Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  © Francis Pryor

  7.3 The view of Stonehenge from the King Barrow Ridge.

  © Francis Pryor

  Round barrows differed from the earlier traditions of long barrows and passage graves in being smaller, and there is also no evidence that bodies were removed once they had been buried. The tradition began sometime around 2300 BC and quite rapidly grew in popularity. In most instances, a new barrow was located alongside others – probably of family members – and would have been built to cover what is known as the primary burial, at the centre. Secondary burials, which sometimes included cremations, were often inserted into the original mound covering the primary burial, or else into enlargements of the mound. If the barrow has not been plough-damaged the secondary burials can be quite numerous, but they probably all belonged to members of the same clan or family.

  The sheer number of barrows surrounding Stonehenge can best be appreciated by walking through the landscape on a spring or autumn day, when the air is clear and dry and before the crops become too high. Most of the hundreds of tourists will be trudging around Stonehenge and you can see them, and of course get some superb views of the Stones, from the groups of barrows in the surrounding landscape. When you have walked through them, you will be in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that they were carefully positioned both to see and be seen from the Stones. My personal favourites (which are readily accessible from the eastbound carriageway of the A303) are the large barrows arranged along the King Barrow Ridge.

  This careful placing of the barrows around Stonehenge strongly suggests that there was a close ideological link between the two and I don’t think it’s stretching credulity even slightly to suggest that the link was Death. Bodies or cremated bones were transported to Stonehenge for a funeral service, before being taken on another, much shorter ceremonial journey to their eventual place of permanent burial, within one of the barrows visible in the middle distance. I suspect that this final journey was also the most intimate and private one, attended by close members of the family alone.

  7.4 Carvings of Early Bronze Age flat axes on the surface of Stone 4 of the Sarsen Circle, at Stonehenge. More than half of the carvings were revealed in a laser scan carried out in 2012.

  Throughout most of the twentieth century, speculation about the ceremonies at Stonehenge centred around solar and other alignments and emphasis was placed on larger public gatherings, with huge congregations being confined to the area outside the encircling ditch and bank. The ground within the Stones was seen as a Holy-of-Holies where secret rituals took place that could only be glimpsed by the crowds standing outside. Then at about five o’clock on the afternoon of 10 July 1953, something very remarkable happened. Professor Richard Atkinson was looking at one of the uprights of the central horseshoe of huge Trilithons when he spotted the shallow carvings of three Early Bronze Age daggers. Further carvings, mostly of axes, have been discovered since, on Stone 53 and on other stones, both of the Trilithons and of the outer Sarsen Circle.15 At the time of Professor Atkinson’s original discovery, there was a great debate in scholarly circles about possible links between Stonehenge and Mycenaean Crete and these shallow carvings were triumphantly produced as being positive evidence for such contacts (there is a slight resemblance between the carvings and Mycenaean daggers, but they are also closely similar to known British Early Bronze Age daggers and flat axes). Then new radiocarbon dates demonstrated beyond any doubt that the Mycenaean link was a red herring. So people stopped thinking about the carvings, which was a shame, because subsequent discoveries were to prove far more exciting than yet another dubious link with the Mediterranean world.

  Shallow carvings on the surface of rocks are an ideal subject for a laser scan and one was recently carried out at Stonehenge for English Heritage.16 It was published in 2012 and revealed no fewer than seventy-five new axe-head carvings, which, added to what was already known, gives a grand total of 115 – plus, of course, the three dagger carvings originally discovered by Professor Atkinson. All the axe-heads belong to a distinctive type, known as flat axes, which can be closely matched with known examples from Early Bronze Age graves dating from about 1750 to 1500 BC, when Stonehenge seems quite rapidly to have gone out of use.

  When I first read about the Stonehenge axe and dagger carvings, I simply assumed that they were Bronze Age graffiti – and thought no more about it. Somewhat later, I met somebody who had studied graffiti in medieval churches and this opened my eyes to their potential. There are two aspects of the carvings that are intriguing. The first is that none have ever been observed on the parts of the uprights that have always been below ground. This strongly suggests that the carvings were executed after the stones had been erected. The second is that no attempt seems to have been made to standardize any of them. Had they simply been used to record that a funeral or other ceremony had taken place, one might have expected the axes to have become simplified in some way. But that never happened. This would suggest that the precise shape of the individual axe-head was important. And why? Because in the eyes and minds of the people attending the ceremonies, that axe carving represented a particular person. Most probably the axe was a token of the person (being an axe or a dagger, this was probably a mani) whose body was carried to Stonehenge before being taken out to one of the barrows on the skyline for final burial.

  So if particular axes could have been identified with certain individuals, could not a drawing, outline or carving of them not be seen as the equivalent, say, of a medieval coat of arms? Individual knights in the Middle Ages displayed their coats of arms prominently, often on their shields. It was as if they were displaying a poster with their name emblazoned across it. Most ordinary foot soldiers were illiterate, but they soon learned to remember the coats of arms of the leading generals, both friendly and foe. You didn’t want to kill a friend. So could axes have been seen as something similar, back in the Bronze Age?

