f The first major cast-iron structure is the bridge across the Severn at Ironbridge, which opened in 1781.
g I discuss Blick Mead in Scene 4, pages 65–8.
Scene 1
Britain During the Ages of Ice (900,000–500,000 years ago)
Happisburgh – Pakefield – Boxgrove
Shoreline cliffs are the town walls of an island. Like the White Cliffs of Dover, they can come to symbolize a nation’s identity, yet they are strangely fragile: liable to collapse without warning. Their many layers record the passage of the millennia, but their massive monumentality can seem timeless. They are, however, geological features and as such they have obeyed the same physical laws that constrain the processes of soil growth, river valley sedimentation and erosion that are still shaping our world today. The principle that the past and present were governed by the same rules is known as uniformitarianism and it provides the basis for modern, science-based approaches to both geology and archaeology. It was initially worked out by the Scottish geologist James Hutton in the late eighteenth century and culminated in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, first published in 1830. This was to prove one of the most influential and important books on science of the nineteenth century – second only to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), which also had a lasting influence on the growth and development of archaeology.1
I have mentioned the early history of archaeology because I want to stress that it is more than just a technique for discovering exciting objects. In order to study the long eras before writing existed, the disciplines of archaeology and physical anthropology – using excavation, geological and geographic surveys, and other scientific analysis – are the only tools we possess if we want to understand the place and role of humans on this planet. And this applies just as much to the centuries leading up to the Roman conquest as to the two million or so years of the Ice Ages, when Britain was still an integral part of the European mainland and when the North Sea and English Channel had yet to form. The Ice Ages belong within the Pleistocene geological era, which ended around 10,000 BC when the climate grew warmer. The Pleistocene was followed by the Flandrian, or modern era, in which we are living today. Of course, we don’t know for certain, but the Flandrian may well be followed by another cold spell in the future – if, that is, the production of too much carbon by mankind doesn’t mess everything up.
In the earlier part of the twentieth century, archaeologists of these very early periods tended to view their sites as geological phenomena: there was massive attention to the most minute details of every layer in each cave. Inevitably, this approach became rather mechanistic: the people of prehistory (then popularly known as ‘cavemen’) were seen as predictable, behaving in certain ways as the climate and environment around them changed. But in the last fifty or so years, archaeological attitudes have become less prescriptive and we can now appreciate that Stone Age communities did far more than merely cope with their surroundings. These fresher approaches to the study of the remote past have in part been caused by some remarkable new discoveries, made not, as might be expected, in caves, but out in the open, where most Palaeolithic people lived out their lives.
Modern archaeology is a science-based humanity that sets out to reveal the way various communities interacted and how this in turn led to their rise, or decline. But you cannot do this simply by studying artefacts. You must also pay close attention to the landscapes where people lived: to changes in the local vegetation, forest cover, crops, livestock and diseases of humans and animals. Surprisingly, a place as geologically tranquil as Britain can be adversely affected by flooding, soil erosion and landslides – and even by cataclysmic events such as short-term climate change brought on by distant volcanic eruptions. It has recently been shown that Britain was seriously affected by a North Sea tsunami, around 6200 BC, just as she was becoming an island.2 These wider, explanatory goals help to explain why archaeologists today try to take the broadest view possible. So they always study their sites and monuments within a landscape setting, even when the questions that interest them are straightforward and direct. For example, I am frequently asked: when was Britain first settled by humans? To answer that, we must first point out that the British Isles are a recent creation (hastened by that tsunami I just mentioned). I then go on to explain that the earliest settlers occupied land that later, very much later, became the island of Britain. By this point, my listeners often start to look fidgety: this wasn’t the quick response they had expected. So let’s cut to the chase and return to those coastal cliffs, not all of which are so ancient, or so massive, as the well-known ones near Dover.
