Britain B.C.
Life in Britain and Ireland
Before the Romans
Francis Pryor

Dedication

For

TOBY FOX

and

MALCOLM GIBB

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Dates and Periods

Part I: Another Country

Chapter One: In the Beginning

Chapter Two: Neanderthals, the Red ‘Lady’ and Ages of Ice

Chapter Three: Hotting up: Hunters at the End of the Ice Age

Part II: An Island People

Chapter Four: After the Ice

Chapter Five: DNA and the Adoption of Farming

Chapter Six: The Earlier Neolithic (4200-3000 BC)

Chapter Seven: The Earlier Neolithic (4200-3000 BC)

Chapter Eight: The Archaeology of Death in the Neolithic

Part III: The Tyranny of Technology

Chapter Nine: The Age of Stonehenge (the Final Neolithic and Earliest Bronze Age: 2500-1800 BC)

Chapter Ten: Pathways to Paradise (the Mid- and Later Bronze Age: 1800-700 BC)

Chapter Eleven: Men of Iron (the Early Iron Age: 700-150 BC)

Chapter Twelve: Glimpses of Vanished Ways (the Later Iron Age: 200 BC-AD 43, and After)

Afterword

Places to Visit

Notes

Index

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…

About the author

Portrait

Snapshot

Top Ten Favourite Books

About the book

A Visit to Flag Fen

A Critical Eye

Read on

Have You Read?

If You Loved This, You’ll Like…

Find Out More

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface
British ‘Peculiarity’

I decided to write this book because I am fascinated by the story that British prehistory has to tell. By ‘prehistory’ I mean the half-million or so years that elapsed before the Romans introduced written records to the British Isles in AD 43. I could add here that I was tempted to give the book a subtitle suggested to me by Mike Parker Pearson: ‘The Missing 99 Per Cent of British and Irish History’ – but I resisted. In any case, when the Roman Conquest happened, British prehistory did not simply hit the buffers. Soldiers alone cannot bring a culture to a full stop, as Hitler was to discover two millennia later. It is my contention that the influences of British pre-Roman cultures are still of fundamental importance to modern British society. If this sounds far-fetched, we will see that Britain and Ireland’s prehistoric populations had over six thousand years in which to develop their special insular characteristics.

I regard the nations of the British Isles as having more that unites than divides them, and as being culturally peculiar when compared with other European states. I believe that this peculiarity can be traced back to the time when Britain became a series of offshore islands, around 6000 BC. Those six millennia of insular development gave British culture a unique identity and strength that was able to survive the tribulations posed by the Roman Conquest, and the folk movements of the post-Roman Migration Period, culminating in the Danish raids, the Danelaw and of course the Norman Conquest of 1066. It’s in the very nature of British culture to be flexible and to absorb, and sometimes to enliven or transform, influences from outside. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by the historical hybrid that is the English language, which many regard as Britain’s greatest contribution to world culture.

The English language is of course a post-Roman phenomenon that owes much to influences from across the North Sea. Very recent research carried out by a team of scientists from University College (London University) Centre for Genetic Anthropology has shown that the genetic make-up of men now living in English towns mentioned in the Domesday Survey of 1086 is closely similar to that of men from Norway and the Province of Friesland in northern Holland.¹ By contrast, Welshmen from towns on the other side of Offa’s Dyke are genetically very different from English, Dutch and Norwegian males. Does this mean (as some have claimed) that the Anglo-Saxon ‘invasions’ of the early post-Roman centuries wiped out all the native Britons in what was later to become England? I suppose that on the face of it, it could, although I’d like to see more supporting data, because there’s very little actual archaeological evidence for the type of wholesale slaughter such a theory demands. Besides, people have always had to live in settlements and landscapes, which over the centuries acquire their own myths, legends and histories. These in turn may have a profound effect on the incoming component of the local population. It’s not by any means a simple business of one lot in and another lot out.

It is difficult to accept that the entire British cultural heritage of England was wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons. Why, for example, did the newcomers continue to live in the same places as the people they are supposed to have ousted, retaining the earlier place-names? It simply doesn’t make sense, and we should be cautious before adopting all the findings of molecular biology holus-bolus. Culture and population are not synonymous.

Stories have plots and themes, and I have fashioned this book around what I think are the most important. But inevitably I have had to omit an enormous amount of significant material, simply because it fell outside the immediate scope of the story. However, Britain B.C. is not intended to be a textbook, nor is it in any way comprehensive. It’s essentially a narrative – and a personal one at that. This is how I see the story of British prehistory unfolding, and I hold the view that a good narrative should be clear-cut, and not cluttered with fascinating but inessential detail.

What is it about archaeology that fascinates so many people? My own theory is that it’s because it is a tactile, hands-on subject. It isn’t something that exists in the mind alone. Unlike archaeologists, historians rarely get the opportunity to hold something that was last touched by a human hand thousands of years ago. Archaeology is a vivid and direct link to the past, which I believe accounts for the immediacy of its appeal – and to a wide cross-section of society. Over twenty years ago my wife was on a train from London to Huntingdon and found herself sitting next to the British heavyweight boxer Joe Bugner. He was charming and impeccably mannered. At the time he was a national celebrity, but when he discovered that Maisie was an archaeologist he confided that that was something he had always wanted to be. Then this morning I opened The Times to read that the most famous (or infamous) heavyweight of them all, Mike Tyson, had stated: ‘I would like to be an archaeologist.’² I would imagine that both of them could wield a mattock quite effectively.

Many archaeological books which purport to be non-technical are written as impersonal descriptions of places and objects that are seldom explained, and are united only by the thinnest of themes. As a result, the public may be forgiven for wondering why so much money is currently being spent on a subject that seems to produce such dreary results. ‘Does it really matter?’ is a question I’ve been asked many times in recent years. Of course I think it does. I believe passionately that archaeology is vitally important. Without an informed understanding of our origins and history, we will never place our personal and national lives in a true context. And if we cannot do that, then we are prey to nationalists, fundamentalists and bigots of all sorts, who assert that the revelations or half-truths to which they subscribe are an integral part of human history. It needs to be stated quite clearly: they’re not. In my view, the main lesson of prehistory is that humanity is generally humane, but from time to time is subject to bouts of extreme and unpleasant ruthlessness. Of course one cannot be sure, but I wonder whether this ruthlessness is perhaps a relict survival mechanism that goes back to our origins as a distinct and separate species, known as Homo sapiens. Whatever the cause, the important thing is that it exists, and we should recognise it, not just in others, but within ourselves as well.

Archaeology as an academic discipline is a humanity, and while there are accepted rules for ‘doing’ the subject, it is both impossible and, I believe, undesirable to pretend that archaeologists can provide unbiased and objective truth. We all have our own hobby-horses to bestride, and we might as well ride them in public. So I’ll come clean. My own background is as a field archaeologist – what in the States they refer to as a ‘dirt archaeologist’. It’s a badge I wear with pride, and this book will inevitably reflect that background. Also, for what it’s worth, my views on Creation, religion, ideology and the other related topics I’ll be addressing in this book are essentially pragmatic. I don’t believe in revealed truth, and if I’m forced to seek justification for our existence on this planet, I would turn to Darwin before scripture. He at least provided explanations, even if some of them have been superseded by later findings.

Has its insular peculiarity excluded Britain from other, more important relationships with mainland Europe? In 1972, in his book Britain and the Western Seaways, Professor E.G. Bowen attempted to explain the cultures of western Britain and Ireland in essentially maritime terms.³ He saw close ties between those regions and neighbouring parts of Europe, especially Brittany, Spain and Portugal. In a masterly reworking of the subject, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples (2001), Professor Barry Cunliffe has arrived at much the same view, but revised and extensively enlarged.⁴ I wouldn’t contest the observations of these two distinguished authors, but I would emphasise the many features that are unique to British and Irish prehistory, ranging from roundhouses and henges to the massive livestock landscapes of the Bronze Age. I would also stress the strong ties that unite east and south-east England to the Low Countries and north-western France; and north-eastern England and eastern Scotland to Scandinavia and the North Sea shores of Germany. I would further suggest that the natural overseas communication routes of at least half of England and Scotland lie to the east, to the North Sea basin and the mainland of north-western Europe.⁵

This east-west division of Britain also broadly coincides with the lowland and upland zones (respectively) that the great mid-twentieth-century archaeologist Sir Cyril Fox saw as being fundamental to the development of British landscape and culture – what he referred to as the ‘personality of Britain’.⁶ I tend towards a less closely defined view of these zones. I do not see them as inward-looking or self-referential. Quite the opposite, in fact. To me, the Atlantic/North Sea contrast is just that: it’s a cultural contrast, not a divide, and is one of the key characteristics of the British Isles. It’s a long-term stimulus that has fired the social boilers of Britain and helped ward off complacency.

Before I start in earnest, I’d like to express the hope that by the end of this book you will be as convinced as I am that their pre-Roman cultures have made a distinct contribution to the various national identities of the people of the British Isles. I hope you will also agree that the Ancient Britons have lurked in the twilight zone of history for far too long.

Dates and Periods

PART I Another Country

CHAPTER ONE In the Beginning

OUR STORY WILL BE about people and time. Human prehistory is such a vast topic that it has proved necessary to divide it up into a series of shorter, more manageable periods. Their origins lie in the birth and development of archaeology itself.

It was a museum curator, C.J. Thomsen, who proposed the Three-Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron when faced with the challenge of making the first catalogue of the prehistoric collections of the Danish National Museum of Antiquities in Copenhagen. He based his scheme on the relative technological difficulty of fashioning stone, bronze and iron. Iron, of course, requires far greater heat – and controlled heat at that – to smelt and to work than does copper, the principal constituent (with tin) of bronze. Thomsen’s book, A Guide to Northern Antiquities, was published in 1836, with an English translation in 1848. Eleven years later (1859) Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species; by then Thomsen’s scheme had gained wide acceptance.

Although still a young subject, prehistory played an important role in the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s ideas.¹ Perhaps that’s why most English prehistorians, myself included, tend to approach our subject from an evolutionary perspective. We probably shouldn’t think in this way, but most of us are products of an education system that places great emphasis on structure, pattern and analytical discipline. Darwin’s views on evolution sit very happily within such a rigorous yet down-to-earth conceptual framework.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century archaeologists in both Britain and France were caught up in the great debate around Noah’s Flood. Working on material found in the gravels of the river Somme, the great French archaeologist Boucher de Perthes published evidence in 1841 that linked stone tools with the bones of extinct animals. He argued that these remains had to predate the biblical Flood by a very long time. It was revolutionary stuff a full eighteen years before the appearance of On the Origin of Species.

I said that Boucher de Perthes published evidence that linked stone tools with the bones of extinct animals. I should have said he published evidence that associated stone tools with the bones of extinct animals. ‘Associated’ is a very important word to archaeologists. It’s code for more than just a link; it can imply something altogether tighter and more intimate. An example might help.

A few years ago we built our house, and whenever I dig the vegetable garden I find pieces of brick and roof-tile in the topsoil. I also find sherds of Victorian willow-pattern plate and fragments of land-drainage pipe which date to the 1920s. Like most topsoils, that in my vegetable garden is a jumble of material that has accumulated over the past few centuries. In archaeological terms these things are only very loosely associated. However, when work eventually finished on the house, I used a digger to excavate a soakaway for a drain, and filled the hole with all manner of builders’ debris left over from the actual building of the house: bricks, tiles, mortar, bent nails and so on. In archaeological terms, my soakaway is a ‘closed group’, and the items found within it are therefore closely associated. To return to the Somme gravels, Boucher de Perthes was able to prove that the bones and the flint tools were from a closed group. This tight association gave his discoveries enormous importance.

It was not long before gravel deposits elsewhere in Europe, including Britain, were producing heavy flint implements like those found in the Somme. They are known as hand-axes, and are the most characteristic artefacts of the earliest age of mankind, the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age.

Initially, archaeologists, and many others too, were more interested in what these finds stood for – evidence for the true antiquity of mankind – than in the finds themselves. Alliances were formed with pioneering geologists such as Sir Charles Lyell, whose book Principles of Geology, published in 1833, had established the fundamentally important ‘doctrine of uniformity’. This sounds daunting, but isn’t. It’s a grand-sounding way of saying that the natural processes of geology were the same in the past as they are today. So, even ten million years ago rivers wore away at their banks, glaciers scoured out their valleys and every so often volcanoes erupted, covering the countryside around with thick layers of ash and pumice, just as they do today. Put another way, after Lyell nobody could argue that, for example, the highest mountains on earth were covered by the waters of a vast flood just because that accorded with their beliefs.

