Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  Archaeological sites, however, are irreplaceable. Once they have been destroyed they have gone for ever. Sadly, peat extraction has removed thousands of important prehistoric sites, for the simple reason they occur relatively high in the bogs. Most peat bogs in Britain and Ireland originated in the final centuries of the Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago.7 This was a time when Britain had still not been re-inhabited following the end of the last Ice Age. And when people did return, it was a slow, gradual process.b So archaeological remains are relatively infrequent in peat bogs until about the fifth millennium BC, during the later Mesolithic and Neolithic periods – and with the start of farming, the evidence for settlement increases rapidly. These later remains tend to be found in the higher layers of peat, which of course are – or in most cases, sadly, were – the first to be removed during the process of extraction.

  Certain peats are better than others for making into composts and growbags. Some of the best are found in Ireland and in the Somerset Levels and this is where many spectacular archaeological discoveries have been made. Happily, extraction has been massively reduced in the Levels, but it continues in Scotland and in England it still takes place in the lower reaches of the River Trent, between Doncaster and Scunthorpe. This low-lying land in north Lincolnshire is known as the Isle of Axholme. Peats from the Fens tended not to be used in composts, largely, I suspect, because they were very fertile if left in place. I suppose you could see the Fens as a vast growbag – but one quite rapidly approaching the end of its useful life.8

  Peatlands are archaeologically important because of the process of peat formation, in which the natural rotting of soft, and once-living, material is halted through a mixture of acidity, waterlogging and a shortage of oxygen. This occurs in situations where water flow is slow or absent and where drying out never happens. This process can lead to the near-perfect preservation of organic materials including plant matter, fabrics and even flesh, skin and hair. When ancient peat bogs and fens are drained, the airless water soon acquires oxygen, which allows fungi and other natural agents to resume the natural processes of rotting and degradation that had been halted centuries, even millennia, previously. This process releases huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.

  Close examination of peats under a microscope will reveal preserved insects, minute mosses, seeds – even pollen grains. These accumulated gradually and formed distinct layers. The pollen grains ultimately derived from the ‘pollen rain’ that is everywhere in the atmosphere and causes so many people distress in springtime, thanks to hay fever. This ‘rain’ reflects the pollen growing not just in the immediate vicinity, but in a very wide area round about. So when the pollen grains are identified and counted, the information can be used to reconstruct, for example, the extent of woodland coverage at a particular time in prehistory. Pollen analysis, as it is known, has played an important role in mapping the spread of woodland clearance in the early stages of agriculture.

  Archaeologists had known about the extraordinary potential of wetlands long before the Second World War, but the realization of the growing extent of peat extraction, and the archaeological damage it was doing, only started to make an impact in the 1960s. One of the pioneers of what would soon become a very rapidly growing subject in its own right – Wetland Archaeology – was Dr John Coles, of Cambridge University. John was Canadian and I had the great good fortune to have him as a supervisor for my last two years at college.c I enjoyed his easy-going appeal and relaxed attitude; I also hugely admired his academic discipline and breadth of knowledge. But there was another side to John that was to have a lasting effect on the subject he loved so much – and that was his practical ability, his love of rolling his sleeves up. I know it’s an old cliché, but archaeologists really do like to get their hands dirty. And I’m no exception: hardly a day goes by when I don’t find myself trying to extract a rose thorn from my thumb or prising stiff clay from behind my fingernails.

  John Coles and his Somerset Levels Project team pioneered most of the specialized techniques you need to employ when excavating something as soft as waterlogged wood. Steel trowels – the normal hand tool of all archaeologists – can do terrible damage to an ancient timber. The chemical composition of the wood itself is altered by centuries of waterlogging and a timber as hard as the heartwood of oak can be quite badly damaged even by a plastic knife, let alone a sharp-edged trowel. So the Somerset team developed new techniques involving wooden spatulae and even lollipop sticks. This care was essential if they were to reveal the delicate axe and chisel marks that can tell us so much about prehistoric woodwork. They even worked out how to kneel in soft peat without leaving deep knee- and toe-impressions. These tricks of the trade were to prove vital when we began our own researches in the Fens, a decade later. We copied them shamelessly.9

  John Coles took his love of practical things a stage further. He realized that by trying to replicate the way people performed certain everyday prehistoric tasks, you would gain remarkable insights into their lives. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pioneering prehistorians discovered that flint-knapping took great skill and that it involved far more than merely bashing two stones together. It was an extraordinarily difficult process and it took hundreds of thousands of years to perfect. For many decades, archaeologists mostly confined their attempts to replicate prehistoric techniques to flint-working. After the war, however, academic horizons widened. John Coles and other colleagues believed that a practical approach could be applied to the replication of other ancient skills, ranging from woodwork to quarrying, house-building and metalworking. Experimental Archaeology had been born, and John wrote one of the first and best guides to it.10

