The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Part Three

  * * *

  THE YOUNG OCEAN: THE ATLANTIC,

  22,000 BC–AD 1500

  15

  Living on the Edge

  I

  A history of the oceans might be expected to say little about the Atlantic before Columbus, or at least before the Portuguese discovered and settled islands out of sight of land in the fifteenth century, apart from a glancing reference to Vikings who reached America after they were lost off the coast of Greenland. ‘Atlantic history’ has become an entire industry, and it is mainly concerned with connections after 1492 between the four continents that border the Atlantic Ocean: North America, South America, Africa and Europe.1 At first sight there is nothing in prehistoric and ancient times to compare with the astonishing feats of the Polynesian navigators, nor with the mastering of the monsoons by those who crossed the open Indian Ocean. There are plenty of crackpot theories about ancient Egyptians or Phoenicians who reached Central America, and the name of Thor Heyerdahl comes up once again here. And yet, going back as far as the fifth millennium BC along the European flank of the Atlantic, and, quite separately, as far back as 2000 BC in the Caribbean, people moved across parts of the ocean, and the sea exercised massive influence on their social and economic life (the Caribbean will be described within a later chapter). Reconstructing these worlds depends on archaeology, but not just in one place – it is only possible to make sense of what was happening by looking at the links between societies separated by considerable distances, whether in the form of trade connections or similarities in culture, including art and architecture. For several archaeologists have identified a common north-eastern Atlantic culture that was formed by the communities living along the edges of the Neolithic Atlantic, from Orkney in the far north past Ireland and Great Britain to Brittany, northern Spain, Portugal and even the Atlantic coast of Morocco, a distance of about 4,000 kilometres. A spur leads down the English Channel to Holland, Denmark and Sweden, bringing parts of the Baltic into this Atlantic world, the world of what have been called ‘the Western Seaways’.2

  Still, there are several ways of interpreting the clear evidence that people built similar monuments in Portugal to those that were built in Scotland and Ireland. Traditional ‘diffusionist’ interpretations have gone out of fashion among archaeologists, and there is much more emphasis among ‘processual’ archaeologists on the internal dynamics of society, so it might be argued that similar physical conditions created similar solutions: pressed between the rough seas of the Atlantic and rugged shores, the inhabitants of Galicia, Brittany and northern Scotland found the same solution to the problem of how to subsist. And when connections can be demonstrated between communities hundreds or even thousands of kilometres apart, was this the result of direct contact, or did artefacts and ideas seep slowly from one area to another and another and another, in slow stages? Then there is the problem of how contact might have been maintained, either locally between shore-side settlements or over longer distances. Evidently sturdy boats were needed in order to reach Britain and Ireland from Brittany, and there are good reasons to assume that contact between Brittany and Galicia tended to be by sea. Land routes cannot be ruled out; but the coastal communities that are going to be examined here were not easily accessible by land: Galicia, with its deep fjord-like rías and its steep slopes, as well as a similar environment in Brittany or Wales. Even Cornwall was not as easily accessible as south-eastern Britain, because its hilly landscape was cut off from the rest of Britain by quite forbidding moorland. According to this view, travel across water proved more rapid, while it was also possible to transport large quantities of goods between one place and another with much less physical effort than on land. The sea had its terrors; but as it came to be better known, and as astronomical knowledge increased, even the unpredictable waters of the eastern Atlantic were found to be manageable.3 Yet engagement with the ocean varied over time. Dependence on seafood might be replaced by reliance on pasture, agriculture and hunting. Trade connections familiar from the New Stone Age and the Bronze Age might wither in the Iron Age. This is not a history of ever-closer integration binding together this great arc of coastline, but a history of connections created, sundered and re-created over many millennia.

