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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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,
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.’
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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 (#ulink_31c6cca6-23a8-5ae9-8c4b-010989fcc82f)
CHAPTER FOUR After the Ice (#ulink_85725c8e-03b3-5c23-ade4-77fbd4724020)
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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
Although his lectures were as dry as a charcoal biscuit, and I found him impossible to relate to as a student, Clark was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most innovative prehistorians of the twentieth century. In 1967 he published a short, well-illustrated account of The Stone Age Hunters, aimed at a popular readership.
(#litres_trial_promo) It put his own site at Star Carr into the context of living societies, and I found it memorable for its numerous illustrations of Australian Aborigines, Eskimos, Lapps, Bushmen and other hunting societies. In many ways it anticipated Lee and DeVore’s more influential Man the Hunter, which came out a year later.
Modern approaches to the period have moved on from a narrow study of flint typology. The best of them, such as Christopher Smith’s Late Stone Age Hunters of the British Isles,
(#litres_trial_promo) view Mesolithic people as hunters who acted out their lives within very specific types of environment. Mesolithic communities often settled near rivers and lakes, not just for fishing, but because that was where animals came to drink, and the forest cover was not too dense. As we have already seen, groundwater levels generally rose during the postglacial period, with the result that many Mesolithic hunting camps and settlements became waterlogged.
Archaeologically, this was extremely important. In certain situations where there is not too much flow, waterlogging can prevent oxygen feeding the fungi and bacteria that promote decay. This can lead to the preservation of organic material which would not survive for more than a few decades under normal circumstances. Sometimes the things preserved by stagnant waterlogging can be amazingly delicate, ranging from hair, skin and hide to wood, leaves and even pollen grains. On a normal, dry site, well over 90 per cent of all ‘material culture’ – i.e. everything made and used by human beings – will vanish in a few decades, leaving only those archaeological stalwarts and near-imperishables, stone, flint, pottery and fired clay. Sometimes, if the ground isn’t too acidic, bone and antler will survive too. But on a wet site almost everything is capable of survival, although acidity can play strange tricks. A number of waterlogged bodies were found within Bronze Age oak coffins in Denmark. In some, clothes and footwear survived, but the skeletons themselves had vanished, eaten away by acid attack.
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Waterlogging also preserves the fragile remains of plants, insects and other creatures, large and small, that lived in or near the settlements occupied by prehistoric people. These waterlogged environmental remains can be analysed by various specialists, such as pollen analysts (or palynologists), botanists and experts in ancient molluscs or insects, to reconstruct the environment around the settlement. The principle lying behind these studies is Sir Charles Lyell’s doctrine of uniformity, which we encountered in Chapter 1; waterlogged ground often favours plants and creatures that are fussy about where they live. So, the combination in a single deposit of, say, species of water snail, rush and cowslip would indicate not only that it was wet for part of the year, but also that it dried out in summer.
Taking a broad view of the subject, Christopher Smith points out that although Mesolithic people may well have gathered plant foods to supplement their primarily meat-based diet, they were always far more hunters than gatherers, or indeed fishers. With the British climate being what it is, gathered plant foods alone wouldn’t even begin to supply the calories people require to stay alive for more than a short period.
(#litres_trial_promo) Having said that, the term ‘hunter-gatherer’ has been around so long that it has stuck. So I’ll continue to use it.
Grahame Clark’s excavations at Star Carr took place between 1949 and 1951, and revealed a remarkably well-preserved and partially waterlogged site, on the marshy fringes of a postglacial lake, which was occupied around 7500 BC.
(#litres_trial_promo) Since Clark’s excavations, the animal bones from the original dig, plus the area around Star Carr, have been closely examined by archaeologists and archaeological environmentalists, so that it now possible to put the site into a reasonably coherent regional context.
(#litres_trial_promo) This, of course, is necessary if we are to work out how hunters operated. It’s no good looking at just one spot in the landscape, because the prey, and with it the hunters, are obliged to move around.
Star Carr produced a wealth of information about hunting. It was also a site where antler – of both native species of British deer, red and roe – was worked to make a variety of barbed spearheads, the vast majority of which were not fitted with small flint barbs. Antler is tough stuff, and requires special tools and techniques to be worked efficiently. Many of the flint tools, borers and burins, were designed to score and bore through the antler in a technique known as groove-and-splinter, which produced long, thin and strong ‘blanks’; these could then be further modified to produce the finished spearhead. Most of the raw material for this mini-industry was brought to the site as antlers, rather than as deer on the hoof. So it is best to omit antlers when using bones from an excavation to estimate the range and number of animals that were hunted.