If one accepted Lyell’s idea of uniformity, it became impossible to deny that the extinct animal bones and the flint tools found by Boucher de Perthes were in existence at precisely the same time – and a very long time ago. By the mid-nineteenth century, Palaeolithic archaeology was on something of a popular roll. No educated household could afford to ignore it. John Lubbock’s book Pre-Historic Times (1865) became a best-seller. Indeed, it was so popular that it’s still possible to pick up a copy quite cheaply. Mine is the fifth edition of 1890, and it cost me a fiver in 1980. It introduced the word ‘prehistory’ to a general audience, albeit with a hyphen, and it didn’t stop short at the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age). Lubbock also discussed the later Ages with considerable learning and not a little gusto. I find his enthusiasm infectious, and it isn’t surprising that some of his other books had titles such as The Pleasures of Life (in two volumes, no less). Like many of his contemporaries, Lubbock was able to turn his hand to subjects other than archaeology: his other works include books on insects and flowers aimed at both popular and scientific readers. He was a diverse and extraordinary man.

The first three chapters of this book will be about the earliest archaeological period, the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age. The archaeologists and anthropologists who study the Old Stone Age are grappling with concepts of universal, or fundamental, importance. What, for example, are the characteristics that define us as human beings? When and how did we acquire culture, and with it language? Let’s start with the first question; we can deal with the next one in the chapters that follow. I’ll begin by restating it in more archaeological terms: when and where did humankind originate?

The study of genetics has been transformed by molecular biology, but it isn’t always realised just how profound that transformation has been.² I studied these things in the 1960s, as an undergraduate at university, where I learned that human beings and the great apes were descended from a common ancestor over twenty million years ago. But molecular science has shown this to be wrong. For a start, the time-scale has been compressed, and it is now known that mankind and two of the African great apes, the chimpanzee and the bonobo (a species of pygmy chimp found in the Congo basin),³ share a common ancestor who lived around five million years ago. However, you have to go back thirteen million years to find a common ancestor for man and all the great apes, which include the orang and the gorilla.

There is now a growing body of evidence to suggest that recognisably human beings had evolved in Africa over two and a half million years ago. By ‘recognisably human’ I mean that if one dressed an early hominid, such as Homo rudolfensis (named after a site near Lake Rudolf in Kenya), in a suit and tie, and gave him a shave and a haircut he would, as the old saying goes, probably frighten the children, but not necessarily the horses, should he then decide to take a stroll along Oxford Street. His gait and facial appearance would certainly attract strange looks from those too ill-bred to conceal them; but such frightened sidelong glances aside, he might just be able to complete his shopping unmolested. His appearance in modern clothes would not be as undignified and inappropriate, for example, as that of those poor chimpanzees who until very recently were used to advertise teabags; he was no Frankenstein’s monster. He died out less than two million years ago, and his place was immediately taken by other hominids, including the remarkable Homo erectus, a late form of whose bones were found at a site in Italy dating to a mere 700,000 years ago.⁴ If Homo erectus took a stroll along Oxford Street, his appearance would attract far less attention than Homo rudolfensis, even if his size and stature would cause most men to step respectfully aside.

When I was a student, the descent of man (people were less twitchy then about using ‘man’ to mean ‘mankind’) was seen as essentially a smooth course, with one branch leading naturally to another. More recently it has become clear that the development actually happened in a more disjointed fashion, with many more false starts and wrong turnings along the way. We now realise that our roots don’t mimic those of a dock or a dandelion, with a single strong central taproot, but are more like those of grasses and shrubs, with many separate strands of greater or lesser length.

The dating of these early bones and the rocks in which they are found depends on various scientific techniques, but not on radiocarbon – more about which later – which is ineffective on samples over about forty thousand years old. Palaeolithic archaeology relies more on the dating of geological deposits, or the contexts in which finds are made, than in dating the finds themselves, as is frequently the case in later prehistory. This often means that dates are established by a number of different, unrelated routes, and that in turn leads to a degree of independence and robustness. So it is possible to say, for example, that early hominids had begun to move out of Africa and into parts of Asia about 1.8 million years ago. When did they move into Europe? That is a very vexed question, involving many hotly disputed sites, dates and theories. But it is probably safe to suggest that man appeared in Mediterranean Europe somewhere around 800,000 years ago, but did not reach northern Europe and the place that was later to become the British Isles until just over half a million years ago.

The most probable reason why there was so long a delay is relatively simple, and has to do with the European climate, which was far less hospitable than that of Africa. It has been suggested that wild animals may have acted as another disincentive, but I find that less plausible: why should European animals have been so very much more fierce than those of Africa? We should also bear in mind that conditions in Europe are less favourable to the survival of archaeological sites than are those in Africa. There is more flowing water around – rivers ceaselessly wear away at their banks; there is a disproportionately larger coastline; and of course there are vastly more people, whose towns, roads and farmlands must have buried or destroyed many Palaeolithic sites. And these very early sites aren’t easy to spot. Unlike the settlements of later prehistory, there’s no pottery, and stone tools are both remarkably rare and easily overlooked, having frequently been stained earthy colours because of their great age. All this suggests that it’s not entirely impossible that the million-year ‘gap’ between the original move out of Africa and the subsequent colonisation of Europe may be more apparent than real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1740.1807

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I’ve noted, Boxgrove frequently featured in the news, but unlike some other famous sites, it has also been comprehensively written-up. The learned, heavy-duty report was published by English Heritage in 1999.¹³ It’s a superb piece of work, but it’s fairly heavy-going and technical, aimed at postgraduate students and professional archaeologists rather than the general reader. A far more accessible account of the project, written by Mike Pitts and Mark Roberts, appeared in 1997.¹⁴ This is a landmark of a book that’s hard to put down, combining a good, racy narrative with accurate scholarship.

Boxgrove is so important because its very ancient archaeological finds and deposits were preserved in situ, precisely as they were left half a million years ago. When I visited, I could almost have believed that the people who made the dozens of hand-axes that still lay in the trenches had only just left, and that they would return shortly to collect one for use, as soon as they had killed the wild horse they were now out stalking. It was an eerie feeling – almost upsetting, were it not so extraordinarily exciting.

The reason Boxgrove became, in effect, a time capsule, is that the original surface on which Palaeolithic people walked was quickly buried below a mantle of quite fine-grained deposits. This material accumulated entirely naturally – as a result of normal processes such as wind-blown sand, water wash, etc. – but the result was an eventual accumulation of some twenty metres (sixty-five feet) of overburden, which protected the hand-axes and other finds which still lay where they had been dropped on the original land surface. Today Boxgrove is fifteen kilometres from the south coast, and forty metres above sea level, on the highest of a series of raised beaches. This gives some indication of what can happen when one is considering a time frame as long as half a million years. You have to think in geological, rather than human, terms – which makes the superb preservation at Boxgrove all the more remarkable.

I was astonished when I saw the condition of the hand-axes. Having knocked up a few of them myself, I’m very familiar with the look of a newly made flint implement. There’s an almost unfinished look to the things: edges are incredibly sharp and jagged, and there are clearly defined areas of ‘bruising’, perhaps where flakes failed to detach, or only partially detached. Knapping flint can also produce a distinctive, slightly sulphurous, smell, not dissimilar to that of a freshly struck match. I’ve no idea what causes it – perhaps an occasional spark, or very fine dust – but it must be familiar to anyone with more than occasional experience of flint-knapping. As I looked at those hand-axes in the ground, I could have sworn I caught a whiff of that smell – which is plainly ridiculous, but it does hint at just how superbly fresh everything was.

Boxgrove would not have featured on national television more than once had it only produced extraordinarily fresh hand-axes. Something more was needed; and what could possibly be better than human remains? The bones in question were part of a shinbone, or tibia, of a left leg, and two front teeth. The shinbone and the teeth must have come from two separate individuals, as the shinbone was found about three feet below the teeth, which were close together, and were almost certainly from the same person. The teeth had distinctive scratch-marks on their surface, suggesting that the person they belonged to had used his or her mouth to grip meat while cutting it with a flint tool. This was consistent with a build-up of tartar-like deposits on the other tooth surfaces, which is typical of people who ate a diet rich in meat. Vegetarians they were not.

The tibia came from a large person, most probably a man to judge from his build, who was about six feet (1.8 metres) tall and weighed twelve and a half stone (eighty kilos). He was muscular, and presumably pretty strong and fit. Evidence for this comes from the great thickness of the bone, which is what one would expect of a person who was used to continuous hard exercise – like, for example, hours spent out on the trail, stalking and hunting.

I’ve tried to steer clear of hominid classification because it’s both complex and constantly changing (incidentally, this is a good sign, as it shows that our knowledge about past people is growing all the time). It would appear that the Boxgrove people were distinctly different not only from modern man, but indeed from Neanderthal man, who came later. The Boxgrove finds are thought to belong to a species of hominids known as Homo heidelbergensis, after a well-preserved lower jawbone found in a quarry near Heidelberg in 1907. At present, physical anthropologists aren’t wholly agreed as to whether Homo heidelbergensis was a direct ancestor of modern man (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis), or of just one of them, of which Neanderthal seems the most probable. Recent research, however, suggests that Homo heidelbergensis may have been one of the many ‘blind alley’ developments of mankind’s history, and that the true ancestor to both Neanderthal and modern man was another African hominid known as Homo helmei, who lived some 400,000 years ago.¹⁵

The large quantities of animal bones found at Boxgrove have an equally fascinating tale to tell as the flints and hand-axes. The material accumulated on flat, mainly open ground very close to the coast, and as I read through the accounts of Boxgrove I was struck by the fact that this could have been a site almost anywhere in inland England: nowhere could I find evidence that fish, seabirds or shellfish were eaten. Mealtimes weren’t enlivened by so much as a humble dressed crab: it was meat, meat, meat – and red meat at that. This fits with what we know about other Lower Palaeolithic sites in Europe, where seafood also seems to have been ignored.

Further evidence for the consumption of meat is provided by the hand-axes. They are so superbly preserved that examining their cutting edges under a high-powered microscope reveals traces of so-called microwear – the scratches and polishes left when the tool was used in the Palaeolithic. The project’s microwear specialist gave a local butcher several replica hand-axes, made by Time Team’s Phil Harding, and asked him to butcher a deer carcass with them.¹⁶ Not surprisingly, the butcher had never used a hand-axe before, but even so he declared them excellent tools for the job. When he had finished, the edges of the replicas were examined microscopically, and the distinctive polish that had been produced by cutting the meat was very similar to that seen on ancient hand-axes from Boxgrove and other Palaeolithic sites.

Most of the animals that lived at or near Boxgrove would have been familiar to us today, but there were also extinct species of wolves, giant deer, bear and rhinoceros. There’s no doubt that large mammals such as deer, wild horse and even rhino were being butchered at Boxgrove. There’s also evidence to suggest that meat was removed on the bone and taken somewhere else to be eaten, presumably because the butchery sites were foul-smelling and swarming with flies – not a pleasant accompaniment to even a Palaeolithic lunch. It would seem most likely – again, there is some slight evidence to support this – that the meat was taken a short distance up the hill to the edge of the woods, where people would have stayed overnight. It was a sheltered area, protected from sight by trees and shrubs, where there would also have been abundant supplies of firewood. It’s worth noting that the butchery areas at Boxgrove did not produce evidence for hearths or fires, as one might have expected had people lived there for a prolonged period of time.

So far I’ve concentrated on what one might term simple, direct observations: hand-axes were made, animals were butchered and so forth; to what extent can one go further and ask more searching questions, of which the most obvious is: did the people who lived at the Boxgrove site have language? I firmly believe that archaeology can answer such questions, but they often need to be approached indirectly, and from several directions at the same time.

A minimalist view has been proposed by Professor Clive Gamble. This view would have it that these were very simple folk. They lived, after all, half a million years ago, and their brains were far smaller than ours. Gamble has suggested that theirs was essentially an opportunistic ‘fifteen-minute culture’ that involved an absolute minimum of planning ahead. If they could think in ways that are truly comparable with us, he argues, why on earth did it take them so long to reach northern Europe from Africa? A million years is a long time to pause and admire even the grandest of Alpine views. If we look at the evidence from Boxgrove, the minimalist would challenge whether there was actually any 100 per cent solid evidence even for hunting. One horse shoulderblade had been penetrated by something which left a neat semi-circular wound,¹⁷ which Mark Roberts is convinced is evidence for the use of the sort of pointed wooden spears that have been found at Palaeolithic sites in Britain and Germany, but not at Boxgrove itself (where the conditions of preservation did not favour wood). However, a minimalist wouldn’t necessarily agree with this. To my eye that semi-circular wound seems fairly convincing, but minimalists would remind us that other interpretations are also possible. Certainly, it can’t be regarded as a piece of ‘smoking gun’ evidence; it’s pretty indicative, but no more than that.

So if they weren’t hunting (which I very much doubt), presumably they were simply scavenging animals that had died naturally, or had been killed by a carnivore further up the food chain. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be any need for them to plan ahead. And if you don’t need to plan ahead, you don’t require the sophistication of language that goes with it. Just pause for a moment and reflect on how much of one’s conversation, at breakfast, for example, is spent planning for the day to come: if I take the car to do this, then you have to do that until I return; but if you take the car, then I’m left stranded, unless etc., etc. If, on the other hand, we simply bumped along, taking life and food as we found it, then everything, language included, would be so much simpler. That, at least, is the minimalist position.