  In order to understand the nature of the space that will be described here, it is important to turn aside from a continent-based mental image of ancient Europe, and to visualize long stretches of coast punctuated by massive projecting promontories.4 Working up from the south, these include Cape St Vincent in southern Portugal, Cape Finisterre in Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, and Cape Wrath at the northern tip of Scotland, an area also characterized by a profusion of rocky islands and easy access to the granite that has ever after been the chosen building material of many Scots. Strong winds from the ocean brought heavy rainfall, which favoured those trying to produce crops in low-lying corridors along the shoreline. When metalworking became widespread in the Bronze and Iron Ages, the ready availability of good-quality ores, including Welsh copper and gold, Cornish tin, and Iberian silver, tin and copper stimulated the creation of trade networks linking these lands and bringing in other lands, such as western Scotland, that were rather poor in metals but sought to acquire them.5

  Describing the resources only goes so far; finding out who the people were who exploited them, and whether they were of common ancestry or culture, is also important. Here even the most sober accounts of what has been found in the soil become entangled with the idea that the inhabitants of this Atlantic arc were ‘Celts’, whose ancestors had originated somewhere in central Europe and had migrated stage by stage until they could reach no further. The fact that classical writers used this term to describe peoples living in large areas of western Europe does not mean that ‘Celt’ is a precise ethnic label. As for the debatable question of what language they spoke, that will be addressed in a later chapter.6 Nor, indeed, is there much agreement about the role of the sea in drawing together prehistoric communities that were largely self-sufficient. Some communities, even close to the sea, depended on food they foraged from the land for their survival; but often their self-sufficiency extended to the sea itself, which was a magnificent source of food, some harvested along its shores, including the molluscs whose shells were dumped in vast, mountainous middens that altered the seaside landscape, while fishermen also used nets and hooks to catch large fish that swarmed in coastal waters. This is, then, a rather different story to the great maritime adventures of those who struck out across the open sea in the Pacific and, eventually, the Indian Ocean. It begins as a series of histories of local connections.

  II

  The effects of falling and rising sea levels have been felt much more dramatically in the Atlantic than in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, and have had a powerful influence on how the edges of Europe were settled in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic times (the Old and Middle Stone Ages). About 11,500 years ago significant changes occurred, which geologists mark as the start of the Holocene period that has continued ever since; ‘Holocene’ means ‘wholly new’, and yet the Holocene is understood as a temporary warm phase in the middle of a continuing Ice Age that (in theory) should some day return; temperatures were not consistent, and fell by about 2°C early in the first millennium BC, at the end of what is regarded as the Atlantic Bronze Age. These higher temperatures did not exactly make the climate in places such as Orkney balmy, but they did facilitate crop production and hence the growth of population.7 The changes that were taking place were geological as well as climatic. Long before the Holocene, the massive accumulation of ice far beyond the poles had sucked away water from the oceans and had lowered sea levels by thirty-five metres or more, exposing the floor of what are now shallow seas such as the North Sea. The Baltic began as a freshwater lake and was only joined to the salt sea as water inundated the land bridge between what is now Denmark and Sweden; the North Sea was partly blocked by the large expanse of Doggerland that linked the east of Britain to the continent be
fore it sank beneath the waves to become what is now known as the Dogger Bank. The end of the Ice Age saw seawater levels rise as melted ice returned to the sea, and also made the climate more congenial for the limited number of humans who inhabited Europe around 8000 BC; Doggerland was one of the areas where they flourished.8 The process was more complicated than that, however, since the sheer weight of the ice had pushed the land hundreds of metres lower in some areas, such as Scotland, and as the weight was removed the land itself began to rise; Great Britain is still slowly tilting, with the result that the coast of East Anglia is gradually falling into the sea.9 Several islands around the British coast that were now clear of ice found themselves joined to the mainland for several centuries; it is possible that one could walk from Scotland to Orkney for a while, or at least wade across the tidal waters.10 In other parts of Atlantic Europe, the glaciers had scored deep gashes in the landscape, which remain in southern Norway and along the deeply indented western coast of Galicia in north-western Spain, creating the dramatic scenery of the Rías Baixas; their appearance was accentuated by the Atlantic winds and waves that stripped away softer stones and left behind the hard rocks of the Galician coastline. This area will be revisited shortly, since Galicia has provided rich evidence for prehistoric communities that exploited the sea and enjoyed ties to other parts of the Atlantic shoreline.

