Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  In many recent and ancient societies, the process of excarnation was seen as the first stage of the soul’s journey into the Next World. Once cleansed of flesh, the bones would be ceremoniously transferred to the family tomb. This may have been what happened at the Early Bronze Age site known as Seahenge on the north Norfolk coast.16 Seahenge consisted of a large upside-down oak tree, surrounded by a tall wall of close-set oak posts. No bones were discovered, but it seems highly likely that a body had been laid within the tree roots, to be defleshed by carrion crows, buzzards and other scavenging birds. The tall wooden wall would have helped to exclude foxes, badgers, wild cats and wolves, who would have torn the corpse apart. Once defleshed, the bones would have been carried just a few yards to be buried in a burial mound known as a round barrow, which we know was erected at precisely the same time as the Seahenge timber circle.17

  The first evidence for taking human bones into the cave at Killuragh is in the Bronze Age, when bones may well have been carried from the platform outside the entranceway, where the excarnation had taken place, into the body of the cave, where they were placed, along with animal bones and man-made items such as pottery. These rites seem to have taken place on numerous occasions, over many centuries. They also appear to be part of an ancient but continuing and evolving tradition, whose roots go back to the earliest Mesolithic settlers. The continuity shown in the Irish caves from hunter-gatherers to Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers is remarkable. Yes, the rites changed, but never radically: the same places were used again and again. This suggests that many of the early farmers were probably direct descendants of people, like the man in Sramore Cave, who witnessed the arrival of the new way of life. We tend to think of farming as being entirely different from hunting and gathering, but as a livestock farmer myself I am in little doubt that managing animals, whether in the wild or safely enclosed in a field, is about experience and knowledge. These are things that hunters must also understand, especially during those times of the year when game is harder to find.

  Today we have elaborate laws about hunting game, with closely monitored seasons when game such as fish or pheasants must be left alone to breed. Any hunter knows that the animals he hunts cannot just be wiped out, because he will need to rely on them in the future. So it seems probable that Mesolithic hunters would have protected watering holes and safe places for animals to raise their young. This almost amounts to a form of farming and may help explain how and why early Mesolithic hunters were able to domesticate dogs from wolves – which we know had happened by around 9000 BC.f I am also firmly convinced that hunter-gatherers effectively farmed certain plants, such as hazelnuts, whose bushes have to be pruned and managed in a very specific way if they are to produce the quantities of nuts that have been found on many Mesolithic settlement sites. So the shift to farming would not necessarily have been a traumatic process at the time it was happening – although its long-term consequences for the landscape were of course profound.

  Shared beliefs in the power of the ancestors and other religious doctrines undoubtedly helped to maintain social cohesion when farming and other new ideas were introduced at the start of the Neolithic period, around 4000 BC. Although the remote caves where some of the ancient rituals and ceremonies took place continued to be venerated and remained much the same, the rites themselves were constantly changing. We tend to think of religion as being somehow fixed and immutable, but pause to reflect: yes, our cities, towns and villages are dominated by ancient cathedrals and churches, but would a medieval peasant identify with a modern service, which would be conducted in English, not Latin, and might even be overseen by a woman priest rather than a man?

  Recent discoveries in the ominously named Robber’s Den Cave, high above the west coast of County Clare, provide us with a vivid picture of changing rites and rituals.18 In 1989 the cavers exploring the Robber’s Den Cave would have been aware that they were in a landscape that had been very important in the Bronze Age. The Burren is today an Irish National Park and nature reserve best known for its glaciated ‘karst’g landscapes, where the underlying limestone lies at the surface. The exposed, bare limestone does not favour luxuriant plant growth, but those that do grow there are hugely varied and find their sustenance in pockets of soil preserved between the slabs of the limestone pavement. But we know from pollen analysish that this would have been very different in early post-Ice Age prehistory, when yew and pine trees would have provided protection against the strong and persistent winds off the Atlantic. Tree roots held the soil together and allowed other grasses and plants to thrive.

  During the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, the light, fertile limestone soils of the Burren attracted early farmers because they were far easier to plough than heavier clay land. So the trees were cleared, and when that happened, the light soil, which had previously been held in place by their roots, began to erode. By the end of the Bronze Age (i.e. in the centuries leading up to 500 BC), the soil had grown too thin to allow trees or shrubs to re-establish themselves – and the open, rocky Burren had been created. Today, of course, it is cherished by ecologists and botanists, but Bronze Age farmers would not have shared their enthusiasm while their crops dwindled and it became increasingly difficult to earn a living.

  The Burren had enjoyed an all-too-brief period of prosperity in the Bronze Age, during the second and early first millennium BC. We can see this in the numerous Bronze Age sites that still cover the landscape. The upper, hard limestone plateau contains many wedge-shaped burial mounds. Below this was a more sheltered plain, which is liberally dotted with evidence of settlement, including a fort-like enclosure, a dozen settlement or farming enclosures, several house sites and a number of so-called burnt mounds.

