Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  The real story began to emerge when climatologists, geologists and palaeo-environmentalists started to turn their attention to the details of how and why our climate changed in the millennia leading up to and into the Holocene – the post-Ice Age era. Subsequently, of course, we have witnessed how these various natural changes have been greatly accelerated by carbon emissions brought about by the rise of modern industry from the mid-nineteenth century.a The new research convincingly demonstrated that climate change wasn’t always a smooth and gradual process. Instead, there were spikes and troughs that didn’t always last for very long. But sometimes they did.

  One of the clearest examples of a rapid, long-lasting change took place over some fifty years around 9600 BC.4 It was during this time – maybe a short human lifetime – that the climate of northern Europe warmed by some ten degrees Celsius, before it levelled off. Subsequently, it has wobbled or changed from time to time, growing a little wetter and colder at the turn of the first millennium BC.5 In historic times we see this in the cooler phases, sometimes dubbed the ‘Mini Ice Ages’ of the sixth and seventh centuries AD and in the so-called Mini Ice Age of 1645–1715, when the River Thames froze in London.6 Such phenomena, however, were local rather than regional and often had clear causes, such as the aftermath of volcanic eruptions. This new appreciation of the speed and scale of post-Ice Age warming coincided with a number of important archaeological discoveries. These new sites and finds have caused us to rethink the story of early human resettlement of what was quite rapidly becoming the island of Britain.

  For many people, the appeal of upland or mountainous landscapes lies in what one might term their ‘unchangingness’: they are massive, humbling monuments to the past. In certain respects I share this view, but I also have to confess that the archaeologist deep within me feels rather frustrated, as I stand and stare down the dished sides of a once glaciated valley: it all seems rather unchallenging, because it’s there, in front of you – in-your-face, as it were. And besides, we know for a fact that people have never inhabited remote upland landscapes in appreciable numbers. I would far rather get in my car and drive down to the plains surrounding the hills, because these are the places where the archaeological problems – and opportunities – lie. These landscapes have been changed enormously by the numerous communities that once inhabited them.

  The modern county of Yorkshire is perhaps best known for its picturesque Moors and Dales – the landscapes of Wuthering Heights and the stories of the farm vet James Herriot and other flights of creative imagination. A certain amount of attention is still paid to the valleys and lowlands where the factories and workshops of the mill towns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries heralded the rise of the industrial era. But the part of Yorkshire that sometimes seems to have slipped off the map is the low-lying plain that separates the rolling hills of the Yorkshire Wolds, which form the south-eastern part of the county – the old East Riding – from the steeper uplands of the North York Moors. This plain is the Vale of Pickering and it has been well known to archaeologists since the 1950s. Today, much of the Vale is threatened by intensive agriculture, land drainage, housing and factory development, but research in the second half of the twentieth century has revealed an extraordinary wealth of earlier and later prehistoric remains, together with some of the best-preserved Roman, Saxon and early medieval villages and farms in Britain. It is a rich, fertile and gentle landscape of enormous old-fashioned English charm. It is rightly famous for things that really matter: for traditional beers, cheese and, of course, fish and chips.

  In pre-glacial times, the Vale of Pickering was drained by earlier versions of the River Derwent, which flowed out of what, much later, became the island of Britain, between the modern coastal towns of Scarborough (to the north) and Filey. In the final stages of the last Ice Age, however, a large glacier deposited a substantial terminal moraine right across the Vale, just inland from Scarborough. So today the River Derwent follows an entirely new course, southwards, through Malton, eventually joining the River Ouse just east of Selby – a long way to the south. But at the point where the natural drainage was blocked by the terminal moraine, a large glacial lake began to form. This lake (now dry) has been named Lake Flixton by archaeologists and geologists and its shores contain some of the most important, and ancient, prehistoric sites in northern Europe.

