Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  Her first awareness of the possibility of a much larger submerged land mass came on a seaside holiday in Brittany when she saw mammoth bones for sale in a little shop. Later she met Professor Leendert Louwe Kooijmans from the Leiden museum where they had a collection of all sorts of bones and human artefacts fished up by Dutch trawlers from the Brown Banks. Someone mentioned the discovery of what appeared to be a worked flint and flint core, found during oil exploration north of the Shetlands, and she wondered how on earth that had got there. The implications of all this settled in her mind.

  There was good research going on at that time and geographers studying sea-level changes after the last Ice Age were beginning to become aware that it was not just a question of mapping contours; what had to be taken into account was the reaction of entire land masses when the weight of the ice dropped from them as it melted. Some areas would have been flooded, but others would rise up like great waking beasts no longer trapped by the burden that had held them down. ‘A bouncy castle,’ she said, which rather startled me, but then she added, ‘Soft geology,’ which sounded like a rather loose and modern scientific term. The combination of images made me able to see the slow shifting of the face of the earth and I had a brief memory of standing on a quaking bog in Wales, ages ago. I was high on magic mushrooms and, with the sense of revelation that can come from such stuff, I suddenly understood that the world itself was a living creature and I could feel its heartbeat and hear its laboured breath.

  c. 13,500 BP

  By now what was left of the tea was cold and the muffins were reduced to a few crumbs. We moved back to Doggerland. For a long while there had been the theory of a land bridge, imagined as a wide causeway connecting Britain to Europe, with people and animals crossing over it – like the chicken – just in order to reach the other side. Bryony was increasingly persuaded that it was a large and inhabited country in its own right. In the early 1990s she was able to follow her hunch when she was awarded a research grant to make a two-year study of British wetland archaeology and its relationship with the submerged landscape of the North Sea.

  She needed to find a name for the place she was looking for and she chose Doggerland because that put it alongside England and the Netherlands, Jutland, Friesland, Zeeland and all the other lands within the sea. She liked the etymology of dogger, which seems to derive from the Danish word dag, meaning dagger. The pliable stems of dogwood were used by Mesolithic peoples for making fish-traps, while the hard heart-wood was used for spears and indeed for a type of dagger. On top of that, dogwood used to grow on Dogger Bank.

  She worked on a hypothetical map, using sonar evidence of steep- sided tunnel valleys as indicators for the flow of rivers in a time when those rivers were flowing. The modern distribution of certain varieties of freshwater fish helped to suggest where they might have met with the sea. The true extent of that land mass was given extra credibility from studies of a little primula flower which only grows in Yorkshire and must have migrated from Eastern Europe before Doggerland was lost, while the distribution of field voles with different evolutionary features on either side of Hadrian’s Wall indicated a connection with Western Europe. In this way the map began to take shape and the land it described grew bigger and bigger. There was and still is a lot of contention as to whether the couse of the Thames originally went northwards, and only changed direction when the chalk cliffs in the south were broken through eight thousand years ago, connecting the Channel with the North Sea, but that was not Bryony’s concern.

  She spoke about the density of life that must have been concentrated in the northern coastal regions of Doggerland, an area where there was an all-year food supply very similar to what is found among the coastal hunting and fishing communities in British Columbia. These people were able to form a sedentary society, because the food they needed for their survival came to them, each in its own season, from the arrival of the spawning salmon, the migrating birds, the grazing animals.

  I asked her where I should go to get close to an idea of what Doggerland was like. She said that although there are a few places in Britain, so much of the land has been drained and altered beyond recognition and so many of the sites were lost under the rising sea levels, but in Denmark, where the bouncy-castle effect lifted the land up once the weight of the ice had gone, there are still several marshy landscapes that have a lot in common with that other time, like the one near the village of Tollund which has held the almost perfectly preserved bodies of the dead within the mix of peat and acid water, along with the clothes they were wearing when they died and even the simple meal they had eaten before their death some two thousand years ago. And if I wanted to get a sense of the earlier hunter-gatherers who established themselves in the area when the land had emerged from under the ice, then I should go to see the burials from a place called Vedbaek, and there were other important sites lying in the very shallow waters of the North Sea: Tybrind Vig and Kalo Vig in Denmark, and Tagerup in Sweden.

  And then to beavers. She apologised that these days, all her attention is on beavers. It started when she was at a conference in London and her husband was at a conference in Canada and they had been trying to work out the nature of mysterious cutting marks that had been found on some ancient pieces of wood. They couldn’t have been made by a stone axe, it looked more as if they had been made with a penknife, but at a time before metal had been discovered. She showed photos of the marks to two Russians during the coffee break and without any hesitation they said, Beaver! Later her husband contacted her to say the Canadians who looked at the marks had also said, Beaver!

