Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

Archaeologists often seek to demonstrate seasonality when they suspect that a site was only occupied at a certain time of year. There are many ways of doing this, and it’s much easier to demonstrate when a site was occupied than when it wasn’t. Absence is invariably harder to pin down. Bearing that in mind, a close examination of the eruption and growth patterns of horse and red-deer teeth found at Gough’s Cave suggests that the animals were killed in two seasons: in late winter or spring, and in the summer. This would suggest that the group moved away from the cave in the autumn. Perhaps that was when they went to the North Sea coast.

The final cold period, the Loch Lomond sub-phase, lasted from 10,800 to ten thousand years ago, and thereafter we’re in our own postglacial or Flandrian period, which I’ll cover in the next chapter. It was very cold in Loch Lomond times: there was ice over the Highlands of Scotland, winter sea-ice as far south as Spain, and most of Britain and north-central Europe was tundra. Scandinavia north of Denmark was under ice, and the Baltic Sea was a seasonally frozen-over lake. Along with the cold came dryness, and this suited the development of the particular dwarf grasses, mosses and lichens preferred by animals such as wild horse and reindeer. We must imagine that herds of reindeer migrated across the plain that was later to form the North Sea, between Britain and the continental mainland. Like the Lapps of today, people would have followed behind the herds, taking beasts when the time and place was appropriate. It’s an elegant and rather attractive idea, but what is the evidence to support it?

The old road from Peterborough to Northampton is very familiar to me. It twists its way along the Nene valley, swerving randomly from one side to another. Nowadays a soulless dual carriageway bypasses anything of interest, but that old road went through all the villages and hamlets. One of these was the pleasant village of Earls Barton, which nestled in what was still then the remote peace of the Northamptonshire countryside. It was in a low-lying, flat, tranquil and prosperous landscape, quite unlike the more rugged uplands characteristic of places like Creswell Crags and Cheddar Gorge – the natural habitat, as I once believed, of Late Upper Palaeolithic man. The boring reality is that evidence for him (and her) in open and less protected environments has mostly been removed by later geological events.

I used to travel that road to Northampton quite regularly in the 1970s. A few years later, in 1982, an extraordinary discovery would be made that would forever tie Earls Barton into the frozen world of the Loch Lomond cold phase, over ten thousand years ago. Not just that, it would weld this small part of rural Northamptonshire to more distant horizons, far across the North Sea. For me at least, the remote past was coming home. Immediately I could identify with it.

The discovery was made unexpectedly in a gravel quarry in the Nene valley, just outside the village, which is well known to historians and archaeologists because its church boasts one of the finest Saxon towers in Britain. The quarry revealed a strange-looking object made in reindeer antler and known as a ‘Lyngby axe’. The antler itself was radiocarbon dated to just over ten thousand years ago – in other words to the very end of the Loch Lomond sub-phase. At this time sea levels were lower because so much water was locked up in ice, and as a consequence the southern North Sea would have been a low-lying plain.

Lyngby axes are strange-looking objects that are fashioned from the main shaft of a reindeer’s antler which has been shortened and all the side-pieces trimmed off. The end result more or less resembles a modern policeman’s baton. They occur at about forty sites around the edges of what is now the southern North Sea basin, in Denmark, Germany, Poland, Holland and, with the discovery at Earls Barton, Britain. Most have been found on their own, as isolated finds. What were they? Perhaps it’s easier to state what they weren’t: they weren’t axes or wood-working tools of any sort. The name is entirely inappropriate; maybe, like the Red ‘Lady’, we should refer to them as Lyngby ‘axes’ – but life’s too short.