Norfolk is notorious for its place-name pronunciation: some say Hunstanton, others, ‘Hunston’; Garboldisham is often pronounced ‘Garbolsham’, but the craziest of them all is surely Happisburgh, known across Norfolk (and even into my part of Lincolnshire) as ‘Hazebrough’. Its weird pronunciation apart, Happisburgh is best known for its tall stone lighthouse, the earliest surviving in East Anglia, which was built in 1790. Today it is painted in wide red-and-white bands that can be seen for miles out at sea, and indeed inland. The village also boasts a superb medieval church – a classic East Anglian ‘wool church’ – which also stands out in the landscape and might explain why it was deliberately bombed in 1940.3 My wife, Maisie, and I often head along the north Norfolk coast in the winter, when the hordes of summer visitors and second-homers have retreated inland. This is when the coastal villages of north Norfolk return to the county that created them and local people can venture out onto the now empty coastal roads. In our experience, churches, beaches and coastal pubs are at their atmospheric best in these colder months.
The seaside towns and villages of East Anglia have a charm all of their own. I have a particular fondness for the cliffs at the little village of Dunwich, in Suffolk, with their thick woods that allow tantalizing glimpses of the sea far below and to the east. The waves conceal the remains of Saxon Dunwich, Britain’s best-known vanished town, capital of the East Angles, which was overtaken by catastrophic storms in the late thirteenth century. Further north, and across the county boundary in Norfolk, Happisburgh used to be a terrible place for shipwrecks – hence the huge lighthouse – but the many waves also caused damage to the foreshore, where the cliffs were formed from muds and Ice Age estuarine and river deposits. This material had accumulated quite rapidly along the course of one of the streams belonging to an early version of the river system that today we call the Thames. Many British river names have very ancient roots and the Thames is no exception: it is almost certainly pre-Roman, and derived from the Celtic word for ‘dark one’ or ‘river’.4
And now I must make a confession: I’m a fully qualified archaeologist, as is Maisie, and we have walked along Happisburgh beach many times. But we never spotted the prehistoric riches that were lying at our feet. I blame the tides for not exposing them – but that’s just my excuse.
A team of archaeologists had been examining the ancient river deposits at Happisburgh since 2005 and had revealed five sites with evidence for human activity dating back to the Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic. One of these (known to the Happisburgh team as Site 3) was particularly important, as it revealed a series of sharp flint tools that had almost certainly been made and used locally.5 The shape of these tools suggested that the site was far too old to be dated by the usual radiocarbon method (which doesn’t work for sites older than about 50,000 years). Then, in May 2013, there was a remarkable and seemingly very lucky discovery. I say ‘seemingly’, because when you examine how new things are revealed in archaeology, you often find that ‘luck’ is more apparent than real: it conceals a lot of careful thought and planning. And that was certainly the case on Happisburgh beach, back in 2013.
Dr Martin Bates and his brother Richard were doing a complex geophysical survey of the old river deposits beneath the rapidly eroding cliffs. They wanted to find out more about their width, depth and history of accumulation and erosion over the centuries. The p
rocess involves the sinking of numerous electrodes, which are connected to various devices, including a computer. Once the electricity has been turned on, it takes about an hour for the data to be gathered and during this time nothing must be disturbed. So Martin and Richard took a stroll along the beach, which had just had much of its sand removed by a particularly severe storm. The washing away of the sand had revealed the undisturbed muds of the ancient Thames estuary that formed the bed of the beach. Normally such deposits are quite smooth and you can spot little streams and the remains of patches of reeds. But Martin’s attention was immediately grabbed by the lack of smoothness. These muds were bumpy and disturbed.
