Scenes from Prehistoric Life

Home > Other > Scenes from Prehistoric Life > Page 22
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 22

by Pryor, Francis;


  I have always found that one of the most appealing aspects of archaeology is that it can reveal remarkable stories not just about great sites, but about humdrum, everyday objects too. One find I will never forget was revealed in a very ordinary ditch just a short distance from Northey. It was also part of the salt-making process, but it had a unique story that still has the power to fire my imagination: I would so like to meet the person who made and intended to use it.

  At the same time that Northey was being excavated, we also started to find evidence for salt extraction in two of the Bronze Age field boundary ditches at Fengate, about half a mile to the south-west, on the other side of the Flag Fen basin.3 This time we found six pieces of briquetage, but also two unusual pieces of pottery. One was a substantial fragment from a large, flat-sided vessel that had deliberately been snapped off along one edge, which also showed clear evidence for a saw-like cut.a Sawn vessels like this are known from salt-production sites elsewhere. Near it was a small flat-bottomed round bowl of about 95-millimetre (4-in) diameter. It was quite competently made, with thin walls, but no care whatsoever had been taken over its appearance: it was poorly finished, with a very irregular rim – quite unlike other pottery of the time. One got the firm impression that this was a disposable vessel – the equivalent today of a supermarket yogurt pot. Again, similar containers have been found on other prehistoric salt sites.

  Complete pots are very rarely found on prehistoric settlement sites, because what generally survives are the remains of domestic or farmyard rubbish – and as a rule, people in the past, just like today, don’t discard unbroken pots. If the Fengate pot had been intended as a container, then it would have been filled with salt that had been freshly removed from the evaporation pans and was still slightly damp. It would have been packed in and then allowed to harden, thereby becoming more stable and easier to transport. Today, we take powdery table salt for granted, but it only remains pourable and loose through additivesb and because modern houses are warm and dry. Take some unadulterated ground sea salt on a camping holiday to the Lake District, and you will soon discover how it behaves when even slightly damp.

  If the salt in the moulds was indeed in a block, then it would make sense to break the jar to remove it. I would suggest that the salt used in the preparation and consumption of food would have been kept in a lidded container close to the kitchen hearth. Small blocks could be split off, as and when they were needed. That unused, rather hastily made pot lying in a ditch near the Fengate briquetage and the large sawn-through sherd reminded me very much of the debris that lay around the back yard of Truman’s Brewery in Brick Lane, in East London, where I took my first full-time job, shortly after leaving university. The yard was by no means an untidy mess, but it was somewhere people worked and the debris of daily production was all around us: broken pallets, leaky wooden casks and faulty bottles. At the end of the day they’d be tidied away into skips, or onto heaps to be burned at the weekend.

  Traditionally, beer is brewed in batches, known as gyles, and material would often be left over at the end of a batch. It was stored carefully to be used in the next gyle, but I wonder what would happen if brewing, like salt extraction, was seasonal: something that only happened in the warmer months of summer? Maybe that explains why the pottery salt container wasn’t used. At the end of the summer, when the weather became colder and damper, it was swept into a nearby ditch, whose sides and bottom were probably thickly lined with grass, cushioning its fall and preserving it for posterity. I wonder if the people who made the pot and had the task of clearing the season’s rubbish had any idea that we would be thinking about them, over three thousand years later.

  *

  Peterborough is about 56 kilometres (35 miles) from the coast as the crow flies, and I wouldn’t have expected to find evidence for salt extraction there. But even today the River Nene is tidal as far inland as the wonderfully named Dog in a Doublet sluice, midway between Whittlesey and Thorney, just 8 kilometres (5 miles) east of Peterborough. Sea levels in the Bronze Age were 2 or 3 metres (6–10 ft) lower than they are today (rising sea levels are not a modern phenomenon), but the region had not been subject to the extensive drainage and flood-protection measures that were introduced in medieval times, and later. Were it not for these many high banks and deep ditches, large areas of the western Fens should have been flooded by the sea many centuries ago. By the Bronze Age, the area around Fengate and Northey, a short walk east of Peterborough’s Eastern Industrial Area, would have been a landscape of seasonally flooded tidal creeks and mudflats.4 I suspect that in particularly active seasons, tidal floods would have reached Peterborough by flowing up the various winding courses of the River Nene. Peterborough-on-Sea is an interesting thought – and maybe one that might become reality again, before too long.