The Earls Barton example was large, generally well-preserved, and heavily used. There was no evidence that it had ever had an inserted flint or stone cutting edge to act as a blade. So it was made to be used on its own. A number of worked, step-like or scalloped facets distinguished it from some of its continental cousins, and showed that it had been used to work softer materials than stone, or indeed wood. In their study of the Earls Barton piece Jill Cook and Roger Jacobi were also able to rule out its use as a slaughterman’s pole-axe, a weapon, or a pick or digging-stick,10 and suggested that the wear-patterns implied that it had been used to work something like leather, meat, fat or plant material. They thought the scalloped bevels were secondary – i.e. not to do with its actual use – and could have been formed, for example, by being slung from a tent or from wear caused by rubbing against a harness or sledge fitting.

Reindeer were actually killed by hunters using flint-tipped arrowheads whose shafts were sometimes deliberately fashioned in two pieces, to break on impact. One particularly well-preserved site of this period (about ten thousand years ago), at Stellmoor in north-western Germany, has revealed numerous reindeer bones with flint arrowheads, or their tips, still in place within them. Some animals appear to have been hit twice, and it has been suggested that the wounds indicate that the hunters worked in groups, and not alone. Evidence from the growth-pattern of the many antlers found suggests too that the hunting took place in autumn or early winter, and that large numbers of people and animals may have been involved. Bodil Bratlund, who studied the Stellmoor material, suggested that the evidence hints at ‘the communal drive-hunts of migrating animals’.11

We know that the postglacial climate grew rapidly warmer, but the pattern of reindeer- and horse-hunting continued as during colder times. It would seem reasonable to link the Lyngby axe with reindeer-hunting and the preparation of food and hides after the kill during the final years of the Loch Lomond sub-phase. Perhaps the secondary wear reflects a highly mobile way of life. If that is indeed the case, one can suggest that people followed the reindeer in a large seasonal cycle, starting in what are now the depths of the southern North Sea in summer, moving to north-western Germany and Denmark in the autumn, then perhaps further south in winter, dispersing to Britain and Holland in the spring.12 Earls Barton would fit well into such a pattern. The Nene valley is wide and open, and very gently dips down into the natural basin of the fens, which at the close of the Ice Age would have formed an integral part of the larger North European Plain.

In terms of elapsed time alone, the reader should now be turning the last half-dozen pages of this book. But our story still has a long way to go. As a prehistorian of later periods, I am all too aware that we have tended to play down the Palaeolithic and the archaeology of the Ice Age in general. I used to think that this simply reflected the fact that specialists in the earlier periods seemed to be more concerned with the classification of flints than with the recreation of ancient societies. From the Neolithic period onwards archaeologists were increasingly involved with social matters, with the organisation of cultures, the transfer and gaining of power, prestige and authority, and latterly with the academic and social politics surrounding different gender perspectives (for ‘gender’ read ‘female’ throughout).

Perhaps this variety of approach merely reflected the better information that was then available for the later periods. Perhaps it reflected the prevailing archaeological ‘culture’. I don’t know. But what I do know is that today this has changed completely. The Palaeolithic is coming alive, and it has even proved possible to carry out successful studies on changing social structure in such extraordinarily ancient times. The key which unlocked these secrets and released those poor isolated, structureless ‘cave-men’ from their cavernous prisons in our minds came with the simple realisation that they were hunters – and that hunters still exist today.

One of the main pioneers of this new approach was Richard B. Lee. Lee was at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto when I was a young curator at the Royal Ontario Museum there, and I went to several of his lectures on the Bushmen people of the Kalahari desert. He had lived with them, and his lectures were inspiring. He edited a most influential collection of papers, with another anthropologist, Irven DeVore, under the collective title Man the Hunter.13 In Britain we were a little slower to join the Man the Hunter revolution, but when we did, we did so with great success – as the contributions by archaeologists like Roger Jacobi and Nick Barton attest. Once again, Clive Gamble has given us some remarkable insights into the way that Palaeolithic people organised their material and social worlds. He has used a variety of sources, including studies made by specialists in later periods, such as the Neolithic and Bronze Age. He has also drawn heavily upon the anthropological literature to produce a thoroughly satisfying explanation of life in the Old Stone Age.