Tony Legge and Pete Rowley-Conwy have analysed the bones from Star Carr and have shown that over half, by weight, of meat came from wild cattle, followed by elk and red deer, with roe deer and wild pig bringing up the rear. It is suggested that the larger animals were hunted by stealth, rather than by large groups of hunters working a ‘drive/stampede’ system, which we saw at Stellmoor in Germany in the Final Upper Palaeolithic. Evidence to support the idea of stalking is provided by the remarkable discovery on the shoulderbones of two elk and one red deer of lesions produced by a flint-tipped spear or arrowhead. What makes them remarkable is that they had healed over. In other words, the three animals in question had each survived at least one attempt to hunt them before they were finally caught and killed.
The position of the wounds, at the shoulders, suggests that the hunters were aiming for the heart. If they missed, as often would have happened, they would have had to resign themselves to a long period of stalking, as the prey slowly bled to death.
(#litres_trial_promo) And of course sometimes the animals got away – maybe when night fell and the trail went cold. The fact that these three beasts had done so suggests that the animal population around Star Carr and the now-vanished Lake Flixton was more sedentary than usual. Alternatively, it might suggest a somewhat larger human population in the region, perhaps at certain times of the year. But whatever the explanation, it is not the sort of thing one would have expected to encounter much earlier, at places like Paviland or Boxgrove. It’s a sign, surely, that the general population was growing.
Smaller animals, including pine marten, red fox and beaver, were also taken, probably for their pelts. The hunters at Star Carr were most remarkable for having domestic dogs, which presumably were used for hunting and rounding up.
(#litres_trial_promo) I find it fascinating to think that my own Border collie sheepdog, Jess, when she rounds up ewes is behaving in a fashion that any Mesolithic hunter would immediately recognise.
I’ve mentioned that the site was positioned next to a lake, so how can we explain the lack of fishbones? The best theory to account for the absence of fish, particularly pike, a large freshwater fish that one might have expected to be found near Star Carr, is that they hadn’t recolonised this part of Britain after the very cold years of the last glaciation.
(#litres_trial_promo) The North Sea would still have been very cold, and it is doubtful whether the small prey fish that pike need to feed on would have been present in anything like adequate numbers. So in this instance the absence of fishbones may indicate an absence of fish. Unfortunately, however, the acidity of the peats at Star Carr is sufficient to degrade fishbone, so the question cannot be satisfactorily resolved one way or the other.
Star Carr was waterlogged, and produced large quantities of wood, but evidence for actual wood-working took some time to appear. And when it did appear it lingered on our kitchen draining-board for ages. I should perhaps point out that my wife, Maisie Taylor, is a specialist in prehistoric wood-working, and I have had to grow used to finding black, grimy and rather unpalatable pieces of ancient wood in the sink. It’s a part of our life.
The pieces in question were sent to Maisie by Professor Paul Mellars at Cambridge, who was writing up excavations he had carried out at Star Carr with Tim Schadla-Hall in 1985 and 1989. They had come across some pieces of wood they thought had been worked by man. The wood in question seemed to have come from an artificial platform of some sort, but they couldn’t be entirely certain, unless it could be shown to have been worked or split by man. Other wood-working specialists had expressed reservations about its possible man-made status.
Maisie looked at it very closely, and at first she too had her doubts; but there were areas where peat still adhered to the surface, and if gently floated off (in our sink) its removal might reveal fresh surfaces, which could be diagnostic. The freshly removed peat did indeed expose cleanly split surfaces, and I spent several happy hours in our barn taking close-up photographs which showed clearly that the wood – or rather timber, to give it its correct name
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(#litres_trial_promo) This is the earliest evidence for worked timber found anywhere in the world – and it spent a tiny part of its long life in my sink. When he saw Maisie’s first results, Paul immediately recalled a series of bevelled red-deer antler tines, illustrated in the original Clark report, which he thought might well have been used as wedges for splitting.
In our story so far we have failed, if that’s the right word, to discover a site that we could safely say was a home-base: in other words, somewhere where people stayed and lived. Even at Boxgrove we saw how the meat was probably taken away from the smelly, fly-blown butchery site at the bottom of the cliff and up towards the woods on the chalk hill above. None of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic caves we have looked at could with any certainty be considered a permanent dwelling-place, and Earls Barton wasn’t really a site at all.
