Homo Britannicus
Page 21
Around that time, a series of intriguing questions about the British Palaeolithic started cropping up. Did Boxgrove really represent the earliest human occupation in Britain? What was the significance of all the evidence from the Hoxnian interglacial? Could we resolve the Clactonian/Acheulean puzzle, or find out when and why the Neanderthals went extinct? It was clear that the British Palaeolithic was ripe for something like the Stage 3 approach. But what was needed was funding. Then in 1999, Leverhulme – a charitable trust with a long history of supporting scientific endeavour – announced a new initiative offering grants for research focusing on early human settlement of a particular region. The sums offered were much larger than usual, but the brief was very general. There were rumours that the focus did not extend to the Palaeolithic. Nonetheless, we took a gamble and applied.
During the application process, I started to build a team. The first to join me were Andy, Roger and Simon Parfitt because I was already working with them. With all the fantastic collections at the British Museum, Nick Ashton was an obvious candidate too. While the Natural History Museum has an unparalleled collection of Britain’s Ice Age mammals, the British Museum looks after most of the archaeology, much of which comes from the same sites. Fossil mammal specialists and archaeologists head to the respective museums to research the collections, but no one had ever studied them together comprehensively. We realized that by combining the collections and investigating the complete story, we could learn so much more. We designed the project so that it would address seven major questions. To answer them, we proposed a detailed re-examination of existing collections, and some new excavations as well. A key benefit of the funding was that it gave Roger and Simon salaries for five years, enabling them to focus on critical research.
From there, we gradually built up the team from further networks of collaborators, inviting experts on such diverse topics as palaeoclimate, geology, and stable isotope analysis to get involved. As the director of AHOB, I’m nominally responsible for all the administration, although thankfully I’m able to share the work around. I have to send Leverhulme the annual accounts and progress report, the latter assembled by the whole group with the invaluable support of the team of administrators here at the Museum. I also have to make sure that the project keeps an eye on its goals and that people don’t become too distracted and head down research avenues that might not be so productive, or would lead us away from our core objectives. The whole team meets four times a year to discuss our achievements and plans for the future, and we also have workshops to discuss the science. With such a large group, opinions often vary tremendously. Dating is quite a controversial issue – it’s not an exact science and different people have strong method preferences. Ultimately, it’s down to me to get people to pull in the same direction so we can move forwards. Sometimes, if we’re putting a paper together, it can be a real challenge to find a consensus view to which everyone is happy to put his or her names.
For my own work on the project I’ve visited most of the AHOB sites, although it’s fair to say that I get much more excited by those where human bones have been discovered. I’ve done considerable work on Pontnewydd, a Welsh cave site. Early Neanderthal teeth from about 200,000 years ago were recovered some time back, but are only now being studied in detail. I’ve also collaborated on work to estimate the age at death of the individual whose tibia was found at Boxgrove. Bone studies revealed that the man could have reached 40, a decent age at that time. I have worked with Mike Richards on using isotope analyses to understand ancient diets, and with Roger and Andy on getting more accurate dates for sites between 130,000 and 70,000 years ago, a critical period when people seem to have been absent from Britain. And I have continued my work on the Swanscombe skull, comparing it with contemporary fossils from other parts of Europe. We need to ascertain if one or more different populations inhabited Britain during this time. Swanscombe is a key site for the Clactonian/Acheulean debate, so more information will be of great value.
I’m especially fascinated by the early sites in East Anglia and what they tell us about early human occupation. Working at Pakefield has been an extraordinary experience. Of all the outputs of the project, I suspect this will have the biggest impact in terms of media and public interest, and will be what the project is most remembered for. We’re pushing back the first arrival of humans in Britain by 200,000 years and that’s big news. We’ve also been able to reconstruct the environment in which these people lived because the plant and animal evidence is so rich. The Pakefield discovery was published in the journal Nature in 2005 with a long list of names on the paper – AHOB members, associates and collaborators, including several dedicated local workers. This reveals the strength of the project: with so many people working together we can create the most detailed picture possible. A small team could never have achieved this.
Roger’s paper on the artefacts from Gough’s Cave, Cheddar, for which he won an award, is also a tremendous piece of work. While Pakefield shows the breadth of the project, with so many people approaching the subject from different perspectives, Roger’s paper illustrates the depth. It shows how much one person can achieve when they’re given the time and resources they need to concentrate on a particular topic. I hope AHOB will inspire other teams to adopt a similar multidisciplinary approach. Our experience shows how much you can achieve this way. We’ve significantly advanced research into the British Pleistocene and Palaeolithic, and put a wealth of information in the public domain. Before AHOB, both the faunal and archaeological records needed attention. We’ve filtered through the evidence, standardized the records, and created a database that is quality-controlled and sets out the best possible summation of our knowledge. People know that some of the country’s leading experts produced these records and that they can be trusted. Our success is due, in part, to the strength of our team, and in part to being in the right place at the right time. Following substantial coastal erosion in East Anglia, sites that had been buried for a hundred years have suddenly been exposed and we’ve been able to take advantage of that. I’ve learned so much from the project. The other team members have taught me about a diverse range of subjects, and it’s been enlightening to see how people address the same issue from such different perspectives. We’re now finishing AHOB and can assess what progress we have made, and start to plan our future research. And the great news is that the success of AHOB has meant that the Leverhulme Trust is awarding us a further large grant to continue the most productive collaborations and research. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the last year of the project. A key goal for 2006–7 is to pull all our research together and publish a conference volume and a monograph. There may also be a touring exhibition of our findings, and I hope this book will be considered another successful output of the project.