Gamble’s arguments are closely reasoned and complex.14 They are also very convincing, being based on observations of human behaviour and not a little common-sense. The main problem he has had to contend with is that the players in his drama change physically and mentally as hundreds of thousands of years roll by. And, of course, nobody knows for certain what those changes did or did not involve. It’s rather like painting a picture with a brush that’s constantly mutating as you work: at first it’s wider, then narrower, but at the same time it can be thicker, finer or coarser.

Gamble’s work is confined to Europe, which as we have seen was mainly colonised by human beings in the last half million years or so. He defines three broad time periods, which he uses to describe the ways people lived and organised their lives. The first is from half a million to 300,000 years ago, and he begins by making the unusual claim that the slow colonisation of Europe wasn’t merely a matter of cold climate alone. He believes that ‘it was never their intention to colonise Europe’, that their lives were lived on a small scale: groups of people were small, and their outlook was essentially vertical; in other words they looked inwards and vertically up, towards the previous generation, and down, towards their own children and grandchildren. In many respects it was a pattern of social behaviour that owed a certain amount to their primate ancestors of five million years previously. It was against this background that Gamble wrote about the short-lived ‘fifteen-minute culture’ of Boxgrove, a minimalist view with which I have increasing sympathy – despite the proven wonders of Boxgrove and the controversy about whether they did or did not hunt prey there. It’s very difficult not to take sides in Palaeolithic archaeology, and in this instance I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being on both sides at the same time.

In Gamble’s view, people of the Lower Palaeolithic lived in a small-scale ‘landscape of habit’, rather than a truly social landscape. Communication was essentially a face-to-face process that happened between two or more people at the same time. Indirect reference to people elsewhere in time and space would not have taken place. Language, in other words, was used ‘as an attention device rather than as an organising principle’. He sums up their world thus: ‘they had lives of great variety within a small social neighbourhood of possibilities’. I can think of many worse ways to spend one’s time on this earth.

His second phase is that of the more complex society of the Neanderthals, between 300,000 and twenty-seven thousand years ago. It is a period which sees the appearance and growth of true social networks. In the previous period, when relationships were essentially one-to-one, and based on close family ties, they were probably very strong, simple and unambiguous. In the Neanderthal world this was to change, largely because communication improved – but not just through language. Objects themselves can communicate. For example, in my family, like many others in England, it is traditional to give children a small engraved mug on their christening. That mug carries the child’s name and the date of its christening. Sometimes, as in my case, the mug formerly belonged to a dead relative, whose name and date of christening appears above mine. That mug is communicating all manner of things to me and others. It is telling me that I am part of an established family, that I am a baptised Christian, and that my parents loved me sufficiently to have a mug engraved for me. So symbolically it’s expressing my place in society (Church of England) and family. It’s also symbolic of me to other people. Its actual function as an object – i.e. a mug to hold liquid – is of minor importance.

There is no evidence to suggest that any of the manmade objects from Boxgrove carried such a burden of communication. They were hand-axes, admittedly beautifully made hand-axes, but they were made to be used. They were not passed on from one community to another, and they didn’t express anything more than the need to butcher a carcass. But from 300,000 years ago material things can be perceived as communications: as symbols of individuals, of families and family ties. As Gamble puts it, ‘after 300,000 BP [Before Present] chains of connection were extended in all regions of Europe’. With the growth of social networks came more subtle close and long-distance human relationships. The simplicity of the one-to-one, me-to-you, close and unambiguous family relationship was supplemented by a host of new, subtle and ambiguous relationships.

