Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  Close inspection of the stonework revealed that the builders of the stone circle had been at pains to match the uprights to the shape and size of stones used to form the central cairn’s kerb. Again, there are symmetries both across the circle and within the different panels of the kerb. Structure is apparent everywhere. The framing of the Deeside mountain of Lochnagar, some 32 kilometres (20 miles) to the south-west, between the two flankers of the recumbent stone, when seen from the centre of the circle, was clearly deliberate. This view would never have framed a rising or setting sun, but it would have caught the position of the setting moon, every eighteen and a half years.15 This layout, together with the use of red stone and the distinctive, pale and slightly glistening surface of the quartz recumbent, suggests that Tomnaverie was probably intended to be used at night. And of course there is something very special about night-time rituals and ceremonies.

  Midnight Mass might be one thing, but imagine being here at Tomnaverie in moonshine, with the white light reflecting off the coloured stones. Those stones would also have affected the acoustics of the place, muffling some sounds, but amplifying what was being said, sung or chanted within the stone circle. We noticed the powerful muffling and enhancement of sound in the reconstruction we made of the Seahenge timber circle – where the effect was intensified by the release of tannic acid fumes from the recently split oak timbers surrounding us.16 The fires that we know were burned at many cairn sites might well have included scented herbs. The combined effect of these various elements on people’s senses – sight, smell and hearing – must have been profoundly moving.

  I think the most remarkable conclusion of the excavation is that the sequence of building at Tomnaverie was carefully planned. Richard Bradley puts it succinctly:

  It seems that the entire sequence recovered by excavation was conceived by the builders from the outset. The successive elements were fitted on to one another in a predetermined order until the process reached its conclusion. Little was left to chance and the nature of the monument was not altered radically from the moment of its inception.17

  On current evidence, it would appear that the site was first built and used in the twenty-fifth century BC. People returned to it as a place to bury cremated remains almost a millennium or so later, in the Bronze Age, sometime around 1600–1400 BC. I’ve already hinted that the development and chronology of these sites in north-east Scotland has fascinated prehistorians for a long time and I won’t attempt to unravel the complexity here. Personally, I suspect it would prove a pointless exercise, because it is quite clear from the research already undertaken that cairns and recumbent stone circles have many features in common, but they also differ regionally and between individual monuments. If, as Richard Bradley suggests – I believe convincingly – the development of Tomnaverie was carefully planned from the outset, then this tells us much about the way communities in the region behaved towards each other.

  For a start, nobody sat in impoverished isolation. These communities were in regular touch with one another and the slightly different development paths of the ceremonial monuments they built for themselves reflected their identities and aspirations. I live in a Fenland parish, where the nave of the once quite large parish church collapsed in the seventeenth century, leaving just a small part of the chancel to the east and the tall bell tower to the west. Between them is open ground. I suppose that, as Lincolnshire parish churches go, it is less than exciting. But if anyone were to dare to propose rebuilding the nave, I’m certain the local population would rise up in open rebellion. Our funny-looking church is now part of our identity: the land was soft, the building collapsed, but we continue – undaunted. Such expressions of communal togetherness make sense only in regions where the landscape has slowly evolved and where the different farms and settlements are in close communication. They are symbols of success, aspiration, ownership and identity. But to return to our theme, what about those recumbent stones – what did they symbolize?

  The two flankers must surely hold the clue. Doorways must always have stout posts, if the weight of the roof or the floors upstairs are not to force the walls apart. So we can assume that the flankers represent doorposts and the recumbent stone is a symbolic blocking of the entrance to the shrine within. Presumably it was lowered into place when the monument’s construction was finished. It marks it out as a very special sacred place, housing the spirits of the ancestors. Doubtless that is why it continued to be revered long after its completion. I’m sure such sealed-up monuments would have been seen as symbols of local pride and identity for a very long time. Indeed, that is why it is so very pleasing that Tomnaverie has at last been restored to its former glory with accuracy and sympathy. And of course, when we ourselves visit such sites, we should acknowledge that we are respecting very much earlier traditions. It never hurts to be humble.

  a I use the term ‘sheep/goat’ because it is extremely difficult to distinguish between the bones of the two species.

  b See Scene 7, pages 121–33.

  c Described in the first section of the next Scene.

  d Curtilage was originally used to describe a small paddock or yard attached to a larger building.

