This leaves the important but controversial question of where the Neolithic peoples of the Atlantic coast, and of western Europe in general, came from, assuming they came from anywhere and were not just the descendants of the old Mesolithic inhabitants who had learned new skills as these skills filtered from one community to another and, higgledy-piggledy, were copied by the existing population. The easiest way out of this dilemma, but also without doubt the most accurate answer, is that both answers are correct in different measure and in different places at different times.19 One could hardly expect all the communities that had developed along the coastline from Iberia to Scotland by the late Mesolithic age, say 8000 BC, to have responded in an identical way to the arrival of farming, for each of these communities exploited different resources in the sea, in the rivers and along the edges of the forests. One case, at first sight surprising but in fact only to be expected, is the shift in diet that took place in Brittany as the Mesolithic faded into the Neolithic around 4000 BC. The people of Hoëdic, which has been mentioned earlier, lost much of their interest in seafood and seabirds, which would have left a strong signature in their skeletons, and became fashionably Neolithic in their preference for grain, dairy products, meat and other non-marine products. It is possible that these areas had been taken over by migrants from the interior, which would explain their lack of interest in the sea.20
Even if these early Bretons were less interested in the harvests of the sea, they may still have been keen to cross the sea, either to settle other lands or to acquire objects they could not obtain or produce locally. The great triangle of Brittany, standing in the way of direct passage by sea from south-western France to the English Channel, looked in several directions. In the sixth to fourth millennia BC sea contact along this coast becomes visible to archaeologists, who would not exclude the strong probability that this is the second or third chapter in a story of maritime connections that began in the Middle Stone Age, or even in the late Palaeolithic. A marvellous example of Breton links across the sea is provided by a small passage tomb in Scotland from around 4000 BC; these passage tombs, entered by a corridor and lined with stone, are characteristic of the ‘megalithic’ culture that will be discussed shortly. It is located at Achnacreebeag, on the west coast not far from Oban. Its most remarkable feature is that it contained pottery at a time when the art of pottery was unknown in Scotland. The pots found in the tomb are from Brittany and Lower Normandy, and they were carried at some point across the open sea, most probably up the Irish Sea directly to western Scotland, since a few fragments of similar pottery have turned up in north-eastern Ireland. Among the scenarios that archaeologists then envisage is the movement of a small group of Bretons around 4000 BC, just when tombs of this type were becoming fashionable in Brittany.21 Some of these Bretons reached as far as Scotland, others, whether at the same time or earlier and later, made their landfall in Ireland, passing also through Cornwall, Wales and the Isle of Man, all of which were inhabited by people using similar ‘Tardenoisian’ flint tools as early as the Mesolithic period.22
Meanwhile, objects from Iberia turned up in Brittany and were buried alongside its inhabitants.23 While they may have filtered up the coast of France overland, it is clear that early Neolithic travellers possessed the knowhow to cross tracts of the Atlantic Ocean: if Bretons could reach Scotland by sea, they could reach Spain. And Spain stands at the centre of a bigger argument about Neolithic culture, the debate about the megaliths.24 The origins of the large stone structures found along the coast of Spain and Portugal, as well as inland, and in great numbers in Brittany, not to mention northern France and parts of Britain, have long been debated. They are best described as large stone structures rather than structures made of large stones, as not all the stones used were mega, or ‘large’.25 The most famous of these structures, Stonehenge, is far from the sea; however, even setting aside the more bizarre arguments about its use as a Neolithic computer, this and other Neolithic structures reveal a knowledge of the heavens that was surely exploited by sailors as well as the priests and rulers of Late Stone Age southern England.
