A History of Ancient Britain (14 page)

Rather than moving around a wide territory as before, people began instead to live in permanent settlements. Most fateful of all, they allowed themselves the luxury of more children, bigger
families. So when the Near Eastern equivalent of the Big Freeze, the Younger Dryas, took hold, from 11,000 to 9,500 years ago, there may simply have been too many people to permit a return to
hunting. Hunters need far bigger territories than farmers and when the climate took a turn for the worse the large, near-sedentary populations may have been forced into taking a more pro-active
role in cultivating, and so domesticating, the wild crops they had come to depend on. Only then, with necessity having given birth to an innovation, did they slowly come to appreciate how farming
might give them the certainty of fresh meat, milk, hide and horn, the hope of surplus grain. Done right, farming might offer the best chance of survival for the many.

In short that last cold snap may have left out-of-practice hunters, now handicapped by too-big families, with no option but to learn how to farm for real. Erstwhile Mesolithic people had put all
their eggs in one Neolithic basket. They were trapped in the future. Neolithic means ‘New Stone Age’ and was at heart a way of life centred on domesticated animals and plants. Like
every age before it, the Neolithic is associated with a specific range of tools and equipment, made for different tasks. But more than anything else the new age, the Neolithic, was about a new
state of mind.

From its seedbed in Mesopotamia (meaning ‘between the rivers’, namely the Tigris and the Euphrates) farming eventually spread westwards into Europe. One route followed the coast of
the Mediterranean Sea while a second took a line across Greece and back up the pathway cut by the River Danube. One or both routes then carried the new technology – its secrets
and its practitioners – all the way to western Europe and finally to Britain.

The preceding paragraph is a summary of what must have happened: farming started in the east and ended up in the west and all points in between, several thousand years later. The precise
details, however – of the journey made by the technology of farming – are still being mapped and argued about by academics, and often bitterly. Most furiously debated in this part of
the world is whether farming reached Britain as an idea or in the heads and hands of actual farmers who brought it here themselves as part of some kind of cultural invasion.

Most archaeologists are at least agreed that farming (together with the rest of the Neolithic toolkit of polished stone axes, knapped stone tools and pottery) was in parts of western Europe by
around 5000
BC
. And early farming spread because it had to. The first child of a farmer stands to inherit the parent’s land. For second and subsequent children,
however, there is often no option but to leave home in search of virgin woodland that can be tamed, cleared and cultivated. In this way farming nudged ever westward, spreading like a vine across
the landmass of Europe, slowly strangling the life breath of the hunting way of life.

Writer and polymath Jared Diamond has suggested it was the very alignment of the European continent upon the globe of the Earth that made the spread possible. Consider the iPhone: hold it
upright and all the images are displayed in portrait mode; turn it onto its side and the image flips over into landscape. All but one of the planet’s continents, notes Diamond, are in
portrait mode with their long axes running north to south (think of Africa, and North and South America). Only Europe is laid out in landscape mode – with its long axis running west to east
– so that 9,000-odd miles of related habitats connect Asia to the west, and ultimately to Britain. Animals and plants adapted to a specific band of latitudes were able to move, strolling or
sown, all the way across Europe from Asia – from Tehran to Toledo – without too much discomfort.

(When it came to domesticating animals it probably helped too that the countries of the Fertile Crescent were home to the ancestors of sheep. If you are contemplating the physical proximity
required for animal husbandry, you might want to test the theory on something like an Iranian mouflon. No wonder British hunter-gatherers confronted, by way of a contrast, with red deer and aurochs
– aggressive wild bulls standing seven feet tall at the shoulder – preferred to kill and eat the local beasts rather than try to stroke them.)

But in imagining the farmers, their seeds and livestock moving east to west, it is easy to overlook the impact the incomers must have had on the hunters whose territories
were encroached upon. This is part of what fuels the furious debate about whether farming was forced onto hunters, or whether they sought it out for themselves. In the British context that
particular conundrum – whether the new way of life crossed the Channel by some sort of osmosis, or alongside hobbled cattle and bags of seed in the holds of an invasion fleet of French
farmers’ boats – might be unravelled by whoever understands the great stone alignments of Carnac, in Brittany in north-west France.