In my opinion, minimalist views such as this are important because they make us keep our feet on the ground. They prevent us from building academic castles in the air. Had there been a clear-eyed minimalist standing at their elbows, I doubt whether medieval scholars would have wasted their time arguing about the number of angels that could balance on a pinhead. Having said that, I also believe in common sense and informed debate enriched by practical experience. All of which is to say that the totality of the evidence from Boxgrove seems to suggest to me that the people who lived there half a million years ago did hunt their prey, which included animals as fearsome as the rhino. This must have taken teamwork, organisation and forethought, and with them some sort of language. Let’s examine further the direct evidence for forward planning.

First, consider the distinction between hunting and opportunistic scavenging. I can see no reason why hunting should not have developed quite naturally out of scavenging. It seems a perfectly reasonable progression, just as in later chapters I will argue that stock-keeping and animal husbandry are a logical development from hunting. The problem may lie inside our own heads. In countless books and articles I’ve seen mankind’s relentless march of evolutionary progress illustrated in full colour, with crouching, ape-like hominids gradually being replaced by taller, more erect and intelligent beings until – Glory be! – modern man strides forth, head held erect and not so much as a genital in sight. Steps of progression form an important part of this pattern of evolutionary thought: from scavenging to hunting; from hunting to farming; from farming to urban life; from urban life to literacy, ‘Civilisation’, the Industrial Revolution and so on. It’s a pattern of thought that makes us feel good, but I wonder to what extent it reflects the truth, which was probably more like the way I’m writing this book: two pages forward, then one page deleted, and so on.

So, perhaps one day they hunted, and the next day they scavenged – whichever seemed the appropriate thing to do at the time. Eventually they found that hunting was both more efficient and more effective. It could also be fun – I suspect this was of equal importance as efficiency and effectiveness – and it gave young people a chance to show off their skills. Larger groups would have been needed to catch animals as massive as rhinos, and they would surely have relished not only the thrill of the chase and the reward of food at its completion, but also the teamwork required to co-ordinate so many individuals into an effective unit.

These arguments sound attractive, but are they true? Do they represent what might have happened half a million years ago? Remember, we are not discussing people like ourselves, but people with a very different brain and patterns of thinking. Most of the ideas in the previous paragraphs presuppose that the people of the Lower Palaeolithic thought more or less like ourselves; and we can’t assume that – a minimalist certainly wouldn’t. A minimalist would argue that their way of thinking differed profoundly from ours. For them thought was more to do with habit; what would seem straightforward to us – for example the logical leaps from one set of unrelated ideas to another – simply didn’t happen. I shall discuss this further in Chapter 3, but here I want to note that the way one interprets a site such as Boxgrove depends very much on one’s theoretical position. It’s no good even attempting to approach such problems with ‘an open mind’. One has to have a theoretical position and a particular set of ideas to test out. Otherwise one’s analysis lacks purpose and direction. Put another way, for ‘open’ mind, read ‘empty’, throughout.

So, what is the evidence for scavenging, or rather for persistent scavenging, at Boxgrove? As we have seen, the direct evidence for hunting is still quite slight, but it would be a mistake to assume that killing was necessarily accomplished by a sudden, massive and catastrophic wound that felled the prey on the spot – something like a javelin through the heart. In later periods of the Palaeolithic and in the subsequent Mesolithic there is good evidence that death could be very slow.¹⁸ The prey was wounded badly enough to bleed to death slowly. As the poor beast gradually became weaker, it would be stalked by the hunting party until it either died or was weak enough to be finished off. Certainly this pattern of hunting would help to account for the thickness of the Boxgrove people’s shinbones.

One piece of positive evidence for hunting, as opposed to scavenging, at Boxgrove is the evidence for human control of the carcasses found there. If the prey was dragged there from scavenging expeditions, one might reasonably expect to find that the initial hunters – be they bears or wolves – had left their toothmarks on the bones first. Thereafter one might expect to find the scratches left by the hand-axes that detached the meat. But this never happens. Where gnaw-marks and hand-axe marks are found together on the same bone, it is always the gnawing that comes later – presumably when the hunters had no further use for the carcass. I have to say, I find this evidence for hunting fairly convincing. But I can still hear Clive Gamble asking, ‘Why? Surely these patterns could equally well have resulted from people arriving at a kill site first, before the other scavengers arrived on the scene.’ And he could well be right. After all, there is no direct, incontrovertible evidence for human beings actually killing prey at Boxgrove.

This absence of direct evidence may in part be due to the fact that the wooden spears of the Lower Palaeolithic leave only a slight impression on bone, unlike, say, a broken-off flint arrowhead. We do, however, know that wooden spears of this period did exist. There’s a very probable contender made of yew wood which was found at Clacton, but several complete examples have been found across the North Sea at Schönongen, a site in Germany.¹⁹ So the evidence most certainly is out there. But it still seems to be absent from Boxgrove. Maybe I ought to reserve my position until something definite, one way or the other, turns up. But I can’t: I still find the cumulative evidence for hunting, especially as presented in the full Boxgrove report by Mark Roberts, convincing. And what is far more significant, John Wymer does too. In his preface to the full report, he is emphatic (the italics are his):

The people were hunters of large mammals; they did hunt with spears; they did retain useful objects for future use…We know that they had craftsmen among them with a concept of symmetry, if not beauty. They performed tasks that involved a division of labour and there is much to imply a social order of groups larger than usually imagined working together.²⁰

I’ll leave it there for the time being. In Chapter 3 I’ll review the evidence for Palaeolithic social organisation, and then Clive Gamble will have a chance to give the reasons why he inclines to a more minimalist view. I find this controversy both stimulating and refreshing – not least because the people concerned are not at each other’s throats, but are all far more concerned about the broader issues lying behind Palaeolithic research. As John Wymer put it in the final words of his preface to the Boxgrove report, the topic is alive because it is ‘research into what is the most important subject confronting us: ourselves’.

I’ve tended to emphasise the quality of preservation at Boxgrove, simply because it’s so extraordinary and, for me at least, affecting. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the quantity either. Before Boxgrove, discoveries of hand-axes from this period were rare events indeed – perhaps a dozen or two each year, most of which were those archaeologically less-than-useful isolated or ‘stray’ finds. By contrast, one small area of the Boxgrove excavations revealed over 150 hand-axes, some of which were unused. Mark Roberts has suggested, quite reasonably, that these implements had been made, perhaps when a particularly good source of flint had been found, to be kept to one side and used when needed. If he is right, plainly this is evidence for forethought.

The hand-axes themselves were difficult to make, and in this respect, as we’ve already seen, they were quite unlike the earlier tools of the pebble-chopper tradition. One doesn’t simply select a suitably sized piece of flint and then remove flakes on the off-chance that one can whittle away enough, and in the right places, to produce the desired end-result. There are a number of quite clearly defined stages that have to be gone through before one can produce a finished hand-axe, starting with the removal of the softer, more granular cortex, a type of ‘skin’ or ‘peel’ that develops through time and which protects the higher-quality, glass-like flint within.

At Boxgrove there is clear evidence that many of the hand-axes used for butchery were made then and there, on the spot. There are numerous waste flakes along with the finished hand-axes, and in one instance it’s possible to see where a person sat on the ground while he knapped a hand-axe. As he worked he allowed the flakes of flint to fall into his lap and then onto the ground, making a characteristically tight pattern (about ten inches across) that can be replicated experimentally. It’s as if fifteen minutes of time had been frozen for half a million years.

Each stage of a hand-axe’s manufacture requires a great deal of manual skill to start and complete, and it also takes good judgement to know when to move from one stage to another. The hand-axes found at Boxgrove are rarely ever skewed or misshaped, and are nearly always balanced and evenly proportioned, both when laid flat and when viewed edge-on. Speaking again from personal experience, I know that it takes considerable skill and judgement to keep an eye on the proportions of two separate planes simultaneously. It’s easy to get slightly carried away when things are going well, only to realise – when it’s too late – that one’s arrowhead, or whatever else one is making, will never fly straight. I’ve watched a good flint-knapper make a hand-axe, and a large part of the time he spent turning and inspecting the piece at arm’s length, to see that everything was in balance. The discipline required, and the knowledge of the different stages of manufacture, must surely have been taught from one generation to the next – and teaching, of course, requires language of some sort.

Much of the manufacture of hand-axes requires the use of a so-called ‘soft’ hammer, which in most cases was probably made from a billet or baton of antler, perhaps a foot or slightly less long and with the diameter of, say, a cricket stump. Antler is hard, but it’s also very resilient, and doesn’t chip or flake even when hit with force. This makes it ideal for flint-working. Before Boxgrove, we suspected that antler was used for soft hammers, but couldn’t prove it. But at Boxgrove an antler billet was found with small, sharp fragments of flint still sticking into it. The worn state of that antler hammer suggests that it was used to make more than one hand-axe, and again this provides good evidence for forethought, as presumably whoever it was that owned it carried the hammer around until he needed to use it again.

Where do all these indications of forethought lead us? Did the inhabitants of Boxgrove possess a sophisticated, highly adaptable language, such as English? The evidence from those who understand and study the human brain and the inside of the bone case – the cranium – that protects it suggests that Homo heidelbergensis simply didn’t have the mental equipment to develop or use a highly sophisticated language. On the other hand, the archaeological record makes it clear that these people must routinely have used a form of language – albeit of a relatively simple type. That, it would appear, is as far as we can take matters at present.

CHAPTER TWO Neanderthals, the Red ‘Lady’ and Ages of Ice

BOXGROVE WAS OCCUPIED before the great chill of the Anglian glaciation, whose ice retreated around 423,000 years ago. Then, so far as we know, essentially the same type of lifestyle resumed. Much of the evidence for this comes not from spectacular sites like Boxgrove, but from the discovery of hundreds of hand-axes from the lowland river gravels of England. In the past these hand-axes would generally not have been systematically studied, as they would have been seen as out of context, or ‘derived’, to use the archaeological term. They were derived because they were found in gravels whose very formation – derivation – had eroded away the original settlement sites where the hand-axes had been deposited. Imagine that a series of rivers had flowed through Boxgrove, churning the material around and around. Would what was left have any archaeological value? It depends, as Professor Joad of The Brains Trust would have said, on what one means by archaeological value. And that, in turn, depends on the scale at which one is working.

Boxgrove is remarkable for the detail it provides. It’s actually possible to refit flint flakes back together, to reconstruct precisely how a Palaeolithic flint-knapper once worked for fifteen minutes. One might refer to this as the micro-scale of archaeological investigation. But one might also quite reasonably wonder what else was going on at that time so very long ago. Were there, for example, other settlements in the area, and how long did they last? These larger-scale, or macro-level, questions require a different type of information if they’re to be answered properly. However remarkable refitting flint flakes might be in itself, it won’t take us any further forward in this instance.

I mentioned that the river gravel hand-axes were ‘derived’ from earlier deposits, and this was due to the down-cutting of rivers and the reworking of the gravels lying in the floodplain. These changes in the rivers’ behaviour were caused by fluctuations in climate during the successive glacial, cold, cool and temperate phases of the Ice Ages. There was plenty of fast-flowing water around as the ice melted, then less during temperate times, and none when ice was present. And of course, each of these phases had innumerable sub-phases, which varied from one river valley to another. If you understand how the resulting sequence of gravel terraces within the floodplain formed, then you provide at least a secondary context for the hand-axes and other flints within them.

John Wymer’s survey of the river gravels unravelled the sequence of terraces of all the major river valleys of southern Britain, and for that alone it is notable. The results of the survey ‘provide incontrovertible evidence for the presence of human groups during intermittent occupations in all the major valleys, over a time span of some half-million years’.¹ The survey also revealed extensive evidence for occupation in areas outside the major river valleys, such as around lakes, on the coastal fringe and in the chalk downland. It’s difficult at this stage even to hazard a guess at the British population during a warmer period of an interglacial, but I imagine that a low-level flight across the country would have detected the smoke from at most one or two fires. In 1972, the eminent archaeologist Don Brothwell estimated that the population for Britain as a whole at any one time during the Lower Palaeolithic would have been less than five thousand.²

So far we have been dealing with the longest period in British prehistory, the Lower Palaeolithic. Now we must move forward, and rapidly, if we are to keep to our schedule. The next significant stage starts shortly after 250,000 years ago and is known as the Middle Palaeolithic. Initially it would appear that occupation – or the evidence for occupation – during this period is slight, and this was doubtless due to adverse climate conditions. But unlike the previous period, the evidence from elsewhere in Europe is very much better. This is a shame, because it was a time of very considerable interest.

