Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  In the past, students and archaeological enthusiasts had to rely on newsletters, newspapers and specialist journals if they wanted to follow the progress of an excavation. Of course, thanks to the internet, today things are very different and the Ness of Brodgar has an excellent website that publishes a daily diary.13 But as with so much digital ‘reality’, the real thing is so much better. For a start, it’s inhabited by real, living people with trowels, buckets, wheelbarrows and kneeling pads. First-time visitors to a dig can find the experience a bit strange and I can sympathize. I remember my first excavation as a student: I was a very, very small cog in a huge machine, but gradually I found my way around both the site and the organization running the dig and within a few weeks I was accepted as part of the team. During this process I learned how to view a series of post-holes, stubby walls and other small features in the ground as actual standing structures. That’s the only way to reconstruct how the various posts and doorways fitted together into a coherent pattern. I remember once working out how a group of post-holes formed a possible house – until I realized I’d positioned the hearth directly below the main doorway. My imagined little house wouldn’t have stood up long on a cold winter’s day. But the ability – the knack – of reconstructing 3D buildings from a few marks or stones below the topsoil is made redundant at such a superbly preserved site as the Ness of Brodgar – or is it?

  I’ve visited hundreds, maybe thousands, of prehistoric excavations, but I have never seen walls, doorways and stonework better preserved than at the Ness of Brodgar.14 I can remember running my hand down the outside of a house wall in much the same way as I did in 1994 when we were building our own house. In our case, the bricklaying had been done by two professional craftsmen, who had done a superb job, and I couldn’t avoid the conclusion that the ancient stonework had also been laid by people who knew exactly what they were doing – and how to do it. This wasn’t even slightly amateur work. I remain in no doubt whatsoever about that.

  Many of the large houses at the Ness of Brodgar were plainly more than domestic dwellings alone – just like the two larger structures at Barnhouse – but there is little evidence to suggest that this was a restricted settlement, either. It could perhaps be seen as a shrine to domestic life, as there was a lot of food and other debris. Some of the butchered animal bones suggest that these were the remains of huge feasts, involving large numbers of people. The site was occupied relatively late in the Neolithic period, reaching a peak around 3100 BC, before things quietened down, only to start again with renewed vigour when a truly massive communal house – one of the largest in Neolithic Europe – was constructed around 2900 BC.15 After about 2500 BC it was partially demolished and a heap of stone, gravel and animal bones was carefully erected on top of it – in effect, this was a barrow or burial mound for the building and presumably, too, the souls of those who had used it.

  A hundred years later, in 2400 BC, people returned to the house and surrounded it with a vast heap of animal bones. Subsequent analysis has shown this heap to have been carefully structured, with cattle skulls overlain by leg bones from no fewer than 400 individual beasts. Finally, red-deer carcasses were laid on top of the cattle bones. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the animals were all killed at the same time, perhaps in preparation for an enormous feast that would have drawn people to the site from all over Orkney, and probably beyond. The special house had been given a final ceremony that would surely have been fondly remembered for many generations.

  The Ness of Brodgar excavations have thrown new light on the sophistication and complexity of life in a Neolithic settlement – and I don’t think for one moment that somehow Orkney was a ‘one-off’. The Orkney Islands played a major role in developing the concepts and ideas behind Neolithic religious beliefs, but they would have been but one of several major centres. Other centres we know about include Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire and along the Thames valley; they are also found in parts of Yorkshire, Cumbria and south-western Scotland – all areas that have revealed large and complex ritual landscapes.f There is a tendency to view the prehistoric past as somehow inferior to the modern world – to believe that we have ‘progressed’ beyond such superstitious beliefs. I disagree profoundly with this rather patronizing view of our ancestors. When you study the intricacies of the seemingly endless reconstructions, rebuildings and reuses of Neolithic shrines, you can only come to the conclusion that they were based on a widely held world view that had remained remarkably stable for at least a millennium and a half – and maybe slightly longer.

  a Which we described in Scene 4, pages 65–8.

  b See the Sweet Track, Scene 8, pages 155–64.

  c See Scene 3, pages 54–6.

  d See Scene 5, page 78.

  e See Scene 2, page 27.

  f See Scene 4, page 59.

  Scene 7

  Axes and Identities: Bronze Age Individuality and Family Ties (2500–900 BC)

  Holme-next-the-Sea – Stonehenge

  Archaeology is about people in the past: how they lived, how they worked, how they relaxed and how they died. They have been the focus of all the research of my professional life and I have often felt humbled by the daunting task that faced me. Whatever else I might do, I cannot let them down. But it hasn’t always been a simple process of revelation: my life has often interwoven with theirs – as if they have somehow become a part of my family. And just like real people in real families, they can appear to be obtuse, awkward and even irritating. I say ‘appear’ because of course it isn’t they who irritate, but the nature of the evidence they have left behind them, which can often seem frustratingly inadequate. Being human, one tends to take these things personally – or at least I do.