  The presence of tidal waters so close to Peterborough would explain why there was evidence for salt extraction, but it was clearly on a fairly small scale – and for quite a short time. Water levels continued to rise slowly throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. By the start of the Iron Age, however, there was less salt in local water; marine tides were confined closer to the coast, which would help to explain the growth of huge peat beds in Whittlesey Mere, the great freshwater lake that had formed directly south of Peterborough. This was one of the largest lakes in England, prior to its drainage in 1852.5

  While a few people were starting to extract salt from brackish (semi-salt) water at Northey and Fengate, some 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) to the south-east, at the lakeside location of Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps, Europe’s first large-scale salt mine was coming into operation. There is some evidence that people had been extracting salt from Hallstatt in a small way since Neolithic times, but after 1200 BC the pace started to quicken; from 800 BC until about 500 BC, the mines were a major enterprise. Salt doesn’t just pickle onions and bacon. It also preserves anything in close contact with it, like the superb pieces of fabric worn by the Bronze Age miners at Hallstatt – and even a three-thousand-year-old wooden staircase leading from one gallery to another. It is the oldest staircase anywhere in the world.6 I mention this partly because I’d hate you not to have the chance of seeing such a remarkable structure when you next find yourself in the Alps, but also because it shows that from the start of the first millennium BC, salt was playing a major role in the European economy.

  Britain is an island surrounded by sea, so it is not surprising to discover that salt was being extracted quite widely by coastal communities. The presence of rocks and cliffs makes salt extraction more difficult – what is required is easy access to less turbulent waters. Quiet tidal ponds and lagoons where you can erect your heated evaporation dishes are ideal – and these are most readily found along Britain’s east coast. Sadly, these coastal mudflats are under serious threat from climate change and rising sea levels. It is therefore essential that sites similar to the Red Hills of Essex are surveyed and mapped, so they can be protected when new coastal wetlands are constructed during the process of what used to be called ‘Managed Retreat’7 – but which today we would see as controlled coastal flooding.

  I think it is inevitable that the world we inhabit will colour, if not actually shape, our view of the past, which is why I have taken readers to places they may not be very familiar with. When Britain was held in the grip of the Ice Ages, sea levels were very much lower, largely because so much water was locked up within enormous ice sheets, some of which partially covered Britain. The land that would later become the island of Britain was then an integral part of the European mainland. As sea levels rose, the North Sea began to be recognizable as such from about twelve thousand years ago. It is generally thought that land to the south – now beneath the sea – in what one might term the North Sea basin was quite well populated.c It was a very rich environment for hunters and fishers, with quantities of shellfish, waders and eels, as well as vegetables such as marsh samphire. There were even low hills and areas of woodland. People would probably have regarded w
hat are now the countries of Denmark, Germany, Holland and Britain as a slightly hostile hinterland – until, that is, they were forced to move there, as water levels rose even higher, from about 6000 BC. The reason I mention this is that it suggests to me that people then would have had a very different cultural ‘mindscape’, or sense of social history, compared with how we see ourselves today.

  Our world is essentially landlocked and increasingly urban, whereas their populations were mainly centred on coastal places. Although societies were to change quite radically with the arrival of farming shortly before 4000 BC, I believe that many communities would have continued to have strong links to the coast and the sea. Salt would have played a major role in maintaining those links. Some recent surveys are now showing that the extent of salt extraction along the coasts of eastern England was far more intensive than we had once supposed. Salt must have been traded with inland communities in considerable quantities; and as we all know, once you have tasted salted food, there is no turning back – you are hooked. Indeed, as with all pleasurable addictions, you will be happy to spread the good news. Like sugar very much later, salt was a commodity whose success was inbuilt and guaranteed.