  For the human population of Europe, the Ice Age had also been an era of extinction and repopulation. By 8000 BC, the Neanderthals of the Upper Palaeolithic, who had found a way to survive in the cold of Ice Age Europe, were long extinct.11 In the early Holocene period the modern human population remained very thinly spread around Europe, but some families were beginning to reach the Atlantic seashore, beyond the current coastline of France, Britain, Holland, Germany and Denmark. The cultures that were emerging in these lands are broadly described as ‘Mesolithic’, or Middle Stone Age, yet this is a troublesome term. It indicates that these people retained many characteristics of the Palaeolithic lifestyle, notably their reliance on hunting and gathering food, including, along the coast, seafood. The term ‘Mesolithic’ recognizes some innovations in toolmaking, for much of what is known about these societies depends on the close examination of stone tools that were becoming smaller, even very small (microliths); blades, harpoons, arrowheads and scrapers became everyday objects in the toolkit of Mesolithic hunters. These changes took many centuries, yet they occurred more or less in sequence across one area after another of western Europe, which shows that technical knowhow was spread by contact between groups of hunters. This improvement in the quality of tools in turn indicates that the tasks being performed in Mesolithic societies were becoming more complex, such as sewing together animal skins to make more effective clothing, and, using the microliths, the creation of delicate secondary tools made of wood, reed and bone. In some areas, simple pottery was created. It is a moot point whether Atlantic Europe learned from or developed independently techniques that can be observed in the Middle East in the twelfth millennium BC. In the Middle East the Mesolithic inhabitants gradually developed an interest in farming, by taming the wild grasses they had been gathering since time immemorial; large villages and even fortified towns became home to more and more of those who lived off the soil. But along the Atlantic coast of Iberia around 5000 BC the relationship with the soil was different; grass seeds formed part of quite a rich diet, but were still casually gathered as they grew wild in fields and meadows, alongside berries, bulbs (notably onions) and legumes.12

  Each environment was different in detail, and each small pocket of population exploited what was to be had without having the need to develop close interaction with neighbours, or at any rate trade in foodstuffs – no doubt other forms of interaction, such as the exchange of brides or warfare to gain control of valleys rich in game, were quite frequent. During the Mesolithic period, populations became more settled, and villages began to emerge; the inhabitants would mark out the territory they exploited, though it is unlikely they thought of this as rule over a chunk of land. They sought control of the material assets of the land, not the land itself. A harsh winter or a boiling summer could suddenly deplete resources to dangerous levels as the seasons changed. From this point of view, living by seas and river mouths was a sensible strategy; what mattered was variety, rather than reliance on a staple foodstuff. The more diverse the habitat, the easier it was to survive, and that made the coastal fringes of Europe the most attractive places to settle. In addition, it was as far as one could go by land. By the fifth millennium BC these areas hard by the shore were therefore quite densely settled, and as the population rose pressure was placed on the food supply, which, again, fostered movement – the voluntary or forced departure of superfluous people for new lands. With time, migrants needed to search further afield for empty spaces, whether by trekking along the coast or by braving the sea in boats made from animal skins, wicker or felled trees – since the evidence for boats comes from the Bronze Age, the design of their boats will be looked at later.13

  Unfortunately, much of the best information about these shore-dwellers is now buried beneath the sea, for the shoreline that they knew has been inundated, and the remains of what appear to be coastal communities often come from settlements a little way inland. But this is not always the case, since the melting of the ice also allowed landmasses in some areas to rise. For that reason a good many archaeological sites from this period survive in northern Scotland, including middens, mounds of food debris. Oronsay, to the south of Mull, is a tiny island off western Scotland that already stood offshore in the Mesolithic period; archaeologists have been able to deduce the exact time of the year at which the type of pollock known as the saithe was caught, because its ear-bone grows longer according to a strict schedule. This shows that people moved around from midden to midden; these people were either inhabitants of the island itself, who over the centuries gobbled down gargantuan amounts of fish and shellfish, or, bearing in mind the minute size of the territory, they came across from bigger islands nearby (Islay, Jura, and so on) on seasonal visits, because they knew that its intertidal outcrops were a perfect breeding ground for shellfish.14