  Research rarely happens in a single, breakthrough moment. In archaeology, the basic research often takes the form of an excavation, which one then writes up and publishes, first in a series of short interim reports (today these often take the form of blogs), followed by a fully detailed final report. I’ve written my fair share of massive final reports and I have to confess that none of them have proved to be even slightly final. Many have triggered healthy academic debate, which I warmly welcome, and of course research in the area continues and new discoveries throw new – and often very unexpected – light on previous research.

  This continuing process of debate, both in print and behind the scenes, means that I am constantly returning to old digs. I don’t do this in a spirit of regret – did we miss something in that trench or that pit? – but because I’m still curious about the prehistoric people we were investigating; and the excavations I took part in remain my most vivid route into their lives. The strange timber circle on the Norfolk coast at Holme-next-the-Sea, which is widely known today as Seahenge, was just such a site.a Indeed, it has never been far from my thoughts.

  Seahenge was an unusual site for me, because I was busy with other projects at the time and was only involved in the dig part-time. This gave me a chance to observe what was happening in a fairly objective way. If you’re not on site every day, you can see progress much more clearly: rather like a speeded-up film. Seahenge consisted of a small circle of some fifty-five oak posts set around an upside-down oak tree, whose branch-like roots may well have been used to support a dead body, back in the Early Bronze Age, just before 2000 BC. As the dig unfolded, I began to realize just how much detail the extraordinarily fine preservation of the wood was going to reveal.

  Shortly before the Seahenge excavations, Maisie and I had been building our house and farm. Now, when I say ‘building’, in actual fact most of the hard, skilled work was done by carpenters, bricklayers and other craftsmen. And there weren’t many people involved in the work: one carpenter and his assistant did the timber framework. A few weeks later they were joined by a bricklayer and his assistant and then, towards the completion of the project and long after the carpenters had gone, a joiner and his assistant started erecting interior features such as bookshelves, banisters and the main staircase. Ra
ther to my surprise, these craftsmen didn’t have a large repertory of tools: each woodworker had a favourite handsaw, and various mallets and hammers plus electric saws, planes, chisels, sanders and so forth. Yet when Maisie started to examine the tool marks on the Seahenge timbers, she eventually concluded that around fifty different axe-heads had been used – and possibly as many as fifty-nine. The uncertainty arose from the probability that the cutting edges of some axes had been altered during work through vigorous sharpening. Bronze, being much softer than iron, loses its edge quite rapidly and needs constant sharpening.

  In the light of my own experience with house-building, I had rather expected her to reveal that Seahenge had been constructed by, say, six or maybe ten different axes. Bear in mind that around 2000 BC bronze was still a relatively new material and was by no means as common as it was to become during the next few centuries. In other words, bronze tools would still have been relatively costly and most people could not have afforded more than one axe. In modern terms, an axe would have cost the equivalent of, say, a car. They would have been well looked after.

  The large number of axe cutting-edge profiles that Maisie was revealing on the surfaces and cut-ends of the Seahenge timbers could only be explained in two ways: either that bronze was cheaper and far more widely available than we used to think, or that many more people had been present at the construction of the monument than would have been strictly necessary had it just been a routine construction job. While I think that bronze may well turn out to have been slightly more common in Britain than we formerly believed, there is no evidence from any other sites that its introduction was dramatically sudden and in such high quantities. There is now considerable evidence to suggest that pure copper had been arriving in Britain for perhaps two to three centuries,b between 2500 and 2200 BC, before the first bronze appears on the scene.1 Again, this would suggest that the introduction of bronze tools and weapons was a gradual process.

  I’m in little doubt that the large number of marks made by different axes that were revealed on the various timbers of Seahenge provide direct evidence that many people were involved in the shrine’s construction. They also support the suggestion that in prehistoric times, shrines and other sacred places were not built to be used in the way that modern and, to a lesser extent, medieval buildings were. Today, we erect a building, it passes various structural and health and safety examinations, and then it is deemed to be ready for use by the general public. Construction and use are two quite distinct and separate processes.

  But there is now increasing evidence that this clear-cut distinction never applied in prehistory. In fact, the opposite was true and the construction or modification of a henge or some other similar shrine would actually have been an integral part of its use. This would suggest that the work was conducted in ways that were considered appropriate both for the shrine and for the ceremony being undertaken. And again, this shows that we must be careful about imposing our own ideas on people in the distant past. Today, for example, we Britons see death as something sad and sombre; there is nothing joyous or celebratory about it at all. Admittedly, we’re not quite as gloomy as middle-class Victorians with their almost legally binding rules of mourning: newly bereaved widows, for example, were expected to wear full mourning dress for two years.2

  But many societies have long taken an altogether different view. Instead, the emphasis is placed on the achievements in the life of the departed person and mourners at the funeral celebrate their passing into a new and better place. Frequently, such rites of passage are marked by dancing and feasting, although, of course, the nearest and dearest are given time and space to grieve – but this is often quite private. The origins of traditional jazz, for example, lie in the joyous return of New Orleans funeral processions from the cemetery. Songs like ‘Didn’t He Ramble’ imagine that the dead man is now enjoying himself as much in death as he did in life.3 Personally, I rather prefer this way of celebrating a person’s life.