  I’ve already suggested that my interest in the prehistoric salt trade was first kindled by our relatively minor finds at Northey and Fengate. I say minor, because we never discovered an actual place where salt was extracted (these, incidentally, are known to archaeologists and historians as ‘salterns’). I would dearly have liked to have found one, but it was not to be, because the salterns close to the edge of the Fens, at places like Fengate, would almost certainly have been ploughed flat by centuries of farming. If they do survive, they’ll lie in buried landscapes, such as the newly revealed complex at Must Farm. While we were excavating in the Cambridgeshire Fens during the last three decades of the twentieth century, fellow archaeologists were surveying for new sites just across the county boundary in Lincolnshire. They were working closer to the coast, in areas where medieval and recent farming had been less intense – and what their work revealed was truly remarkable.

  In the early 1990s, a subsurface geophysical survey was carried out ahead of the construction of a new sewage treatment works at Tetney (see map, Illus. 11.1, page 213), not far from Cleethorpes on the north Lincolnshire coast.8 The survey was done because the area was known to have been the site of many medieval salterns, thirteen of which were recorded in the Domesday survey of 1086. The industry thrived throughout the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, when Lincolnshire salterns were put out of business by competition from Scotland and north-eastern England.

  The survey at Tetney revealed what looked like a classic set-up: a medium-sized natural pool, about 16 metres (17 yd) across, with a spread of occupation debris to one side and two dense patches of salt-making briquetage fragments along part of the edge of the pool. Immediately next to the larger spread of briquetage, and also alongside the pool, was a fire pit, where clay pans of salt water from the pool were heated up to extract the salt. These pans were raised above the fire using clay supports similar to the ones we found at Fengate and Northey. The pottery was broadly similar and also came in two distinct forms: thick- and thin-walled. Then the results of radiocarbon dating came through and the Tetney site was securely dated to between 845 and 745 BC. So it was firmly Late Bronze Age.

  *

  Our understanding of salt extraction has been transformed by a series of discoveries made during the course of the English Heritage Fenland Survey of 1981–8.9 It had long been realized that the archaeology of the Wash Fens was very rich and well preserved; but it was becoming increasingly apparent that this valuable resource was rapidly being destroyed and seriously damaged by drainage and intensive arable agriculture – hence the need for the survey. While it was taking place I was carrying out active research in the Fens with my team, and we helped the Fenland surveyors whenever we could. At first I found their discoveries very exciting, but as time passed and more and more sites were drying out, and the extent of plough damage became evident, I found the survey was starting to depress me. This was despite the huge amount of work they did, and their scrupulous attention to detail. They were certainly revealing superb and unexpected sites. Indeed, amazing new discoveries, such as the waterlogged Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm, are still being made as a direct consequence of the survey’s pioneering research.

  It was something deeper that was upsetting me. It felt as if a lot of what was being done – what we were all trying to achieve – was to no avail. Somehow we were failing to get across to the wider public. Sure, our conferences, lectures and seminars were well attended, but their audiences were mostly elderly and I recognized many of the faces as long-term archaeological enthusiasts. I remember giving a talk once and having to stop because of the high-pitched noise given off by so many of the audience’s hearing aids. It seemed to me that the scale of the damage to our most important and best-preserved archaeological sites demanded a new audience – preferably of younger people. In retrospect, we would have welcomed a Greta Thunberg – but even as recently as thirty years ago, such a youthful figure would still have been regarded as suspect and unreliable. So our message remained – and I fear still remains – unappreciated outside archaeological circles. The public at large don’t realize just how much of our archaeological heritage has been destroyed since the war – and why we must take urgent measures to protect what little is left. Sadly, when politicians want to stimulate economic development, archaeology is usually seen as an impairment to growth, because a dig or survey might delay a project by a few months.

