Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  Eventually, in late summer or early autumn, people would head out into the marshes and scoop what was left of the water in tidal pools into the evaporation dishes. It would have been quite muddy, but very salty. As part of the baling-out process, the water would have been filtered, initially through reeds or straw, but later through woven fabric. This was probably the part of the process that involved the larger pottery vessels. Experiments have shown that heating the water also makes it easier to filter out mud and clay particles. Eventually, the damp salt would be packed into pottery containers, which were then loaded onto carts or barrows and taken inland. It all sounds quite simple, but as ever, excavation reveals a more complex story.

  Cowbit (pronounced ‘Cubbit’) is a medieval village built on one of the dried-out courses of the River Welland, just south of Spalding. Today, the landscape is quite dramatic, with the great flood banks of the modern river and huge areas of intentionally flooded ‘washland’ between them. I said ‘modern’, but in reality the great Welland Washes were created in 1664 – one of many major fen drainage schemes of the seventeenth century. As part of the Fenland Survey, a series of about thirteen salterns was found near the village in Cowbit Wash; sadly they were now very dried-out and had been quite badly damaged by ploughing.13 Despite the dryness and damage, in 1986 it was decided that one site should be excavated. It turned out to be a very wise decision.14

  11.2 Reconstruction of a traditional Iron Age open, tray-like saltern hearth, where two gutter-shaped troughs are raised above the hot charcoals on pyramid-shaped clay supports.

  © David Hopkins, Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire

  Radiocarbon dates suggest the Cowbit site was in use towards the latter part of the Iron Age, during the last two centuries BC.15 There is evidence, however, that it was almost certainly visited on several occasions. There were not many traces of domestic rubbish or other signs of permanent settlement, which perhaps suggests that the saltern was worked by a small group from a nearby community. A broadly similar pattern was observed at other salterns of this period in the Fens, which might imply that salt extraction was something carried out by local communities not so much to earn a living as to supplement their lifestyle. There is evidence to suggest that a few centuries later, in Roman times, the production of salt had gradually intensified to become a true industry and one that supported the families living close by the salterns, full-time.

  The Cowbit dig revealed the bottom of a saltern oven. The walls were of clay and the base led off the stoke pit, where the hot draught from a covered fire was conducted into the oven along two grooves in the base. The grooves were bridged by four slabs, which carried a series of short clay supports for a large evaporation tray. A series of troughs were raised on slightly taller clay supports above the tray. It was important that hot air from the hearth and stoke-hole was able to circulate freely – hence the many supports – around the evaporation vessels, which were formed from stiff clay, before the oven was fired up, and were then discarded when it was emptied.

  11.3 A reconstruction by Dave Hopkins showing life on a Lincolnshire Fenland saltern at South Drove, in Morton Fen, about 6.5 km (4 miles) west of Spalding. The scene is based on excavations of a site that was in use in the late first to early second century AD, in early Roman times, although the people and the techniques they employed were firmly based on earlier, Iron Age, practices.

  © David Hopkins, Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire

  The enclosed oven-like salterns at Cowbit were rather unusual and would not have been found on earlier sites of the Bronze and Iron Ages, where the evaporation vessels that contained the concentrated brine were heated over a fire, held in a pan-like open hearth, beneath them.

  The fen around Cowbit has been drained and farmed for many centuries, which is why the archaeological remains had been damaged. But head north for a couple of miles, into Spalding, then turn left towards the western fen-edge and after about 6.5 kilometres (4 miles) you enter Morton Fen, which was drained far more recently. The saltern site at Willow Tree Farm in Morton Fen lies close to the new nature reserve at Willow Tree Fen.16 The site was well preserved and the excavators were able to piece together how the whole complex would have worked.

  Although the Willow Tree Farm saltern was in use in the transition from the Iron Age to Roman times – in other words, it’s slightly younger than the site at Cowbit – most of the techniques used there were traditional. The tidal mudflats at Willow Tree Farm were capped in many places by layers of peat, which were cut and placed in stacks to dry. This would provide fuel for the salterns – and indeed for the neighbouring settlement (which would have been placed on less flood-prone land). The excavations revealed that tidal creeks had been extended by artificial canal-like cuttings, which were further lengthened by shorter spurs that ran up to, and alongside, the salterns. Once filled, they were blocked off and this was where the initial, sunlight, evaporation took place. Smaller, roughly square, steep-sided tanks were cut between the spurs and the actual saltern ovens. Slightly more concentrated water was scooped from the spurs into the tanks, where it was allowed to settle and evaporate further. It was then poured directly into the troughs on their supports above the unlit fire.

  The evaporation troughs and their clay supports were all made on site, and when the heated evaporation had been completed, the salt-filled troughs were allowed to cool. They were then loaded onto carts and taken back to the settlement.