I started the previous chapter with some thoughts about the very earliest recognisable hominids, and perhaps the best way to span the half-million or so years that now confront us is via them (the hominids) and us (modern man, or Homo sapiens). In other words, we shall rapidly trace the story of human evolution and development, insofar as it affects what was shortly to become Britain. The other approach would be via the flint implements and other archaeological remains that were left behind.³ The problem here, however, is that there is a wealth of material which can be discussed and classified in various ways, depending on one’s archaeological interests and background.⁴ Sometimes one can become too introspective: it’s easy to be more concerned with flint implements, and what they may have been used for, than with the people who actually made and used them. I shall stick to flesh and blood – to people.

In the previous chapter we saw how early hominids moved out of Africa, and took a very long time indeed finally to colonise northern Europe. We then took a closer look at the site at Boxgrove, where possible ancestors of modern man and the Neanderthals butchered their meat and made flint tools for the purpose. It’s those two descendants – or possible descendants – of the people at Boxgrove who will concern us here. We will start with perhaps the most famous name in archaeology: Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis).

The Neanderthals have not always had a good press, and I often wonder how they would have reacted to some of the things that have been said (or worse, painted) about them. A recent (and hugely expensive) television series and its spin-off book were at pains to be objective about them, and they succeeded admirably.⁵ But things haven’t always been so well done: there’s something about the Neanderthals, and our treatment of them, that ultimately mocks ourselves. When it comes to our closest, deceased relatives, historically we can’t seem to get it right. Perhaps they’re just too close to us.

The story of the finding of bones in the Neander valley (or thal) near Düsseldorf in 1856 is well known.⁶ It was a discovery that was profoundly to affect the development of archaeological thought, and not always for the better.⁷ Quite soon after the initial discoveries at the Feldhover Cave, other, earlier finds were recognised as people of the same type, or species. Neanderthals have been found over most of Europe and western Asia – but not, interestingly, in Africa; presumably because they had become so well adapted to cooler climates that they didn’t fancy crossing the Sahara desert. Actual hard-and-fast evidence for Neanderthals in Britain was only found very recently. They lived in this vast stretch of the globe for a very long time indeed, and during some of the coldest episodes of the Ice Ages, between about 130,000 and thirty thousand years ago. As we will see, the Neanderthals were on the earth for considerably longer than modern man (Homo sapiens) has yet managed.

Happily, there’s no shortage of Neanderthal bone to work with, and as a result we have a pretty good idea of what they would have looked like. For a start, they were absolutely human, and would not have given rise to those ill-bred stares in Oxford Street, although when first confronted with one, I suspect I might have registered that they came from somewhere a long way away. In the days when such questions were not considered sexist in academic circles, I once asked a colleague who specialised in the Palaeolithic whether he thought he’d fancy a young Neanderthal woman. He replied: ‘You bet I would, but I’d make myself scarce when her brother arrived.’ They were thick-set and quite heavily built, with stout bones that showed signs of having supported a very active body. The face was characterised by strong brow ridges above the eyes and a forehead that sloped backwards far more than ours. The lower face and jaw was more prominent, which tended to disguise the fact that the chin profile was weak.

Reading this through, I’m struck by the fact that I’m judging the unfortunate Neanderthaler as if he were an aberrant modern man. He might say of us: they have domed, baby-like foreheads which, when combined with a receding jawline and spindly limbs, gives them an awkward, insubstantial and unbalanced appearance.

Neanderthals had a larger brain than modern man, not just in relation to their somewhat larger body mass, but absolutely. I suppose we’re bound to say this, but there is no evidence that this larger brain gave them more intelligence. Indeed, the bare fact that they failed to survive the evolutionary rat-race – given no help whatsoever from Homo sapiens – tends to support this view. It has been suggested that the principal difference in the way the two species thought was that modern man was able to lump his thoughts together.⁸ He was more of a generalist, whereas Neanderthals were ‘domain specific’, to use a term coined by the cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen.⁹ Put another way, Homo sapiens was better at integrating concepts: he could identify similarities in supposedly unrelated spheres (the way that Newton could see how a falling apple and gravity were part of the same phenomenon). I remember reading that remarkable book by Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964), in which he maintained that all great intellectual insights came as a result of making links between different spheres (he termed them ‘matrices’) of thought. It would now seem that this ability to cross-reference and reintegrate is something unique to our species, and it led directly to the development of sophisticated language. Neanderthals, on the other hand, are believed to have maintained more rigid or impermeable pigeonholes in their brains: different realms of thought stayed apart from each other. In some respects this was good: it gave focus and discipline, as their magnificently executed flintwork attests. But so far as is known it doesn’t seem to have given rise to art (as opposed to decoration plain and simple), or to more complex symbolic expression.

There were other things that distinguished Neanderthals from modern humans. Plainly these ideas are tentative, but it’s worth noting that drawing conclusions about ancient behaviour from dry bones, flints and, crucially, the contexts of their discovery is a major achievement of Palaeolithic archaeology. The concept of ‘context’ is fundamentally important to archaeology.¹⁰ Essentially it refers to the way that different artefacts, bones and other finds relate to each other. Thus, the dagger found protruding from a dead man’s ribcage tells a very different story to the dagger tucked into a dancing Scotsman’s sock. The dagger may be constant, but the context – which provides the meaning – isn’t. The word can also be used in a more specific archaeological sense, which loosely correlates with ‘layer’ or ‘deposit’. So, in an ancient settlement, for instance, the soil (and the finds therein) that filled an abandoned ditch would form a different archaeological context to the ashes and charcoal in a nearby hearth.

Using such contextual information, it would appear that the children of Neanderthal parents grew up faster, and achieved their independence more rapidly, than their Homo sapiens equivalents.¹¹ Maybe this was a result of their large brains and focused way of thinking, but it could have had a downside, too. Without prolonged exposure to their parents’ acquired experience and wisdom, the younger generation would have been forever reinventing and rediscovering things that their parents knew perfectly well. This would undoubtedly have affected the pace and dynamics of social development within the group as a whole. As we will see later, change in Homo sapiens society is by its nature slow, but in the case of the Neanderthals it must have been even slower. This would have put them at a considerable disadvantage compared with the more adaptable communities of Homo sapiens – especially in periods when the natural environment around them was changing rapidly.

One should resist the temptation always to put theories and observations on past behaviour into modern terms, but I can’t help thinking that the Neanderthal thought-process may have been similar to the overfocused approach of obsessive trainspotters or stamp collectors. Their hobbies lack interest or appeal for me, because they are devoid of most social context. Don’t get me wrong – I love steam trains, but I’m far more interested in their drivers and firemen and where they would have taken their summer holidays. I have lately observed a certain philatelic tendency creeping into archaeology, both professional and non-professional: an obsession with sites, dates, artefacts and other minutiae – at the expense of the original people and the stories that lay behind them. It’s all very Neanderthal.

It is clear that the Neanderthals ate a great deal of meat, which they undoubtedly hunted effectively, using a variety of techniques and tactics. As we have seen, their bones were robust and thick-walled, which indicates that their lives were extremely active. Dr Paul Pettitt, a notable authority on the subject, put it well: ‘Neanderthals lived fast and died young.’¹² I don’t want to give the impression that Neanderthals were thugs, because the facts do not support that. Far from it, there is much evidence (mainly from Europe and the Middle East) to suggest that they cared deeply about death and the dead: burials were deliberately placed in dug graves, and bodies were sometimes accompanied by grave goods and red ochre – a natural powder-based mineral paint. Neanderthals took considerable care over the burial of children and older, physically disabled people, who would not have been able to survive outside what must have been a small, robust but nonetheless caring community. Sadly, as we will see shortly, our Neanderthal cousins were to learn that small, caring communities don’t last long when the competition for survival begins to hot up.

The Middle Palaeolithic is the name given to the period dominated by Neanderthal man. As we have noted, Britain was sparsely occupied especially during the earlier years of the period; I know of only one find of Neanderthal-style bones here (teeth and lower jaw fragments from two individuals), from Pontnewydd Cave, in north Wales. I say Neanderthal-style bones because although they have Neanderthal characteristics, their date is very early indeed (around 240,000 years ago), so they are perhaps best seen as coming from people who were ancestral to the true Neanderthals. But Pontnewydd Cave also had another, far subtler, archaeological secret to reveal.

The cave was superbly excavated by Dr Stephen Aldhouse-Green of the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff. I first met Stephen when he was excavating open-air (i.e. non-cave) sites that were threatened by the construction of the New Town at Milton Keynes, in Buckinghamshire. At that time I was also working on open sites threatened by a New Town, at Peterborough, and we kept in close touch. Stephen’s approach was meticulous: everything was carefully planned and plotted, and his excavations were a model of neatness. When I returned to my own sites, which seemed to spread across acres of eastern England in an organic, amoeba-like sprawl, I envied his neatness and precision. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that archaeology can have different styles and approaches. In that respect it’s like art or design: there’s more than one way to approach a site or a given research objective, and very often the one chosen will reflect the personality and academic outlook of the people, or person, concerned. Stephen has always been meticulous and precise, which is absolutely essential in his line of Palaeolithic research, and was ideally suited to the excavation of the Palaeolithic caves and rock shelters he became interested in when he moved to Wales.¹³

He has examined a number of Welsh caves, and has found evidence for the presence of Palaeolithic people in or near them; but so far there is no convincing evidence for large-scale occupation in the manner of, say, Boxgrove. Sadly, Stephen has found no classic Flintstone-style cave dwellings, complete with hearths, floors and surfaces where families actually lived their day-to-day domestic lives. One reason for this might have been that other, rather fiercer animals, such as bears and hyenas, chose the caves for themselves. They were mainly used in the short term, as lookout spots during hunting, or as overnight stopping-off points. Gnawing on prey bones and other telltale signs suggest that at least one site, Priory Farm Cave, above the Pembroke river, was a hyenas’ den; even so, it produced evidence (in the form of flint tools) for human beings, albeit from our next period, the Upper Palaeolithic. Stephen’s research at Pontnewydd and other Welsh caves has shown that the river gravels do not tell the entire story: that large areas of upland Britain could have been occupied during warmer phases of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, but all the archaeological evidence has been removed – in effect planed off – by subsequent glaciers.

Neanderthal people would not have arrived here until about sixty thousand years ago, during the second half of the last glaciation; this probably reflects the fact that Britain lay close to the northern limit of their distribution. The trouble is that, with the rather strange exception of Pontnewydd Cave, there was until very recently indeed no clear evidence for Neanderthal bones in Britain. So Pontnewydd Cave is potentially very important. Its location is unusual too, as it is currently the most north-westerly Earlier Palaeolithic site in Europe. The European landscape would have been very different then to that of today. It was largely open and treeless, steppe-like, with enormous expanses of grassy plain that extended into Asia. In Britain, as elsewhere, people mainly hunted large mammals, such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bear, spotted hyena, wolf and wild horse. It’s no wonder that their own bones often carry signs of injury similar to what a modern rodeo rider might expect. It was a challenging diet.

I mentioned that there was no clear evidence for the presence of Neanderthal people in Britain until ‘very recently indeed’. The latest discovery was announced in June 2002, about two months after I had completed the first draft of this book. The site in question is in Thetford, Norfolk, and is one of those commercial excavations that have become such an important part of the modern archaeological scene.¹⁴ Initial reports suggest that the bones and tools from the Thetford quarry are about fifty thousand years old, and were found close to a group of ponds which were used as watering places by Neanderthal people and their animal prey, which consisted of mammoth (bones of three or four animals), woolly rhino (a tooth) and reindeer (antler). Along with the bones, and most probably associated with them (using the word in its strictly archaeological sense), were eight hand-axes and 129 pieces of worked flint. Subsequent excavations have revealed many more bones, flint implements and hand-axes, some of them in mint condition. There are also clear signs that much of the mammoth bone had been cut up with flint tools. Was this a Boxgrove-style butchery site, or perhaps, better still, a settlement of some sort? We don’t know at this stage, but David Miles, Geoff Wainwright’s successor as Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage, is wildly excited. It’s a dream of a site, even if it hasn’t (yet) produced human bones.

The Neanderthals were the great survivors of the Ice Age world, and they made a far wider variety of flint tools than are found in the Lower Palaeolithic. Some are most beautiful, and show an extraordinary degree of skill and control. To my eye they also show that Neanderthals could create and appreciate, if not art, then craft of the highest order. The principal archaeological ‘culture’ of Neanderthal man is known as the Mousterian, after a series of overhanging rock shelters at a place called Le Moustier, in south-western France. Before we go on, perhaps I should say a few words about what I mean by the term archaeological ‘culture’, and how it differs from what we are used to in our own, living culture.

An archaeological culture is essentially an attempt by archaeologists to define a culturally distinct group of people, using any evidence left to us by the passage of time.¹⁵ Inevitably this means that, for example, Palaeolithic cultures tend to be very much larger and more broadly defined than those of later prehistory, for the simple reason that Old Stone Age artefacts are few and widely dispersed. Clearly there are problems in this: could we, for example, distinguish archaeologically between the different cultures of, say, nineteenth-century Wales and western England? I doubt it, but we could probably discern broad differences between the rural populations of eastern and western Britain. The landscape was different, in particular field systems were different, and people used regionally distinctive styles of tools, ranging from ploughs to bill-hooks.