  The different ways that the timbers at Seahenge were actually felled, transported and shaped provide us with hints that the large number of people involved in the construction of the monument did not work haphazardly. We must remember that shrines like this were part of a widespread pan-European tradition and that customs surrounding their erection and construction would have been quite well established. But again, I can see no reason to suppose that the work was carried out in gloomy, respectful silence; moving large timbers, such as the central oak tree, would have required huge efforts, and such tasks are far better performed by a group of people who are rejoicing, like the bands returning from the cemeteries in New Orleans. Much of the pottery buried in graves of this period consists of highly decorated drinking cups that may well have contained alcoholic beverages – versions of mead or ales. In many tribal societies the consumption of alcohol is, and was, confined to religious and ceremonial occasions, such as the interment of bodies, the construction of tombs and during feasts on special days.

  The different axe marks at Seahenge suggest that the trees were felled, split and finished by different groups of people.4 Eighteen different axe marks suggest that eighteen separate people worked on felling the trees used in the construction of the monument, which numbered between fifteen and twenty.5 The axe marks suggest that each tree was felled by two people chopping from opposite directions. Each pair of people felled one or, at most, two trees. The upper trunks of the trees were cut square by another twenty-three people. Lower branches were cut off and trimmed back to the trunks by a further group of ten people. This work almost certainly took place at some distance from the coastal plain, where Seahenge was eventually located, because the growth rings of the trees suggest they came from higher, well-drained land – maybe 5–8 kilometres (3–5 miles) from the foreshore. The massive central oak tree, which weighed about 2½ tons, had been dragged there, as one side showed clear signs of wear and a honeysuckle rope was found attached to two towing-holes. There was no evidence (in the form of surviving twigs and leaves) that the upper branches had been removed on the foreshore. So this work probably happened on the felling site, where the trees were reduced to bare trunks.

  7.1 The timbers of the Holme-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, timber circle during excavation. The site, dubbed ‘Seahenge’ by the press, featured a circle of fifty-five vertical oak timbers surrounding an upside-down oak tree, whose roots are cloaked with seaweed (in front of the bending figure).

  Holmes Garden Photos / Alamy

  It is interesting that the felled tree stump was removed from the ground by cutting through the roots and toppling it over – probably helped by ropes and long levers. This is one of the techniques of prehistoric tree-felling that might help to explain how the woodlands of Orkney were removed without the growth of renewed coppice shoots.c It would also have been simpler to topple the stumps over, given the thinner topsoil and the hard, rocky subsoil.

  Subsequent splitting and dressing of the timbers took place close by the monument. Taken together, the axe marks suggest that a minimum of fifty-one people worked on the preparation of the Seahenge timbers. In general, larger, wider-bladed axes were used for felling and smaller ones for trimming. But this wasn’t a hard and fast rule: smaller axes were also used for felling. This is important, because it suggests that it wasn’t so much the size of the axe that determined how it was used. Maybe fit young men owned the larger axes, the smaller ones belonging to older, more experienced woodworkers. But the overall pattern of axe use suggests with some clarity that each individual owned a single axe. This would also fit with what we know about the value of the earliest metal tools. Given such a clear pattern of use and possession, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that particular axes could become identified with individual people.6 The complex patterns on the highly decorated so-called Beaker pots that accompanied the people who introduced metalworking to Britain from the continent are believed by many specialists to have represented and identified individuals and possibly their tribal or family tie
s, too. Clearly, identity mattered: everyone would have had names, although, of course, prehistory hasn’t recorded them.

  *

  I am in little doubt that the experience of attending a funeral ceremony at Seahenge four thousand years ago would have been a very emotional one. Laying aside the fact that ideas surrounding death would have been subject to more vivid hopes, myths and fears than most modern people have ever experienced, the ceremonies involved were also quite prolonged. As we will shortly discover, travel – perhaps journeying would be a better word – also played an important role. These journeys are believed to have been physical expressions of the departed soul’s voyage from this world to the next. It has recently been suggested that wood might have symbolized the world we live in and stone the permanent, everlasting realm of the ancestors. These notions aren’t idle speculation, however: they are based on long-held beliefs that are still current in Madagascar – and while nobody is proposing any links between the southern Indian Ocean today and Britain in the Bronze Age, they suggest a form of symbolism that is known to have had enduring appeal for many people.7 If one accepts this view of the soul’s journey after death, then the Seahenge tree and timber circle marks the end of life and the start of the next stage, which would probably have been beneath an earth-covered barrow nearby – stone being rare in north Norfolk.

  So let us take this idea, that the soul’s journey or procession was framed in terms of the transition from wood to stone, a little further. At Stonehenge, for example, there is mounting evidence that ceremonial journeys were quite complex, starting at timber circles at the great henges of Durrington Walls and Woodhenge; then down a ceremonial avenue to the River Avon; from there onto a boat, which made the difficult journey downstream to the newly discovered Bluestonehenge and then, finally, by land along the great Avenue to Stonehenge itself. So the river and the boat represent death and the return to land at Bluestonehenge is the start of the afterlife. It was a journey that couldn’t conceivably have been done in less than a full day – and would probably have taken longer.