Like a marching army of giants turned to stone they are arranged in neat parallel rows, some the best part of a mile long. Every one of the uncarved blocks (and there are more than 3,000 of
them) weighs at least several tons, and some must be much heavier than that. Many tower above the heads of the visitors milling among them, like children around the feet of grown-ups. But it is the
sheer scale of the alignments – the over-arching vision on the part of their creators – that boggles the mind. Stand in the middle of the rows and they stretch off out of sight,
sometimes over the horizon. Silently and endlessly they make us ask: How? . . . Who? . . . When? . . . Why?

There has been little proper excavation of the Carnac stones but some of the most recent thinking suggests they were erected not by Neolithic farmers – the people normally associated with
great monuments of stone – but by Mesolithic hunters. French archaeologist Serge Cassen has studied the monoliths and the associated stone tombs and menhirs for over 20 years and has come to
the conclusion they mark a great crossroads in the human journey. According to him, some remarkable rock art inside the nearby passage grave of Table des Marchands, in the commune of Locmariaquer,
illustrates the moment when the world of the hunters was brought face to face with the New World of the farmers.

The tomb was built by the farmers, part of the process of laying claim to the land. Cassen excavated the construction and its interior during the mid 1990s and it has subsequently been rebuilt
– partly to give an impression of how it may have looked but mostly to protect the carved artworks within. The passage leads into a chamber tall enough to stand up in. Directly opposite the
end of the entrance and completely dominating the interior is a single block of stone shaped like a massive, squat phallus. As if that were not arresting enough, its flat surface is decorated all
over with what
look at first sight like old men’s walking sticks. These are in fact representations of throwing sticks – curved hunting weapons related to
boomerangs, which would be thrown into rising flocks of birds in hope of braining some of them. According to Cassen these are symbolic of the Mesolithic hunters; and superimposed upon the phallus
they make the strongest possible statement about masculinity.

More significant in terms of Cassen’s theory is the decoration on another large, flat stone forming part of the chamber’s ceiling. This is dominated by an image that brings the
throwing stick of the hunter together with the archetypal symbol of the Neolithic farmer, the polished stone axe. Under closer inspection it is obvious this is no meeting of equals – far from
it. Instead the axe is quite clearly on top of the stick, even cutting it in two – a depiction, according to Cassen, of the moment when the New World of the farmers rose to dominate, to cut
down with the axe the Old World of the hunters.

The truth is that when it comes to interpretation, the Carnac stones are surrounded by something of a void. Despite their obvious magisterial presence, they are as mysterious now as in the early
eighteenth century when antiquarians first turned their attention to them. Local legend tells of a Roman legion turned to stone for persecuting Christians. More recently they have been seen as
markers tracking the movements of the stars. Even druids have been evoked – the lines becoming avenues for religious procession. But they do seem to demand serious thought, to challenge the
onlooker for a meaning; and Cassen has been moved to oblige. For him they represent nothing less than the very years when the first of the farmers appeared on the hunters’ horizon.

With this thought in mind, of a collision of worlds, the great alignments take on an air that is close to poignancy. The Mesolithic hunters of Brittany were a people with their backs to the
wall, or rather to the sea. There on the western limit of mainland Europe they had nowhere to go (not that they wanted to go anywhere, this was their home and always had been). Onto and into that
beleaguered world crept the incomers, at the forefront of a movement that had taken millennia to travel so far. Rather than arriving as conquerors or invaders, the first of them were pushed
forward, unwillingly, by the crowd at their backs. Digging their heels in but too weak to resist, those tongue-tied ambassadors were made to do the talking on behalf of the horde.