  Much of John Coles’s pioneering work in the new sub-discipline of Experimental Archaeology was carried out as part of his researches into the Somerset wetlands, where I saw what he was doing – and I have to say I found it inspiring. I know that the felled trees and the replica tools were modern, but they seemed entirely authentic and, yes: real. Their authenticity wasn’t just the result of discipline and strict adherence to the tools and techniques that would have been available at the time, it was about more than that. I felt that the archaeologists who did the work loved their subject and took it very seriously, but they also wanted to learn. When you looked at their reconstructions, it was like you were witnessing an historic explorer returning from a distant land. There was something inspirational in what they were doing and it certainly inspired my own work in the 1980s, when I was able to reconstruct Bronze Age fields, droveways, a farm and houses in the flat, open landscapes of Fengate and Flag Fen. Today, that reconstructed Bronze Age landscape is still open to the public.11

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  In the early spring of 1970, John Coles was working in the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge when he received a package in the mail from the Eclipse Peat Works of Shapwick and Meare Heaths, two of the large peatlands of the Somerset Levels. Opening the package, he found a fragment broken from a waterlogged ash plank. The plank had clearly been split from out of a large ash tree. Once you’ve seen a few split wooden planks you can immediately differentiate the ones that had been split deliberately – to make planks – from those that happened by accident, when, for example, a large branch is blown down during severe gales.

  John headed straight down to Somerset to meet the man who had discovered the wood. His name was Raymond Sweet.12 They both went to the place where the wood had been found and John organized a rapid exploratory excavation, which soon revealed more of the plank plus some wooden pegs that had been driven into the ground. It was clearly part of a prehistoric trackway, but of what date? Earlier, Raymond Sweet had found a very finely made leaf-shaped flint arrowhead, which could only have been Neolithic; the date was confirmed by the discovery of a hoard of Neolithic flint flakes. Later, tree-ring studies of the oak and ash timbers from what was soon to be called the Sweet Track showed it to have been constructed during the winter of 3807 to 3806 BC. Further tree-ring researc
h was able to demonstrate that repairs continued for another ten years – which suggests that it was relatively short-lived.

  The Sweet Track was constructed from the dry ridge formed by the Polden Hills, out across the peatlands to the higher ground of the ‘island’ today occupied by the villages of Westhay and Meare. Meare and Glastonbury (about 5 kilometres/3 miles to the south-east) were to become important ‘lake village’ settlements in the Iron Age, some three millennia later.d You might suppose that such a short-lived wooden footpath was built without a great deal of care and preparation, but nothing could be further from the truth. It follows a very straight path and can be traced for about 1,800 metres (1 mile). Far from being cobbled together using different methods in various places, the way it was built was uniform, but simple; it was also highly effective. It was adjustable so that the builders could achieve a level walkway and repair any subsidence or tilting. The aim of the structure was to raise a wooden path well above the flooded ground, in order to keep it relatively dry. As anyone knows who has tried to walk across one of those decking patios that were so trendy in the 1990s, the surface of wet wood soon becomes lethally slippery – especially when it acquires a light coating of green algae.

  John Coles set about building an accurate replica of the track, using appropriate tools and techniques, all of which were based on what they had observed during their excavations.13 First a long log (say 4 metres/13 ft), about the size of a large fence post, was placed on the ground. This was carefully lined up on the trackway’s alignment. Then two sharpened pegs, each a bit longer than a person’s arm, were driven into the ground, forming an X-shape, with the log immediately below the cross. Next, a wide plank was propped between the pegs, along and above the log. Then further crossed pegs were driven into the ground at the other end of the log and the plank was lifted onto them. It now lay above and parallel to the log lying on the wet surface. Finally, additional crossed pegs were added along its length, to better support the weight of the plank – and of anyone walking along it. Rather to their surprise, John and his collaborators found that adjusting the crossed pegs to support the plank and keep it level was remarkably easy. Erecting the trackway was to prove a rapid and straightforward process, providing, of course, that the various components had been prepared in advance. The team found that about 10 metres (11 yd) of trackway could be laid, erected and adjusted in about half an hour, and with practice they were able to reduce this to just fifteen minutes.14 So although over six thousand years old, the Sweet Track had been planned and constructed with extraordinary efficiency by people who clearly understood what they were doing.

  The other aspect of prehistoric trackway construction that the Sweet Track experiments illustrated was the need to plan in advance. Distances had to be measured and the correct number of components – logs, pegs and planks – had to be prepared. This was something we also found at Flag Fen, near Peterborough (a much later site of about 1000 BC),e where there was also good evidence for sophisticated woodwork and a controlling authority who assigned materials, such as pre-split oak posts, for separate repair projects along the post alignment – the term we used to describe a large ceremonial trackway and boundary.

  In addition to precise dates, the tree-ring research showed that the oak trees that were felled and then split to provide the Sweet Track’s walkway planks came from mature trees in the trackway’s northern half and from younger ones closer to its southern section. Again, this suggests prior organization and it also indicates that different communities were co-operating in what today we would refer to as the ‘supply chain’. As a general rule, prehistoric construction projects were often organized through community, tribal and family groups and it is likely that the Sweet Track, like Flag Fen, very much later, was a trackway that was rather more than just a means of getting from A to B. There was another dimension to it.