Most of the structures are classed as graves, though whether they really were that, or just that, is a complex issue. The traditional assumption has been that two distinctive types of tomb appeared over large areas of Atlantic Europe during the Neolithic period: the passage grave, which consisted of a corridor leading into an often circular inner chamber, all carefully constructed out of large blocks of stone; and the gallery grave, which lacked the inner chamber but was once again built of stone and often covered over with earth. Elaborate theories were built on the argument that they represented different cultural streams. Modern dating using Carbon 14 and other methods established that the earliest passage graves so far identified are to be found in Brittany, and go back to the fifth millennium BC. On the other hand, a series of passage graves from southern Spain were built about a millennium later.26 This style of funerary architecture was not a passing fancy; passage graves were constructed in northern Scotland, in northern, central and south-eastern Ireland, in Brittany and along the coast south from there; and all around the Iberian coast from Galicia to southern Spain; but they also appeared in Denmark and northern Germany, with 7,000 identified in Denmark alone, maybe one third of the number in existence 4,500 years ago.27 They range in date from 4800 BC to 2300 BC, and none can be found more than 300 kilometres from the Atlantic or North Sea coasts.28 But they did not all develop at the same time, and they originated in different places in different ways – in Great Britain the custom around 4000 BC was to build unchambered long barrows, still a feature of the British landscape; and these developed into passage graves later. Meanwhile the Bretons constructed grander graves ahead of everyone else. To say that knowledge of these Breton monuments influenced the architecture of passage graves in England or Iberia is not the same thing as claiming that the same people, of the same ancestry and language, built all these monuments. There is general agreement that different places developed this style of monument independently, with Brittany coming first, and once the megaliths were a common feature of the landscape along the shores of western Europe, different communities copied details of the design and structure from one another, to make their own monuments more perfect.29
When speaking of perfection, the megalithic settlement at Skara Brae in Orkney has a special claim to attention. This is not just because it, and above all the passage grave at Maes Howe, is very well preserved; it also sits in the midst of other important Neolithic sites from the period 3600–2100 BC. The first Neolithic settlers on Orkney (assuming they were not descended from Mesolithic predecessors) arrived from the facing shore of Scotland around 3600 BC with their animals – cattle, sheep and deer – and took advantage of the excellent fishing to be had around the islands.30 There were very many deer on the Orkney island of Westray, and it is possible they were herded rather than allowed to run completely wild. Catching birds and collecting birds’ eggs was another way of ensuring a high-protein diet. The consumption of shellfish, as elsewhere along the Atlantic coast of Europe, was prodigious. The predominance of limpet shells can be interpreted in several ways. Since this is a low-nutrition shellfish, reliance on limpets could indicate that during periods of shortage or famine the islanders relied on this second-class food. Or they may have been used as fish bait, a practice that has not disappeared from the area. The fish the islanders caught was probably used not just for human consumption but to produce fish meal, of the sort already encountered in the Indian Ocean; and this would be fed to animals.31
This style of life was very stable and lasted for maybe half a millennium. The islanders’ use of stone slabs, easily obtained, to construct their houses means that there are some truly remarkable archaeological sites on Orkney, which offer a very clear idea of how their occupants lived; for once, it is possible to move beyond evidence about how people disposed of the dead and to gain an intimate idea of how they lived from day to day. Half a dozen or more ston
e houses, sunk a little into the earth, were constructed at Skara Brae on the main island, and fitted out with stone cupboards and shelving, most likely box beds, benches and hearths, and even what has been described as a dresser, which may have served as a display cabinet, one of whose functions was to impress visitors. Storage boxes were let into the floor – one contained beads, pendants, pins and a dish containing red pigment made out of one of the vertebrae of a whale. These houses formed a compact group, linked by semi-subterranean passages.32 Another structure at Skara Brae was evidently a workshop, where flints were knapped using sophisticated techniques that involved the heating of the chert out of which stone tools were manufactured.33
The inhabitants of the Orkney archipelago lived in small communities scattered across the islands, and apparently obtained enough food and raw materials to meet their needs. Many mysteries about their social and religious life remain. One puzzle is why their chambered tombs so often contain vast amounts of human bone from disarticulated skeletons, but many bones are missing: at Isbister there were many foot bones but few hand bones, and plenty of skulls. Bodies were allowed to decompose and then the bones were collected and redistributed. This suggests the existence of elaborate rituals in which bones were rearranged – perhaps a moderately efficient sorting process so that individual chamber tombs specialized in particular parts of the body. This surely demonstrates that the tombs were not places for the long-term burial of individuals but were seen rather as part of a single greater funerary monument that stretched across an entire island and in some sense embodied the spirit of the island.
The houses at Skara Brae are remarkable enough, but the chamber tomb at Maes Howe has been described as ‘one of the supreme achievements of Neolithic Europe’. It even left a bizarre impression on the Vikings, who covered the walls with runic inscriptions thousands of years later, and mentioned it in the Orkneyinga Saga: ‘during a snowstorm Earl Harald and his men took shelter in Maes Howe and there two of them went insane’.34 The quality of the craftsmanship was exceptional: stones were neatly fitted together and were carefully dressed to create flat surfaces in the low corridor leading to the core of the monument, as also in the central ‘hall’, even though some of the stones used to line the walls weighed as much as three tons.35 The islanders were learned in astronomy, and carefully aligned the monument at Maes Howe with the solstices, indicating that sun and moon rituals were conducted here. This was not unusual – one of the greatest megalithic monuments, New Grange in Ireland, was similarly aligned, and the decoration on its stones matches that at Maes Howe, so connections between Orkney and Ireland must have been close, with regular visits to Ireland by Orcadians.36 The Orkney archipelago provides inherent evidence for the use of the sea passages by Neolithic navigators: they crossed the sea to arrive there in the first place, and all the evidence suggests that they prospered, despite living on what is not the most welcoming climate in Britain. More than that, Orkney, when compared with Ireland and elsewhere, provides evidence for cultural contact between communities separated by the sea – not just art but ritual was shared between communities. The communities on these islands were reasonably self-sufficient, but they did not become cut off from the outside world.
