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once high are now low, and vice versa. Something similar applies at Paviland Cave, which today sits just above the high-tide mark. In the Upper Palaeolithic the sea level was massively lower than it is today, when the waters of the Bristol Channel have inundated a broad coastal plain. But at low tide it’s still possible to stand on the floor of the drowned coastal plain and look up towards Goat’s Hole Cave, just as people would have done twenty-six thousand years ago. It’s a very striking and affecting sight; but more important than that, it’s a setting that accords well with the situation of comparable important places in the religious and mythological lives of people with shamanistic religions – people like the San.³⁴

      There’s always a danger of delving into ethnographic and anthropological literature and doing a Little Jack Horner: inserting a thumb to select a plum, whilst ignoring less palatable fruit that doesn’t happen to fit with our ideas. This was the fatal flaw of many late-Victorian writers, who would assiduously comb through a vast range of anthropological writing, classical authors and travellers’ tales, selecting plums to bolster a particular theoretical view of the world. Sir James Frazer, one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, was guilty of this academic sin,³⁵ and today very similar things are done at the weirder extreme of so-called ‘alternative’ archaeology (the realm of ley lines, Atlantis, aliens, UFOs, etc.). If you pull a huge array of plums out of their original contexts it becomes easy to draw far-fetched conclusions, particularly with regard to things as imprecise as simple landscape features like lines of posts, or stones or pebbles. So the great ceremonial straight ‘roads’ on the high plains of southern Peru could be compared, for example, with Neolithic cursus monuments in lowland Europe (I shall have more to say about these later). It seems not to matter that each is taken out of context to ‘prove’ that ancient people were in regular contact over immense distances, or came from the same alien or extra-terrestrial source. To return to the earlier analogy, plums are being pulled out of two quite separate pies, whereas it’s the pies themselves that ought to be looked at.

      To return to those ivory rods, it’s reasonable to seek illustrative parallels from a culture that is comparable in other respects to that at Paviland, but one should also be on the alert for other uses of rods in that culture – perhaps to support a temporary roof, or whatever.³⁶ More to the point, one should beware of drawing parallels that are too specific – and the use of ochre-stained rods within a ritual might well be such a case. Only time will tell. On the whole, it’s safer and ultimately wiser to seek broader parallels that might help explain why and how people chose to do different things. A good, and very relevant, example are the criteria that lie behind the selection of special places by recent societies that practised shamanistic religion. That might help explain why Goat’s Hole Cave was selected for special treatment. This takes us back to the low-tide mark at Paviland.

      Viewed from here, Goat’s Hole Cave ‘appears as a south-facing cave clearly visible from some distance and set into the high cliffs of a promontory defined, on either side, by slades or valleys’.³⁷ It’s a very striking landmark, and there are anthropological accounts of shamanistic mythological beliefs that link caves in such striking positions with, for example, the creator of mountains, or the spirits of mountains. In one wonderful Siberian account, caves are seen as the holes left by the great mammoth who created the mountains; caves in mountain or hillsides are particularly interesting because they can be seen as a stage or resting place on a mythical ladder between Heaven, earth and the Netherworld. Shamans would have performed the ceremonial tasks of climbing and solemnising the various stages of this symbolic ladder.³⁸ Given this context, the Red ‘Lady’ burial can be seen to fit into an established sequence of possibly regular visits to a very special place.

      Clive Gamble has already been mentioned as a prehistorian with an extraordinary ability to stand back from the detail of a subject and see things from an unusual or unexpected angle. Writing about the social context of Upper Palaeolithic art, he pointed out that societies may have been organised in small groups, but this did not mean that their concerns were entirely parochial. Far from it. In a paper written in 1991 he provided convincing evidence that people at this time were in communication over extraordinarily long distances.³⁹ Those three bone spatulae, with their close parallels on the plains of Russia, surely reinforce his theory. The physical expression of this communication would have been in the form of ceremonial exchange of important objects, such as the spatulae. These ceremonies would have served to reinforce social ranking within the various societies that took part. I would imagine that the spatulae were given to an important person, most probably a senior shaman. It’s worth noting that such long-distance communication would have been very much more difficult had Britain not been physically united with mainland Europe.

      Earlier I said that the Upper Palaeolithic was the period in which many of the defining characteristics of modern civilisation first become apparent. In his 1991 paper Clive Gamble showed how art in the Upper Palaeolithic was far more than just a matter of beauty, whether of carved objects or painted cave walls. This, of course, was the period of the famous cave paintings at places like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain.⁴⁰ Sadly, in Britain we still lack such extraordinary finds, but we do know from smaller, portable carved objects (such as those spatulae) that people here used, appreciated and made art. What did art and its appearance in the Upper Palaeolithic signify? To quote from Clive’s paper:

      Art for me is…a system of communication and includes a wide range of mediums and messages. As an act of social communication it is defined by style which…has its behavioural basis in a fundamental human cognitive process: personal and social identification through comparison. Consequently [art] style is not just a means of transmitting information about identity but is an active tool in building social strategies.⁴¹

      This is very important, because it dismisses commonly heard simplistic views such as, for example, that cave art was merely something done to give good luck in the hunt – the equivalent of tossing a coin in the fountain. That’s rather like saying that Michelangelo’s masterpiece was painted simply to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – classy, hand-painted wallpaper. In part it was, but it was also a great deal more than that: among many other things it was a profound restatement of the aspirations that lay behind the later Renaissance – and that’s just scratching the intellectual surface.

      What we’re witnessing in the Upper Palaeolithic is very complex, but it probably includes the elaboration, if not the development, of languages that were sufficiently sophisticated to express the ideas and symbolism lying behind the art, because an image devoid of any written or spoken textual reference is hard to comprehend. This is particularly true if the image is being introduced to people who are not familiar with the culture or part of society in question. As a European, for example, I can admire the execution of Japanese art, but I find much of its meaning and the philosophy behind it incomprehensible. In such circumstances explanation is essential. Recently the newspapers carried a story of how an installation by Damien Hirst was collected up and thrown away, along with the rubbish, by the gallery’s cleaners on the morning after the opening party. It consisted of empty Coca-Cola cans and other debris and, according to the newspaper I read, had a market value of £40,000. The artist, to his credit, thought it all very amusing. The point is that the textual reference, whether written or explicit, was missed by the cleaners. The art had lost its context, and with it its meaning and distinctiveness. Whichever way one looks at it, there had been a failure in communication. So into the bin it went.

      The Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland belonged to the first or earlier part of the Upper Palaeolithic, which is separated from the later part by the last (and hopefully final) great glacial cold period, which began around twenty-five thousand years ago. During its coldest phase, about eighteen thousand years ago, large areas of northern Europe (including what was later to become Britain) were uninhabited. About thirteen thousand years ago, occupation of the areas

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