ANDY CURRANT
When I began to develop the AHOB Project in the year 1999, Andy Currant was the first person I wanted in the team. He has been a colleague since I joined the Museum and we have dug together at many sites in England, Wales and Gibraltar. As both a researcher and the Curator of Fossil Mammals, he has an unrivalled knowledge of the Museum’s fossil mammal collections. His warm personality and interpersonal skills are also invaluable during difficult times.
I’m the Collections Manager for Vertebrates and Anthropology at the Natural History Museum. I mainly focus on the Ice Age mammal bones. I’ve been at the Museum for thirty-four years and have come to know our collections exceedingly well. I’ve also done a phenomenal amount of fieldwork – when I was younger and thinner I was quite handy at exploring narrow caves and squeezing through small holes. I’ve been digging since the age of four. My great-aunt Hilda lived in St Albans and had connections with a dig at Verulamium nearby. I got to help out, scrubbing bits of pot and bone. I loved it and became passionately interested in stuff in the ground (my parents would say that I never looked up), spending my time digging holes all over the garden and finding all sorts of wonderful things. By the time I le
ft school I had a lot of digging experience. I was due to study at Sheffield University but then my mother noticed an advert for a job at the Natural History Museum so I applied for that instead. I started off as a vermin-grade curator and then gradually floated up the system to my present position.
When in 1999 Chris learned that the Leverhulme Trust were interested in funding a major research programme, I put together much of the original AHOB draft application. People have been collecting human artefacts and fossil mammals for over 250 years and collections have ended up all over the place – in small museums, big museums, private collections, on mantelpieces, in cellars and under beds. My wish was to re-integrate, on paper, those long-separated collections, to see what we could say about human activity through time in the British Isles. However, we realized that the project needed a sexy front end involving original research. One topic we picked was stable isotope analysis, as this area seemed to offer huge potential. Although that particular part of the project is still being delivered, the discoveries we made while knitting together collections have exceeded any of our expectations.
Other revelations have come about through fieldwork. Some really important sites such as Pakefield, Happisburgh and Hoxne have become available in the course of the project. It’s been phenomenal, as if someone opened the celestial letterbox and dropped these fantastic sites into our laps just when we had the resources to deal with them.
One of my key roles has been as a facilitator – going through the collections, re-identifying bones, looking for cut marks and other signs of human activity, and drawing people’s attention to them. For my own research I’ve worked closely with Roger Jacobi to assemble and provide mammalian data on the Late Pleistocene. Roger’s a top-notch archaeologist but he also shares my enthusiasm for fossil mammals. From early on we noticed that groups of mammals are repeated at different locations. Some sites have bison and reindeer, while others feature woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, hyaena and horse; the patterns are very consistent. The study of Ice Ages used to be dominated by botanists and their pollen assemblages, and what was then known about mammal assemblages didn’t fit in with the pollen-based climatic record. What we’ve done is to create a mammal-based framework for the Quaternary.
AHOB gave us the opportunity to fit the human artefacts back into our mammal-based model. This led us to the extraordinary discovery that humans first came to Britain earlier than anyone had ever thought. We also confirmed that human occupation wasn’t continuous. Roger and I have collaborated to try to understand the long period after about 170,000 years ago when humans seem to be absent from Britain. About 80,000 years ago there were lots of game animals like bison and reindeer in Britain, so why weren’t people coming to hunt them? Maybe there were terrible flies, maybe the contemporary brown bear, the size of a polar bear, was sufficiently terrifying to keep people out, or maybe Britain was an island then. We’ve also tried to pinpoint exactly when people came back to Britain during the middle of the last Ice Age and what they then did. It’s a job that’s made more challenging because spotted hyaenas seem to have eaten a lot of the evidence.
One of my approaches is to look at anomalies in the fossil record and reassess previous theories. I’ve recently been working on material from Kent’s Cavern in Devon where, in 1826, Reverend John MacEnery found some sabre-toothed cat canines. These have literally been bones of contention ever since. They were found in a late Pleistocene context, associated with human artefacts, but people didn’t believe the first-hand observations of the excavators and insisted that the teeth were at least 500,000 years old. I’m sure they were wrong. As part of AHOB we’ve arranged to have the teeth dated and I’m looking forward to being proved right! This was a critical period for humans in north-west Europe. The Neanderthals were on the way out and anatomically modern humans were taking over. The hyaenas were unbelievably abundant. Given that a modern hyaena, a smaller animal, will eat the tyres off a Landrover, we can assume they caused huge environmental stress. Until recently we didn’t realize that there was an additional predator, the sabre-toothed cat, around at the same time. The extra pressure it exerted could have tipped the balance in favour of modern humans. The Neanderthals may have been less able to protect themselves, and in these circumstances a small margin can make a big difference.