  The extent to which lowland landscapes have been changed by the hand of man has fascinated me for a long time and many of the most important processes can be clearly seen in the Vale of Pickering. But perhaps the most important point to stress is that the natural, untouched landscape of Britain was never particularly simple, nor straightforward. In the past, historians would write about Britain reverting to deep forest when the Romans withdrew in the early fifth century. These dark, brooding woodlands somehow gave an added spooky feel to the Dark Ages, those four centuries prior to AD 800 when the political organization of the emerging kingdoms of early medieval Britain became apparent. Modern scientific evidence has clearly shown that although there were changes in land use when the Romans withdrew, there is no evidence for spreading forests; indeed, in some places woods were actually cleared to provide grazing for sheep and cattle. That is one of the reasons why the term ‘Dark Ages’ has been abandoned in all academic writing about the period.b

  The landscape that might have confronted the earliest post-Ice Age settlers in Britain was seen in a very similar way: essentially, it was thickly wooded and fairly impenetrable. Between the two world wars, botanists using the newly developed technique of pollen analysis began to show that the blanketing forests were something of a myth. Yes, there was extensive tree cover, but it was by no means impenetrable, as it was largely composed of birch, willow and poplar – all ‘pioneer trees’ that are the first to grow in previously open landscapes and require much light for their characteristic rapid growth. The slower-growing trees of the new woodland, first ash, followed by oak, elm and beech, can grow in deeper shade and will eventually come to dominate a mature, established wood. But this took time: centuries, even millennia.

  Recent changes to the British landscape have been very profound, too. Glacial Lake Flixton has vanished and if you didn’t know it had once been there, I don’t see how you could have spotted it as you drove through it. Yes, there are a few clues for the sharp-eyed, especially if, like me, you enjoy spotting sluices, pumping stations and other tell-tale signs of modern drainage. The drainage of Lake Flixton mostly took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and centred on the straightened and embanked artificial River Hertford, which makes a Fenman like me feel remarkably at home, but which does not sit quite so happily in the gently undulating landscape of the Vale of Pickering.7 Thanks to that terminal glacial moraine blocking its natural outfall into the North Sea, the River Hertford has to flow backwards, from east to west, towards the similarly reversed course of the River Derwent.

  Whenever I’m travelling up to visit friends and family in Yorkshire I always try to go via Hornsea, which lies on the North Sea coast, about 24 kilometres (15 miles) north-east of Hull. Immediately inland, to the west of Hornsea, is Hornsea Mere, a shallow glacial lake that would have been closely similar to Lake Flixton. Today, Hornsea Mere is protected as a place of environmental importance, because of its natural vegetation, which is astonishingly rich and diverse.8 Botanical evidence preserved in the peats clearly demonstrates that the same could also have been said of Lake Flixton, prior to its drainage.9 And of course thriving and varied plant communities attract game, wildfowl and, in the lake itself, fish and eels. Lake Flixton would have been nothing short of a natural larder.

  3.1 A view of the glacial lake Hornsea Mere, in Holderness, Yorkshire, some 16 km (10 miles) north-east of Hull, close to the North Sea coast. In early post-glacial times, the lakeside woodland would mostly have been composed of birch, poplar and willow.

  © Francis Pryor

  New archaeological sites tend to be discovered either from the air, usually by plan
es (but increasingly by drones), or on the surface, using geophysics, ground-penetrating radar or sometimes simply by slow and methodical field walking. Nowadays such work is most often carried out by professionals working either for academic research projects or commercial clients, who need to assess the land they are proposing to develop – usually for quarries, roads or housing. But in the years after the last war, money for academic research was very scarce and commercial developers did not require archaeological clearance from local planning authorities. And this is where the unpaid ‘amateurs’ came in – and I deliberately use the word in quotes, because in the vast majority of instances their methods and approaches were highly professional. John Moore, a local enthusiast from Scarborough, was a fine example. He was a modest man and his name is still not as widely known as it should be. His discoveries in the Vale of Pickering were to have a profound effect on the subsequent development of British and North European prehistory.

