Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor

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      I used to travel that road to Northampton quite regularly in the 1970s. A few years later, in 1982, an extraordinary discovery would be made that would forever tie Earls Barton into the frozen world of the Loch Lomond cold phase, over ten thousand years ago. Not just that, it would weld this small part of rural Northamptonshire to more distant horizons, far across the North Sea. For me at least, the remote past was coming home. Immediately I could identify with it.

      The discovery was made unexpectedly in a gravel quarry in the Nene valley, just outside the village, which is well known to historians and archaeologists because its church boasts one of the finest Saxon towers in Britain. The quarry revealed a strange-looking object made in reindeer antler and known as a ‘Lyngby axe’. The antler itself was radiocarbon dated to just over ten thousand years ago – in other words to the very end of the Loch Lomond sub-phase. At this time sea levels were lower because so much water was locked up in ice, and as a consequence the southern North Sea would have been a low-lying plain.

      Lyngby axes are strange-looking objects that are fashioned from the main shaft of a reindeer’s antler which has been shortened and all the side-pieces trimmed off. The end result more or less resembles a modern policeman’s baton. They occur at about forty sites around the edges of what is now the southern North Sea basin, in Denmark, Germany, Poland, Holland and, with the discovery at Earls Barton, Britain. Most have been found on their own, as isolated finds. What were they? Perhaps it’s easier to state what they weren’t: they weren’t axes or wood-working tools of any sort. The name is entirely inappropriate; maybe, like the Red ‘Lady’, we should refer to them as Lyngby ‘axes’ – but life’s too short.

      The Earls Barton example was large, generally well-preserved, and heavily used. There was no evidence that it had ever had an inserted flint or stone cutting edge to act as a blade. So it was made to be used on its own. A number of worked, step-like or scalloped facets distinguished it from some of its continental cousins, and showed that it had been used to work softer materials than stone, or indeed wood. In their study of the Earls Barton piece Jill Cook and Roger Jacobi were also able to rule out its use as a slaughterman’s pole-axe, a weapon, or a pick or digging-stick,¹⁰ and suggested that the wear-patterns implied that it had been used to work something like leather, meat, fat or plant material. They thought the scalloped bevels were secondary – i.e. not to do with its actual use – and could have been formed, for example, by being slung from a tent or from wear caused by rubbing against a harness or sledge fitting.

      Reindeer were actually killed by hunters using flint-tipped arrowheads whose shafts were sometimes deliberately fashioned in two pieces, to break on impact. One particularly well-preserved site of this period (about ten thousand years ago), at Stellmoor in north-western Germany, has revealed numerous reindeer bones with flint arrowheads, or their tips, still in place within them. Some animals appear to have been hit twice, and it has been suggested that the wounds indicate that the hunters worked in groups, and not alone. Evidence from the growth-pattern of the many antlers found suggests too that the hunting took place in autumn or early winter, and that large numbers of people and animals may have been involved. Bodil Bratlund, who studied the Stellmoor material, suggested that the evidence hints at ‘the communal drive-hunts of migrating animals’.¹¹

      We know that the postglacial climate grew rapidly warmer, but the pattern of reindeer- and horse-hunting continued as during colder times. It would seem reasonable to link the Lyngby axe with reindeer-hunting and the preparation of food and hides after the kill during the final years of the Loch Lomond sub-phase. Perhaps the secondary wear reflects a highly mobile way of life. If that is indeed the case, one can suggest that people followed the reindeer in a large seasonal cycle, starting in what are now the depths of the southern North Sea in summer, moving to north-western Germany and Denmark in the autumn, then perhaps further south in winter, dispersing to Britain and Holland in the spring.¹² Earls Barton would fit well into such a pattern. The Nene valley is wide and open, and very gently dips down into the natural basin of the fens, which at the close of the Ice Age would have formed an integral part of the larger North European Plain.

      In terms of elapsed time alone, the reader should now be turning the last half-dozen pages of this book. But our story still has a long way to go. As a prehistorian of later periods, I am all too aware that we have tended to play down the Palaeolithic and the archaeology of the Ice Age in general. I used to think that this simply reflected the fact that specialists in the earlier periods seemed to be more concerned with the classification of flints than with the recreation of ancient societies. From the Neolithic period onwards archaeologists were increasingly involved with social matters, with the organisation of cultures, the transfer and gaining of power, prestige and authority, and latterly with the academic and social politics surrounding different gender perspectives (for ‘gender’ read ‘female’ throughout).

      Perhaps this variety of approach merely reflected the better information that was then available for the later periods. Perhaps it reflected the prevailing archaeological ‘culture’. I don’t know. But what I do know is that today this has changed completely. The Palaeolithic is coming alive, and it has even proved possible to carry out successful studies on changing social structure in such extraordinarily ancient times. The key which unlocked these secrets and released those poor isolated, structureless ‘cave-men’ from their cavernous prisons in our minds came with the simple realisation that they were hunters – and that hunters still exist today.

      One of the main pioneers of this new approach was Richard B. Lee. Lee was at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto when I was a young curator at the Royal Ontario Museum there, and I went to several of his lectures on the Bushmen people of the Kalahari desert. He had lived with them, and his lectures were inspiring. He edited a most influential collection of papers, with another anthropologist, Irven DeVore, under the collective title Man the Hunter.¹³ In Britain we were a little slower to join the Man the Hunter revolution, but when we did, we did so with great success – as the contributions by archaeologists like Roger Jacobi and Nick Barton attest. Once again, Clive Gamble has given us some remarkable insights into the way that Palaeolithic people organised their material and social worlds. He has used a variety of sources, including studies made by specialists in later periods, such as the Neolithic and Bronze Age. He has also drawn heavily upon the anthropological literature to produce a thoroughly satisfying explanation of life in the Old Stone Age.

      Gamble’s arguments are closely reasoned and complex.¹⁴ They are also very convincing, being based on observations of human behaviour and not a little common-sense. The main problem he has had to contend with is that the players in his drama change physically and mentally as hundreds of thousands of years roll by. And, of course, nobody knows for certain what those changes did or did not involve. It’s rather like painting a picture with a brush that’s constantly mutating as you work: at first it’s wider, then narrower, but at the same time it can be thicker, finer or coarser.

      Gamble’s work is confined to Europe, which as we have seen was mainly colonised by human beings in the last half million years or so. He defines three broad time periods, which he uses to describe the ways people lived and organised their lives. The first is from half a million to 300,000 years ago, and he begins by making the unusual claim that the slow colonisation of Europe wasn’t merely a matter of cold climate alone. He believes that ‘it was never their intention to colonise Europe’, that their lives were lived on a small scale: groups of people were small, and their outlook was essentially vertical; in other words they looked inwards and vertically up, towards the previous generation, and down, towards their own children and grandchildren. In many respects it was a pattern of social behaviour that owed a certain amount to their primate ancestors of five million years previously. СКАЧАТЬ