  She is interested in the interaction between beavers and humans. Beaver bones have been found in the North Sea, alongside all the other creatures rumbling around there. They were present in the Mesolithic site of Star Carr, up in Yorkshire, and on the Somerset Levels. It had been presumed they were only useful for the food and fur they provided, but then Bryony heard something that made her doubt this was the only connection. Following her hunch she went to spend three weeks a year for several years in an area in the south of France, observing a colony of beavers that had established themselves close to a main road. She could only go in the spring or autumn because in the summer there were too many leaves on the trees obscuring her view. Until then it had been thought that European beavers don’t make dams, but she was able to prove they do and this would have made them very useful from a human point of view. She wrote a paper suggesting that during the Mesolithic period and later, beavers provided humans with dead wood for burning, bridges for crossing over streams, and beaver ponds which trapped silt and organic matter, attracting an explosion of plant and animal life, birds, fish and reptiles.

  There was a story told by a member of the Dene Nation in north-west Canada and Bryony promised to look it up for me because although it related to another land mass and another time, it explained the closeness between hunter-gatherers and beavers and she could imagine the same story being told in Doggerland. She sent me the text shortly after our meeting and I turned it into a time song.

  Time Song 9

  A young woman,

  she has been fasting

  for a long time,

  her face is painted black.

  She wanders far off,

  she meets a man

  standing upright,

  she goes with him

  to his home by a lake.

  She becomes his wife,

  she forgets her parents.

  In the spring she gives birth

  to four children.

  She works

  making mats and bags.

  She has every kind of food

  from her husband,

  every kind of fish

  and small animal.

  She has firewood.

  One day a human man

  passes by,

 
and then the woman knows

  she has married a beaver.

  She has more children,

  every spring she has more.

  The human people

  kill the young beavers,

  but they do not really kill them

  because the young beavers

  come home again.

  The beavers in this time

  are very numerous,

  they are fond of the human people,

  they are fond of the gifts the human people give them,

  and even if they are killed

  they are not really dead.

  When they were growing old

  the woman’s husband said,

  ‘I am going away to some other land,

  it is time for you to go back home.

  Remain here in my house.

  Human people will come.

  You must speak to them.’

  The woman stayed in the house

  making twine.

  A human man arrived,

  he sat on the roof.

  The woman picked up a piece of wood

  and made a tapping noise

  so he could know she was there.

  ‘Who is this?’ he said.

  ‘It is I,’ she said,

  ‘I wish to get out.

  Long ago I was taken by the beaver.

  Please break into this beaver house.’

  The man began to break through the roof.

  He reached his hand in,

  he felt the woman,

  he felt her head,

  her ears,

  her ear-rings.

  When the hole was wide enough,

  she stepped out.

  Her head was white,

  she wore beautiful clothes,

  her cloak was worked with beads.

  She told of what had happened.

  The woman went to live with her sister

  who took care of her.

  She used to say,

  ‘Never speak badly of a beaver.

  If you speak badly of a beaver

  you will not be able to kill it.’

  That is why people

  never say bad things about the beaver,

  especially when they mean to go hunting.

  They know that if they never say bad things,

  they will be much loved by the beaver,

  they will be held in the mind of the beaver

  and they will have luck,

  when killing beavers.

  Based on ‘The Woman Who Married a Beaver’ in Thomas W. Overholt and J. Baird Callicott, Clothed-in-Fur and Other Tales: An Introduction to the Objibwa World View, 1982, quoted by Roberta Robin Dods, ‘Wondering the Wetland: Archaeology through the Lens of Myth and Metaphor in Northern Boreal Canada’, Journal of Wetland Archaeology 3, 2003, pp. 17–36.

  In a film called Hunters and Bombers, made by Hugh Brody about the Innu, there’s a scene in which you see a young child sleeping with a young beaver in her arms, both of them looking very comfortable and contented, while outside a woman is cooking beaver meat in a pot over a fire.

  24

  I dream of animals much more than I dream of people. Early this morning, I entered the remembered image of the shed that stands in this garden and there was a greenfinch as big as a chicken perched disconsolately on a white high chair. The bird’s feathers were beautiful, a shimmering rainbow that seemed to contain all the permutations of the spectrum within a single colour. I went to the house to fetch it some food and when I got back it had knocked over a glass of water and I added bread to the water and woke up.

  My notebooks are filled with such encounters. I am carrying a mouse with her babies, I am lying in the soft embrace of a tabby cat, birds roost among my clothes; three snakes swim in a wine glass and I meet seals and large fish. Even the dark and vaguely threatening buildings in which I often find myself tend to be occupied by large beasts: a couple of rhinoceros recently, but there have also been lion and bison and even a hippopotamus.

  When I woke from the dream of a green bird someone on the radio was talking about human language and how it is probably much older than we ever thought it was: one and a half million years was his estimation, instead of the one hundred thousand which is the more familiar number given by Noam Chomsky and others. The man who was talking was called Daniel Everett, and he had been living with the peoples in the Amazon rainforests for many years. He said language does not require syntax – the grammatical arrangement and sequence of words – all it needs is a sound as a symbol of something we can all see, whether that something is a bird in a dream or a tree in the waking life or the fact of death.

