Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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

(#litres_trial_promo) – had been worked by humans.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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).