A History of Ancient Britain (10 page)

By coincidence, I formed a similar attachment to the same part of the world at roughly the same time as Steve Mithen. In 1986 I was a volunteer on the excavation of a Mesolithic settlement on
the island of Rum, an island sitting 15 miles west of the Scottish port of Mallaig. Radiocarbon dates from some of the excavated material would subsequently reveal the island was a destination for
hunters over 9,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest post-glacial settlement sites in the country.

Mesolithic hunters were attracted to Rum by the mountain that glowers over its north-west coast – Creag nan Stearnan. This is ‘Bloodstone Hill’ and the bloodstone that gives it
its name is a chalcedonic silica that can be worked into stone tools in much the same way as flint. Mithen’s work on the nearby islands of Coll, Jura, Oronsay and Colonsay is helping to
explain how a resource like Bloodstone Hill fits into a bigger picture of life in the north-western seaboard of Mesolithic Britain.

Fittingly, for reasons that will shortly become apparent, the island of Coll is shaped like a fish, with its head towards the desolate peninsula of Ardnamurchan. If ever there was a place where
Mithen could best hope to find his inner ancient hunter it is surely here on this sliver of land – just 13 miles by three. There are only two roads and the peace of the place is scarcely
disturbed by its 200 or so permanent inhabitants; visitors come for the emptiness, the quiet and the sandy beaches.

Since 2006 Mithen and a team of volunteers have been unearthing the ephemeral traces of aMesolithic fishing camp at Fiskary Bay, on the island’s south-east side. The clue was in the name
all along:
fisk
is fish in Old Norse and
Caraidh
is a Gaelic word for a wall, or weir. There is still a caraidh across the bay today – probably dating from the eighteenth or
nineteenth centuries – and it still traps water at low tide. Mithen believes, though, that people were trapping fish at Fiskary Bay much longer ago.

Even without radiocarbon dates the site’s Mesolithic pedigree is
confirmed by finds of ‘microliths’ – tiny pieces of carefully worked flint that
can be used as points and barbs. These are the classic Mesolithic artefact, so that a people and a way of life that lasted for thousands of years are identified by the tiniest, most
insignificant-seeming finds imaginable. There are also beautiful, long, finely flaked blades of flint that would have been put to all manner of uses in hunting, the preparation of food, cleaning
and shaping animal skins and making other tools. Perhaps the best artefact from Fiskary is a tiny piece of red deer antler – the tip, according to Mithen, of a fishing spear.

With infinite patience and thoroughness the team has also made a habit of sieving all the sediments excavated from the trenches, and it is this painstaking work that has enabled the recovery of
hundreds of fish bones – cod, flatfish, haddock, hake, pollock, sea bass, whiting and, most numerous of all, wrasse. Mithen believes hunters were visiting the bay to trap and net fish
throughout the year and thinks it perfectly plausible those first inhabitants built a caraidh of their own. (Here is the kind of impact on the landscape Mesolithic people are not supposed to make:
their choice of the bay, their modification of it with a weir to trap prey, was echoed then by Nordic Vikings and by everyone else who has found their way to Fiskary Bay.)

Another specialist on the team has been analysing the contents of peat and soil samples pulled from the Coll landscape with a piece of equipment not unlike a giant apple corer. Examined under a
microscope the resultant cores yield tiny grains of pollen that show what plant life was growing at different times during the island’s long history. It seems the present monotony of heather,
punctuated only by bog myrtle, sedge and sphagnum moss, was known to the first hunters 10,500 years ago as well.

This, then, is the search for the Mesolithic – relying on sieves, microscopes and the sharpest eyes to find a people who seem identifiable always and only by the tiniest clues. Fortunately
for everyone’s sanity there are occasional glimpses of the people themselves.

In 1979 two men were digging out a rabbit burrow near Burrington Combe in Somerset’s Mendip Hills when they broke through into a large cave. Laid out in rows across the floor of the
chamber were perhaps as many as 100 skeletons. It was not until 1914 that a team of cavers from Bristol began anything like a modern excavation of the site – known by then as Aveline’s
Hole – and by then only 21 skeletons remained. One of them seemed to have been deliberately laid across a hearth and was
accompanied by lumps of red ochre, animal teeth
perforated for use as jewellery and some fossil ammonites. The whole assemblage from Aveline’s Hole went on display in a Bristol museum until a fateful night in November 1940 when a German
bombing raid wrecked the building and almost destroyed the lot, together with all the written records of the excavation.