  Brittany too is a rich source of information, with plenty of middens containing the remains of seafood that indicate how, by 5000 BC, the inhabitants had become heavily pescatarian in taste. The fact that they neatly deposited the shells in reserved piles indicates that they did not simply comb the beach for throw-away snacks, but brought their catch to places where their family could enjoy what they had found. They took up residence on little islands off the coast such as Hoëdic, where there was not much hunting, apart from netting birds or shooting at them, but plenty of food from the sea, and the right sort of rocks from which they could knap their tools. These early Bretons ate a great variety of shellfish: periwinkles, limpets, cockles, mussels, as well as many types of crab. They exploited the Atlantic tides to cross the sands and collect the rich harvest of the sea. Consumption of seaweeds such as samphire and of plants that grow close by the seashore such as sea kale made the seaside a very attractive place to live.15

  In several parts of Atlantic Europe milder temperatures caused a spurt in the growth of forests, and the opportunities for hunting declined as wild animals such as deer were crowded out of their habitat by the trees. This prompted people to move in ever greater numbers towards the coast, away from impenetrable lands in the interior. In Denmark, at a place now known as Ertebølle, the late Mesolithic inhabitants hunted any animals they could find, even including lynx, wolves and pine marten. But they loved fish – herring, cod and flounder were favourites – and they also exploited freshwater supplies, taking eels and pike from rivers and lakes. They took seals from the sea and ate them too. They paddled around in log-boats, which were sometimes at least ten metres long, and they built fish traps out of wickerwork; organic objects of this sort have survived in the marshy conditions of Denmark, to be unearthed by Professor Glob (of Dilmun fame) and his colleagues. And then ther
e were the piles and piles of oysters, cockles, mussels and periwinkles. It was, after all, much less work to go beachcombing than to rely on catching deer, elk and aurochs, which might escape the hunter for days at a time, a change ‘away from the high-risk, high-yield, high-energy expenditure strategy of game hunting to a low-risk, moderate-yield, low-energy expenditure strategy’, in the concise words of Barry Cunliffe.16 One could go further: the dependence of these folk on the produce of the sea must have affected their system of values, which would place less emphasis on the martial skills associated with hunting (casting spears, shooting arrows, and so on) and more on the nautical skills needed to master even inshore waters.

  III

  By the fifth millennium, as new technology began to spread in Europe and many other parts of the world, with the gradual domestication of animals and the adoption of farming, not merely the diet changed. Although the term has come into and gone out of fashion, this is often described as the age of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’; it turns out to have been a very slow revolution, and it is increasingly obvious that many of its apparent innovations reached back into the late Mesolithic period, particularly in the Middle East. Farming the soil, if not the herding of animals, encouraged settlement in permanent villages; this was often the case even when the early farmers followed the widespread practice of slash-and-burn cultivation, which involved the clearance of forest, the planting of the soil, and the cultivation of another patch of cleared forest after the original piece of land had been exhausted of nutrients. The new grain-based diet was not necessarily healthier: body sizes appear to have shrunk from an average of 1.7 metres for men and 1.57 metres for women in the Upper Palaeolithic period to 1.67 and 1.54 in the Neolithic age. This may not seem a significant amount, but skeletal remains also reveal a decline in dental health and an increase in diseases associated with malnutrition, especially among children – infant mortality was high, life expectancy was low.17 As tasks within society became more specialized, political elites emerged who organized production and defended the community’s territory. A distinguished archaeologist has spoken of ‘population stress’ along the Atlantic seaboard within the period from about 4800 BC to about 2300 BC.18