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Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor
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isbn 9780007378685
Автор произведения Francis Pryor
Издательство HarperCollins
Maisie looked at it very closely, and at first she too had her doubts; but there were areas where peat still adhered to the surface, and if gently floated off (in our sink) its removal might reveal fresh surfaces, which could be diagnostic. The freshly removed peat did indeed expose cleanly split surfaces, and I spent several happy hours in our barn taking close-up photographs which showed clearly that the wood – or rather timber, to give it its correct name* – had been worked by humans.13 This is the earliest evidence for worked timber found anywhere in the world – and it spent a tiny part of its long life in my sink. When he saw Maisie’s first results, Paul immediately recalled a series of bevelled red-deer antler tines, illustrated in the original Clark report, which he thought might well have been used as wedges for splitting.
In our story so far we have failed, if that’s the right word, to discover a site that we could safely say was a home-base: in other words, somewhere where people stayed and lived. Even at Boxgrove we saw how the meat was probably taken away from the smelly, fly-blown butchery site at the bottom of the cliff and up towards the woods on the chalk hill above. None of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic caves we have looked at could with any certainty be considered a permanent dwelling-place, and Earls Barton wasn’t really a site at all.14 What about Star Carr, which has produced a huge amount of material, including a great variety of things such as antler mattocks and bone scrapers? Surely this represents a home-base, as the excavator, Grahame Clark, himself believed? I would love to think so, but unfortunately that re-examination of the animal bone refuse by Tony Legge and Pete Rowley-Conwy showed that most of the bone found on site comprised those bits that don’t actually have much meat on them: lower jaws, shoulderblades and foot bones. The joints, the rich cuts as it were, had been taken away and eaten elsewhere – and wherever it was, that’s where home was for those lakeside hunters. Despite its archaeological richness, Star Carr was still essentially a hunting camp, albeit a well-frequented one, and one, moreover, probably quite close to a main home-base.
Work carried out in the Vale of Pickering after the original excavations of Grahame Clark gives a clear impression that there were a number of settlements around the now vanished postglacial Lake Flixton. Some were hunting camps, others more resembled home-bases. But there does seem to be one important respect in which Star Carr differs from those hugely mobile communities in the Late Upper Palaeolithic: it would seem that life near Lake Flixton did not involve much long-distance travel. The area was richly stocked with large mammals, and the human inhabitants knew this well. They probably didn’t use the Star Carr hunting camp all year round, but neither did they go hundreds of miles away when they were absent from it. Seasonal movements were most likely small in scale.
Before we leave this remarkable place, which continues to provide the liveliest and most interesting archaeological debate of any prehistoric site in Britain (with the possible exception of Stonehenge), we must pause for a moment to examine its most intriguing finds. These consist of twenty-one red-deer skull fragments, known as frontlets, some of them complete with their antlers. The undersides of the skulls have had the sharper ridges knocked off, and the massive antlers have been reduced in such as way as still to look impressive, and more or less balanced, but not to be so heavy. The skulls have also been perforated with two or four circular holes. Grahame Clark reckoned these extraordinary and rather heavy objects were head-dresses that were secured in place by hide straps through the holes.
Rather surprisingly for someone so down to earth and a self-confessed functionalist, Clark suggested that the antlers had been used in shamanistic-style dances, reminiscent perhaps of the Abbots Bromley horn dance of Staffordshire, a regional version of the traditional English Morris dance.15 At Abbots Bromley the horns are carried in both hands. Christopher Smith inclines to the view that the Star Carr head-dresses were more likely to have been worn as a disguise when out stalking. He reasons that Star Carr was probably a hunting camp, and that the large number of frontlets found must argue in favour of a practical use.16 He also suggests that a hard-and-fast distinction between the two forms of use is probably wrong, with which I agree 100 per cent.
We now come to an extraordinary twist in this tale. I recently returned from filming at Star Carr with Tim Schadla-Hall, who you will remember co-directed the dig that discovered the split wood that Maisie examined. I’ve known Tim for years, and whenever we meet he has a habit of producing new information that completely blows apart my old ideas. I find archaeologists like Tim exciting because not only do they dig, but they also think, in a lateral way. As we talked between ‘takes’ in the filming, it became clear that after over twenty years’ research Tim had quite suddenly abandoned most of his own and many of his colleagues’ explanations of what was going on at Star Carr. His new theories didn’t accord with the way most people regarded the hunter/gatherer world of the Mesolithic, but would have fitted in better with some much later – say Neolithic or Bronze Age – site. It was as if the artificial boundaries erected by archaeologists between hunter/gatherers and farmers had completely dropped away.
Tim pointed out that Lake Flixton and the land immediately around it was an area of stability: it was wooded, not prone to flooding, and was remarkably protected by the nearby valley-side of the Vale. It was a landscape where small-scale movement was a part of everyday life (the coast was about an hour’s walk to the east), but there was no need at all for longer-distance seasonal migrations. It was a naturally protected and gentle landscape, that was ideally suited for hunting – so people stayed put.
Star Carr was close to the edge of the stable landscape, and Tim suggested that the artificial timber platform on the edge of the lake might have been constructed as somewhere set aside for ceremonies to emphasise or mark the special nature of the stable landscape of Lake Flixton. We’ll see later that so-called ‘liminal’ or boundary zones were viewed as being of particular importance to prehistoric communities. Ceremonies in these places ‘at the edge’ would have protected or reinforced the ‘core’ or stable area against forces that were thought to threaten it. They were also neutral places where people from outside could safely be met – and maybe gifts and other items be exchanged.
The idea of constructing a timber platform at the fringes of water is something we’ll re-encounter in the Bronze Age at Flag Fen (and other sites); moreover, the fact that some care was taken in the platform’s construction should not cause any surprise. Religious sites and shrines were, and indeed still are, both well designed and well built. Tim’s latest explanation also accounts for the otherwise rather strange collection of bones from the site, and of course for those shamanistic antler head-dresses.
So, if Star Carr is out, where can we look for a site of the early postglacial period, around 8000 BC, where there is evidence that people actually lived on the spot – our elusive so-called ‘home-base’? Must we seek out somewhere remote, untouched by the passage of time? Perhaps up in the hills? Or a cave? Far from it. In fact it’s in the pleasant rural town of Newbury in Berkshire that we’ll meet one of the heroes of this book, the great John Wymer, once again.
The date is 1958, and John is working for Reading Museum. The site he is interested in lies in the valley of the Kennet, a tributary of the Thames, nearly two miles east of Newbury, near Thatcham, the village after which it is named. Like several archaeological sites I am personally familiar with, including my own project at Flag Fen, Peterborough, the Thatcham site lies close to a sewage outfall works; but in this instance there is an additional and more serious threat, and one that we will encounter more often as time passes – namely gravel extraction. Today the site is a large flooded hole. John and his team from Reading and Newbury Museums worked on weekends between 1958 and 1961, and his full report was published with model promptness in 1962.17
England has a long and honourable tradition of amateur