The huge increase in the number, quality and variety of ‘things’, of movable objects, in a Neolithic household allowed people to express new ideas and to enhance older beliefs with new layers of imaginative interpretation.6 The power of certain places, long seen as sacred or special, could now be re-expressed and recreated in the homes and farms where people actually lived. And this, I am firmly convinced, is one of the main reasons why so many greenstone axes from Langdale (the Pike O’Stickle) are found on the other side of the Pennines, in eastern England, right down to the Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire border, to the causewayed enclosure at Etton,d where I found that small axe fragment. I should add here that it was by no means unique: the site revealed twenty-four pieces of polished stone axes, mostly from Langdale, including two almost complete examples.7 These distinctive green-tinted axes were fine-grained and were undoubtedly effective as tools, but they were also thought to be endowed with something spiritually special that originated high on a mountain in the Lake District.
We can only guess what that spirituality was about. I have visited Langdale and on a cloudy day the Pike O’Stickle can appear to vanish and then return as passing clouds briefly envelop it. It could be seen as being on the edge, the boundary, of the Earth and the sky.8 Like those earlier caves, it too was liminal.e Again, we can only guess what added power this liminality from so far away gave to those axes from Etton, but they seem to have been used and placed in the ground in a variety of ways, ranging from family-based celebrations and ceremonies to the completion of certain, probably important, tasks. This suggests that their significance was seen as broad, rather than specific, and would help explain why so many were ‘exported’ from west to east. Again, it is worth briefly pausing to reflect.
Our excavations at Etton were quite substantial, but I am sure we did not find all the axe fragments that were in the ground. The original total may well have been several hundred. And these were just the survivors, as many more would have been washed away and eroded over time. Most would have been taken back home by the people who attended the ceremonial gatherings at Etton. Indeed, it seems very likely that the ceremonial exchange of items such as greenstone axes was one of the activities that would have taken place in causewayed enclosures. In prehistory there was no such thing as a market economy. Produce, objects and livestock were not traded for currency in the way they are today. The exchange of such items was more about the repayment of various long-standing family debts and obligations. Younger households paid tribute to older generations and people of lesser rank gave gifts, or tributes, to those higher up the social tree. An individual could express his or her success by the generosity of their gifts. Wealth was to be displayed and expressed, not hoarded, Scrooge-fashion. I could imagine the wide eyes of an elderly tribal chieftain and the gasps of the people attending the ceremony, as he was handed a large Langdale axe by a kneeling, but very ambitious young cousin. The fact that the older man would probably have been too arthritic to have used it was of course irrelevant: it was the gesture that counted.
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Modern houses have become very compact, functional and comfortable. Digital technology is playing an increased role in the way we inhabit and service them. Lawns and gardens are becoming quite rare and when they do survive, they are often tiny. Vegetable gardens – the last remnant of self-sufficiency in a corporate world dominated by supermarkets – are increasingly unusual. Thank heavens that allotments are making something of a comeback and are no longer mostly inhabited by elderly men tending their late-season chrysanthemums.
The idea of the house as something functional – to be built, bought and sold, with or without a mortgage – has come to dominate our perception of domestic space. I have been as guilty of this as anyone, but I believe archaeologists and prehistorians have put too much effort into thinking about the technology of building.
We have assumed that ancient houses were built like those of today – as weatherproof boxes for living in and raising families. So we have been very anxious to work out where people ate, slept and prepared their meals. It’s all about what happened where – and we have discovered a great deal. But revealing where people slept or prepared their food makes little sense if we don’t also try to appreciate what it was that motivated them to get out of bed every morning.
I began to appreciate that prehistoric people thought very differently about the buildings they inhabited when I first visited Orkney, when doing research for my general book on British prehistory, Britain BC. To say that my eyes were opened would be an understatement: what I discovered there was to transform my view of prehistory.
I had done as much reading as I could manage before I arrived in Orkney and one recurrent theme had caught my attention: circles and circularity – round barrows and stone rings. Back in the 1990s, new research was suggesting that the circular layout of many British prehistoric round-houses had something to do with the daily cycle of the sun and the passage of the seasons. It was a very general or broad conclusion and I liked it, because as an active farmer it chimed very well with what was then dominating my life: the seasonal recurrence of lambing, hay-making, shearing and regular trips to livestock markets. Days, weeks and months featured a repeated succession of actions that we were striving to do better and more efficiently each time, but the cycle – the ceaseless repetition – was fundamental to everything. And it seemed very reasonable to me to suggest that prehistoric people – who depended far more on farming than we do today – should have tried to enshrine this circularity in the shape of their houses, tombs and sacred places. It was the observed and experienced fact of regular, predictable repetition that provided hope that the process – and with it life itself – would continue into the future. That is why I, in common with most prehistorians, have never seen circular places such as Stonehenge as being mere calendars that record the passing phases of sun and moon. I believe they were about far more fundamental principles that lay behind the passing of time and the very act of living – which I suspect is what they have in common with the great churches and cathedrals of the medieval world.
