags – all of them gorgeous places that stir the soul.) But the high-quality, fine-textured flint needed for the carefully prepared cores used in making blade-based tools came from further east, where the landscape is softer and far less dramatic. A good example of this is the flint used for Creswellian flake tools found at Gough’s Cave and at contemporary caves in south-west Wales and southern Devon. This occurs naturally in the Vale of Pewsey (Wiltshire), about a hundred miles (160 kilometres) north-east of the Devon findspots.

One of the striking aspects of some Creswellian sites is that in the debris on the cave floors, the early stages of making a flint tool are apparently missing. We saw at Boxgrove how a hand-axe-maker sat on the ground and first removed the outer, cortical or softer parts of the flint nodule. The flakes removed during this initial, roughing out or preparatory, work are known as primary flakes, and they’re easily spotted, as they’re usually very much paler than the other flakes, due to the cortex of soft, weathered flint on their upper surface. But primary flakes are rare, or just don’t occur, on many Creswellian sites. The evidence suggests that first the cores and then the blades were made at the source of the flint, before being carried to the place where they were to be used. Only then were they further modified to be turned into points, piercers, burins (a specialised bone- or antler-scoring tool), knives or scrapers. In conceptual or cognitive terms what we are seeing here is forethought, light years away from the world of the heavy, all-purpose hand-axe.

These smaller tools were clearly intended to carry out specific tasks, and were used by people with much skill and dexterity. It’s apparent from the scratches found on meat bones that the animal carcasses butchered at Gough’s Cave were taken apart expertly and with great economy of effort. Animals such as wild horse and red deer not only gave quantities of meat and bone marrow, but also tongue, brain and doubtless offal too. Their hides were removed to provide warm coats, boots and tent coverings – all essential given the cold climate of the time. Their bones were used to make sewing needles, personal adornments (beads and pendants) and parts of spearheads. Sinew was used for thread, and the animal glue used to fix small flint blades into slots in bone spearheads was boiled up from hooves. Nothing was wasted.

The movement of goods apart from flint, over even longer distances, can also be demonstrated. Among the many other items found there, Gough’s Cave produced pieces of Baltic amber and non-local seashells which may well have come from beaches of the North Sea coast. But in this instance, are we looking at groups meeting other groups who have visited these far-off places, or at a single group (or groups) that was highly mobile and well adapted to travelling very long distances? Taken together, the evidence tends, somewhat unexpectedly, to suggest the latter. Indeed, Roger Jacobi has suggested that certain finds from caves as far apart as Kent’s Cavern (in south Devon) and Robin Hood’s Cave in Creswell Crags (Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire) are so extraordinarily alike that they could have belonged to, or been made by, the same group of people.8 Certainly the distance from Creswell Crags to the North Sea coast would be nothing to a group capable of moving between the north midlands and southern Devon.

It’s interesting that Baltic amber was valued in the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, because in later prehistory, most especially in the Early Bronze Age (around 2000 BC), it was widely traded and was made into some extraordinarily beautiful objects, including a large variety of beads and elaborate multi-stranded necklaces.9 It’s tempting to wonder whether some of the routes whereby this later material found its way to Britain and central parts of mainland Europe were not beginning to emerge as early as late glacial times. But why did people choose to move around in this seemingly restless fashion?

In order to answer this question, one must try to imagine the environment of late glacial Britain during the Creswellian (i.e. between 12,600 and twelve thousand years ago). By this period the Arctic tundra conditions that prevailed after the peak of the last glacial maximum (eighteen thousand years ago) had gradually been replaced by birch woodland. But the climate was already starting to get colder – heading towards the Loch Lomond cold sub-phase – after 12,600 years ago. The main wild animals were horse and red deer, but there were also significant populations of mammoth, wild cattle, elk, wolf, fox, Arctic fox and brown bear. Many of these are animals that move around. The wild horse and red deer, which were the main prey animals, moved through the landscape during the passage of the seasons, and the human population who depended on them would have had to be equally mobile if they were to take advantage of the times, such as when the mares foaled, when their prey was most vulnerable to attack.