This is the fleeting image – the chimera – that we are trying to pin down when we define an archaeological culture from groups of similar finds, animal bones, house types and so on. Ideally there should be a hard core of items that consistently occur together, and there should not be too much blurring at the edges, because by and large true human cultures tend to stop and start, rather than merge. This reflects the fact that societies have internal workings – that marriage, for example, tends to be restricted within a given culture – and that people need to speak languages or dialects that they all understand. Religion also provides barriers that most people find very difficult to cross. As I write these words, the barriers being erected by the world’s religions seem to be growing daily. It’s depressing, but it brings me to another aspect of archaeological cultures and their behaviour.

Professor Ian Hodder is extraordinarily dynamic, and produces books at the rate of one or two a year. Most tend to be very theoretical – indeed, Ian was one of the pioneers of ‘theoretical archaeology’, which gained a firm foothold during the latter 1960s and the seventies, and is now a permanent fixture.¹⁶ Ian and his followers steered archaeology away from what had previously been a practical, functional, quasi-scientific way of thinking. That was, they argued, a flawed approach, because it assumed that cultural behaviour could be predicted, and that it followed a series of rules or laws, none of which have yet been successfully defined. One example will suffice. Suppose we excavate a male burial in which we also find a gold-encrusted sword and jewelled spurs. The functional archaeologist would conclude that the person was a warrior prince, and that the society he came from was probably very hierarchical, with powerful warriors and humble, serf-like footsoldiers. Ian and others pointed out that that reading was altogether too simple. It ignored the fact that we often act in a symbolic way, which expresses what we want to believe rather than the reality which frames and colours the real world. Thus the aristocracy of England are traditionally buried without grave goods, symbolising the belief that all are equal in the eyes of God. A naive functionalist archaeologist might interpret English graves as indicating that British society was, and is, egalitarian – which is patently absurd, because it ignores the symbolism that objects and their contexts can express.

By drawing analogies with modern tribal societies, Ian Hodder was able to show that in times of social and economic tension the boundaries between different cultural groups became better defined and more closely guarded.¹⁷ A modern parallel would be the national boundaries of Europe in, say, 1935 compared with today. Before the war, to cross a border meant producing passports, submitting to a customs search, and so on; today, if you are driving, your shoe barely rises off the accelerator. And of course the world of modern European politics is very much more stable than it was in 1935. In archaeological terms, Hodder reasoned that cultures with clearly defined edges – for example, where one style of pottery stops sharply, and another starts with equal abruptness – were possibly co-existing in a state of tension. In times of peace, people would be less worried about maintaining their own identities at the expense of much else, and there would be more cross-border trade; as a result, boundaries would soon lose their clear definition.

This brings us, in a roundabout way, to the relationship between the cultures of Neanderthal and modern man – each of which was defined with stark clarity. It used to be thought that the two groups of humans co-existed in relative harmony, and that the demise of the Neanderthals was a result of external or internal forces – perhaps a failure to adapt to changing environmental conditions, combined with feuding between different groups in the face of declining resources. However, it looks increasingly probable that although the Neanderthals were excellent hunters of the biggest big game imaginable, they were no match for their two-legged foes in the form of Homo sapiens. As Paul Pettitt has written:

For too long we have regarded the extinction of the Neanderthals as a chance historical accident. Rather, where Neanderthals and modern humans could not co-exist, their disappearance may have been the result of the modern human race’s first and most successful deliberate campaign of genocide.¹⁸

When feeling depressed, I sometimes wonder whether the ability and instinct to carry out genocide isn’t one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens. The ruthless use of force against the last real competitor we’ve ever had to face up to gave us the edge to survive in the Later Ice Age world. Without it, who knows – we may well have perished. Seen in the crudest Darwinian terms, it may have been legitimate thirty thousand years ago; but we still can’t shake the habit off.

This brings me to a question I am frequently asked. Did modern man and Neanderthals interbreed, or were they too busy fighting to have time for what one might consider to be more human pursuits? Had I been asked that question before 1999, my answer would have been a firm ‘no’, based on some substantial evidence. But it now appears that the picture is more complex.

The original bones from the Neander valley were scientifically dated to around forty thousand years ago. This made them relatively late, but within the known Neanderthal age-range. Then samples of DNA were extracted, and these showed that the original Neanderthal was by no means a close cousin of modern man. In fact the DNA from the bones, when compared with our own, showed a difference which the scientists considered represented a divergence of some half a million years. In other words, the two groups had a common ancestor who lived at the time of, say, Boxgrove. According to the DNA, there had been no genetic contact since then. This seemed to confirm the theory that the two groups had lived very separate lives, and did not interbreed.

But now we cannot be so certain. In June 1999 Paul Pettitt wrote another article for the popular journal British Archaeology, in which he gave the first details of a remarkable burial that had just been excavated at a rock shelter at Lagar Velho, in Portugal.¹⁹ The bones were from a boy who had been buried about twenty-four thousand years ago. In theory this was at least five to six thousand years after the last Neanderthal had settled in the Iberian peninsula. He had been buried with some ceremony: he wore a shell pendant or amulet around his neck, and the edges of the grave were marked out by stones and bones. Also in the grave were articulated bones of red deer and rabbit – presumably placed there as offerings. The grave contained a layer of red ochre, from dye which coloured either the boy’s clothes or his shroud. Red ochre burials are known from other sites of this period across Europe and into Russia, and I shall have more to say about one of them, from south Wales, shortly.

The real interest in the Lagar Velho boy lies in the anatomical form of his bones, which are clearly those of Homo sapiens, but also reveal a number of distinctively, and very strongly marked, Neanderthal features. Anatomically, there can be no doubt whatsoever: his ancestors had interbred with Neanderthals, and not just once, but regularly and over a long time. It would be impossible to account for so many Neanderthal features any other way. What are the wider implications of this discovery? Did the two groups of humans routinely interbreed everywhere? We don’t know, but probably not. Spain and Portugal may be a special case, as there does seem to have been a persistent ecological border zone (known as the Ebro Frontier) between the two groups along the northern edge of the Iberian peninsula.

It would seem that modern humans took their time to penetrate south of the Ebro Frontier, possibly because they were better adapted to the cooler conditions of the north. But whatever the root causes might have been, Neanderthals persisted for some time in Spain and Portugal, and it would appear that even though the end result for one group was extinction, for extended periods relations were more friendly than genocidal. The impression we get is what one might expect of human interactions at any time. In some areas the genocide was swift, efficient and ruthless; in others the two groups continued to live side by side for several millennia, and the ‘genocide’ may not have been deliberate, but more the sad consequence of an inevitable process. As groups of Neanderthals became more widely separated, mates would be harder to find, and the population would decline further. It was a process that in the end took some ten thousand years to complete.²⁰

The evidence provided by a particular form of DNA, known as mitochondrial DNA (see Chapter 5), which is passed on via the female line, suggests strongly that Homo sapiens is not a direct descendant of Homo neanderthalensis.²¹ So how on earth does the Lagar Velho boy fit in with this? The leading authority, Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, has suggested that the Lagar Velho boy may be the human equivalent of a mule – a cross between two closely related, but different, species: horse and donkey. The mule is tough, strong and hardy, but sterile, because its parents do not share the same number of chromosomes (horses have sixty-four, donkeys sixty-two). We don’t know yet, because the Lagar Velho boy’s DNA has not been examined, but Bryan Sykes reckons that if he was indeed a cross between a modern human and a Neanderthal, then he might well have been sterile, like the mule. This, of course, would help explain why Neanderthal genes appear to be absent from our own genetic make-up.

As I have already noted, although bona fide Neanderthal bones are so far lacking in Britain, their culture, the Mousterian, was certainly present, and their hand-axes have been found at a number of cave, rock-shelter and open sites, mainly in southern England, but also in East Anglia, south Wales and the midlands.²²

I want now to move forward to what one might term our own time – the world of the earliest truly modern man, known as Crô-Magnon man, after a rock shelter at Les Eyzies in southern France which produced particularly good collections of bones.²³ Crô-Magnons were not identical to us, and if I may return for one final time to that slightly strained Oxford Street analogy, they would not inspire sideways glances from even the most ill-mannered of passers-by. But they were different from us nonetheless, with slightly larger brains (maybe this reflected their larger body size), larger teeth and somewhat flatter faces. Physical anthropologists, such as Chris Stringer in his African Exodus, feel that the tall and relatively thin frames of early Homo sapiens betray the fact that they evolved in the warm, tropical climates of Africa, rather than in Europe.²⁴

One of the best-known examples of Crô-Magnon man in Britain is the so-called Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland Cave, on the Gower Peninsula of south-west Wales. I put the word ‘lady’ in quotes because ‘she’ was in fact a he. His story is altogether most unusual, and is well worth repeating. Like many archaeological tales it is caught up with contemporary intellectual and political controversies.

Dean William Buckland, the first excavator of the Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland, came across some of ‘her’ bones in 1823. He had been invited by the landowner to investigate the cave at a time when he was attempting to reconcile the field evidence of geology with the Biblical account of Creation and Noah’s Great Flood – surely a futile pursuit if ever there was one. But in many ways Buckland was a most able and remarkable man. He was the first Reader in Geology at Oxford, and was later appointed Dean of Westminster. Sadly, he took the clerical line, and backed the wrong horse when it came to the Great Flood. Nor was he by any means adept at creating snappy titles: his discovery of bones and other items at the Goat’s Hole Cave, Paviland, was published in 1823 as Reliquiae Diluvianae: or Observations on the Organic Remains contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel and on other Geological Phenomena attesting the action of an Universal Deluge.²⁵ He considered that the Red ‘Lady’ was Roman, and that the bones of extinct animals found around ‘her’ dated to a time before the Great Flood. One could say he got it as wrong as it was possible to get it.

It is of course only too easy to take the work of men like Buckland out of the context of their times. True, he failed to find a link of any sort between the lowland river gravels of Britain – patently water-derived deposits – and the Biblical Flood; and he allowed his powers of reason to be overruled by his emotional acceptance of a theological doctrine which was never meant to be taken literally, even when first written. But the fact remains that he did go into the field to find empirical evidence to support his views, at a time when most clerics would never have left their libraries. He also took the work of science seriously; and although he certainly didn’t intend it, by doing what he did and by promptly publishing his results, he ultimately helped release geology from the grip of the Church. And he did discover a most remarkable burial, complete with loosely associated Palaeolithic flint implements.

What is the modern view of the Red ‘Lady’ and the archaeological deposits from the Goat’s Hole Cave? Stephen Aldhouse-Green has just edited what he himself has entitled A Definitive Report, and I’m confident it will survive the test of time rather better than Dean Buckland’s Reliquiae Diluvianae.²⁶ (There are also some shorter, and perhaps more accessible, accounts widely available.²⁷)

Buckland’s report concluded that the body was that of a Roman scarlet woman, or ‘painted lady’, whose business was to look after the carnal needs of Roman soldiers from a camp nearby – which we now know is Iron Age anyway. All round, it was an excellent story for a man of the cloth to concoct. But the truth was more remarkable than fiction. In the words of Stephen Aldhouse-Green, ‘When the “Red Lady” skeleton was found, it was the first human fossil recovered anywhere in the world.’²⁸ The burial of the body recalls that of the Lagar Velho boy. The Paviland body was that of a young Crô-Magnon man aged twenty-five to thirty, about five feet eight inches (1.74 metres) tall, and probably weighing about eleven stone (seventy-three kilos). His build and weight were somewhat smaller than the average for such early Homo sapiens, and radiocarbon dates have shown he was alive around twenty-six thousand years ago – again, pretty well contemporary with Lagar Velho.

The molecular biologist Brian Sykes, writing in the definitive report, describes how DNA extracted from the bones can be related to the commonest ancestry extant in Europe. This strongly suggests that the current population of Britain arrived in these islands in the Palaeolithic, and did not spread here seven thousand years ago with the arrival of Neolithic farmers from farther afield. As we will see later, it was most likely the concept of farming that reached us, rather than a wholesale migration of farmers.

I’ll describe the details of the Red ‘Lady’s’ burial in a moment, but first I must say a few words about radiocarbon dating, which will become a regular feature of our story from now onwards.

Radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard F. Libby, a chemist at Chicago University, in 1949.²⁹ The idea behind the technique is straightforward enough. Libby was researching into cosmic radiation – the process whereby the earth’s outer atmosphere is constantly bombarded by sub-atomic particles. This process produces radioactive carbon, known as carbon-14. Carbon-14 is unstable and is constantly breaking down, but at a known and uniform rate: a gram of carbon-14 will be half broken down after 5730 years, three-quarters broken down in twice that time (11,460 years), and so on. Libby’s breakthrough was to link this process to living things, and thence to time itself.