As the principles underlying the circular places of the prehistoric world were so profound and all-encompassing, it should come as no surprise that they found expression in many, apparently unrelated ways. At first glance it might seem difficult to relate landscape to the passage of time and the cycle of the seasons. After all, landscapes don’t change: they remain static. But of course the plants and animals that inhabit them do grow, flourish and die, with the changing of the seasons. Furthermore, the sun and moon rise and set against the horizon, which can be dominated by cliffs, hills and mountains, and these can be used to mark the changing season.
Even in a flat landscape, such as the Fens where I live, you can track changing day length against trees and other landmarks. When I sit down to breakfast every morning – and this especially applies from October to March – I note the rising of the sun as it shifts southwards in autumn, and northwards in spring. It reaches the centre of our rose pergola at the winter solstice (usually 21 December). It then appears to hover around the same spot for at least a week – as if unable to make up its mind – before it very slowly starts the New Year’s journey back towards the north. I have never been surprised that prehistoric people regarded the winter solstice with such respect: if the sun did indeed fail to make its spring journey, they knew their crops would fail and life would end. Such fears must have been very real indeed – and shared by everyone.
Like most prehistorians arriving in Orkney, I was thinking about the big issues that were then dominating the subject: how Neolithic communities would have perceived time; the importance of the summer and winter solstices and why certain places in the landscape were regarded as sacred. But what surprised me and stirred my imagination profoundly were the glimpses I obtained there of a rather different, more intimate world, where I could see that big underlying beliefs – their world view, you might call them – did indeed underpin the layout and construct
ion of their sites and buildings, but that there was far more to them than that. For a start, the simple split between sacred and domestic places that we take for granted today often didn’t apply: features from people’s homes, such as cupboards and dressers, could also be identified inside communal tombs; conversely, houses frequently included altar-like structures in prominent positions, often facing the front door. The arrangement of sites in the landscape also showed this contrast between general principles and local choice.
Major sites were aligned across the landscape, but their individual layouts could be idiosyncratic. It was as if there were indeed controlling authorities, but these provided guidance rather than rigid authority. Family units clearly played a fundamentally important part in Orcadian prehistoric life, not just in the arrangement of individual sites of all kinds, but probably too in the selection and control of the people in authority, who made the larger, strategic decisions.9 Tribally based societies are arranged around family ties and obligations and I think we can see this in Orkney, where the stones used to construct prehistoric sites are starting to reveal unexpected new information about the lives of the people who erected them, some five thousand years ago.
Any visitor from mainland Britain to the Orkney Islands will immediately be struck by the rarity of trees. They do survive in some places, but generally only in very sheltered locations. The best evidence indicates that, in warmer post-Ice Age times, trees returned to Orkney and were able to become established in the soils that had gradually accumulated there. However, the return of human communities in post-glacial times led to the felling of trees for fuel and timber. The tree-felling could have involved the pulling-over of the tree and the cutting of the roots. This works well in shallow soils and prevents any subsequent regrowth. Alternatively, trees were cut down and the removal of their canopy allowed winds and rain to get to the soil to both dry and wash it, thereby removing much of its nutrition and bulk. Under such conditions, the re-emergent shoots could not have thrived for very long. Once felled, the tree roots eventually died and were unable to hold what remained of the soils in place, given the heavy rainfall and strong winds from off the Atlantic Ocean that are (still) such a feature of the region. The lack of soil made it harder for new seedlings and saplings to become established and, as a result, most of the tree cover vanished.
The scarcity of wood and timber on Orkney must have caused its growing prehistoric communities many practical problems, especially with regard to fuel for their fires, but people are adaptable: peat can be dried and heather burns well. We also know that the high-tidelines of the islands’ many beaches were often strewn with driftwood, much of it originating on the far side of the Atlantic, following winter storms. Firewood was one thing, but good-quality timber for building was a far bigger problem. And here the islands’ natural geology came to the rescue in the form of a hard sandstone that occurs widely across the islands, just below the surface. The stone is quite easily split and can be used much like timber to provide shelves and shuttering, although not beams. In chambered tombs it can be worked to form roofs, using a technique known as corbelling, where one slab is placed over another, but jutting out in a stepped pattern, to form a kind of arch or dome. Most British prehistoric houses were built from wood and clay, so that all that survives of their actual structures are stains and marks left by posts that have rotted in the ground. In Orkney, however, the picture is very different. The hard stone with which they are built means that the islands’ prehistoric houses have survived in remarkably good condition. Some of the houses feel as if their inhabitants have only just moved out.
In 1999 the outstanding preservation of prehistoric sites on Orkney’s largest island, Mainland, was marked by the award of UNESCO World Heritage status.10 The award was undoubtedly partly the result of a big upsurge in research from the 1980s, when a number of important new sites were discovered. This research also provided fresh information about the sources of the stones used in the great stone circle with the memorable name: the Ring of Brodgar (or Brogar). It’s worth noting here that Norse or Viking settlers from Scandinavia had moved into Orkney in considerable numbers by the ninth century AD and they adopted many of the prehistoric sites, giving them Norse names, such as Brodgar. They also left graffiti behind, the best of which are in the tomb at Maes Howe. My personal favourite, carved alongside a sketch of a slavering dog, reads: ‘Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women’.11 There was plainly far more to Vikings than invasion and conquest alone.