  In 1947, Moore and other enthusiasts set up the Scarborough and District Archaeological Society.10 Moore was interested in the peaty landscape of the Carrs, which had formed behind the terminal moraine between the small town of Seamer, to the north, and the rural village of Flixton, to the south. Researching peaty landscapes can be challenging, largely because the peats themselves are often very deep and effectively conceal whatever lies within and beneath them. So he decided to conduct an auger survey. Most augers are rather like giant corkscrews that you screw into the ground to the depth of the screw’s length, and then pull out. Once out of the ground, you can examine the soil or peat on the spiral auger blade and remove any fragments of wood, flakes of flint or pieces of bone. You then carefully clean the blade (putting the heap next to the soil from the previous auger ‘bite’, usually on a plank or piece of old plastic guttering) and return to the hole for another bite. And another (it can be back-breaking work!). Eventually the auger hits the rock, clay or gravel lying below the higher, softer layers and the person, or people, working the screw can feel the change through the metal: gravel, for example, has a distinctive ‘gritty’ feel and the screw suddenly becomes easier to turn. If there’s clay below the peat, the auger immediately becomes much harder to twist.

  Screw augers or simple metal probes work well in most places where the ground below your feet is likely to contain pebbles, bands of gravel or fragments of preserved wood, such as the famous ‘bog oaks’ of the Fens. But in certain landscapes the deposits are finer, and often softer, too. The Carrs region of the Vale of Pickering is one of these places, and here it is possible to employ a more subtle and highly effective type of auger. These augers have to be pushed into the ground and if you are doing the job by hand you’ll need the assistance of at least one, and preferably two, hefty and fit young men. These augers contain a long chamber with a door that is closed by a twist. When the auger is withdrawn from the ground, this chamber contains an undisturbed sample of the ground deep below the surface. I have always felt the excitement of the moments when the door protecting the sediments is opened and there, before you, are fresh deposits from the ancient past. They even smell more like lakes than the dry peaty soils of the modern field. You can clearly see the 1- or 2-millimetre-thick layers of winter flood-clay that formed each season on an extinct lakebed, over ten thousand years ago. Such samples are of great interest to palaeobotanists, who can reconstruct a very precise picture of the changing vegetation through time. And of course they also allow samples to be taken for accurate dating, by radiocarbon or other techniques.

  In 1948, the year after he had helped set up the Society, John Moore took a small group of fellow enthusiasts out into the Carrs to do an auger survey. Over the following years, this patient and disciplined research revealed the outline of the long-vanished glacial lake. As my own research team was to learn very much later in the Fens, you cannot hope to discover what might lie beneath peats and other wetland deposits by simply using one approach. You have to be prepared to walk along muddy dykes and ditches on the off-chance that you might spot something on their sides; and when isolated ‘islands’ appear through the peats (there are three main ones in Lake Flixton) then you must carefully examine their surfaces, especially around the edges, as that is where you are most likely to find evidence for past settlement. This sort of research has to take place at different times of the year: freshly ploughed or tilled fields are rarely productive, but allow two or three weeks of frosts to break down the topsoil and make it crumbly and suddenly you can spot the often quite tiny fragments of flint, bone or pottery that were deposited there in prehistory. They stand out brightly, because frost and rain have washed them clean.

  John Moore had long been interested in the peaty landscapes around what he was later to call Lake Flixton. Back in 1947, before he began his survey with his new archaeological society, Moore had found a small flint blade in one of the new ditches that had just been dug to help drainage and to mark out field boundaries. It was a small flint flake of a very distinctive type, known to archaeologists as a microlith. Microliths took much skill to make and were produced during the Mesolithic period from just after 10,000 BC, at the conclusion of the Ice Age, until around 4000 BC, which saw the start of the Neolithic period and with it the introduction of farming, the first pottery and new techniques of flint-working. Microliths were often used to make tooth-like barbs for wooden or bone fish-spears, arrowheads and suchlike. They changed a great deal through time and archaeologists love to produce huge, highly detailed academic papers about them. I’ve tried flint-working myself, and I can appreciate how much skill it took to produce a microlith, but I have to confess that I find the intricate details of their changing sizes, profiles and shape less than completely fascinating. Having said that, such things have to be studied (if not by me), because it isn’t merely the devil that lurks in the detail. The more we learn about the little things in ancient lives, the greater will be our understanding of those larger, more important ideas and beliefs that motivated people not just to eat and work, but to get up in the morning and to love their homes, their families and life in general.