Throughout my five years working on AHOB, I’ve tried to keep it on the straight and narrow by occasionally reminding fellow contributors what our primary aims are. I’ve also acted as a general-purpose trouble-shooter from time to time – diplomacy is sometimes necessary even in the best regulated of households! I’ve had huge fun working on the project. It’s brought together different threads of data stretching back throughout my career. A key principle of ours is to avoid being blinkered by preconceptions and to try to look at things with fresh eyes. Sometimes even things you have dug up yourself can come back and surprise you. We’ve accumulated an extraordinary wealth of verified historical data along with some new interpretations that we will now be able to put into the public domain. I hope it will provide a useful tool for the next generation of researchers.
ROGER JACOBI
I have known Roger Jacobi nearly as long as I have known Andy, and we three worked together for several years at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar. He is one of Britain’s foremost experts on Upper Palaeolithic stone tools and is often to be found travelling round the country, scouring museums and re-evaluating collections. His award-winning paper on Gough’s Cave is one of the prize outputs of the AHOB project.
I’m based in the Department of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum, where I work mainly with stones, but also sometimes with bones. My speciality is Palaeolithic and Mesolithic stone artefacts, but I frequently collaborate with Andy Currant to investigate Late Pleistocene fauna. I’ve worked with Andy and Chris Stringer for almost thirty years. We’ve done many excavations together and we’re good friends. I got involved in AHOB because Chris caught me lurking in the Natural History Museum one afternoon, and asked me to join the team. I think he recruited me mainly for what’s in my head – because of all my travelling I’ve probably seen more of Britain’s late Pleistocene artefacts than anyone else.
I’m the most itinerant member of the project. Many of my colleagues seem to work in East Anglia and I’m the one who treks off to the north of England and Wales. I’ve always been a traveller. If you want to really understand the archaeology, you’ve got to go and see the collections for yourself. They are often widely dispersed, but by seeing and recording the material I can reunite them, at least on paper. I’ve recently worked on Church Hole, the first British site to produce Palaeolithic wall art. The finds from that site, which was excavated in the 1870s, are scattered around ten different museums. While some AHOB members are questioning the past by doing new excavations, others, like Andy and myself, are re-examining and revivifying old collections.
Britain’s history of collecting extends over more than 200 years and is uniquely impressive in terms of what we’ve collected and preserved and the information we’ve recorded alongside the material. During the nineteenth century much money was spent establishing public museums, particularly in the wealthy northern towns. When I visit those museums, I might be looking for something specific or I might simply be browsing. Sometimes I’m amazed at the treasures I find. As well as objects I also consult everything that’s ever been written about the sites – notebooks, letters and diaries. My golden rule for this kind of detective work is: no matter what, photocopy it, you might never see it again. If you’re really methodical about it, seemingly disparate scraps of paper eventually piece together to provide useful information.
Pin Hole Cave, the key site for reconstructing the archaeology of Creswell Crags, has a particularly intriguing history. It was excavated, in the 1920s and 1930s, by an amateur archaeologist called Leslie Armstrong. He was a bit of a loner and was quite badly ostracized by some members of the academic establishment, but he did a superb job at Pin Hole. The cave’s archaeology
has never been properly written up so that’s something I’m planning to do. My research has involved re-identifying the fauna, dating parts of it, and drawing and recording all the Stone Age archaeology. The cave contains both Neanderthal and modern human stone tools, while the fauna represents one of the largest collections from the middle part of the late Pleistocene in Britain. It appears that the modern humans used the cave more intensively than the Neanderthals, and trapped Arctic hares.
The richest site of all is Gough’s Cave, a show cave at Cheddar where I’ve been working for more than twenty-five years. From the 1890s, developers gradually lowered the floor, to facilitate access for tourists, and in doing so revealed late Ice Age implements and animal remains. During a big push to get the cave open in the late 1920s a huge quantity of archaeology and animal bones, dating to around 14,000 years ago, was discovered. Fortunately the estate’s agent knew a bit about cave excavation and they rescued a large and important collection of material. Items continued to be found and recorded until 1986 when I spotted human ribs, teeth and implements sticking out of a newly cleared section. Realizing the importance of the site, Chris, Andy and I continued to excavate there for several years after that.
We found an amazing collection of human bones and this led to the cave being dubbed the Cannibal Cave. The evidence is pretty convincing. The bones represent five individuals, from a child about four years old up to young adults. We found them jumbled up with animal food debris, flint implements and assorted domestic rubbish. They bear the same cut marks as the animal bones and look as if they were broken up to access the bone marrow. It is hard not to conclude that, along with horses and red deer, those people formed part of the food chain. Interestingly, the Gough’s Cave inhabitants used tools made from mammoth ivory and reindeer antler, but neither of those animals lived near Cheddar then, so they were either encountering those animals elsewhere or perhaps trading in raw materials.