  Wet areas have long been regarded as special. In part this reflects their liminality, but there is also something supernatural about water itself: a mirror on life, but a cause of death.f These ideas probably help to explain why so many dry ‘islands’, such as the Isle of Ely, were seen in the past as sacred places. Glastonbury is and was the equivalent of Ely in the Somerset Levels – but it wasn’t just the larger ‘islands’ that were treated with respect, and it seems quite likely that smaller ‘islands’, such as the one that today includes the villages of Westhay and Meare, were also venerated. When the Sweet Track was first revealed, we all thought it was just that: a track, albeit the earliest trackway so far discovered in Britain (which it remains to this day). It was a track (a raised footpath would be a more accurate description) from one area of dry land to another. But then, and to everyone’s surprise at the time, clear, unambiguous evidence was revealed that it wasn’t that straightforward: there were other, more intangible, aspects to it as well. I love it when this sort of thing happens, when a little magic is bestowed on an apparently uncomplicated discovery: somehow it becomes more human – and alive.

  The Sweet Track was intensively investigated for more than ten years in the 1970s and 1980s and work has continued there ever since.15 This research has revealed a great deal not just about the trackway itself, but about its immediate surroundings. Finds alongside and directly beneath the walkway’s timbers have included flint arrowheads – some still attached to partially preserved shafts – and caches of broken pottery. The pottery was all of very good quality, thin-walled and well made; the people using the walkway didn’t carry any of the coarser so-called domestic wares. One vessel still contained hazelnuts, and a stirring stick (or spurtle – the best thing for stirring proper Scottish porridge!) lay alongside it. At least three wooden bows were found near the southern end of the trackway in an area that pollen analysis shows would have been wooded in earlier Neolithic times. Some of these finds could simply be explained in terms of accidental loss, although I find it hard to believe that the fine pottery was simply discarded – like an old lunch box. This was top-quality tableware and I suspect there was more to it than that.

  A hint at what might have been going on along the Sweet Track is provided by the three flint axe-heads found beside the trackway. One was unused and all were unhafted – just like the axe-heads found in graves, such as that of the Amesbury Archer. Strange as it may seem, in my experience prehistoric flint, stone or bronze axes are rarely found on sites where woodwork has been taking place. Sometimes you might find their broken wooden hafts, as we did at Etton.g But for reasons that remain entirely relevant to this day, craftsmen have always cherished their tools: they clean them, sharpen them and keep them in good condition. It’s all part of taking pride in your work: you won’t find blunt chisels on building sites. In fact, you won’t find chisels at all, because good craftsmen clear up behind them. So why did John Coles and his team find three unhafted flint axes alongside the Sweet Track? The rather surprising answer to that question lay in yet another stone axe.

  Perhaps the most remarkable find from the Sweet Track was revealed beneath a piece of wooden board, just a couple of feet to one side of the plank walkway. It was a polished stone axe, clearly of Neolithic style and shape, but not fashioned in one of the known British axe quarries, such as Langdale.h Like the Langdale axes, this axe was green, but a somewhat mottled green. On closer examination the material turned out to be jadeite, a very attractive mineral that polishes up well and is often used today in jewellery. Microscopic examination revealed that the source for the Sweet Track jadeite was the Alpine region of central Europe.

  The discovery of the jadeite axe from central Europe alongside a timber trackway in rural Somerset caused huge excitement. It was plainly a very special and valuable item, which was never intended to be used. Rather like the humbler British polished stone axes, which were sometimes never used, or those carved bronze axes on the uprights at Stonehenge,i this axe would probably have symbolized either an individual, a family or a clan/tribe. Maybe its careful deposition so close to such an obvious pathway through a bog was
a protective measure of some sort: perhaps to ward off unwanted people or spirits from approaching the special island of Westhay and Meare. It could have been placed in water alongside the track as a symbol that somebody’s soul had joined the realm of the ancestors – most probably on the island. This again suggests that the island would have been seen as special or sacred. These explanations could also apply equally well to the three other known complete axe-heads found near the trackway.

  8.1 A close-up of the Sweet Track, Somerset (built 3807–3806 BC). The main oak plank of the walkway is clearly visible, as are some of the smaller roundwood pegs used to support it (although these are somewhat disturbed). To the right of the walkway is a polished jadeite axe-head, which had originally been concealed – perhaps deliberately – beneath a piece of board.

  © Bryony and John Coles

  There is, however, a problem here: the careful deposition of axes – especially such a valuable one as the jadeite axe – is not likely to have been part of a process that started and finished in just ten years – the known use-life of the Sweet Track. Such religious observances take time to develop and evolve. Indeed, I firmly believe that many of the rituals and rites associated with Neolithic monuments have origins that probably lie thousands of years earlier, in the Mesolithic. We can certainly see good evidence for continued respect for the Stonehenge landscape some four millennia before the great stones were erected. So was the Sweet Track a one-off? I think not – and I do have some evidence to support my doubts.