Carbon-14 is present in the earth’s atmosphere – in the air we all breathe – in the form of the gas carbon dioxide. Plants take in the gas through their leaves, and plant-eating animals eat the leaves – and carnivores, in turn, eat them. So all plants and animals absorb carbon-14 while they are alive. As soon as they die, they immediately stop taking it in, and the carbon-14 that has accumulated in their bodies – in their bones, their wood or whatever – starts to break down through the normal processes of radioactive decay. So by measuring the amounts of carbon-14 in a bone, or piece of charcoal, fragment of cloth or peat, it is possible to estimate its age.

But there are problems. First of all, cosmic radiation has not been at a uniform rate, as Libby at first believed. Sunspots and solar flares are known to cause sudden upsurges of radiation. Nuclear testing has also filled the atmosphere with unwanted and unquantifiable radiation. If these problems weren’t enough, the quantities of radiation being measured in the radiocarbon laboratories around the world are truly minute, especially in older samples, such as those from Paviland Cave. Efforts have been made to quantify the way in which radiocarbon dates deviate from true dates, using ancient wood samples that can be precisely dated to a given year AD or BC. This process is known as calibration, and is now widely accepted in archaeology (I’ve tried consistently to use calibrated radiocarbon dates in this book). All this uncertainty means that radiocarbon dates are usually expressed in the form of a range of years – say 1700 to 2000 BC, rather than a single central spot-date of 1850 BC.

A by-product of radiocarbon dating are the figures known as the ‘stable isotope values’ of carbon and nitrogen. These provide very useful information on the general nature of an individual’s diet when the bone was being formed. It would appear that fish and seafood formed a major part of the Red ‘Lady’s’ diet. Today the sea is close by Goat’s Hole Cave, but in the Upper Palaeolithic it was about a hundred kilometres away. Of course, fish could have been caught in rivers closer by, but such a very ‘fishy’ diet surely suggests regular access to the sea – and with it a way of life that must have involved a great deal of travel. The contrast with Boxgrove, which was closer to the sea, but where there was no evidence for fish-eating, is remarkable; but then, so too is the huge time-span (roughly 480,000 years) that separates these two Palaeolithic sites – it’s easy to forget that the Palaeolithic takes up about 98 per cent of British prehistory.

There are remarkable aspects to the Paviland burial which illustrate some of the far-reaching changes that were in the process of transforming humanity. That may sound grandiloquent, but the Upper Palaeolithic was the first period in which many of the defining characteristics of modern civilisation become apparent. Put another way, without the social and intellectual developments of the period, what was subsequently to be known as civilisation would have been impossible. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the achievements made by the people of the Upper Palaeolithic period. We may not always be aware of it, but we owe them an enormous amount.

There is far more to Paviland than just the famous burial. The cave floor also produced numerous flint implements and the by-products of their manufacture, together with charcoal and ash, all of which were found in contexts that must predate the burial. Radiocarbon dates suggest that this earlier occupation preceded the Red ‘Lady’ by three thousand years (i.e. about twenty-nine thousand years ago), and there is evidence that the cave was intermittently occupied both before and after that date, as well as after the Red ‘Lady’ burial. This extended use would indicate that the Goat’s Hole Cave was well known to people at the time.

The Red ‘Lady’ burial was accompanied by a mammoth ivory bracelet and a perforated periwinkle pendant, numerous seashells and some fifty broken ivory rods. Marker stones were placed at the head and foot of the grave. The staining, which most people regard as being derived from heavily stained clothes or wrapping, still colours the two ornaments and the bones, but there is a colour difference between the bones of the arms and chest and the hips and legs – which perhaps suggests that the young man was buried in a two-piece garment of some sort. The feet were only lightly stained, which would indicate that he wore shoes. The ochre, a natural product, was obtained locally. The body was headless, and it’s quite possible that it was deliberately buried in this way – other headless burials are known from this period – but the removal of the head could also have taken place later: perhaps it was carried away by the sea, which is known to have broken into the cave. The archaeological term for disturbance of this sort, which takes place after a deposit, such as a burial, has been placed in the ground, is ‘post-depositional’. It can sometimes take a great deal of skill to distinguish between an action that took place when a body was placed in the ground and a subsequent, post-depositional, effect. It’s something I always have in the back of my mind when I’m excavating.

Paviland Cave also revealed three remarkable bone spatulae. They are small things, roughly six inches (fifteen centimetres) long, and are beautifully shaped, with unusual curves and bulges that don’t seem to make immediate practical sense. As well as the spatulae, there were a number of worked pieces of mammoth ivory, including a well-known perforated pendant that was thought to have formed part of the burial assemblage. Radiocarbon now shows that these objects were slightly later than the Red ‘Lady’ burial, and indicates that the cave was repeatedly used between about twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago.

To sum up, there was a main phase of settlement in the cave around twenty-nine thousand years ago, with intermittent occupation both before and after. Then came the burial, at twenty-six thousand, and later use of the cave between twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago. It’s no wonder that Paviland Cave is the richest Upper Palaeolithic site in Britain – but does this pattern of use and reuse tell us anything more about the site? I believe that the Goat’s Hole Cave was a special place of some sort. If archaeologists have a fault it is to describe everything they find as special, unusual or remarkable. That’s because it is to them personally, who have spent weeks, months or years slaving away at whatever it might be. But is it to the world in general? In the case of Paviland it most certainly is, for the following reasons.

Paviland Cave lies at the extreme northern edge of the Early Upper Palaeolithic world, and it was used remarkably late in the sequence, when the climate was getting very chilly. Those unique bone spatulae and the episode of mammoth-ivory working happened at a time when the climate was rapidly deteriorating and evidence for settlement elsewhere in Britain was virtually unknown. If we also bear in mind that nearly all well-preserved occupied cave sites have extensive living areas outside the cave itself, and that those at Paviland have been removed by the postglacial rise in sea levels, then the use of the cave so far into the developing glaciation, or mini-Ice Age, is truly remarkable – and demands explanation.

Let’s look at the artefacts before turning to the burial itself, and first at those strange, red-stained mammoth-ivory rods discovered by Dean Buckland.³⁰ They don’t appear to have any practical purpose, other perhaps than as blanks for ivory beads, but as there’s no indication that any had been notched or cut up prior to being more closely worked, that idea can probably be rejected. That leaves us with the archaeologist’s catch-all explanation for anything he can’t understand: ‘ritual’, or religion, to use a non-jargon term. If we do decide to invoke religion as an explanation, we shouldn’t do so on negative grounds alone; it always helps if we can provide some positive evidence that supports the suggestion. And in the case of these peculiar ivory rods there is a positive suggestion, but it comes from an unexpected source.

In 1981 the anthropologist J.D. Lewis-Williams published a detailed study of the rock paintings of a southern African people known as the San.³¹ Like the communities of the Upper Palaeolithic, the San were hunters. Their realm was the Kalahari desert, and they lived in small, mobile groups of a few dozen people. Their houses were light and temporary, as befits a highly mobile lifestyle, and their religion was based around shamans and rock art. The San used ochre-painted rods, very similar to those from Paviland, in their religious ceremonies. This could just be coincidence, but the close similarity of the way that the two sets of people were organised and lived their lives does give it greater weight. The red colour of the ochre plainly recalls blood, and with it the symbolic expression of animal or human life-force. It goes without saying that the sight (and meaning) of blood was an everyday occurrence to a hunting people.

As for those three oddly-shaped, but beautifully made, bone spatulae, they’re unique in Britain, and probably in western Europe. The closest parallels for them are in Moravia, or the plains of Russia, where they occur in context dates of twenty-four to twenty thousand ago – precisely contemporary with the later use of Paviland Cave. So what are they? They may have been used to perform a useful purpose of some sort, but then the same can be said, for example, of the Christian paten and chalice – the platter and goblet used in the Eucharist. The workmanship employed on the spatulae is wholly exceptional, and if we compare them with similar items from contemporary sites on the Russian plain it’s possible to see links, for example, with highly stylised images of the female form.³² While not necessarily objects of veneration in their own right, these decorated spatulae could have been closely involved in religious ceremonies. It’s certainly very odd that three were found together. This would suggest deliberate disposal, or laying to rest after use, rather than casual loss in the normal course of daily life. As we will discover shortly, by this late time in the Paviland sequence we are drawing ever closer to the last great glacial maximum of eighteen thousand years ago, when conditions outside the cave were becoming extremely cold. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that some fairly strong incentive must have been required to tempt people so far north. As Professor Richard Bradley and others have shown,³³ certain places, and the stories attached to them, had extraordinary pulling power for people in the past – and of course in the present too: Lourdes springs immediately to mind.

I find in my own work in the East Anglian fens that the shape and form of the modern landscape can often mask patterns and landforms that would have been obvious in prehistory. In the fens this has been caused by the wholesale drainage of the past three centuries, which has lowered the land surface and shrunk peats, so that areas that were once high are now low, and vice versa. Something similar applies at Paviland Cave, which today sits just above the high-tide mark. In the Upper Palaeolithic the sea level was massively lower than it is today, when the waters of the Bristol Channel have inundated a broad coastal plain. But at low tide it’s still possible to stand on the floor of the drowned coastal plain and look up towards Goat’s Hole Cave, just as people would have done twenty-six thousand years ago. It’s a very striking and affecting sight; but more important than that, it’s a setting that accords well with the situation of comparable important places in the religious and mythological lives of people with shamanistic religions – people like the San.³⁴

There’s always a danger of delving into ethnographic and anthropological literature and doing a Little Jack Horner: inserting a thumb to select a plum, whilst ignoring less palatable fruit that doesn’t happen to fit with our ideas. This was the fatal flaw of many late-Victorian writers, who would assiduously comb through a vast range of anthropological writing, classical authors and travellers’ tales, selecting plums to bolster a particular theoretical view of the world. Sir James Frazer, one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, was guilty of this academic sin,³⁵ and today very similar things are done at the weirder extreme of so-called ‘alternative’ archaeology (the realm of ley lines, Atlantis, aliens, UFOs, etc.). If you pull a huge array of plums out of their original contexts it becomes easy to draw far-fetched conclusions, particularly with regard to things as imprecise as simple landscape features like lines of posts, or stones or pebbles. So the great ceremonial straight ‘roads’ on the high plains of southern Peru could be compared, for example, with Neolithic cursus monuments in lowland Europe (I shall have more to say about these later). It seems not to matter that each is taken out of context to ‘prove’ that ancient people were in regular contact over immense distances, or came from the same alien or extra-terrestrial source. To return to the earlier analogy, plums are being pulled out of two quite separate pies, whereas it’s the pies themselves that ought to be looked at.

To return to those ivory rods, it’s reasonable to seek illustrative parallels from a culture that is comparable in other respects to that at Paviland, but one should also be on the alert for other uses of rods in that culture – perhaps to support a temporary roof, or whatever.³⁶ More to the point, one should beware of drawing parallels that are too specific – and the use of ochre-stained rods within a ritual might well be such a case. Only time will tell. On the whole, it’s safer and ultimately wiser to seek broader parallels that might help explain why and how people chose to do different things. A good, and very relevant, example are the criteria that lie behind the selection of special places by recent societies that practised shamanistic religion. That might help explain why Goat’s Hole Cave was selected for special treatment. This takes us back to the low-tide mark at Paviland.

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.

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.

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.⁴ 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,⁵ 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.⁶

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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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.¹² 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* – had been worked by humans.¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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 1962.¹⁷

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.¹⁸ 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).

John’s style of excavation was rather like that of Stephen Aldhouse-Green, somewhat more recently. Both are neat and extremely meticulous, and both make a point of recording everything they find three-dimensionally. This takes time and effort; it also only happens if the crew actually doing the work are happy and highly motivated – and that’s the real skill of a successful dig director: somehow he must keep people informed and enthusiastic, otherwise they won’t willingly do what he asks them.

The most important concentration of occupation debris at Thatcham was unearthed in an area known as Site III, where John had not expected to find much. Like the other settlement sites it was located on the edge of a slope which dipped down to reed beds along an edge of the river floodplain. In Mesolithic times it would have been on the edge of a large lake. The area in question was actually a shallow dip when seen from the surface, and John had quite reasonably expected to find better evidence for settlement on the drier humps than in the damper hollows. But in this case his guess was wrong, which, paradoxically, is why he is such a good field archaeologist. A lesser man would only have put trenches where he expected to make discoveries. A good archaeologist, however, is always aware that he must break the mould, destroy the predictable chains of reasoning.

Like other sites at Thatcham, Site III was dug by yard (metre) squares, and flints were recorded to the appropriate square. As the crew worked they were amazed by the density of flints they found: sometimes as many as two to three hundred per square, and in one extraordinary instance a massive 764. In amongst the flints were numerous burnt pebbles, burnt and unburnt bones, burnt hazelnuts and spreads of charcoal, clear evidence for hearths or fires – and indeed for food, both meat and nuts. This was clearly a domestic site, and clearly too it had been occupied more than once, because some of the flints showed signs of having been worked twice. The sheer quantity of material also indicated repeated use of the place.