This was a period when there was greater teamwork and cooperation in hunting, which doubtless reflected the larger scale of social networks that were being achieved. But it was not a society that modern people would feel at ease in, still being very restricted in all manner of ways. Clive Gamble sums it up well:

These Neanderthal societies, the product of large-brained hominids, equipped with language to talk about themselves, alive with gestures and incorporating objects, were, for all that variety and creativity, still exclusive, local and complex. Theirs was a most successful hominid society. Well matched to the longer rhythms of the ice ages.15

The third of Clive Gamble’s Palaeolithic periods is the one we have been concerned with in this and the previous chapter, what he styles ‘transition and complicated Crô-Magnon society (sixty to twenty-one thousand years ago)’. The Crô-Magnons, you will recall, were the first examples of our own species, Homo sapiens, to appear in Europe. The main innovation of the time was what Gamble has called ‘the release of our primate heritage of proximity’. The term may sound daunting, but when that release happened, we were free to develop a truly complex social life. Let’s return to ‘proximity’ for a moment; if we understand what it is, we can appreciate what it is to be without it. The idea is actually quite straightforward: when two primates, such as chimps, meet, they groom each other, communicate in various non-verbal ways, and when they part they effectively cease to exist for each other. Absence really does mean just that. Then, as soon as they meet again, the relationship is continued where it left off. In other words, the relationship only happens when two or more individuals are in proximity.

When we are released from the ties that bind relationships that only happen in proximity, we are able to continue relationships across time and space. You may not see your grandchildren in Australia, but it’s possible to have a growing and evolving relationship with them by phone, letter, e-mail, presents, films and photographs, etc. By the same token, in the past it was possible to have relationships at long distance between people who were illiterate, by way of gifts and other material gestures of affection, aided sometimes by a helpful third party. Modern human beings (and in ‘modern’ I include the Crô-Magnons) can go even further. They can have loving relationships with objects (Clive Gamble mentions sports cars), pets, or something as bizarre as archaeological theory.

Gamble characterises social life in his third period as being truly complicated, rather than simply complex. I will let him sum up what life at the closing stages of the Ice Ages was about. He is writing about the ability of people to create social, personal and symbolic networks, which for the first time included both human beings and objects. I have no problem in identifying with the lives they led, even if I couldn’t have survived in their world for very long: ‘The surrounding environment in the Upper Palaeolithic was now richly layered with meaning and symbolically linked. Social occasions with rituals and resources now structured the seemingly unfettered life of the Palaeolithic person.’16

One of the aspects of earlier prehistory that I find the hardest to come to terms with is the extent to which the immediate surroundings of what was shortly to become the British Isles changed. Perhaps my inability to feel at home with the colossal transformations of the entire North European Plain simply reflects the short-lived, ephemeral world in which I spend my professional life: a matter of perhaps five millennia. In terms of what had gone before, the Iron Age (700 BC-AD 43) is a mere blink of an eye. In later prehistory we deal with events on a human scale, events we can relate to, such as those years when rivers flooded and farmers were forced to abandon their lowest meadow pastures. These may have been catastrophic events at the time, but in terms of the Upper Palaeolithic they are storms in thimbles, let alone teacups.

During the height of the last glacial maximum, around eighteen thousand years ago, when the climate was at its coldest and vast amounts of fresh and seawater were locked up in ice caps and glaciers, the North European Plain (whose remnants survive in parts of north-western Germany, the Low Countries and eastern England) extended right across the southern North Sea. A narrow channel was all that separated Scandinavia from Scotland. The Hebrides were part of mainland Britain. The climate then warmed a great deal, reaching a peak about thirteen thousand years ago when, as has been mentioned earlier, the climate of Britain was if anything warmer than today. This is the warm spell that preceded the final or Loch Lomond cold sub-phase. Shortly after the warmest period at twelve thousand years ago, the North Sea extended very much further southwards, and Orkney and Shetland were beginning to look more like islands-to-be. Despite this shrinkage of the North European Plain, there is still a huge width of ‘land bridge’ available to those settlers who recolonised Britain to set up the Creswellian tradition around 12,600 years ago.