It was not until 2003 that a team of archaeologists from Queen’s University in Belfast re-examined the surviving fragments. Modern analysis of the remains revealed the people laid to rest
in the cave had been of fairly slight stature – markedly smaller than today. There were also traces of diseases like osteoarthritis and marks on the teeth that showed the people had endured
periods of very poor diet during their short lives. Most fascinating of all, however, were the results of radiocarbon dating. The cave had been used as a cemetery by people who lived and died
around 10,400 years ago, not long after the final retreat of the ice. These were some of our first Mesolithic ancestors.

Only bomb-shattered fragments survive of the Aveline’s Hole skeletons. But a find made in 1903 in Gough’s Cave in nearby Cheddar Gorge, however (erstwhile home of the notorious
Creswellian cannibals who inhabited the place before the Big Freeze), brings us face to face with a Mesolithic hunter. He is known as Cheddar Man and his is the earliest complete human skeleton
ever found in Britain. He lived more than 9,000 years ago, meaning either he or his immediate ancestors were among the very first people to recolonise the land.

His skull is disfigured, just in the vicinity of where his right eyebrow would have been, by an ugly, ragged crater. It is the mark of bone disease and in life would have appeared as a large,
weeping sore. It may have been caused by an injury or, more likely, by a disease that began in his sinuses and spread. As well as looking dreadful, it would have been debilitating, sometimes
causing fever, always causing pain and discomfort. It may well have killed him in the end.

For the making of the television series
A History of Ancient Britain
we arranged to have Cheddar Man’s skull displayed on top of a trolley piled with the large cardboard boxes that
contain the rest of his bones. It was not as undignified as it sounds. The trolley was positioned on the wide landing of an imposing staircase rising up from the main gallery of his present-day
home in London’s Natural History Museum. For an hour or so, long after the place had closed for the night and the last visitor had gone, he was master of all he surveyed.

I spent a long time looking at his skull, considering the empty eye sockets, his still-shining white teeth, the awful hole in his forehead. By then I had seen the
red-stained bones of the mammoth-hunter of Paviland, and the artwork of the people who lived in the caves at Creswell Crags between the Ice Ages.

Cheddar Man was different. In all the ways that matter he and I were born into the same world. When he was alive on the Earth, Britain was still a part of the European continent. He or his
forefathers walked to Cheddar Gorge dry-shod all the way from France – and could have carried on walking straight to south Wales, untroubled by any water in the Bristol Channel. But all that
really keeps us apart is the years. Cheddar Man did not live on icy tundra. His was a Britain cloaked in forests of alder and birch. He did not hunt the wild horse or the mammoth through the snow;
rather he stalked red deer in the Wild Wood. By his time, the glaciers had done their work and the sculpting was complete. When Cheddar Man had eyes to see they looked out at the same mountains,
the same hills, the same valleys and the same islands as mine do now.

His ways were still those of the hunter but his relationship to the land was fundamentally different from that of his Upper Palaeolithic ancestors. During the Mesolithic, people were more
settled within defined territories – perhaps being born, living and dying in the same area. By thisMiddle Stone Age we begin to see not just a lineage leading all the way out of the past to
us, but also the first folk who could be rightly described as British born and bred.

It was in an effort to experience the world of CheddarMan –Mesolithic Man – that I spent 24 hours on the small Hebridean island of Coll cut off from the twenty-first century. My
guide into the past was John Lord, who has spent most of his life relearning the skills our ancestors took for granted. There is something older about Lord – and not in terms of his age. He
is much more about doing things than talking; quiet, but in a way that leaves no awkward silence. His hands are not like mine, not soft from mobile phones and laptop keys, from spending most time
outdoors shoved into warm pockets. His hands know how to make and hold tools; how to tie proper knots; to twist plant fibre into unbreakable string; where and how hard to strike one stone with
another so that within minutes he is holding a knife indistinguishable from those you see on display in the prehistory section of the British Museum. I felt foolish and useless beside him. What
have I been doing with my time?