  We tend to think of families as closely knit small groups – so-called nuclear families – of parents and children. In the modern world, grandparents frequently live on their own, in separate houses, often in different towns or cities. It’s a very self-contained existence, where individual identity and freedom are most important. But in the relatively recent past, households were generally much larger, with grandparents, not to mention various unmarried or widowed aunts and uncles, sharing the same roof as the main nuclear family. In these larger households, it was not uncommon for members of the family to move elsewhere for extended periods: young men would accompany herds or flocks to distant summer grazing, and in more elite families young men and women would spend the summer season attending balls in fashionable Bath or London, while older people would retreat to the comfort of spa towns such as Buxton or Cheltenham.

  My point is that family ties provide both the emotional and social support together with the networks needed for people to be very independent at certain times in their lives. I don’t think for one moment that complete nuclear families would have decamped from their farms on natural ‘islands’, or from villages around the fen-edges, to spend time at places like Cowbit, firing up salterns. It seems far more likely that this would have been done by selected members of several related families, undoubtedly under the close supervision of a recognized salt-maker, who may also have been a senior member of one of the families. I would guess that many of the people in these groups would have been young adults and they almost certainly would have visited the salterns for several years in succession, because the skills required of them were considerable – and acquiring them would have formed an important part of their education. If one considers salt-making in this light, it might well have been a very congenial occasion: the close rules of domestic life could be set aside in this wilder marshy environment, where younger people could relax and take the time to discover themselves, away from the constant supervision of their parents.

  Today, the process of acquiring knowledge and experience of life when young is seen in two quite distinct ways. First, there is Education (with a capital ‘E’); this is a process where children and young people are lectured by an older teacher, often aided today by online support and specially written textbooks. The pupils who prove quick to learn are regarded as successful and are then moved into Higher Education (again with capital letters), followed by entry into a Profession (ditto). The other route is known as training or apprenticeship and is reserved for those with ‘practical skills’. These people might find writing
essays or learning languages difficult, but can often do impossible things with wood or metal. Like most field archaeologists, my working life has been spent among both groups of people. I cannot discern any qualitative distinction between Education and training. They are both part of the same process: learning.

  I have often been asked if there is any evidence for education (without a capital letter) in prehistoric Britain. The short answer to that is both Yes and No. No, there are no identifiable schools or classrooms, but Yes, it took huge skill to build round-houses, or shrines like Stonehenge, whose builders understood both the lunar and solar calendars and probably many other complex astronomical phenomena as well.e Those skills and that background information must have been passed on from previous generations. Much of this education would doubtless have been provided informally, within a family setting: one can imagine a grandparent teaching a circle of younger children. But most information would have been passed on at work, when younger people were learning new skills, out on the farm, or in the round-house kitchen. I suspect that the late summer trip to the tidal salterns would have been another learning opportunity, but one experienced away from home and the reproachful gaze of disapproving parents. I had a similar experience when I was sixteen and spent many hard-working weeks at harvest time, driving tractors on a large Shropshire hop farm. The evenings were very convivial indeed.

  The Fenland Survey has shown that those salterns out in the tidal mudflats around the Wash were not as lonely as we once believed. I would not be at all surprised if the people working them did not get to meet up with others, like them, working nearby. Hard work does not have to be dull and I suspect that the people working the salterns would probably have seen their time in the marshes as something of a holiday: a refreshing break from the routines of the farming year. Who knows, maybe they would meet a future partner there? And when it was over and they all returned to their families, they brought with them the basic ingredient of many delicious pickles and tasty meals. I bet they were given a very warm welcome home.

  a Toothed metal saws didn’t appear until a millennium later. The cut was possibly done with an abrasive, such as coarse grit or sharp sand, and a tough fibre or skin twine.

  b Known as ‘anti-caking agents’.

  c Prehistorians call it ‘Doggerland’, see Scene 1, page 9.

  d Carson died in 1964, just two years after her landmark book’s publication.

  e See Scene 4, page 64.

  Scene 12

  Living near Water (1000 BC–AD 200)

  Atlantic Britain – Fenland Farmers – Loch Tay and the Isle of Skye

  We Britons are used to getting wet. This reflects the fact that we live in a group of islands on Europe’s north-western edge, at the brink of the Atlantic Ocean. Thanks to the revolution of the Earth, our weather systems move from west to east, with greater or lesser energy, depending on the time of year. The ceaseless passage of storms, rain and shower clouds from off the sea ensures that our islands are constantly supplied with rain. The western approaches to the British Isles, especially Ireland and the highlands and islands of Scotland, are the wettest places, but parts of Wales, south-western and north-western England are only slightly drier. These are all areas where rain-fed blanket bogs of acid peat were able to form naturally.a But the water couldn’t stay on land for ever: it had to continue on its journey back to the sea by way of countless streams, rivers and brooks. This constantly renewed cycle of rain and drain has given Britain a uniquely complex set of landscapes, where natural watercourses, ponds and lakes have played a major role in the development of local settlements and economies.