  Today, there is widespread – and entirely justifiable – concern over the largely man-made climate emergency and the damage it is doing to the environment. Some of us have been very worried about it since the 1970s. The pollution scares of that decade and the 1980s frightened everyone. I recall reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a pioneering classic of environmental science first published in 1962.10 The book’s title refers to the lack of birds of prey, killed off by accumulating DDT and other pesticides – many of them synthetic organic compounds that became concentrated in animals at the head of the food chain (and whose use is now banned in many countries). When I was a child, growing up in the countryside in the 1950s, you never saw sparrowhawks or kestrels, let alone buzzards, kites or harriers. I can well remember seeing the first buzzards circling above their nest in the wood we planted on our small farm. That was around 2010. It took almost twenty years for them to find us, but as they wheeled high above my head, exchanging their distinctive ‘mew-mew’ calls, I thought of Silent Spring and how Rachel Carson would have welcomed them.d

  I seem to be witnessing history repeat itself. Just as in the 1980s, when archaeology was never mentioned in any discussion of pollution, today all we hear about is the climate emergency. But the wholesale destruction of ancient landscapes by intensive modern agriculture, across lowland Britain and western Europe, is an integral part of the process. At the same time, archaeological sites are being trashed by wars and antiquities traders in the Middle East. Yet even this wanton vandalism fails to raise public awareness. For most British people, the words ‘archaeology’ and ‘history’ are still synonymous with hoards of buried treasure, with kings and queens – and, of course, with battles, wars and fighting. I blame ratings-obsessed TV channels for this cultural illiteracy, but recently I have begun to detect glimmers of hope.

  11.1 A map showing the distribution of Bronze and Iron Age salt extraction sites (salterns) in the Fenland region. The Bronze Age sites mostly date to the period 1300–700 BC. The majority of sites belong to the later Iron Age (from about 300 BC into earlier Roman times).

  I used to believe that the best way to teach the public about the importance of archaeology was through the media – hence my long involvement with Time Team and other programmes. And it did have some lasting effect: people do now realize that Britain does have a rich heritage; archaeology is not seen as something that only ha
ppened in ancient Greece or Rome. Now things are changing again: prehistory has appeared on the national curriculum of primary schools and, at the other end of the age spectrum, retired people are taking an interest in the archaeology of their region. Small museums, staffed by volunteers, are popping up everywhere. And for enthusiastic groups of both young and old, surveys like the Fenland Survey are a godsend – especially now that many of their results can be accessed online.11 The sites they revealed can be mapped, measured, accurately surveyed and even, where necessary, excavated. Most importantly, this process means that long-forgotten ancient sites are being rediscovered by modern communities, as part of their local history and heritage.

  The map of saltern sites revealed by the Fenland Survey was, and still is, extraordinary.12 It provides a unique glimpse of the extent of an ancient industry, set against the contemporary landscape. The earliest Fenland saltern sites are along the western edge, on slightly higher ground, as at Fengate and Northey, but they also occur about 8 kilometres (5 miles) to the north around Market Deeping and even further north (24 km/15 miles) around the medieval village of Billingborough. This distribution suggests that other sites of this age probably lie beneath later fen deposits a short distance to the east. These few sites aside, the vast majority of Fenland sites belong within the Iron Age and into Roman times, from about 500–400 BC probably through to the second and third centuries AD.

  We had long suspected that there was more to the production of salt in prehistory than just the boiling-up of water. The problem is that seawater isn’t that saline: 1 litre (1¾ imperial pints) produces just 3.5 grams (0.1 oz) of salt. And it takes a lot of heat to boil off a litre of water – just to produce a bit less than a teaspoon of salt. So it seems very likely that one of the reasons why salterns were located at places like Tetney was the natural tidal pools that occurred there. These were sometimes enhanced by temporary dams, perhaps built up in late spring when the weather calmed down and water levels were still high. They would then be left alone for the seawater within them to heat in the summer sunshine – day after day. People sometimes laugh at the idea of hot weather at places like Skegness – ‘It’s SO bracing!’ – but as someone who has lived near the Wash coast for a long time, I am only too aware how hot it can become on long summer days. I’ve seen permanent grazing die back and turn brown after a hot July, and it would have been no different in the Bronze Age.

 

‹ Prev