Читать книгу Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans - Francis Pryor - Страница 12

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.