  Anyone who has ever taken part in an excavation on a wetland, such as the Fens, is soon struck by the extraordinary way in which people in the past learned to cope with their often difficult and dangerous surroundings. Inevitably, we tend to concentrate on the problems people faced and we often downplay the brighter side of their lives: their productive farmland, or the ready supplies of fuel and winter protein. I have long tried to avoid it (not, I must confess, always successfully), but there is a natural tendency to dwell on the way that these often harsh conditions determined how ancient regional economies and communities developed. It might seem like everything was about response and adaptation. Archaeology and history, however, show that the reality was very different: people were prospering and in time they would actually gain control of their surroundings, to such an extent that many of Britain’s largest wetlands, such as the Fens, the Somerset Levels and Romney Marsh, have been drained. Mindful of rising sea levels and climate change, it would now appear that much of this drainage was almost certainly a long-term mistake. But the fact remains that the development of recent and ancient societies has never been determined by environmental conditions alone. It was always a two-way process in which human culture, imagination and inventiveness played an equally influential part. We can catch glimpses of that ingenuity and creativity in the superb conditions of preservation that can be found on many waterlogged prehistoric sites.

  Although the eastern side of Britain has less than half the annual rainfall of the west, much of the rain that falls over west-central and central Britain finds its way into rivers that flow eastwards, into the North Sea. These landscapes are drier than their western counterparts. Rain-fed acid blanket bogs, for example, are very unusual in all but the lowest-lying, wettest parts of these regions, where drainage is naturally impaired.1 The largest of the eastern wetlands are the Fens, the low-lying landscapes that surround the Wash.

  I have spent most of my professional life working in the Fens, excavating sites in a landscape that has changed beyond recognition over the past four centuries, when wholesale drainage converted a complex network of shallow lakes, slow-flowing rivers, marshy meadows and lush willow and alder woodland into a series of huge rectangular arable fields defined by deep ditches and dead-straight tracks. Soon, however, history will be reversed and the featureless fields will start to be replaced by new wetlands, as levels in the North Sea rise and the costs of maintaining such deep drainage become prohibitive. So what would it have been like to have lived in such a watery landscape in prehistory? More importantly, what can our pre-Roman ancestors teach us about daily life in a wetland? The lessons we learn from them will almost certainly come in useful in the near future.

  First, however, I must quickly dispel some commonly held myths.2 Wetlands have had a very bad press over the years. They are often portrayed as thinly populated, disease-ridden and impoverished. In the popular imagination, the Fens and other wetlands were seen as lawless places where thieves and outlaws ruled the roost and where the few small and isolated communities lived in constant fear of attack. Archaeology and local history, however, have shown that the reality was altogether different. There were some places where it was too wet to live permanently, but they were rich in other resources that could be exploited by people living on slightly higher ground nearby. The supposedly empty and hostile wetlands were abundant sources of hay, thatch and grazing in the drier months of summer and autumn, while the rivers and lakes within the marshes sustained huge populations of fish, eels and wildfowl that provided a seemingly infinite supply of that most sought-after commodity in the ancient world: protein-rich food to take people through the lean months of winter and early spring.

  Archaeological research over the past four or five decades has revealed that the land surrounding the seasonally flooded wetlands was densely settled, as were the many natural islands within them. Far from being lawless, wetland communities were tied together by a net of mutually agreed rules and regulations that controlled hunting and fishing, together with the seasonal exploitation of grazing and the gathering of hay. Flood-free land was also carefully managed for the production of cereals. We know that such rules were in existence long before the Norman Conquest of 1066 and similar laws must have existed in prehistoric times – otherwise such a successful network of arable fields, pasture, farms and settlements would not have been possible.3
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  In the modern world, we have grown used to the fact that the laws that govern our daily behaviour are passed by politicians and are then subsequently modified – even improved – by lawyers. It’s a process with a long and often rather chequered history, but its roots lie deep within the prehistoric world, many millennia before the emergence of ancient Greece or Rome. There is no written evidence for these early laws; so we must turn to anthropology for clues as to how they would have worked. Anthropology is the study of humanity. Physical anthropologists research into the development of the human body from early prehistoric times to the present;b social anthropologists study the organization of, and the philosophies behind, the world’s many cultures and societies. The discipline of prehistory combines many of the features of both physical and social anthropology, together with the research techniques of archaeology. It was social anthropology that gave us the ideas we needed to unravel the organization of the prehistoric Fenland landscape – and how it would have been run and managed from one day to another. What I hadn’t anticipated was how these insights into the remote past would profoundly change the course of my own life. The study of the past is never a one-way process.