We have reached a turning point in our story. The ice has melted, the climate is suddenly growing warmer. It’s ten thousand years ago – and it’s that time of year to change the clocks. In this instance we’ll pretend it’s spring, and we’ll turn the clocks forward two thousand years. So, ‘ten thousand years ago’ will become ‘8000 BC’. There’s no good reason for this, other than the fact that many archaeologists, myself included, are happier working in years BC after the Ice Age. It’s also symbolic, and after what has gone before – and the momentous changes that are just around the corner – we ought to do something symbolic of the new era we are about to enter.

PART II An Island People

CHAPTER FOUR After the Ice

I’VE LONG BEEN OF THE OPINION that archaeological terminology can get in the way of sense and meaning, which is why so far I’ve tried to keep matters as straightforward as possible. The trouble is that the Palaeolithic was so long-lived, and the complexities of human physical evolution were such, that any attempt at greater simplification would actually have become misleading. But from now on, the people we are dealing with will be physically identical to us in every respect, and the dates, which will be expressed in years BC, are plain enough. This is just as well, because from here on the pace of our story really does begin to speed up. We will also have a larger canvas available to us, as Scotland emerges from the cold, and Ireland is populated by people who have made the journey west across the channel that was later to become the Irish Sea.

The period we are concerned with in this chapter is known as the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age, and it begins with the onset of the postglacial some ten thousand years ago, when the Loch Lomond cold snap finished. The climate grew rapidly warmer (the most intense warming lasted a mere fifty years), so that within two or three lifetimes, average temperatures were as high as they are today.1 This is the background to the final five thousand years of Britain as a realm exclusively inhabited by groups of hunters.

In every way, the Mesolithic was transitional: between the Ice Ages and the postglacial, and between hunting/gathering and farming. It would be a great mistake to view these changes of culture and environment as abrupt steps, because they weren’t. The more closely we examine the material record of that period, the more we realise that, the initial postglacial warming aside, change was essentially gradual or evolutionary. There were no sudden and dramatic swerves of direction, just as there was no abrupt break between the Final Upper Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic. They were the same people, doing more or less the same things, in an environment that had grown dramatically warmer. And as it grew warmer, so it grew wetter underfoot, as sea levels began to rise – mainly as a result of melting ice.

When I was a student at Cambridge, my first Professor of Archaeology was a specialist in the Mesolithic, Grahame (later Sir Grahame) Clark.2 He excavated what is now the most famous Mesolithic site in Britain, at Star Carr, in the flat, open Vale of Pickering, in north-eastern Yorkshire. It’s a drowned landscape, buried beneath layers of peat, that closely resembles the East Anglian fens, where I’ve spent most of my professional life. Strangely, I have no recollection of Professor Clark lecturing about Star Carr, but that could well be down to my youthful inability to get up in the morning. Alternatively, it could reflect the fact that the Professor’s lectures were very dry indeed. They did not linger fondly in the memory, perhaps because they were so very flinty – almost obsessively flinty.3

In fairness to Clark, he did view the study of flints as a means of reaching the people who made and used them, but at the time I found his enormous interest in their typology daunting. Typology, incidentally, is an archaeological term that describes how one thing gradually develops into another. An example often used to teach the concept to students is the development of the first railway coaches, which initially resembled horse-drawn carriages on flanged wheels, then were joined together on the same chassis, before finally taking the form of something which resembled the railway coach of today. It was a process that took several decades. The history of archaeology is full of typological studies, of which perhaps the most famous is the development of bronze from stone axes. The succession of Upper Palaeolithic and then Mesolithic flint typologies is, however, truly frightening.

In a vastly simplified nutshell, it is essentially a story of miniaturisation. Many of the tiny flints were used to provide barbs or points for composite bone or antler spears which were used for hunting or fishing. Others were used for other purposes – to do, for example, with working bone, or shaping leather. These so-called microliths were made in a highly developed technique that was ultimately based on the core and blade tradition of the Earlier Upper Palaeolithic. Mesolithic microliths occur in a bewildering variety of geometric shapes that are tailor-made for the detailed typological analyses that have kept many scholars gainfully employed for decades. I shan’t attempt to summarise their work here. As I have said previously, life is too short.