  At this point we might recall what we observed at Seahenge. People would have been familiar with the minutiae of axes, because they played an important part in their lives. Think of cars in the modern world: James Bond is famous for his Aston Martin, but we all know the cars our friends drive, right down to the dents and bashes they can accumulate in supermarket car parks. Today, mobile phones are becoming symbols of personal identity; people choose unusual colours, or decorate them with sparkly covers. And of course the workings of the phone – the background ‘wallpaper’, the ringtone and alarms – are easily changed to suit individual preferences. If individual people in the Early Bronze Age became identified with a particular axe, as seems quite likely from the Seahenge axe marks, then it is not stretching credulity too far to suggest that they could also have become a symbol of an individual’s identity – like those coats of arms in the Middle Ages, which, just like the carvings at Stonehenge, often included axes and daggers.17

  And that leaves me with a final thought. The people who made the axe carving most probably knew the man who was being buried. And for many I suspect it would have been an intensely personal moment, rather like the sad time I sprinkled soil on my close friend’s coffin. I also find it intriguing that all the axe-heads at Stonehenge are carved with their crescentic blades pointing skywards – in real life, they would mostly have been swung downwards; in archaeological reports they are always illustrated blade-down. Of course, I have absolutely no evidence to support me, but I sometimes find myself speculating that the upwards direction would have symbolized hope for the future: onwards and upwards; that the dead man had made the long journey and was now in a better place.

  a It is briefly mentioned in the Introduction, page xxiv.

  b This short period is sometimes called the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age.

  c See Scene 6, and the introduction to the Orkney Islands, pages 113–14.

  d The old term was ‘witch doctor’: essentially holy men and women who often performed extreme dances and were used to cure diseases or ease a soul’s journey into the next world.

&n
bsp; e See Scene 6, page 115.

  f I discussed liminality when referring to the ‘Red Lady’ of Paviland cave, in Scene 2, page 27.

  g Its use is now banned.

  h See Scene 5, page 92.

  i In Bronze Age graves, axes and daggers tend to be buried with men.

  Scene 8

  Getting About: On Land (4000–2000 BC)

  The Amesbury Archer – The Sweet Track

  Recent research in both British and European prehistory has clearly demonstrated that travel, and much of it long-distance, was a regular feature of life among early farming societies. There is also increasing evidence that, even earlier, people in hunter-gatherer communities moved around the landscape with far greater freedom than was once believed. Visions of vast tracts of impassable, impenetrably dense forests where nobody dared go are best reserved for fairy tales and fantasy fiction. The reality was very different: people needed to get about in order to stay in touch with relatives, to track game, seek markets for their farm produce or just to see the world.

  The urge to travel, which I certainly felt in my twenties, was never just a modern phenomenon; indeed, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Grand Tour through Europe became an integral part of being a young man from a well-off, cultured background. In the early days of antiquarianism and the development of archaeology, it was to play a significant part in raising people’s awareness of the rich diversity of past civilizations.1 There is a tendency to assume that in prehistory people didn’t travel and consequently had restricted imaginations. The truth is that thinkers and creators have always thought ‘outside the box’ – a process that in many, but not all, cases would have been greatly assisted by actual physical movement.

  It is so difficult to remove modern prejudices, biases and assumptions from one’s attempts to recreate life in the past, but it’s essential that we make the effort to do this, because that is the way we will learn more about ourselves. Given this persistent modern perspective, prehistorians in the recent past have tended to view periods of major change in essentially nationalistic terms – visions that reflect the turbulent history of European states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So we have waves of Celtic migrants sweeping across western Europe from the Alpine region and so-called Belgic invaders attacking southern Britain in the centuries prior to the Roman conquest. Sweeping mass migrations are also used to explain the arrival of farming and of metalworking – a process that is linked to the ‘Beaker People’. Many prehistorians believed that at the same time that these migrations were happening, Europe was seeing the rise of more hierarchical societies with powerful ‘Big Men’ leaders. And it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to link the migrations to the emerging Big Men and suddenly you have a vision of the past that quite neatly mirrors recent history – and therefore finds wide public acceptance.

  The principal problem with many of these explanations is that they imply wholesale population displacement. My experience, however, and I write as somebody who has devoted his professional life to quite localized landscape archaeology, is that the actual evidence in the ground suggests continuity. Farms, fields, settlements and boundaries remain remarkably persistent across the centuries, and even the millennia. So does this mean that these changes never happened? No, it doesn’t. They certainly happened: farming began and metal came into use, but the actual mechanisms whereby the transformations took place were complex, often differed regionally, and will take a long time to be fully revealed. There are also lessons this can teach us about our own times. We should try to look beyond the headline event and think instead about its underlying social and economic processes.