  Scene 6

  From Stone to Bronze: Stone Quarries and Special Places (4000–2500 BC)

  The Pike O’Stickle, Langdale – Orkney Islands

  History happens as a series of interconnected events: one thing leads to another and there are inevitable consequences. If, for example, you had been living in Leicestershire on 22 August 1485, you would probably have learned very quickly that a nasty battle had just been fought in a field outside Market Bosworth. Soon, everyone in England would become aware that King Richard III had been killed there. Most people would also have been aware that the battle potentially marked the end of the long-running Wars of the Roses. In a short time, everyone would grasp that the new king, Henry VII, represented the start of another royal dynasty, the Tudors, but nobody could possibly have appreciated that the change also effectively marked the end of the Middle Ages. The English Midlands would then go on to play an important role in the move away from a closed feudal system towards the more open, owner-based enterprises that would ultimately lead to the industrialization that was to play such an important role in the birth of the modern world. Just fifty years ago, this process was generally seen as a very welcome step that brought with it great social and economic benefits. Today, we are better able to appreciate that it also had major disadvantages, some of which could prove to be an existential threat to the modern world that it helped to bring about. So what we are seeing here are long-term processes and short-term events, both of which can be interpreted in very different ways.

  The changes that marked the big steps of prehistory – represented by the Three Age system of Stone, Bronze and Iron – belong to the more general, long-term category. In common with most other enduring processes, they weren’t recognized as such when they actually happened: people didn’t wake up one morning to discover they had left the Stone Age and were now living in the Bronze Age. We saw in the Introduction that the Three Age system wasn’t conceived until two millennia later, in the early 1800s, when Danish museum curators were looking for ways to catalogue their collections of ancient stone and metal objects. And make no mistake, it was a very important breakthrough, because it provided much-needed structure to our understanding of the remote past. Today, we can show both how and when these important technological and social developments actually happened in the pre-literate world; but at the same time, we should not let them dominate our understanding and appreciation of what it would have been like actually to have lived in prehistory. The spread of farming or the arrival of bronze would certainly have had an effect, but it would not have overshadowed all other aspects of life. So in this Scene I want to consider how two very different groups of people would have thought about the landscape and their roles within it, starting in the Neolithic and then moving into the Bronze Age.

  *

&nb
sp; In the modern world, obsessed as it is with wealth and material possessions, ‘treasure’ is usually portrayed in our newspapers, newsfeeds and television sets as gold. But I clearly remember the moment I discovered my first real treasure and it wasn’t gilded and it didn’t glisten. I was searching through the loose earth at the bottom of a Neolithic ditch on a site in the flatlands of the lower Welland valley, in north Cambridgeshire. I was about to empty my bucket into the wheelbarrow when something strange caught my eye. It had been raining on and off all morning and in my muddy hand was a small piece of stone, slightly larger than my thumbnail. At first sight I had thought it might have been a struck flint flake, which is why I was looking at it, but a quick glance immediately told me it wasn’t flint – an impression that was confirmed by its feel and texture, which was very slightly grainy. Flint is always as smooth as glass. But something else was making me hesitate. If it was just a piece of stone, its colour was very odd. Most of the stone you find in the gravel subsoils of eastern England tends to be either rolled flint pebbles, or weathered fragments of ironstone, or limestone from the hills of the Midlands, further upstream. These pebbles tend to be rather drab greys and browns. But the piece in my hand was a quite distinctive green colour. Then I turned it over and suddenly I knew what I had just found – and had so nearly thrown away.

  I was right about it being a struck flake, because you could clearly see where it had been given a sharp whack, probably with another stone. The side that had detached was the rougher one that I had just been feeling with my fingertips. The other face, which had formed the outside of the piece that had been whacked, was absolutely smooth. One glance confirmed what I had guessed already, that this flake had been struck off a polished stone axe. The polishing of stone to form axes, hammers, archers’ wrist guards and bracelets was an innovation that appeared in Britain in the early part of the fourth millennium. It probably arrived with other new techniques, such as weaving and pottery-making, when the first farmers came to Britain, at the start of the Neolithic, just before 4000 BC. A piece struck from a polished stone axe was certainly exciting – and I was delighted with what I had found – but I would hardly have described it as something to ‘treasure’. So I put it in a finds bag, which I carefully labelled with all the details of its find-spot, and took it over to the Finds Shed.

  Outside the Finds Shed the man in charge, David, was carefully washing pieces of flint and pottery. He then placed them in plastic seed trays (we had bought their entire stock from a local garden centre) and – on those rare occasions when we were blessed with hot summer sun – put them out to dry. I dipped the piece of axe in water and then borrowed David’s soft brush to remove some of the clay that was still sticking to it. As soon as it was clean, the colour – a distinctive, almost Lincoln green – stood out strongly, as did the very fine texture of the rock. I had seen many such axes in numerous museum cases right across eastern Britain, from south-east Scotland down to Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and into north Norfolk.1 Technically, the fine-grained stone is an epidotized greenstone, which is essentially a rock that has been transformed by volcanic heat and pressure.2 This transformation millions of years ago gave the stone its characteristic colour and firm, even texture, which makes it easy to shape, yet tough and resilient when used as an axe.