  25

  Bryony had told me to contact Professor Leendert Louwe Kooijmans, a retired Dutch professor who specialised in the Post Glacial period in Northern Europe. I wrote to him and we arranged to meet in a café in Arnhem. It’s a town I know quite well because my ex-husband’s parents used to live close by. They were involved in the Resistance during the last war and tried to warn the Allies against the Arnhem landings, so now whenever I see the big trees in the water meadows near the Rhine, I see uniformed airmen caught among the branches in a tangle of ropes and billowing parachutes, all of them soon to be gunned down by the soldiers who have been waiting for this moment.

  Leendert was a gentle and friendly man with a slight limp: the after effects of Lyme disease. When I spent a lot of time here on holiday with my young family, we would have a nightly ritual of searching for the tiny black mark of a tick on the skin because they are especially numerous in the heathlands and woodlands, which are still littered with abandoned boulders deposited here at the end of the Ice Age. It turned out that as a schoolboy Leendert was taught by my ex-father-in-law, which added to the unexpected sense of familiarity. And then as we were sitting in the sunshine drinking coffee Sandra’s younger sister happened to pass by and she stopped to chatter a greeting, making me feel as if I still belonged in a country where I no longer live.

  Leendert explained that he is writing a book called Where Do We Come From?, beginning the human story three million years ago and ending it with the drowning of Doggerland, and with hardly any preamble, he launched into an explanation of hunter-gatherers and how they were different to us, the farmers who followed on their heels. He said that thanks to Adam and Eve, we inhabit a domestic world that places the natural world out of bounds. This separation was sustainable for a long while but now the pressure we are putting on the natural world has brought it to breaking point. Our arrogance is apparent even in the way that we call ourselves sapiens, implying that every other living creature is ignorant in comparison.

  The Neanderthals, he said, also had fear and love and a creative imagination, but because we cannot grasp who they were with our limited understanding, we think of them as being less important. All the Stone Age cultures which contain the roots of who we have become are dismissed as some sort of dark age of ignorance.

  As a student, Leendert studied physical geography. A colleague in the geology department was in contact with a group of Dutch fishermen who were pulling up bones in their trawling nets from a depth of some forty metres, close to the Brown Banks. There were huge bones from the Ice Age and even earlier but there were also much more recent bones: horse and beaver, deer and bear and the occasional, unmistakable, human artefact. The colleague was not interested in the younger bones or in barbed points carved from reindeer horn or bone and so Leendert took them over. They could all be dated at around 8,000 BC and the fact that many of them were what is called domestic and not hunting gear implied they were associated with human habitation, rather than being things lost on a hunt far from home. None of them had any sign of wear to indicate they had been carried by rivers or currents over ma
ny miles before they settled in this deep-water place and Leendert wanted to know why they were abandoned in the middle of the North Sea.

  He said that by studying so many simple and yet beautiful worked tools and weapons over the years, you begin to see things: you see the mind of the people who made them and the landscapes they inhabited; the climate and vegetation and what animals were to be found living close by. He became aware of the sheer profusion of living creatures that belonged to this time and he spoke with a sort of nostalgia for such a world. He said what one learns from all such studies is not expertise but a gathering of uncertainties and it is from these uncertainties that one must work.

  All hunter-gatherers lived so lightly on the earth and left few traces of their passing. The people of Doggerland seemed to produce very little in the way of decorative arts and even the scratched marks found on worked bones, stone and horn appear to be more like personal signatures of ownership rather than decoration for its own sake. With the start of the Holocene when the climate was warming up, it was possible for them to live in this rich environment all through the year, even though the sea levels were beginning to rise as much as two metres within a single century, making it necessary for them to learn to adapt to a land that was endlessly changing shape and size. He drew a little graph for me in my notebook to illustrate the sheer speed of what was happening. For him, the simple fact that these people were able to survive from one generation to the next was their greatest achievement.

  He has spent much of his working life examining the delicate perfection of barbed hunting points; a broken twist of rope made from the bark of a tree that must have once been used as a basket for fish; a piece of wood that might have been a post in a dwelling; or human bones battered and broken by the events of a life and the circumstances of a death. He said you have to be rich in imagination when you try to do the work of understanding these people, while being careful to repress any fantasy. From their bones you can read of hunger and starvation, accidents and the effort of carrying heavy loads and you can work out that half of the children never reached the age of fourteen and very few adults were older than sixty. You can also see that many men and some women died as a result of violent conflict with other humans: there is often trauma to the skull, spear wounds piercing the chest or head. Usually burial sites will give an insight into a way of comprehending the world, but even the way the Mesoliths buried their dead is so complex and various it gives no clear understanding as to how these people comprehended the mystery and the reality of the world in which they found themselves.