  Modern archaeology is increasingly drawing on science and scientific techniques. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t read about some new discovery about human genetics and the origins of ancient communities in far-off places. Close microscopic studies of the working edges of flint tools, for example, can reveal fascinating details about the way people butchered their meat and prepared their vegetable food. But neither genetics nor microwear can tell us anything about the motivations that led people to move from one place to another, nor why they chose to eat or avoid certain foods. Somebody has to step back from the detail and attempt to paint a broader picture that might mean something to interested people living today – otherwise all the detailed research will have been in vain. This is where the concept of landscape archaeology comes in.

  Even today, media coverage of new archaeological discoveries tends to be very localized and site-specific. Totally inappropriate parallels are drawn to link a new find with something well known from the past: if I had to think of a parallel for a briefly occupied, waterlogged Bronze Age site in the Cambridgeshire Fens, it would not be a long-lived, stone-built Roman town. And yet that was the place chosen by the BBC as a comparison. I suppose it made a good headline: ‘Britain’s Pompeii’ (try googling it). Personally, I think it undersold the site because it made it sound like a freakish one-off discovery, whereas the reality was that it was the result of more than half a century of patient archaeological research. And that research is ongoing. I am certain there are many more similar – and maybe even better-preserved – prehistoric sites waiting to be revealed in the Fens around Must Farm.

  Archaeologists have long known that readily identifiable ‘sites’ – usually places where people lived or buried their dead – are just one component in an ancient landscape. If you want to understand what motivated people to live and work in a particular settlement, you must try to discover how it fitted into the fields or hunting
territories that surrounded it: who owned or controlled what land; how they sold or exchanged food, gifts and commodities; whether they lived in peace or tension with their neighbours, and what the burial or cremation of their dead can tell us about their spiritual lives and beliefs. These questions can only be addressed if we move beyond sites and look at an ancient landscape as a working, evolving and, yes, living entity. And this was something John Moore appreciated. He realized that those first flints he was discovering would only begin to make sense if he understood something – anything – about the landscape in which they originated.

  So John Moore walked around the edges of Lake Flixton, which had formed in the lower-lying parts of the gently undulating Vale. He was looking for places where early Mesolithic people might have settled. You can clearly spot the lake edges today: the area that would have been lake is now black peaty topsoil – rather like a giant growbag – whereas the edges are formed by low sandy or gravel banks and mounds that were originally raised by passing glaciers. Where the banks rise steeply, the contrast between the dark peats and the much paler sands is quite sharp and easy to spot, but where the sides slope more gently it becomes harder to decide precisely where the actual dry land begins. But with time, you develop quite a good eye, which is important because the edges of the lake were where prehistoric people chose to settle. So you’ve got to be able to spot such shoreline areas accurately.

  3.2 A map of glacial Lake Flixton as it would have appeared in early post-glacial times, around 9000 BC.

  John Moore’s initial research revealed the outline of Lake Flixton, together with at least three areas that were producing early post-glacial flints and were therefore potential Mesolithic settlements. One of these sites, which Moore labelled Site 4, turned out to be of international importance. In the early 1950s it was excavated by a team from Cambridge University and became well known as Star Carr.11 The latest excavations there (by York University) have revealed a settlement of some fifteen houses. We cannot tell how many would have been occupied simultaneously, but it seems entirely possible that the community consisted of several families and that it was occupied for some two to three centuries, sometime around 9000 BC. The settlement has revealed hearths, meat bones and evidence that food was prepared and consumed in and around the small, roughly circular single-family houses.