Away from Orkney we depend on the evidence from tombs, or structures that at first sight appear to be tombs. That gallery and passage graves became a widespread fashion is not in doubt, but what caused this change in burial practices is far from clear. Archaeologists were tempted to compare evidence from the eastern Mediterranean (some of it actually much later, but dating methods have taken time to improve); they then concluded that the practice spread from the east by way of Malta, Sardinia and the Balearic Islands, each of which has its own impressive stone monuments. It was also tempting to link this to the cult of the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother who may well have been worshipped in the great stone temples of Malta around 4000 BC.37 Admittedly, the great stone towers, or nuraghi, of Sardinia are much later, and a subtle distinction has resulted in the classification of the talayot, or prehistoric stone monuments, of Minorca and its neighbours as ‘cyclopean’ rather than ‘megalithic’; but it was easy to draw lines on a map showing how the megalithic culture of the Atlantic was diffused out of the Mediterranean towards Iberia, and then out of Iberia towards Brittany and the British Isles. British experts expressed polite differences of opinion with Spanish archaeologists, who, with a nationalist flourish, were determined to show that Galicia and northern Portugal were the obvious places to find the origins of the megalithic culture of Neolithic western Europe. However, the dates of the Spanish tombs were relatively late – the end of the fourth millennium BC for the very earliest. To be sure, the grave goods found in southern Spanish megalithic monuments show both Atlantic and Mediterranean influences; this was a place where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds converged.38
In the end, though, the old ‘diffusionist’ approach to Megalithic culture, arguing that it was spread by migrants from the Mediterranean, was abandoned even by its former champions such as Glyn Daniel, the Cambridge archaeologist who also did much to promote archaeology in the early days of television.39 Carbon 14 dating produced surprises and pushed the date of these monuments much further back in time, so it made no sense to see them as massively reduced imitations of the pyramids, not that it had ever made much sense to do so. Yet these differences of opinion converged at one point: the megalithic tombs were characteristic of the lands along the Atlantic seaboard. Moreover, they do share some features. Plaques inscribed with designs that seem to show boats, axes, snakes and undulating lines are found in several areas, so that similar snake designs were used in Galicia, Brittany and the Irish Channel, and there are similarities between snake patterns found carved on slabs in passage graves from Anglesey and patterns used by megalithic builders in Galicia, who were versatile builders, using carvings and paintings in their structures.40 Rather than showing that the megalithic tradition spread slowly out of the Mediterranean and into first southern and then northern Spain, all this suggests that there was a good amount of to-ing and fro-ing between Iberia, Brittany and Britain, so that the north-west corner of Spain, the north-west corner of France and the Irish Sea were linked by regular sea voyages. Brittany stood at the centre of this Atlantic world, and was more precocious in its use of this architecture than its maritime neighbours to north and south.
Were these monuments actually tombs? In some, no human remains have been found. But even when there is evidence of burial this does not mean the prime purpose of the megalithic mounds was to dispose of the dead with honour. They may also, or primarily, have been used to mark out territory at a time when a more settled Neolithic population was beginning to think of ownership of the land itself and not just (as in the Mesolithic era) the exploitation of its resources. This makes good sense because the coming of farming tied humans to the land in a way that did not apply to a hunter-gatherer society. These were small, localized societies, for there is no evidence of great power centres nor of large settlements similar to the towns that had emerged in the Middle East during the early Neolithic period. In such a fragmented society, subject to constant pressure as agriculture and pastoralism brought population increase, it was important to know who belonged where. Monuments to, and often containing the remains of, the ancestors of the leaders of the community acquired special importance. For this reason it made sense to raise large mounds over the chambers these people carefully constructed. Whether they stood at the edge of a territory, to mark out borders, or at the centre, to function as cult centres and hallowed places where the leaders of the community would announce important decisions, they were places for the living as well as for the dead. When no evidence can be found that they were used for burial, the likelihood still remains that they were built to commemorate ancestors, sometimes so distant in time that there were no bones to show for them; or sometimes the mounds may commemorate people lost at sea whose remains were simply not available for burial. Quite often, indeed, the
corridor was left open so people could come and go into the inner chamber.41 For us, they also open a door – one into the political world of these early Atlantic societies.
16
Swords and Ploughshares
I
The societies of the Neolithic Atlantic have left behind few signs of major changes during the second millennium BC. This was the period when great Bronze Age civilizations came into being in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East: Minoans, Mycenaeans and Hittites in Greece and Anatolia, not to mention the high civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia and the Indus Valley. The Atlantic fringes of Europe remained dependent on high-quality stone for tools, and consisted of village communities that did not compare in size and sophistication with the cities, palaces and temples of the East. Atlantic societies were not literate, although claims have been made that signs incised on pottery found in France consist of a rudimentary type of writing.1 Even the use of bronze did not greatly alter life in the Atlantic arc. Between about 1200 BC and about 900 BC bronze objects filtered into the coastal lands from the European hinterland, but the low level of finds of foreign goods from this period indicates that they came through gift exchange and were owned by members of the local elite, rather than being everyday commodities.2 The trade routes of Bronze Age Greece had reached no further west than Italy, though Mycenaean objects have occasionally surfaced in southern Spain, and very occasionally as far afield as the British Isles: a copper axe from Topsham in Devon has been identified as Mycenaean.3 Indeed, it would be surprising if some goods had not been handed on from place to place until they reached the Atlantic, by which time they would be seen as exotic curiosities from an unknown world. And then, as the Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean experienced severe crisis in the twelfth century BC, the opportunity to create links to their once prosperous lands was lost.
The Boundless Sea Page 42