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

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most obvious is that communication across the ever-wetter North Sea basin was becoming more difficult, and after 7000 BC it effectively became impossible without a sea-going boat. It could also be argued that the British Mesolithic patterns of life were admirably suited to islands with a long and intricate coastline. Societies had to remain mobile in order to exploit the seasonally available marine and land-based sources of food properly. So why change? Indeed, in coastal areas of Scotland and Ireland this pattern of living was so successful that an essentially Mesolithic way of life continued pretty well unaltered until as late as 3000 BC.35 A third explanation, which I suspect might turn out to be the true one, is that we haven’t yet struck lucky. On the mainland of Europe, Mesolithic cemeteries tend to occur outside the areas of settlement, as indicated by scatters of flints on the ground surface. To date in Britain we’ve tended only to excavate the ground beneath flint scatters, because we know there will be something to reveal there. I think it will take an accident, or a chance find of some sort, to reveal the first hunter/gatherer cemetery.

      A fine example of the developing insularity of Britain is provided by the flint implements of the time. The main series of British microliths becomes ever more reduced as time passes, and there are many types which are unique to Britain, and not commonly encountered on the mainland of Europe. As Christopher Smith remarks, ‘The initiation of the technique of making geometric microliths on narrow blades may mark the last input, of people or ideas, to Britain from the Continent until the initiation of farming over three thousand years later.’36

      But in Ireland during the Later Mesolithic we encounter a tradition of flint implements that goes against the trend of miniaturisation entirely. These large tools, known as ‘Bann flakes’, are characteristic of so-called Larnian industries in Ireland. There’s no reason not to suppose that they were very efficient at what they were intended to do: they are made using a specialised technique of direct percussion with a hard stone hammer on a specially prepared core, and have trimmed-up indentations near the base, presumably to make mounting onto a shaft easier. But the fact remains that they fly in the face of what was happening to flint industries outside Ireland.

      But why was this? The answer has to be: insularity. Ireland was separated from Britain for a sufficient length of time to allow differences to develop between the types of animals that lived on each island. Red deer, for example, had to be introduced to Ireland from England – and then of course there are those snakes that St Patrick is meant to have banished. We have seen that Ireland had to be colonised, or possibly recolonised, by boat; and as time passed the channel between Britain and Ireland grew progressively wider – in effect it developed from a strait into a sea. The Irish, as they have always done, set about solving the technological problems that confronted them in their own manner, and the result was the unique ‘Bann flake’.

      In the next chapter I shall briefly describe the processes whereby Britain physically became an island. But this is a book about people, not geomorphology, and I will leave the final words on what Britain’s newly acquired insular status was to mean to the development of British society in general to someone else. They’re by Christopher Smith, whose ideas have contributed much to this chapter on the Mesolithic, and to my mind they express a recurrent theme of British history and prehistory: ‘It is characteristic of societies in large islands that have substantial populations isolated from other groups that they develop rather idiosyncratic responses to social, economic and technological issues.’

      That, surely, is the story of Britain and Ireland in a nutshell.

       CHAPTER FIVE DNA and the Adoption of Farming

      LIKE MANY CHILDREN, I adored dinosaurs, and by the time I reached the grand old age of sixteen this fascination had evolved into a growing interest in marine biology. I don’t know why this was, because it isn’t an interest that has lasted – maybe it simply reflected the fact that I enjoyed fishing when we went to Ireland for our summer holidays. Anyhow, by great good fortune I discovered that a teacher at school was planning a trip for teams of two boys each to join the crew of a deep-sea trawler out of Grimsby, and take pot luck: some would go to the fishing grounds of north Norway and the White Sea, others would fetch up somewhere off north-east Iceland. I was assigned a berth in a ship heading for the latter.

      I remember the day I arrived at the Fish Quay. It was cold, wet and windy. The sea looked rough and the crew were rough, although later I was to learn that theirs was the hardest life going, and you had to be tough just to survive. I also learned not to judge people by their appearance. The cook, an enormous Pole who had worked in the coalmines of his native country, and then as a lumberjack in Canada, had an abiding interest in Chopin, and could fry the best fresh plaice it was possible to eat.

      It was April, and as soon as we left the protection of the harbour we hit the north-easterly spring gales of the North Sea. The trip lasted three weeks, and I have never been so cold and sick as I was for the four days it took to acquire my sea legs. The two weeks we spent in the Iceland fishing grounds were largely remarkable for the activities of two Icelandic World War II Catalina flying boats that tried to stop us fishing inside their self-declared twelve-mile limit. Whenever it was stormy, we painted out our identification numbers with fuel oil and went well inside all existing limits, while the Catalinas circled overhead like frustrated gannets.

      At night the fishing grounds were a floating city of a thousand disembodied lights that stretched between the invisible horizons. There were hundreds of trawlers from all European nations, and massive Russian factory ships. Even the crew of our ship, some of whom stood to lose their jobs if the ‘Cod War’ went Iceland’s way, admitted that it was absurd, and couldn’t continue for long. On our way back I felt excited and hugely invigorated by my first experience of an undiluted adult world. Just outside the Humber Estuary we hit a storm, and perhaps because the sea is relatively shallow there, we had to contend with waves as high as the vessel’s bridge. I didn’t know it then, but had we been at that precise spot just before Star Carr and Thatcham, around say 8000 BC, we wouldn’t have needed a ship. We’d have been on foot, standing on dry land, and perhaps looking anxiously towards the storm raging around the North Sea coast some ten miles to the north.

      When I first learned about the relatively recent formation of the southern North Sea I was incredulous – partly, I suppose, because of my trawler experience. How on earth, I wondered, could something as huge, grey and brooding as the North Sea just swamp dry land and swallow it up forever? Even now my head accepts the fact, but something deep inside me retains irrational doubts. Today we have hard and fast proof of the relatively recent advance southwards of the North Sea, in the form of offshore borehole records and other scientific data.

      A recent paper by a team assembled by Professor Ian Shennan of the Department of Geography at Durham University has collated all this information with some sophisticated computer wizardry, and produced a sequence of authoritative – I hesitate to say definitive – maps showing how and when the process of inundation happened.1

      The root cause of the sea’s triumph over land is ultimately the rise in sea level consequent upon postglacial warming, but there are many other factors that Ian, his team and their computers have had to contend with. For example, as the burden of ice was removed, the land beneath tended to rise, thereby counteracting some of the effects of increasing sea level. It was like taking one’s finger off a cork in a glass of water: it (the land) bobbed up. But this bounce-back, or to use the correct term, this ‘isostatic recovery’, was not a universal or even a homogeneous effect: in some places it didn’t happen at all, whereas in others the land actually began to sink.

      So the relationship of land to sea level is by no means a simple picture, and as we will see, its consequences in human terms, too, were to prove far from predictable. This is because these important developments in the shrinking geography of the north-western European Plain coincided with what was to be a hugely significant long-term change in the way people gained their livelihoods, after which our world would never be the same again.

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