(#litres_trial_promo) What about Star Carr, which has produced a huge amount of material, including a great variety of things such as antler mattocks and bone scrapers? Surely this represents a home-base, as the excavator, Grahame Clark, himself believed? I would love to think so, but unfortunately that re-examination of the animal bone refuse by Tony Legge and Pete Rowley-Conwy showed that most of the bone found on site comprised those bits that don’t actually have much meat on them: lower jaws, shoulderblades and foot bones. The joints, the rich cuts as it were, had been taken away and eaten elsewhere – and wherever it was, that’s where home was for those lakeside hunters. Despite its archaeological richness, Star Carr was still essentially a hunting camp, albeit a well-frequented one, and one, moreover, probably quite close to a main home-base.
Work carried out in the Vale of Pickering after the original excavations of Grahame Clark gives a clear impression that there were a number of settlements around the now vanished postglacial Lake Flixton. Some were hunting camps, others more resembled home-bases. But there does seem to be one important respect in which Star Carr differs from those hugely mobile communities in the Late Upper Palaeolithic: it would seem that life near Lake Flixton did not involve much long-distance travel. The area was richly stocked with large mammals, and the human inhabitants knew this well. They probably didn’t use the Star Carr hunting camp all year round, but neither did they go hundreds of miles away when they were absent from it. Seasonal movements were most likely small in scale.
Before we leave this remarkable place, which continues to provide the liveliest and most interesting archaeological debate of any prehistoric site in Britain (with the possible exception of Stonehenge), we must pause for a moment to examine its most intriguing finds. These consist of twenty-one red-deer skull fragments, known as frontlets, some of them complete with their antlers. The undersides of the skulls have had the sharper ridges knocked off, and the massive antlers have been reduced in such as way as still to look impressive, and more or less balanced, but not to be so heavy. The skulls have also been perforated with two or four circular holes. Grahame Clark reckoned these extraordinary and rather heavy objects were head-dresses that were secured in place by hide straps through the holes.
Rather surprisingly for someone so down to earth and a self-confessed functionalist, Clark suggested that the antlers had been used in shamanistic-style dances, reminiscent perhaps of the Abbots Bromley horn dance of Staffordshire, a regional version of the traditional English Morris dance.
(#litres_trial_promo) At Abbots Bromley the horns are carried in both hands. Christopher Smith inclines to the view that the Star Carr head-dresses were more likely to have been worn as a disguise when out stalking. He reasons that Star Carr was probably a hunting camp, and that the large number of frontlets found must argue in favour of a practical use.
(#litres_trial_promo) He also suggests that a hard-and-fast distinction between the two forms of use is probably wrong, with which I agree 100 per cent.
We now come to an extraordinary twist in this tale. I recently returned from filming at Star Carr with Tim Schadla-Hall, who you will remember co-directed the dig that discovered the split wood that Maisie examined. I’ve known Tim for years, and whenever we meet he has a habit of producing new information that completely blows apart my old ideas. I find archaeologists like Tim exciting because not only do they dig, but they also think, in a lateral way. As we talked between ‘takes’ in the filming, it became clear that after over twenty years’ research Tim had quite suddenly abandoned most of his own and many of his colleagues’ explanations of what was going on at Star Carr. His new theories didn’t accord with the way most people regarded the hunter/gatherer world of the Mesolithic, but would have fitted in better with some much later – say Neolithic or Bronze Age – site. It was as if the artificial boundaries erected by archaeologists between hunter/gatherers and farmers had completely dropped away.
Tim pointed out that Lake Flixton and the land immediately around it was an area of stability: it was wooded, not prone to flooding, and was remarkably protected by the nearby valley-side of the Vale. It was a landscape where small-scale movement was a part of everyday life (the coast was about an hour’s walk to the east), but there was no need at all for longer-distance seasonal migrations. It was a naturally protected and gentle landscape, that was ideally suited for hunting – so people stayed put.