  These strange sites occur across the British Isles and consist of a heap of burnt stones, often covering a wooden tank, made from planks or a hollowed-out tree (I can think of one example from the Fens that actually made use of an old dugout canoe). There have been various explanations for burnt mounds. Some people think they were Bronze Age saunas, but others – and they have good evidence to back them up – think they were ancient mash tuns.19 For readers who have never worked in a brewery, the mash tuns are where the hops, malt and water are boiled together in the first stage of brewing beer. Personally, I prefer that explanation – but then I confess, I’m biased. But I also believe there was more to them than just being baths or breweries. Burnt mounds are often located close by other ceremonial sites in places in the landscape that were seen to be liminal – on the edge – in some way. In the Fens, for example, they often occur in pasture close by permanently waterlogged ground.

  The entrance to the Robber’s Den Cave was located in a steep cliff, which modern cavers have to climb using ropes. This cliff was at the boundary of the fertile plain with all the Bronze Age settlement remains and the sparse limestone plateau above it – where the tombs occur. So it could be seen as a way into another realm. Entering the cave was not an easy process and, once inside, the passages were extraordinarily narrow. But somehow Late Bronze Age people carried the corpse of a woman aged over thirty-five into the deepest part of the cave. Here she was laid on the ground, together with two decorated stone rings, which were placed, one on top of the other, alongside her skull. A radiocarbon date suggests that this happened in the centuries around 600 BC. The fact that the woman’s body was disposed of with such extreme difficulty suggests either that she had transgressed in some way or that she was a religious person – perhaps the equivalent of a hermit nun – who had made the cave her personal spiritual domain. Either way, she must have been a very special person. And of course we only know about this because we have found her bones. It’s hard for us to imagine all the different ways in which ancient caves might have affected – and enriched – the lives of ordinary people.

  This exploration into the Irish caver’s world has taken us forward into the later Bronze Age, but now we must return to the Mesolithic and the centuries that followed the end of the last Ice Age. W
e will descend from the dramatic uplands of western Ireland and cross the sea to the low-lying river floodplains of East Yorkshire. It was in unspectacular regions like these that the majority of the population lived out their lives. The various landscapes of the British lowlands were the places that would be most affected by the arrival of farming and the massive growth of population that would accompany it. These were dynamic times that would have an enduring influence, not just on the shape of the landscape, but on the developing character of modern European society.

  a A natural stain derived locally from clay and oxidised (rusted) iron.

  b Glyn Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 35.

  c Liminal is derived from the Latin word for a threshold, edge or boundary.

  d Gerald S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded (Dell Publishing, New York, 1965).

  e See Scene 7, pages 128–44.

  f Dog bones are known from Star Carr, see Scene 3, pages 39–42.

  g ‘Karst’ is borrowed from German, where it refers to limestone Alpine landscapes.

  h See Scene 8, page 152.

  Scene 3

  Inhabiting the Post-Glacial Landscape: Living on the Plains (9000 BC)

  The Vale of Pickering – Glacial Lake Flixton

  I have lived for most of my life in the British lowlands and I have found they have a quiet charm all of their own. But when I was young I was desperate to get away, to experience something less dull and more stimulating. So in August 1962 (during what was known as the first ‘cod war’ with Iceland) I sailed on a North Sea trawler to the Icelandic coast; then in my ‘gap’ year I spent time in southern Spain and Venice; eventually I took up residence in Toronto, on the shores of Lake Ontario. After nine very happy years spent living in Canada, but digging in England, I came to my senses and laid aside the carbon my seasonal transatlantic commuting was adding to the environment. I could not run away from the reality that I was British and have always loved life in the English countryside. I had been brought up in rural north Hertfordshire and by the late 1970s I had become convinced that, far from being dull, the English lowlands had actually exerted a very profound influence on the person I had become.

  Although they have quite strict rules of good behaviour for young people, traditional British rural communities are also kind and tolerant. And by my late twenties I was beginning to appreciate how much they had to offer. Now, in later life, I find I am taking a longer view: were such values just a phenomenon of the past few centuries, or can they be found earlier in history – maybe even in prehistory? Of course, this is all pure speculation, based on what can best be described as a ‘gut feeling’, as there are few hard facts to support me. I think it’s especially important to imagine, in a world that now seems to be becoming increasingly self-centred and intolerant, that there are other, kinder, ways of living.

  Knowing what I know now, I think I would feel quite confident if somehow I were to be transported back to the Middle Ages, the Bronze Age or even the Neolithic. Farming communities have always had to confront the diverse problems thrown up by nature and the weather. They lived in settled villages, surrounded by fields, meadows and woodland, and we know that families formed the basis of their social systems. Given the presence of these familiar elements of life, I believe it’s much simpler for modern western people to feel a sense of kinship with more recent rural communities – and by ‘recent’ I am extending my chronology back a mere six thousand years, to the arrival of farming around 4000 BC – than with those who lived in earlier periods of history.