There were also some areas of Site III where there were low densities of flints. If we plot the densities at Site III, we notice that there’s an area near the centre of the site which is relatively free from flints and surrounded also by hearths. If one assumes that flint-working was an activity best carried out in the open (as we saw, for example, at Boxgrove), this could well have been a place where light structures were erected when people returned to the site. It measures about 6.5 by 5.5 metres, and has a floor area of some thirty-five square metres – large enough for a single family. In northern Europe there is evidence that early postglacial people made houses by bending birch saplings and covering them with hides. These are about the same size as the possible house-sized space at Thatcham.

It seems probable that more than one family occupied the ridge at Thatcham, and that, like other communities of the time, they were mobile. Their home-base was probably occupied in the summer months, and analysis of pollen shows it to have been positioned within birch woodland, on the edge of the lake.¹⁹ They hunted a variety of animals, including both native species of deer, and wild pig (a term I prefer to ‘wild boar’, which implies that all the animals are male) was particularly important.

Once in a while it happens that an archaeologist excavates a site and publishes a report in which he speculates about its date and function, then someone else comes along ten years later, with the improved techniques of the time, and proves him right or wrong. It happened to me a few years ago, and I was proved wrong – but in the nicest possible way.²⁰ It happened to John Wymer too – and of course he was proved right. Another spread of flint on the same ridge, but about two hundred metres to the north-west, was excavated in 1989.²¹ This revealed a pattern of sharp rises and falls in the density of flints found on the ancient surfaces, just as John had done, but the excavators now had available the newer technique of microwear, or use-wear, analysis. Essentially this is a way of examining microscopic damage to the scraping and cutting edges of flint tools, but it requires flints from sealed contexts, such as Thatcham (where the occupation levels were covered by a layer of peat), otherwise it’s hard to discount the ‘noise’ caused by more recent, post-depositional effects, such as plough damage.

The technique relies on the controlled experimental ‘use’ of flints, which are then examined, and the results compared with the ancient material. The microscopic edge-damage found at kill or butchery sites is very characteristic and includes, as one might expect, evidence for percussion and harsh damage, when joints are severed and bones are broken. There will also be arrowheads and projectile points at such sites. A domestic site – a home-base, in other words – produces a far more diverse pattern of edge-wear. The heavy-duty percussive damage tends to be lacking, as are quantities of arrowheads, and there are more signs of scraping hides and sinews, and of cutting soft materials, such as vegetable matter. The range of flint implements found at Thatcham, and the edge-wear revealed in the microwear analyses, showed that it had indeed been a domestic site. John had been right: it was a true home-base.

It cannot have escaped attention that up till now I have been writing about Britain alone – as if Ireland was floating out over the horizon, miles away in the Atlantic. Of course it wasn’t, but neither was it inhabited by human beings in the Ice Age, with the possible exception of the odd visitor or two at the close of the Lower Palaeolithic.²² For practical purposes Ireland’s earliest Stone Age was the Mesolithic. It is a very well-preserved Mesolithic, with some fascinating stories to tell.

I have a soft spot for Ireland and the Irish. My mother came from an old Anglo-Irish family who went to Ireland in the sixteenth century, essentially as English mercenaries to fight in the Desmond Wars of County Wexford. They built a moated tower house, Huntington Castle, on the borders of Counties Wexford and Carlow in 1625, and are living there to this day. My grandmother, Nora Robertson, wrote a wonderful account of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy which I keep by my bed and dip into regularly.²³ I have never had the privilege of excavating in Ireland, but I would love to do a dig there one day.

It is well known that Ireland has a long tradition of close relations with the United States, and this extends to archaeology, too. I remember when I worked at the Royal Ontario Museum in the early 1970s being recommended to read the reports of the Harvard University Irish Project of the 1930s. Not only were these a model of how to do good field archaeology, but they were published promptly and in sources that were readily accessible to the ‘natives’, and in a language that they could understand. This was in contrast to what was going on elsewhere in the world, especially in the Near East, Western Asia and South America. I can imagine how indignant I’d feel if the standard reference work on the archaeology of East Anglia was published in Russian.

Ireland was cut off from the rest of Britain by rising sea levels at some time around 7500 BC. Thereafter anyone wishing to settle in what we still assume was an uninhabited island had to come by way of a short sea crossing. Actual physical evidence for Earlier Mesolithic boats has yet to be found in Britain, but dug-out, canoe-style logboats have been found in Denmark,²⁴ and possible logboats of the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition period are known in Britain.²⁵ These are generally too rigid and inflexible for long sea-crossings, unless fitted with outriggers or double hulls, and would more likely have plied inland waterways such as Lake Flixton (a possible paddle was found at Star Carr). We also know from rock carvings in Scandinavia and elsewhere that skin-covered craft existed in prehistory. These would have been similar to the curraghs that I remember seeing bobbing about in the Atlantic surf off County Galway as a boy. Such vessels could perfectly well have crossed the narrow channel separating Britain from Ireland in the mid-eighth millennium BC.

For a long time the version of the Irish Mesolithic established by the Harvard expeditions of the 1930s held sway, but then a young archaeologist working close to the river Bann, in County Antrim, changed all that. Peter Woodman’s discoveries at Mount Sandel, a settlement on a thirty-metre-high bluff or sandy bank alongside the river, showed that the gap that separated the world of the hunter/gatherers and the very first (Neolithic) farmers was by no means as wide as we used to believe. He has also helped to fill in that central void at Thatcham – the one surrounded by hearths and huge numbers of flints. I remember well when the first pictures of his dig appeared in the archaeological literature. I couldn’t believe my eyes: his meticulous excavations had revealed the clearest evidence possible for lightweight, tent-like houses built by these hunters of the Later Mesolithic.

The site has been dated by radiocarbon to about 6500 BC, so it’s significantly later than Thatcham or Star Carr, but in many respects it’s quite similar.²⁶ It’s positioned near water in woods of birch and hazel, but unlike either English site, Peter Woodman’s excavations produced huge quantities of fishbones, of which salmon and sea trout were by far the commonest. This gives us an important clue as to the time of year the site would have been occupied. Both fish are migratory, and enter rivers from the sea to spawn in summer and autumn. It seems most probable that this was when the site was occupied. We don’t know where the occupants went for the rest of the year, although the seaside is a possibility. Other evidence shows that their food was not confined to these very delicious fish; they also ate eel, wild pig, various birds including game birds, and hazelnuts. I can think of worse diets.

Mount Sandel is principally famous for its lightweight houses, which are still, I believe, the oldest proven domestic structures in the British Isles. There were two types. Six examples of the first type were found. It consists of a roughly circular or oval arrangement of angled stake- or post-holes, plus a doorway; sometimes there’s also evidence for a central hearth. The house was probably built from curved or hooped poles covered with hides, and the average size was just over five metres across, giving a floor area of about thirty square metres, which is broadly comparable with the ‘void’ area at Thatcham.

The second type of house was more tent-like, and about half the size of the hooped pole structures. It consists of four banana-shaped, shallow ditches or gullies arranged in a rough circle. Presumably these were dug to take the run-off of water from a tent-like structure. There’s no evidence for post-holes, so we must assume the framework didn’t need to be securely anchored, being structurally stable and able to shed all but the severest of gales. In this instance the hearth was positioned outside, but opposite, the entranceway.

Both styles of structure are lightweight and appropriate to people whose pattern of life requires movement through the landscape. Can we call them houses? I don’t see why not. A house is where people choose to live. As soon as we start to talk about ‘huts’ – or worse, ‘shacks’ – we do these buildings a disservice. The small structure within the four gullies at Mount Sandel is undoubtedly a tent-house, the other is a house, albeit a lightweight one. I strongly dislike the term ‘hut’, which I see in the archaeological literature far too often. Huts are for wheelbarrows and garden tools, not for people.

We’ve looked at Mesolithic settlements in England and Ireland, but what was happening further north, in Scotland – was it too cold for settlement in postglacial times? The answer is that it wasn’t; Scotland has produced plentiful evidence of life in the period. One of the most revealing sites was excavated by John Coles, who lectured to me on the Palaeolithic at Cambridge and co-authored the standard textbook of the day.²⁷ He also lectured on the European Bronze Age, and a few years later co-authored another standard work.²⁸ At the time he was busily engaged in experimental archaeology, and was dipping his toes into the waters of wetland archaeology, which posterity will probably judge to have been his major contribution. So he’s a man of many parts, which is perhaps why he was invited to take over an existing Mesolithic excavation at Morton, in the Kingdom of Fife, in 1967. The main dig took place in 1969 and 1970.²⁹

I should perhaps note here that we still know of no evidence for postglacial occupation in Scotland before about 9000 BC. To the best of my knowledge the earliest site on the mainland is currently Cramond, near Edinburgh, which has produced radiocarbon dates from hazelnut shells to around 8500 BC.³⁰ This is remarkably early, given the fact that it is generally agreed that most of Scotland would still have been uninhabitable before around 9600 BC.

Like most other Mesolithic sites, Morton shows clear evidence for more than one episode of occupation, and there are at least two centres of interest, which are known as Sites A and B. Today these are located a short distance inland, but in the fifth millennium BC they would have been very close to the shoreline. Radiocarbon dates indicate the sites were occupied three or four centuries before 4000 BC. So we are now approaching the end of the Mesolithic in this particular part of Scotland. Elsewhere in Britain some formerly Mesolithic communities will already have started to adopt the techniques of farming – to become in effect Neolithic.

Morton isn’t far from St Andrews, the home of golf, and the countryside round about reflects this, being gentle and undulating. In the fifth millennium BC the area was cloaked in open oak woodland (with elm) and an under-storey of hazel. These woods probably didn’t extend right down to the shoreline, which is where we find our two areas of occupation.

I hesitate to call both Sites A and B settlements, because Site B was very specialised, being in effect a huge dump or midden – a mound no less – of seashells. Mesolithic shell midden mounds are found in many places around the coasts of Britain and Ireland, but the shores of Scotland and the Western Isles boast some of the largest. Some are massive: substantial hillocks you could build a small bungalow on. They demonstrate, among other things, that shellfish were a highly important part of the seasonal round. The shells of shellfish such as the common cockle grow at varying rates at different times of year, in response to a variety of factors including air/water temperature and the salinity of the seawater. Using the information encoded within the shells at Morton, Margaret Deith of Cambridge University was able to demonstrate that a high proportion of them had been harvested high on the beach, and that no particular season seems to have been favoured.³¹ If anything, wintertime, when the meat of cockles is less nutritious than in summer, was the most popular period for visiting Morton beach.

The impression gained is of opportunistic visits, the way one ‘grabs a bite’ whilst busily engaged in something else – at Morton this may have been the collection of suitable beach pebbles from which to fashion implements. The midden did however show clear signs that small temporary squats or camps had been scooped into it, perhaps as refuges from the worst of the wind. The surviving mound of shells was large, gently curving, and about thirty by 3.5 metres; its maximum thickness was 0.78 metres. At one point John Coles was able to identify a succession of five scoops or hollows which were floored with an occupation deposit – essentially crushed shells and an organic ‘dark earth’ – and showed clear signs of human use, including ‘bashed lumps’, stones that had been roughly hit to provide usable cutting edges and sharp points. But the signs of settlement on the midden were far less intensive than at Site A, about 150 metres to the south. The midden produced just 372 stone artefacts – compared with over thirteen thousand on Site A – and large quantities of fish and mammal bones, including red and roe deer, wild cattle and pig. By way of numerical compensation, it was composed of some ten million shells.

Why did these vast mounds of shells accumulate? The beach is a very hostile environment, lashed by winds, waves and storms. Heaps of shells wouldn’t last for long unless (a) they were carefully positioned to be out of the reach of storms and tides, and (b) people wanted them to build up, and took pains to see that they grew every season. I think it’s absurd to suggest that these great mounds were simply piles of rubbish, and had no other role. In any case, if a site was seen merely as being suitable for disposing of food refuse, it would surely not be regarded as appropriate for settlement, as happened at Morton, however short-lived. It seems to me that these great middens also served a symbolic role – perhaps marking out the position of a particular band’s stretch of beach – in some respects rather like the similarly-shaped long barrows of the Neolithic, which I’ll discuss in Chapter 8. If this idea has any validity at all, it knocks on the head the idea that Mesolithic people didn’t construct, or understand, monuments and the symbolism lying behind them. Traditionally the introduction of monuments has been regarded as a strictly Neolithic innovation, but a few hints are beginning to emerge that it was never quite as straightforward as that. As we will see, some very strange things indeed were happening in the area that was to become the Stonehenge car park. But more on this later.

Site A at Morton didn’t produce evidence for lightweight houses, or spaces for them, as convincing as Mount Sandel or Thatcham. Post-holes, even decayed fragments of wood, did survive, but were never arranged in patterns that suggested any sort of permanence. They more resembled windbreaks, or temporary shelters over sleeping places, than dwellings as such.

Bones from Morton revealed that cod, and even sturgeon, were eaten, but the size of these bones suggests that they were caught offshore (what my local fishmonger flags up as ‘long shore cod’), most probably from skin boats. Birds were also taken, including guillemot, gannet and cormorant, which nest on cliffs nearby and can be caught in the spring by an intrepid, or hungry, climber.