Star Carr was close to the edge of the stable landscape, and Tim suggested that the artificial timber platform on the edge of the lake might have been constructed as somewhere set aside for ceremonies to emphasise or mark the special nature of the stable landscape of Lake Flixton. We’ll see later that so-called ‘liminal’ or boundary zones were viewed as being of particular importance to prehistoric communities. Ceremonies in these places ‘at the edge’ would have protected or reinforced the ‘core’ or stable area against forces that were thought to threaten it. They were also neutral places where people from outside could safely be met – and maybe gifts and other items be exchanged.
The idea of constructing a timber platform at the fringes of water is something we’ll re-encounter in the Bronze Age at Flag Fen (and other sites); moreover, the fact that some care was taken in the platform’s construction should not cause any surprise. Religious sites and shrines were, and indeed still are, both well designed and well built. Tim’s latest explanation also accounts for the otherwise rather strange collection of bones from the site, and of course for those shamanistic antler head-dresses.
So, if Star Carr is out, where can we look for a site of the early postglacial period, around 8000 BC, where there is evidence that people actually lived on the spot – our elusive so-called ‘home-base’? Must we seek out somewhere remote, untouched by the passage of time? Perhaps up in the hills? Or a cave? Far from it. In fact it’s in the pleasant rural town of Newbury in Berkshire that we’ll meet one of the heroes of this book, the great John Wymer, once again.
The date is 1958, and John is working for Reading Museum. The site he is interested in lies in the valley of the Kennet, a tributary of the Thames, nearly two miles east of Newbury, near Thatcham, the village after which it is named. Like several archaeological sites I am personally familiar with, including my own project at Flag Fen, Peterborough, the Thatcham site lies close to a sewage outfall works; but in this instance there is an additional and more serious threat, and one that we will encounter more often as time passes – namely gravel extraction. Today the site is a large flooded hole. John and his team from Reading and Newbury Museums worked on weekends between 1958 and 1961, and his full report was published with model promptness in 1962.
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England has a long and honourable tradition of amateur archaeology, which in the first part of the twentieth century was pretty well indistinguishable from the professional. It was amateurs, mainly, who established many of the county archaeological journals in Victorian times, and it was amateurs who found and then kept an eye on well-known sites in case they came under threat. The Newbury area had its own group of archaeological stalwarts who located a number of Mesolithic flint scatters in fields close to the river Kennet at Thatcham and in Newbury itself. In 1921 a trench through one of the flint scatters was excavated at Thatcham. This produced clear evidence that flint implements were actually being made on site. There were finished implements, but there were also numerous flint waste flakes, the by-products of flint-knapping.
The earlier work made it essential that something be done about the site when the threat of gravel-digging arose in the late 1950s. Today a threat of this sort to an archaeological site would lead to a dig which would be funded by the company that owned the gravel quarry – which is fair, as it is they who stand to profit from the site’s destruction. But in those days there was less justice, and the local archaeologists had to find the money, which they managed to do, from the local museums, the Prehistoric Society and Cambridge University. The Prehistoric Society, incidentally, is the national society for the study of all pre-Roman archaeology. Its Proceedings is an academic journal of record, and is pretty technical. But it also organises tours of prehistoric landscapes in Britain and Europe, and has regular meetings, a wide non-professional membership, and a lively newsletter, Past.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Society helped to excavate Thatcham – and dozens of other sites in Britain.
As a first stage, John Wymer decided to cut a quick reconnaissance or trial trench in December 1957. This produced quantities of flint and scraps of bone which lay beneath nine inches (twenty-three centimetres) of peat and eighteen inches (forty-six centimetres) of peaty topsoil. This depth of material was hugely important, because it meant that the site beneath was sealed intact. It could never have been damaged by ploughing, and the presence of the in situ peat bed clearly demonstrated that it hadn’t. John immediately realised that he had an extraordinarily important site on his hands.
As work progressed in the seasons that followed that winter exploratory trench, it became evident that Thatcham was not just one site. It was clearly a place where people settled repeatedly, as there were distinct concentrations of flint and other debris on the gravel terrace that ran along the river. Although many flint implements were made there, Thatcham doesn’t seem to have been a place where specialised tasks were carried out, like the antler-working at Star Carr. And there was a huge variety of things found: antler and bone, as at Star Carr, hammerstones for flint-working, flint axes or adzes and vast numbers (16,029) of waste flakes, blades (1,207), cores (283) and those tiny, geometrically-shaped microliths (285) that were used to make composite spears and arrowheads. At Thatcham waste flakes formed 96.5 per cent of the entire flint assemblage, even higher than at Star Carr (92.8 per cent).