  But what about those preceding million or so years (give or take the odd millennium) of British prehistory, when people hunted or gathered their food from the natural world around them? Was all their time spent chasing after food, or did they have leisure for other things? Had I been writing this in the 1950s, I would probably have been very pessimistic about life in pre-farming times: I would have written of sparse populations eking out a frugal existence from resources that were often threatened not by global warming (as they are today), but by approaching episodes of ice. So were the lives of these small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers really nasty, brutish and short? To answer that question, we must first think about the nature of the archaeological evidence.

  Throughout my professional life, I have been grateful that the university authorities linked the two subjects of Archaeology and Anthropology together so closely for my degree. Students of archaeology were constantly reminded that the subject of our study was Anthropos, the ancient Greek word for mankind, or humanity. As archaeologists, we were being trained to reach into the past through finds made on excavations and surveys. Sometimes these were big and spectacular, more often they were scraps of pottery, tiny flint flakes or pieces of bone. We also made use of science: everything from molecular biology to geophysics, but it was all part of a larger plan, to reveal the lives of ancient people – men, women and children. So the objects we discovered were always a means to an end. They were never an end in themselves – which is what distinguishes archaeology from treasure hunting.

  As you work your way further back in time, the quantity and often the quality of your evidence decreases. This is the inevitable result of natural processes, such as floods, glaciers and just the day-to-day erosion of nature: food decays, cloth and skins are attacked by fungi and moths, wood is eaten by woodworm, wet- and dry-rot; even pottery and flint can get crushed underfoot or be shattered by fire and ice. To make our task harder, people living a very long time ago lacked most modern technologies. The earliest assuredly recognizable humans (hominins) evolved in Africa around five million years ago.1 And yet fire only seems to have been discovered about half a million years ago.2 Even if fire can be pushed back to a million years, that still leaves our ancestors without cooked food or warmth for some four million years. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they were ill-informed or stupid in any way at all: it merely highlights just how difficult it is to achieve such changes. It is perhaps worth remembering that men and women with the intelligence of an Einstein or a Newton were still being born every few generations and even with their input people were unable to make what we can now appreciate was one of the first great technological step changes. So was this an age of stagnation, when nothing happened?

  Recent research in Africa and elsewhere has revealed that even in the earliest millennia of human existence, things were constantly changing. Finds from the few sites we know about have revealed that tool shapes were evolving and that weapons, hunting and butchery practices never stood still; these observations further suggest that language and communication skills were improving – and as communication improved, we would also have seen parallel developments in family, social and religious life. We have seen glimpses of such developments in the Irish prehistoric caves, but can they also be detected in the open country where people actually lived out their lives? Again, recent research has produced some very exciting new information. It is time to come down from the hills and see how the Ages of Ice have subtly changed the modern landscape.

  *

  Geology teaches us that the massive power of an expanding glacier is capable of resculpting hills and valleys. I first learned about this at school and I well remember visiting the Scottish Borders in Dumfries and Galloway, where I was entranced by the shape of the glaciated valleys with their distinctive U-shaped profiles, scraped to perfection by centuries of ice.3 Maybe they lacked the powerful, dramatic impact of vertical cliffs and escarpments, but to my eye their gentle, graceful form was somehow more human and less threatening.

  Glaciers can also alter the landscape in more subtle ways. As the ice progresses along a valley, it scrapes the ground and the earth, pebbles, rocks and boulders it removes are pushed ahead of it – much like a bulldozer. This advancing bank of loose material is known as a moraine. Eventually, the glacier will have to stop. Usually this happens when it reaches the coast, a wide plain, or when the climate starts to grow warmer. When the glacier stops advan
cing, the ice melts and the moraine it was pushing is immediately stranded. Geologists have named these glacial banks ‘terminal moraines’. Quite often, glaciers start to retreat before they reach the end of a river valley or floodplain and in these instances the terminal moraines can permanently block or impede the flow of streams and rivers in the rapidly forming post-glacial landscape. Often, water accumulated behind these terminal moraines, giving rise to glacial lakes.

  The traditional view of the resettlement of Britain following its abandonment to ice and tundra has always been very uncertain, largely because we have lacked the information we needed. It was assumed that the climate warmed gradually and that there was a prolonged period of several millennia when people made occasional summer visits in warm years. As time passed and the weather grew warmer, a few groups dared to stay for longer, but the emerging island of Britain, which was still firmly joined to the continent, remained a very open, treeless place, devoid of natural shelter. So small groups of hunters eked out a meagre livelihood by keeping constantly on the move, following the few herds of reindeer and other game they depended upon. It doesn’t sound very pleasant.