Morton wasn’t a permanent settlement or a home-base. It was a place visited at several times of the year by a mobile band of hunters whose home-base was probably not far distant. Although visited episodically, it gives us an impression of stability: it would have been familiar to the people who used it, part of the seasonal round. Maybe on certain visits, perhaps to collect suitable stone for making tools, only a few people came, possibly for a day and a night, stopping over in temporary shelters on the midden. They would have recognised the little headland and its accompanying inlet as ‘theirs’, and would have been well aware of why they were there. The landscape was becoming sufficiently populated for people to carry clear maps within their heads. The slow process of dividing up Britain was beginning to gather momentum. Soon it would become an irresistible force.

This brings me to the question of population in the Mesolithic period. It will, of course, always be difficult to estimate prehistoric populations, simply because the basic data – the sites and finds – which one has to use are constantly changing. This does not mean that one shouldn’t make the effort. One particularly well-thought-out attempt to chart population trends in postglacial Britain (excluding Ireland) was made by Christopher Smith in 1992.³² He based his calculations not on individual sites, but on the evidence provided by ten-by-ten-kilometre squares, reasoning that in highly mobile societies simply counting sites was probably going to involve a great deal of replication and distortion, because the same band of people would have occupied more than one in a single season, while an area as large as a hundred square kilometres would probably contain all the seasonal stopping-off points of a single group. It may be easy to suggest pitfalls in this hypothesis, but then, it’s very much harder to come up with anything better. So I’m happy to stay with it.

Smith’s paper was principally concerned with the rate at which population growth happened. He notes a steadily rising British population in the centuries before the Loch Lomond cold episode, then retreat, followed by growth leading to rapid growth thereafter. By 5000 BC he believes growth slowed down or ceased – only to pick up again, as we will shortly see, in the subsequent Neolithic period. He steers clear of actual numbers, but does commit himself to some broad estimates: 1100 to 1200 people at 9000 BC; 1200 to 2400 by 8000 BC. Then there was a period of rapid growth, leading to an estimate of 2500 to five thousand people by 7000 BC. By the end of the period (approximately 5000 BC) the range was 2750 to 5500.³³

Smith used material he assembled for his Late Stone Age Hunters of the British Isles for his paper on population, which was published in the same year (1992). As we noted earlier, in this book he stayed clear of the more usual flinty typological approach to the subject, and instead viewed the people of the Mesolithic for what they were, namely hunters. As time passed they seem to have become somewhat less mobile, and the territories each band controlled became progressively smaller – as, for example, at Morton. Perhaps this more sedentary way of life was accompanied by a slightly greater reliance on gathered and stored vegetable foods, such as hazelnuts. It’s remarkable how productive a large stand of hazelnut bushes can be.* I imagine it would not be difficult, in an unrestricted area of mature woodland, for a group of people working full-time in the autumn to fill the equivalent of several wheelbarrows with hazelnuts, which could then be stored above or below ground, in pits.

I concluded the previous chapter with Clive Gamble’s thoughts on the nature and structure of Palaeolithic society. How did British society change in the Mesolithic? The consensus of opinion would suggest that structurally it altered very little.³⁴ Certainly the population grew, and grew quite quickly, but there was plenty of country to absorb this expansion. In other words, people didn’t live in such close proximity that disputes and rivalry for scarce resources could give rise to social competition, which might in turn lead to the development of more formally organised, hierarchical communities.

It has been suggested that one of the signs that societies have moved beyond the simple group or band level of organisation is the appearance of cemeteries, which start to appear in the Late Mesolithic right across northern Europe, including the Baltic and Scandinavia. Cemeteries might also be taken to indicate sedentism, as they would make little sense in a highly mobile world. But for some reason they don’t appear in Britain at this time.

There are three possible reasons for this. The most obvious is that communication across the ever-wetter North Sea basin was becoming more difficult, and after 7000 BC it effectively became impossible without a sea-going boat. It could also be argued that the British Mesolithic patterns of life were admirably suited to islands with a long and intricate coastline. Societies had to remain mobile in order to exploit the seasonally available marine and land-based sources of food properly. So why change? Indeed, in coastal areas of Scotland and Ireland this pattern of living was so successful that an essentially Mesolithic way of life continued pretty well unaltered until as late as 3000 BC.³⁵ A third explanation, which I suspect might turn out to be the true one, is that we haven’t yet struck lucky. On the mainland of Europe, Mesolithic cemeteries tend to occur outside the areas of settlement, as indicated by scatters of flints on the ground surface. To date in Britain we’ve tended only to excavate the ground beneath flint scatters, because we know there will be something to reveal there. I think it will take an accident, or a chance find of some sort, to reveal the first hunter/gatherer cemetery.

A fine example of the developing insularity of Britain is provided by the flint implements of the time. The main series of British microliths becomes ever more reduced as time passes, and there are many types which are unique to Britain, and not commonly encountered on the mainland of Europe. As Christopher Smith remarks, ‘The initiation of the technique of making geometric microliths on narrow blades may mark the last input, of people or ideas, to Britain from the Continent until the initiation of farming over three thousand years later.’³⁶

But in Ireland during the Later Mesolithic we encounter a tradition of flint implements that goes against the trend of miniaturisation entirely. These large tools, known as ‘Bann flakes’, are characteristic of so-called Larnian industries in Ireland. There’s no reason not to suppose that they were very efficient at what they were intended to do: they are made using a specialised technique of direct percussion with a hard stone hammer on a specially prepared core, and have trimmed-up indentations near the base, presumably to make mounting onto a shaft easier. But the fact remains that they fly in the face of what was happening to flint industries outside Ireland.

But why was this? The answer has to be: insularity. Ireland was separated from Britain for a sufficient length of time to allow differences to develop between the types of animals that lived on each island. Red deer, for example, had to be introduced to Ireland from England – and then of course there are those snakes that St Patrick is meant to have banished. We have seen that Ireland had to be colonised, or possibly recolonised, by boat; and as time passed the channel between Britain and Ireland grew progressively wider – in effect it developed from a strait into a sea. The Irish, as they have always done, set about solving the technological problems that confronted them in their own manner, and the result was the unique ‘Bann flake’.

In the next chapter I shall briefly describe the processes whereby Britain physically became an island. But this is a book about people, not geomorphology, and I will leave the final words on what Britain’s newly acquired insular status was to mean to the development of British society in general to someone else. They’re by Christopher Smith, whose ideas have contributed much to this chapter on the Mesolithic, and to my mind they express a recurrent theme of British history and prehistory: ‘It is characteristic of societies in large islands that have substantial populations isolated from other groups that they develop rather idiosyncratic responses to social, economic and technological issues.’

That, surely, is the story of Britain and Ireland in a nutshell.

CHAPTER FIVE DNA and the Adoption of Farming

LIKE MANY CHILDREN, I adored dinosaurs, and by the time I reached the grand old age of sixteen this fascination had evolved into a growing interest in marine biology. I don’t know why this was, because it isn’t an interest that has lasted – maybe it simply reflected the fact that I enjoyed fishing when we went to Ireland for our summer holidays. Anyhow, by great good fortune I discovered that a teacher at school was planning a trip for teams of two boys each to join the crew of a deep-sea trawler out of Grimsby, and take pot luck: some would go to the fishing grounds of north Norway and the White Sea, others would fetch up somewhere off north-east Iceland. I was assigned a berth in a ship heading for the latter.

I remember the day I arrived at the Fish Quay. It was cold, wet and windy. The sea looked rough and the crew were rough, although later I was to learn that theirs was the hardest life going, and you had to be tough just to survive. I also learned not to judge people by their appearance. The cook, an enormous Pole who had worked in the coalmines of his native country, and then as a lumberjack in Canada, had an abiding interest in Chopin, and could fry the best fresh plaice it was possible to eat.

It was April, and as soon as we left the protection of the harbour we hit the north-easterly spring gales of the North Sea. The trip lasted three weeks, and I have never been so cold and sick as I was for the four days it took to acquire my sea legs. The two weeks we spent in the Iceland fishing grounds were largely remarkable for the activities of two Icelandic World War II Catalina flying boats that tried to stop us fishing inside their self-declared twelve-mile limit. Whenever it was stormy, we painted out our identification numbers with fuel oil and went well inside all existing limits, while the Catalinas circled overhead like frustrated gannets.

At night the fishing grounds were a floating city of a thousand disembodied lights that stretched between the invisible horizons. There were hundreds of trawlers from all European nations, and massive Russian factory ships. Even the crew of our ship, some of whom stood to lose their jobs if the ‘Cod War’ went Iceland’s way, admitted that it was absurd, and couldn’t continue for long. On our way back I felt excited and hugely invigorated by my first experience of an undiluted adult world. Just outside the Humber Estuary we hit a storm, and perhaps because the sea is relatively shallow there, we had to contend with waves as high as the vessel’s bridge. I didn’t know it then, but had we been at that precise spot just before Star Carr and Thatcham, around say 8000 BC, we wouldn’t have needed a ship. We’d have been on foot, standing on dry land, and perhaps looking anxiously towards the storm raging around the North Sea coast some ten miles to the north.

When I first learned about the relatively recent formation of the southern North Sea I was incredulous – partly, I suppose, because of my trawler experience. How on earth, I wondered, could something as huge, grey and brooding as the North Sea just swamp dry land and swallow it up forever? Even now my head accepts the fact, but something deep inside me retains irrational doubts. Today we have hard and fast proof of the relatively recent advance southwards of the North Sea, in the form of offshore borehole records and other scientific data.

A recent paper by a team assembled by Professor Ian Shennan of the Department of Geography at Durham University has collated all this information with some sophisticated computer wizardry, and produced a sequence of authoritative – I hesitate to say definitive – maps showing how and when the process of inundation happened.¹

The root cause of the sea’s triumph over land is ultimately the rise in sea level consequent upon postglacial warming, but there are many other factors that Ian, his team and their computers have had to contend with. For example, as the burden of ice was removed, the land beneath tended to rise, thereby counteracting some of the effects of increasing sea level. It was like taking one’s finger off a cork in a glass of water: it (the land) bobbed up. But this bounce-back, or to use the correct term, this ‘isostatic recovery’, was not a universal or even a homogeneous effect: in some places it didn’t happen at all, whereas in others the land actually began to sink.

So the relationship of land to sea level is by no means a simple picture, and as we will see, its consequences in human terms, too, were to prove far from predictable. This is because these important developments in the shrinking geography of the north-western European Plain coincided with what was to be a hugely significant long-term change in the way people gained their livelihoods, after which our world would never be the same again.

Archaeology is the study of past human societies from artefacts and other material remains found in or on the ground. But it’s also rather more than that: it is profoundly concerned with the processes of cultural change. We must now confront what has always been considered one of the biggest changes in human history, namely the switch from food acquisition, in the form of hunting, fishing and gathering, to food production, in the form of arable farming and animal husbandry.² With hindsight – of course something fundamental to archaeology – this switch looks more dramatic than in fact it was. Its consequences were indeed revolutionary, but the original processes of change probably weren’t. In fact, they were remarkably gradual. This confusion between cause and effect, plus an imperfect appreciation of the timescale involved, has led archaeologists in the past to view the period of the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition as somehow special, and even traumatic to people living at the time. Personally, I doubt this.

The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers belonged to the Middle Stone Age, and the farmers to the Neolithic or New Stone Age. It is important not to lose sight, however, of the lithic, the ‘Stone Age’ suffix of their labels. To my mind both were the same Stone Age people whose roots lay back in the Upper Palaeolithic, at sites like Paviland or Gough’s Caves. The fact that they decided to adopt the techniques of farming did not make them culturally different – at least not at first. What it did do was allow them to populate the landscape far more densely, because farming is a vastly more efficient means of producing food calories than hunting or gathering.³ It allows many more people to live in the landscape, and that in turn means that communities have to live alongside each other. So they must find ways of settling disputes, coping with individual and tribal rivalries, moving goods, animals and people, and dealing with the emergence of what later we would recognise as politics.

All of these social transformations took time: from the beginning to the end of the process, right across Britain, it took centuries – as long as two millennia before the farthest-flung areas acquired a fully Neolithic lifestyle. Despite what some earlier authors would have had us believe, the arrival of farming was not the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.⁴ It was certainly not comparable with the Industrial or Agricultural Revolutions of recent times, which happened rapidly and had immediate as well as long-term effects. It was a process of change, not a revolution.

Let’s examine what was probably going on as the waters of the North Sea spread relentlessly south. To do this I must return to the decks of the trawler in the North Sea that opened this chapter. That trawler was built in 1954, and was powered by a marine-oil engine. It was noisy and smelly, but it was powerful, capable of hauling a large trawl through high seas. But until quite recently, trawlers that worked closer to the shore than my ship from Grimsby were not powered at all. One such vessel was the sailing trawler Colinda.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.