It is striking how many permanent settlements occur close by large tombs and stone circles on Orkney’s Mainland. Elsewhere in Britain, the more substantial henges and other shrines are mostly confined to so-called ritual landscapes, which are often positioned in liminal areas away from fields and farms. The standing stones for the Ring of Brodgar were transported to the site from quarries near the settlements occupied by the people who erected and then used them.
It would be a great mistake to assume that life in Neolithic Britain was somehow homogeneous. There were certainly broad similarities in the way that tombs, henges and even houses were arranged, but these were not seen as rigid – to be adhered to at all cost. In Orkney, for example, the divide between houses where people dwelt and the ritual or ceremonial places, where they worshipped, could be remarkably fluid. The best-known houses on Neolithic Orkney are undoubtedly those at Skara Brae, a site that was first revealed, on the western side of Mainland, before the war. Today, it’s very well displayed and they’ve made an excellent replica house that you can enter. I’m normally rather doubtful about attempts to reconstruct the past, as they’re often very predictable and usually reflect what the modern guardians of the monuments think their visitors would like. To judge by open days at British medieval houses and castles, people in the Middle Ages spent 90 per cent of their time jousting, which I don’t think very likely. The Skara Brae replica successfully avoids all these pitfalls.
However, to get the best impression of what an enclosed prehistoric space would actually have felt like, you could not find anywhere better than the chambered tomb at Maes Howe. I am so grateful that history has allowed this astonishing monument to survive more or less intact. It has had some restoration work done, but that’s only to be expected, especially given Orkney’s somewhat turbulent history.
Maes Howe (or Maeshowe) was located near the centre of the great cluster of prehistoric sites on Mainland. It is within comfortable walking distance of the two best-known Orcadian stone circles, the standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar – but also to two rather unexpected – and recently discovered – sites, which I’ll mention shortly. But first the tomb itself.
Maes Howe belongs to a tradition of tombs known as passage graves, which probably originated in Brittany. It was built in the later Neolithic, shortly after 3000 BC, and consists of a long entrance passage that leads into a central hall with small side cells for burials. In common with the other great passage grave from these islands, Newgrange, in Ireland, the long entrance passage faces south-west, precisely towards the midwinter sunset. On that day, light shines down the 12-metre (40 ft)-long passageway and illuminates the central chamber.
Rather like the cathedrals and churches of our own times, many prehistoric tombs and shrines have complex histories. When you enter Maes Howe, for example, you will notice the huge upright stones at the corners of the main hall – these most probably formed part of a pre-existing stone circle, now built into the tomb. It’s also very probable that an earlier Neolithic settlement lies in the ground beneath the floor. The attention to detail evident in all the Orcadian sites, whether houses or shrines, suggests strongly that they were visited and used at regular intervals; people would have been intimately familiar with them. It also suggests a pattern of life that was focused on settlements – and particularly houses. In Orkney, communities remained in the same places from one generation to the next, at a time when populations elsewhere were more mobile. I’m not suggesting that Neolithic farmers
migrated around the country, but that farms could, and did, shift from one area to another as land grew wetter, or as soils became depleted. They could have returned to their original locations after a few years, but the basic settlement pattern was essentially flexible. This does not seem to have been the case in Orkney, where the house retained a strong hold on individual families for generations.
The importance of houses in third millennium BC Orkney has been revealed recently by some exciting new discoveries. The first of these was a settlement, now known as Barnhouse, which was discovered by the archaeologist Colin Richards a very short distance from the Stones of Stenness. One might expect a settlement that was placed alongside a contemporary stone circle to include houses alone, since any need for rituals or ceremony could readily be met by nearby Stenness, whose tall stones must have dominated life in the Barnhouse houses twenty-four hours a day. But when the site was excavated in the late 1980s, the dozen or so houses included two that were substantially larger. It would be reasonable to suppose that these might have been used by important people or families – priests or chieftains, perhaps – and there may well be something in this. But the layout of both buildings was rather strange: elongated, with side alcoves that resembled the cells found in chambered tombs, and with two or more hearths.12 They seemed to have a lot in common with tombs, yet they were clearly buildings and located within the heart of the settlement.
It was believed that Barnhouse was a unique, one-off discovery until 2003, when local farmers reported some unusual stone slabs on a narrow spit of land that separated Lochs Harray and Stenness, a short distance to the north-east of Barnhouse. The site that was then revealed, the Ness of Brodgar, has proved to be one of the most remarkable discoveries in prehistoric Europe. I’ve had the great pleasure of visiting the excavations twice and on each occasion I found the experience strangely unsettling – but I’ll return to that shortly.
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 13