I’ve seen similar ‘bumpy’ prehistoric deposits at Flag Fen and in the Severn Estuary and they closely resemble the churned-up mud of a farm gateway in winter, when sheep or cattle have just been driven through. The Flag Fen footprints were of animals alone, but those on the Severn were made by bare-footed people and they stood out immediately – just as they did to Martin Bates, at Happisburgh. The human footprints I’d seen at Goldcliff in the Severn Estuary had been made around 4700 BC,6 at the end of the Mesolithic, but the ones at Happisburgh were to prove very much earlier. Following a quite complex process of scientific dating, we now realize that the estuarine muds at Happisburgh formed between 850,000 and 950,000 years ago. This was when the tools found in the nearby Site 3 trench were made and when the footprints were formed. We know from many studies of Ice Age pollen and other indicators that this was a time when the climate was getting colder, following a warmer phase in the Ice Age. Broadleaf woodland (oak, ash and elm) was giving way to more hardy pine forest. Soon, people would retreat to warmer places south of what was later to become Britain.7
I can remember being very moved by the fact that the more recent footprints in the muds of the Severn were made by men, women and children and when I visited the site I could imagine Mesolithic families out for a stroll along the foreshore. But what we now realize were the earliest footprints in Europe, at Happisburgh, were probably left by a family group who were out foraging for food along the tidal river. The people themselves would have been precursors of modern humans (Homo sapiens), most probably Homo antecessor (or ‘Pioneer Man’). A close examination of the forty-nine identifiable footprints shows that they were left by a man, a woman (probably) and three children. There’s no evidence for larking about. Nobody runs or jumps. It looks like they were slowly walking in one direction, but weaving around a bit, as one would, when on the lookout for edible plants, birds’ eggs, eels – or whatever. That small family group could never have imagined that their walk along the river had left marks that, almost a million years later, have now been recorded for posterity. The actual footprints in the mud have long since been reclaimed by the North Sea.
1.1 A mass of footprints on the beach at Happisburgh, north Norfolk. They were preserved in the muds of an old course of an extinct river that flowed into the North Sea about a million years ago.
© Martin Bates
1.2 Close-up of the best-preserved footprint at Happisburgh. The impression left by the heel is deeper, to the right, and outlines of four toes can just be seen, to the left.
© Martin Bates
*
I come from a Quaker family and many of my ancestors were either brewers, maltsters or bankers. Today, of course, ‘banker’ has almost become a term of abuse, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Quaker bankers came to be trusted because of their high ethical and moral standards. So they were very successful. By the same token, people had become distrustful of many brewers and maltsters, who often watered down or adulterated their beers. Again, the Quakers stepped in and re-established public trust and confidence in their products. One of the breweries my family was associated with was Truman’s of Brick Lane, in East London, where I worked after graduating. It was here that I was trained as a beer-taster. And I have never lost that taste for a good cask-conditioned real ale. Some of the best ales in East Anglia are brewed by Adnams of Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, and over the years I often found myself heading there. One of the routes south from Lincolnshire, where I live, is via Great Yarmouth, then along the coast, following the A12 through the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – which includes Dunwich (a few miles south of Southwold).
Just outside Lowestoft, the A12 passes through the coastal village of Pakefield. The name was familiar to me through the researches of another beer enthusiast, the late John Wymer. John loved a pint or two of Abbot Ale, brewed in Bury St Edmunds, near his home; he was also a keen gardener, kept ducks and played a mean boogie-woogie piano. All in all he was a lovely, humorous man, but he was also one of the world’s leading authorities on the Palaeolithic. I remember once discussing John with a student on a dig. He found it surprising that a man with so many interests could find the time to be such a good prehistorian. Then I heard myself saying something that has stayed with me ever since: ‘No,’ I replied. ‘You’ve got it wrong. He was a great prehistorian because he lived his own life to the full. Yes, prehistory is about facts and information, but it’s mostly about people and you will never be able to understand the challenges faced by ancient communities if you’ve led a sheltered life yourself.’
