A History of Ancient Britain (28 page)

This first stage of the arrival in Britain of metal-working technology is known by archaeologists as the Copper Age – or the Chalcolithic, from
khalkos
, the Greek word for copper.
As well as their understanding of how metal was to be made, the incomers seem to have brought with them an entire culture – one represented by a set of objects they were in the habit of
burying alongside their dead. Typically there are distinctive drinking vessels called Beakers, copper knives, arrowheads, wristguards to protect an archer’s forearm, boars’ tusks, stone
tools and special ‘cushion’ stones for putting the finishing touches to metal items. Sometimes there are even pieces of gold jewellery.

As well as equipping their loved ones with specific grave goods, the practitioners of the new technology liked to place them in their graves lying on their left sides and slightly curled up, as
though sleeping, their faces towards the north. The graves containing people positioned that way and accompanied by some or all of those bits and pieces are therefore like a
trail of footprints archaeologists can follow all across central, western and Mediterranean Europe. (I said ‘culture’ in the preceding paragraph and from time to time it
has been fashionable to use that word to imply a unified people, all thinking and acting the same way. When I was a student we were taught about the ‘Beaker People’ and it was tempting
to see them almost as missionaries, travelling throughout the Continent spreading the word and enlightening Stone Age farmers with the message of metal.)

The Beakers are shaped rather like upturned bells (so that they are often referred to in the archaeological literature as ‘Bell Beakers’) and have been interpreted as part of
male-dominated drinking rituals. Viewed from that perspective much of the rest of the kit – the arrows, wristguards and knives – seem similarly masculine, related to hunting. Perhaps
even after millennia of farming, real manhood continued to be associated with the ways of the hunter, so that men felt the need to incorporate at least a ritualised form of hunting into their
lives. If they had to be farmers in life, perhaps in death their souls were freed to return to the trail, bow and arrows in hand.

In all likelihood, however, there was probably no single ‘people’ and no single explanation for the inclusion of Beakers and the rest in graves scattered all across Europe. Instead
there were probably many explanations, as different peoples acquired the new science and adapted it to suit their lives and circumstances. By the time metal-working reached Britain it had travelled
for thousands of years and over thousands of miles, a technology that was flexible and malleable and ready to take on whatever shape and use was required of it.

Sometime between 2500 and 2300
BC
a boy grew to manhood in the Alpine region of Europe, among people who had made and worked metal for centuries at least. He had the
skill himself and even among his own people it made him worthy of note, since it was known only to that caste of specialists who kept the secrets to themselves. It is impossible to know if he was
actually born there in that swathe of territory incorporating modern Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland – but he spent enough of his childhood and early adulthood in
the vicinity to ensure that, as his teeth developed in his jaws, they incorporated the very atoms contained in the earth and water of the place. The Alpine region was therefore quite literally in
his bones. As an adult he stood around five feet eight inches tall and, completely unbeknown to him, he had a highly unusual and benign malformation of some of the bones in his feet.

It was as a fully grown man that he left that part of Europe and headed
north-west, either walking on his peculiar feet or riding a domesticated horse. It is possible he
travelled alone, but more likely he was part of a group that had found reasons to leave the place they knew best and set out towards new horizons. There is only so far a person, or indeed a group
of people, can travel in a day and the journey from its beginning to its end would ultimately have taken many months, if not years. We will never know if he or they had a final destination in mind
and they may have spent unknown days, months or even years in any number of places along the way. Finally, though, their route reached the Channel and a boat was begged, borrowed, made or stolen in
order to make the crossing.

By the time of that life, and that journey, there was a place towards the extreme north-west of Europe – on an island across the sea – that was already special and famous. It may
even have been the inspiration for the journey in the first place. We cannot know what it was called then – even whether it had one name or many – but it was a special location where
circles of timber had become circles of stone and those circles were themselves set inside a bigger circle dug out of the ground, the fill heaped into a rounded bank that underlined the
separateness, the apartness of the space within. Some people said it was a world of the dead and that even the sun was born and died there every year.

A long time before the man died, on one side of the Channel or the other, he suffered a terrible injury to his left knee. It was crippling and meant that for at least part of his life he was
partially disabled and would have walked with a halting limp. If it happened in the Alpine region where he grew up, then the journey or journeys he made in adulthood seem even more remarkable. If
it happened in England, it may explain why he died there rather than back home.

How long he spent living close by the place known to us as Stonehenge is anyone’s guess. Also unknowable is whether, having arrived, he spent the rest of his life there or if he made many
trips, sometimes returning home to the Alps or journeying elsewhere in between. (Given the nature of his knee injury, it seems unlikely he would have enjoyed covering long distances, but you never
know.) Maybe he believed the stones in their circle had healing properties and visited them from his home over and over, like a modern-day pilgrim to Lourdes, before eventually dying in their
shadow, aged no more than 45 and still unhealed, still uncured.