Lord showed me how to paddle out into Fiskary Bay in a boat called a coracle, a versatile little craft he had made by stretching a cow skin over a basket-like frame of
bent branches lashed together with cords made of tree bark. (It was boats like these – as well as dugout canoes – that enabled those early hunters to reach places like Coll in the first
place.) A coracle needs only one paddle, which must be stirred in a leisurely figure of eight to provide propulsion and direction; but do it even slightly wrong and the thing just spins in place,
like a bottle-top in a puddle. He showed me how razor-edged flakes, quickly knapped from a pebble of flint, could be used for cutting everything from animal hide to my own fingers.

As we stretched fresh deer skins, still soft and bloody from the carcasses, across a simple A-frame to make the tent in which I was to spend the night (in the far north of Scotland, in
February), I got my first sense of what the Mesolithic world would have smelled like – a heavy, all-pervading animal odour that must have permeated everything from people’s own skin and
hair, to their clothes, to the shelters they called home. We charred red deer antler until it was brittle enough for shards to be split from the main. These Lord carved, with flint blades, to make
elegant multi-barbed points that could be lashed to shafts with twine made from tendons cut from red deer carcasses, to make fishing spears.

All the time we worked our hands were slicked with a sheen of animal fat that steadily seeped into our skin so that we smelled no different from the raw materials we were using. We waded out
into the bay in the forlorn hope of spearing fish, but the seals had chased them away. Still we tried – Lord telling me to keep the tip of the spear submerged. Light-waves change direction
when they hit water so the shaft seems suddenly crooked. Let my eyes adjust to the new angle of the spear underwater, he said, and my chances of actually hitting something would be increased. (On
my own I know nothing of value while hunters 9,000 years ago understood how to compensate for the effects of refraction!)

They hunted and trapped hare on Coll once, but those are a protected species now and so, in homage to the original quarry, Lord had me skin a rabbit. I did as I was told, pulling the hide from
the carcass as easily as taking off a glove, to reveal a little shiny pink body that looked alarmingly like that of a premature baby. Best of all, we made fire by using a little bow rapidly to spin
the sharpened end of a stick inside a shallow hole cut from a flat piece of hard, dry wood. After minutes of effort, a glowing ember was conjured into being at the tip. This Lord
coaxed into the heart of a bundle of wood shavings before crouching down so he could breathe some air across it. There was a genie of smoke first and then, like ancient magic, a tiny
serpent’s tongue of flame that licked upwards through the shavings. It took hold with the softest sound, like a gasp, and we had fire. I would like to say I could repeat the feat now, but I
would be lying.

That night, after everyone else had gone back to proper beds and heating, I sat as close to the flames as I could get without actually catching fire myself. It was a cloudless night, with a
gibbous Moon, and in a bid to cheat the cold I drank too much rough red wine, my only concession to the present (apart from a four-season sleeping bag). I looked up at a million stars and wondered
how many new pinpricks of light had reached our planet in the last 9,000 years – or was I looking at the same lights as they had, give or take a few degrees of parallax?

In the morning I was wretched – not cold, since the night inside the deer-skin shelter, cocooned in modern warmth while breathing freezing air, had been unexpectedly comfortable –
but from lack of sleep. I watched the sun rise from behind a shoulder of Mull, just as those fishermen and women of Fiskary Bay must have done nine millennia ago, and thought about how far away
their world was, and how close.

After my Mesolithic experience, it was a jolt to climb into a helicopter for a tour of the neighbouring islands. Steve Mithen has traipsed back and forth on foot across and around the coastlines
not just of Coll but of Jura, Oronsay, Colonsay and Islay as well in search of lost hunters. It has been laborious, but also time well spent because it has enabled him to see how different islands
met different needs for hunter-gatherers.

On Colonsay, a few hours’ paddling from Coll, he has unearthed pits containing up to a third of a million hazelnut shells. ‘What they may have been doing is gathering large
quantities in the autumn and then storing them as food through the winter,’ he said. ‘If you roast them you can grind them down to a paste and then it becomes easy, nutritious food you
can carry away and use later.’