John Wymer wrote many books on the Palaeolithic and excavated a number of classic sites. The last major research project he was involved with took place below the cliffs at Pakefield. The area had long been known to archaeologists and geologists of the Pleistocene because of the Cromer Forest Bed which forms the cliffs and underlies the beach there. The Cromer Forest Bed, formed between two million and half a million years ago, was well known to both Victorian and twentieth-century prehistorians and geologists for producing Pleistocene tree stumps and animal bones. Its various layers are a remnant of the low-lying plains and river valleys that once extended across what is now the North Sea basin, between Britain, Germany and the Low Countries. Geologists have given this landscape, which connected Britain and Europe in early post-Ice Age (Flandrian) times, the name Doggerland, after the Dogger Bank, a huge sandbank about 130 kilometres (80 miles) off the Yorkshire/Lincolnshire coast.8
It’s odd the way places, like people, reoccur in one’s life. I can remember spending a wonderful holiday at West Runton, a coastal village in the sand dunes near Cromer in north-east Norfolk. My small boy’s memories of the early 1950s are like a time capsule: steam trains chugging along the coastal railway and Mosquitos (the Second World War planes, not the insects) towing targets that were shot at by anti-aircraft guns mounted along the foreshore – far more exciting than boring old sandcastles and picnics on the beach. Much later, I was to learn that West Runton has one of the best outcrops of the Cromer Forest Bed, which in 1990 revealed the bones of Britain’s earliest and most complete mammoth.9
The discovery of ancient flint tools, or the waste flakes that result from their manufacture, is always exciting, but everything depends on how and where they are found. So-called hand-axes are the best-known stone tools of the Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic. They come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, whose classification and definition have kept hundreds of students and academics in gainful employment for decades. Hand-axes were probably not hafted and used as tree-felling axes, but were multipurpose cutting, butchering and digging tools. They may even have served as a source, or core, for the removal of smaller flint flakes, with razor-sharp cutting edges. While hand-axes have grabbed most people’s attention, the majority of flint finds on Palaeolithic sites have been far humbler: a selection of flakes and fragments, which show the tell-tale signs of human manufacture.
I first learned how to identify deliberately worked flints when I was a student at Cambridge. Superficially similar flakes can be naturally produced by sharp frosts, or when glaciers crush layers of flint and gravel beneath tons of slowly moving ice. But it wasn’t until I returned home in summer vacations and started chippinga away at flints myself that I really started to appreciate the intricacies of flint-wor
king. And believe me, flint-knapping techniques can be extremely difficult to master: so-called pressure flaking, for example, is done by pressing (very hard!) on the edge of a piece of flint with a pointed tool made from bone or antler. And you have to get everything just right – the angle of the tool, its distance from the edge of the flint and the actual pressure applied – if you want to successfully remove a pressure flake. Arrowheads and other small, delicate items can only be made in this way.
Two local collectors at Pakefield appreciated that the best time to find flints and fossils was during winter, especially after storms had caused small landslides along the Cromer Forest Bed cliffs. They realized that it was important to be quite certain of precise locations: it wasn’t enough simply to find things on the beach. You had to prove where they originally came from. Their foresight, patience and persistence was rewarded in 2002, when they found a deliberately knapped flint flake in the Cromer Forest Bed, in deposits that formed around 700,000 years ago. This led to excavations that have revealed a total of thirty-two flint flakes, including a core, a larger lump of flint from which flint flakes had been removed to make smaller, sharp-edged tools.10
Most students of archaeology get to handle Palaeolithic flints and you can still see many of them in museum cases across Britain. By and large they tend to be hand-axes and they’re often quite worn and abraded – as might befit their great age. Often such flints have come from gravel quarries, where they were spotted by sharp-eyed workmen or collectors. I can remember looking for them in a local quarry where the gravel was being sorted into various grades: fine sand, coarse sand, pea grit, fine gravel, coarse gravel and so on. The coarsest heap of all was known as the wasters’ heap, because the rocks and occasional fossil mammoth tooth or bone had no commercial value. I stood by the wasters’ heap as it slowly accumulated, but apart from a couple of fragmentary mammoth teeth, I found nothing.
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 3