The newcomers found themselves among people living the old way, by
hunting and gathering in a rich habitat that offered up the creatures of the woods as well as all the
fish in the sea. According to Cassen the sitting tenants wanted nothing at all to do with the farmers, with their strange talk of clearing fields, planting seeds and . . . waiting. But the incomers
were just as unyielding. They had nowhere else to go either. Behind them was the rest of Europe, already in the long, slow process of conversion to the new technology. Sooner or later these new
arrivals would have to put down roots – their own and those of their plants. It was in that atmosphere – of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object – that first the
stones and then later the tombs were erected.

Cassen has spent decades considering Carnac – and he has come to conclusions that are too much, too precise, too prescriptive and too involved for some. For him the stones are words and
phrases of a story that was decades or even centuries in the telling. He believes that as the two worlds collided – that of the hunter with that of the farmer – both found the need to
raise monuments of stone.

He has come to view the stone rows as something akin to lines in the sand, or at least in the grass. Modern visitors tend to see them as avenues that must be walked down. Cassen by contrast sees
them as a barrier, a thin grey line of soldiers standing in the face of overwhelming numbers. Confronted by the inevitable, he believes, the hunters raised the stones as a statement of ownership:
they both belonged to, and were part of, the land. But, just as there are gaps between the stones, so the hunters’ defiance could never have worked to exclude the farmers. Welcome or not,
farming seeped through any and all opposition, like water through the holes in a colander.

The farmers, for their part, raised their own memorials in the form of tombs for their dead. Cassen believes that once the new way of life was in the ascendant, its proponents sought to make
their point in stone as well. Thus it became appropriate to envelop the hunters’ symbols within their own – to take the old phallic stones, decorated with throwing sticks, and absorb
them within the new womb-like tombs. For farmers concerned with fertility and the cycle of life, it made sense to bring male and female symbols together as one.

It is quite a leap, this theory of Cassen’s. But stand with him among the stones, see them through his eyes, and there is somehow a sense to it all. He is believable – they are
believable. The stone lines are so astounding, so outrageous they must surely have come from a momentous time. These
are no ordinary monuments and therefore no ordinary
explanation will suffice.

Cassen sees a symbolic gesture – a besieged community’s need to leave a definite mark upon the surface of a world made uncertain and unpredictable. For as long as I was beside him, I
felt I could see it too. The standing stones were a statement of defiance. It said the farmers could come onto the hunters’ land – but only if those farmers acknowledged and respected
whose land it was.

The Mesolithic way of life is always spoken of as travelling light, leaving little trace of its presence. Perhaps there in Brittany a community of hunters did indeed take a step that had been,
for them, almost unthinkable. But by raising a permanent monument in stone they declared: ‘We will not last. Our way of life will not last. But we must be remembered. You must remember us
– not for a short time, but for ever.’

And there may be one more thing to think about. Perhaps the hunters let the farmers work the land on their behalf. Maybe they saw the future and a way to benefit from it. After all, the hunter
is still a potent image today, still associated in our society with wealth and prestige. Aristocratic landowners do not soil their hands with the work of farming – they have tenant farmers
for that. And while the farmers grow the crops and tend the animals those richest landowners don crimson coats and black hats and gallop across the land on horseback as . . . hunters. Who really
was triumphant in the end?

Brittany is also conspicuous for the sheer volume of a special class of super-monolith. The Breton word for these monsters is
menhir
– meaning long stones. The largest of them, Le
Grand Menhir Brise – the Great Broken Menhir – lies in four pieces beside that reconstructed passage grave of Table des Marchands, at Locmariaquer. Together the gigantic fragments weigh
330 tons and when upright and intact the complete piece would have stood over 60 feet high.

Whatever they were for – and there is no more consensus regarding the menhirs than there is for the stone alignments – they were allowed to fall down (or were knocked down) by the
farmers who built the passage graves. Time and again Cassen and other excavators in Brittany have found former standing stones and pieces of menhir reused as building material for tombs. Cassen
believes this act – of neglect or destruction – was another attempt
by the farmers to bury the past beneath the future. ‘It is probably linked to this new
process,’ he said. ‘To this new economy, to this full Neolithic where the life of animals and the life of plants is very important to the perception of the cycle of life
itself.’