  The quality of the greenstone and its highly distinctive colour is remarkable, but rather like the spring at Blick Mead,a the source of the rock used to make the distinctive greenstone axes is very unusual, if not unique. We now know the source of the greenstone was in very spectacular scenery high on the side of the Langdale Pikes in the Lake District of north-west England, where a distinctive pointed Pike, the Pike O’Stickle, has been revealed as the quarry where it was mined. The actual quarry was high on the Pike, but it is likely that rocks would also have been taken from the scree further down the slope. The Langdale stone ‘axe factory’, as these identifiable quarries came to be known, was just one of many, with others distributed across western Britain from Scotland, into Wales and south to Cornwall. Further south and east, flint was the major raw material, and although it is harder to identify with absolute precision, quarry sites are known along the chalk downs of the south and, of course, in Norfolk, where some of the shafts and galleries of the Grime’s Graves flint mines have been excavated and are open to the public.3

  I put the words ‘axe factory’ in quotes because of the way we tend to regard factories today: as places of work alone – and often rather dull, routine, production-line work, at that. But such a description wouldn’t have applied to the highly skilled Neolithic craftsmen who first acquired and selected the stone, and then fashioned axes from it. The reason I say this with some confidence is the special way that polished stone and flint axes were treated.4 Some particularly fine examples, such as a superb jadeite axe from the peat bogs of the Somerset Levels, had clearly been placed in the ground, as offerings.b

  Polished stone axes are also frequently found in Neolithic graves, but complete axes – and fragments like the one I had the great pleasure of discovering – can often be found at other ceremonial sites, such as the causewayed enclosures of the earlier Neolithic, where I believe it likely they were being sharpened or reshaped. Like many of the activities that took place within these enclosures, this work might have happened during ceremonies centred on clans or families – maybe after somebody had died, or in the autumn when the harvest had been safely gathered in and communities were preparing themselves for the colder months of winter. Polished flint and stone axes would have been the treasured possessions of senior individuals, but they would also have signified the means of gathering fuel – which in itself would have represented warmth and survival, especially for children and older members of the village. It would be a mistake to think that any object in prehistoric life could be explained in purely functional terms – just as mobile phones today are about far, far more than mere conversation.

  6.1 The Langdale Pikes, Cumbria. The ’Stickle, site of the Neolithic axe stone quarry, is the sharp peak immediately right of the central valley. The lake in the foreground is Blea Tarn.

  HAL-9000 / Shutterstock

  The ‘trade’ in stone axes has been studied in great detail, ever since geologists developed microscopic techniques that could pin down with a fair degree of precision the sources and quarries of the rocks used. This work began before the last war and gathered pace in the 1950s and 1960s. Generally speaking, these studies viewed the axe ‘trade’ through the eyes of a modern market economist – hence the use of terms like ‘trade’ and ‘axe factories’. Then in the late 1960s there was something of a revolution in prehistory, leading to what at the time was labelled the New Archaeology.5 In hindsight, of course, it probably wasn’t that new, because most of the theories it advanced had already been propounded by social anthropologists and others. But it did mark a very welcome shift away from a view of the past that was in many ways very predictable and not very exciting – and was mostly based on economic laws of supply and demand. Social anthropologists have known for a long time that large numbers of successful societies do not follow these principles; such societies perceive life very differently and in a variety of ways, many of which cannot be simply explained.

  The human imagination certainly played an important part in shaping the way that objects were perceived in Neolithic societies, which were growing in number and becoming more settled. The houses and communities of the early farmers were far larger and more robustly built than those of their hunter-gatherer forebears – even though, thanks to sites like Star Carr,c we now appreciate that these could be substantial and permanent structures. The new way of life also demanded that the landscape should be partitioned and managed to avoid conflict between different families and communities – and eventually these boundaries would find more permanent expression with the appearance of the first field systems. Farming and a more settled lifestyle allowed – indeed, they required – more objects to accumulate: querns, or corn-grinding stones, b
askets and jars for storage, spindles and looms for weaving, mallets and hammers, ploughshares and, of course, axes. These utilitarian objects were accompanied by purely decorative items, such as carved chalk drums, bracelets, earrings and beads. These first farmers also brought with them techniques for controlling heat and for firing clay. The first pottery was quite plain, but soon bowls and jars appeared that were highly decorated and some of the finest axes, such as those made in jade, must surely have been more than just tools.

  Again, there is a danger of viewing these ancient objects through modern, classificatory eyes: we see things as either utilitarian (which increasingly means disposable) or decorative/non-functional. This way of appreciating objects lacks the richness and imagination of the past. We can only guess at what the motifs on a Neolithic pottery vessel would have symbolized, but rather like the elaborate patterns on a Scottish Victorian fisherman’s knitted sweater, they would have looked very attractive, but would also have proclaimed to other seafarers and members of the fishing community the wearer’s identity: his family and his port of origin. Even the most beautiful designs can be about more than just decoration.