  Archaeological science has provided us with important new evidence on the subject of human movement and genetic links between different populations in Europe and further afield. The movement of people, for example, can be detected by analysing the molecular composition of tooth enamel. The famous burial of a man known as the Amesbury Archer, not far from Stonehenge, is a case in point.2 His grave, which has been radiocarbon dated to between 2470 and 2280 BC, was carefully arranged with five complete Beaker pots, a large collection of fine flint and polished stone objects, and no fewer than three copper daggers, plus a pair of gold earrings. A sort of anvil, known as a cushion stone, suggests he was most probably a craftsman in metalworking. Who knows, he may well have made some of the axes that were portrayed in the carvings at Stonehenge. He was clearly a man of great local influence and highly regarded, yet he wasn’t from the area at all. The enamel of his teeth shows that he was in fact raised in central Europe, around Bavaria or the Swiss Alps.

  The Amesbury Archer suggests that the process of metalworking was introduced by very skilled individuals who were highly regarded by the local communities they visited – and probably on a regular basis. The diverse and complex reality involved in the spread of new ideas, technologies and materials can be demonstrated by archaeology, but this varied picture only makes sense if people at the time had access to good communication systems.3 Travel would have been essential, as would regular links to our neighbours on the European mainland. This suggests that roads, paths and trackways were well established and had probably been in place for a long time. They would also have formed the boundaries between different communities. As the population grew and neighbouring tribes merged into larger chiefdoms, and by the first and second centuries BC into the first Iron Age kingdoms, many of these routes would have become important political boundaries, too. Doubtless they would have witnessed quite frequent diplomatic journeys, which brings me briefly to a topic that is often ignored when discussing prehistoric roads and tracks: the traffic they carried.

  I have always tried to take a long view of history and archaeology and I can remember being fascinated when, as a student, I read about the emergence of the first turnpikes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (AD) in W. G. Hoskins’s pioneering masterpiece of landscape history, The Making of the English Landscape.4 This was published in 1955 and I first encountered it as a student, some ten years later. At that time, the relatively new subject of Industrial Archaeology was starting to make a big impact in academic circles: places like Ironbridge were very much in the news and I can remember my fascination as I discovered just how long it took for the Industrial Revolution to happen – in fact, it wasn’t a ‘revolution’ at all. New forms of transport – first navigable rivers, then canals, then railways – were to play a key role in the movement of heavy goods between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. These were exciting, indeed enormous engineering challenges, but I found my attention was being gripped by what happened somewhat earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Britain pioneered some rather different systems, which have received less attention.

  In the early post-medieval period (i.e. after about 1550), the upkeep of roads was the responsibility of the cities, towns and parishes they passed through. So inevitably they would have carried out repairs and maintenance work on those stretches of road that were most used by local people going about their daily work. But as long-distance travel grew in importance, as workshops expanded and goods had to be moved from one part of the country to another, the old system was found wanting. Many of the new road-users were associated with the rising number of workshops and new industries. As a consequence, the poor state of the roads became a hot topic, but not just at a local level. A solution to the problem was proposed in the mid-seventeenth century, when the first Turnpike Trusts were established along the Great North Road (now the A1) in Hertfordshire.5 Parliament approved the setting up of these trusts, which in essence were small companies with the power to charge tolls to use the road. The money raised was used for the roads’ maintenance and improvement.

  The turnpikes provided a system of well-maintained roads that ran between Britain’s towns and cities. Soon, fast stagecoaches made these journeys shorter. The Royal Maila was quick to take advantage of the new network, which was as much about the spread of information a
nd ideas as the movement of actual physical objects. In this respect you could see it as a precursor of telephones, or indeed the internet. But the turnpike tolls cost money and the transport of heavy goods in bulk was expensive. So these larger items, together with flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, continued to be moved on a less formal network of so-called drovers’ roads, which also acquired its own infrastructure of bridges and drovers’ inns.6 From the eighteenth century the drovers’ roads were slowly replaced by canals and then, in the mid-nineteenth century, by railways.

  I have taken this brief diversion into recent history because I want to avoid the trap of placing all prehistoric routes in the catch-all category of ‘trackways’. Just as with modern roads, we need to think about the people who used them and what they were moving. Sometimes the journeys were about the movement of goods; at other times they were used for less tangible purposes – for diplomacy, family connections and the spread of information. And on certain special occasions, they were used for both at the same time. But do we have any actual evidence that prehistoric roads were used for these less tangible purposes, for reasons other than the simple transport of goods? And if so, how do we prove it, given that writing was not to reach Britain for almost four millennia? One might suspect that hard evidence for the less tangible uses of an ancient road or trackway might be better preserved on a route that was built and used quite late in prehistory. But you would be wrong. In fact, you couldn’t be more wrong: it is time to visit Britain’s earliest trackway, deep in the peatlands of the Somerset Levels.

  *

  I have long been a keen gardener and I frequently find myself having to buy compost for potting up my tomatoes and house plants – and for at least twenty-five years I have studiously avoided all that were peat-based. The substitutes aren’t always very good, but they’re getting better; even so, nothing will persuade me to return to peat. The reason for my horror at using peat isn’t simply the environmental damage that its extraction causes – although that is serious and usually irreversible – but I have also witnessed the archaeological harm caused by peat-digging. If anything, that is even worse and it is certainly irreversible. Given time and sufficient water, peat will eventually regrow, but it’s a process that is very slow – think more in terms of centuries and millennia than the mere years or decades it takes to remove entire peat bogs.