He was buried in the manner of his people, a few miles to the south-east of the great monument. First they dug him a grave and lined it with timber.
They laid him inside
it on his left side, the side of his withered leg, and took care to curl him neatly into a foetal position so he seemed less lost to them, more likely to return. His face was turned towards the
north, as was their custom. But if that much of the burial tradition was familiar – common to countless graves of his kind, their kind, all across Continental Europe – then the wealth
they heaped upon and around his body was nothing less than startling. Into the grave went a whole quiver of arrows, 15 of them, tipped with beautifully worked, barbed and tanged heads of flint, all
of which appear to have been made by the same craftsman. On one of his forearms was a wristguard of grey-black sandstone – a practical item to protect an archer from the painful recoil of the
bowstring but also a mark of status – and on his chest a precious copper knife. By the wristguard, or bracer, was a bone pin, the fastening for a cloak. At his back the mourners placed a Bell
Beaker that, before firing, had been decorated with lines scratched into the wet clay with a comb. Beside it they set a handful of flint tools, some used and broken, a so-called ‘cushion
stone’ for finishing metal and a pair of boars’ tusks. Close to his face they put two more decorated Bell Beakers, more flint and flint tools, another pair of boars’ tusks, some
red deer bones and pieces of antler and a second copper knife. A fourth Beaker was placed in the crook of his bent knees, a fifth at his feet, together with yet another copper knife. The belt
around his waist was strung through a ring carved from shale. Also near his feet was a second wristguard, this one of red sandstone. Most wondrous of all – at least to our eyes – the
burial party laid at the man’s feet two tiny pieces of fine, beautifully worked gold jewellery. At first sight they look like little basket-shaped earrings but are more likely to have been
decorations designed to be worn in long hair. Content they had done right by him, they backfilled the grave and topped it with a low mound, so they would always know where their metal-worker
lay.

For thousands of years he lay at peace – thousands of years during which his world disappeared and was replaced, again and again, by others. Long ago the mound marking his grave was eroded
away by years and neglect so that for the longest time no one even knew he was there. Other peoples settled the land, including Romans in the centuries following their invasion of Britain, and they
buried their own dead in a careful cemetery close to the long-forgotten metal-worker. Perhaps the mound was still visible then – and drew them to the place – perhaps it was only
coincidence. During the time of the Anglo-Saxons a village was
established there, called Amesbury, a possession of the kings. Most recently it has been a simple market town,
but popular enough to create demand for new houses and a new primary school. And so it was that in the spring of 2002 archaeologists, mindful of the Romano-British presence in the area, conducted a
programme of excavations in advance of the construction work.

To begin with they found what they had been expecting – evidence of burials related to the time of the Roman Empire; but as spring gave way to summer they turned their attention to some
depressions they thought might be no more than cavities left by the root bowls of trees fallen long ago. Instead, from within one of them, they unearthed the metal-worker in all his Early Bronze
Age glory.

Given the arrowheads and wristguards it was not long before he was being referred to, at least by the writers of newspaper headlines, as the ‘Amesbury Archer’. It was soon clear to
the archaeologists that they had found the richest burial of the period in the whole of Britain, indeed one of the richest in Europe. By then the tabloids were speculating about the ‘King of
Stonehenge’. One of his teeth was removed and taken for isotope analysis – a process that finds elements like strontium and oxygen in tooth enamel and allows scientists to pinpoint
where a person lived his or her early years. The rock of a place becomes the soil of a place; rivers and streams run over the rock, acquiring the elements too. Plants absorb them; the animals that
eat them and drink the water do the same, so that a child makes himself from the very stuff of the land on which he grows. That the Amesbury Archer was found to be no local but a man who had
reached maturity south of the Alps confounded all expectations.

And there was a further twist. Excavation of a second depression just 15 feet or so away from the first revealed a second burial, this time of a man aged between 20 and 25. There was nothing on
the scale of the wealth that had accompanied the older man, but in addition to some flint tools and a single boar’s tusk, a second pair of golden hair tresses was found stuck to the jawbone
of the skull. At first it seemed they might have been placed inside the young man’s mouth during his burial, as some kind of ritual act, but it has subsequently been thought more likely they
were simply placed on a cord around his neck. Nothing more than time and decay of the body had seen to it that the precious items found their way to a position between his jaws. It was examination
of the skeleton itself, however, that delivered the real surprise: the younger man had the same, extremely unusual
deformity of the bones of his feet. This was no
coincidence – the pair had to be related by blood.

Radiocarbon dates are always tricky to interpret, but those recovered from both skeletons are compellingly similar, and suggest in fact the younger man lived and died just a little later than
his older relative. He has gone into the literature as the Amesbury Archer’s ‘companion’ but he must be family – a close relative, maybe even the older man’s son.

The same isotope analysis that revealed a central European childhood for the Archer showed his companion, or son, probably grew up in southern England – maybe close to Amesbury and
Stonehenge and the rest of the great Stone Age monuments. Taken collectively, the evidence is fascinating: it suggests the older man, with his debilitating knee injury, not only reached Stonehenge
but rose to prominence within the society he found in its shadow. Perhaps he brought his wife and other followers with him, and after settling in the vicinity of modern-day Amesbury she bore him a
son. Whatever the relationship between the men, both of them were valued, in life as in death, by the people they lived among. Both were accorded the kind of burials reserved only for men of real
status.

There is as well the story to be told by the Archer’s grave goods. The copper from which his three knives were made came originally from Europe, possibly Spain, and the gold for his hair
tresses (in fact the earliest gold jewellery found in Britain so far) is also from a Continental source – all suggestive of a life and a man connected to other metal-making communities far
from where he and his belongings ended up. The people who buried him took care to ensure he had that cushion stone with him too. It was smoothed and burnished by much use and may have belonged to
the Archer in life, proof he was a man accustomed to making and shaping metal. If he was not a metal-worker himself, then the inclusion of such an item may indicate he was a man who had the power
to control access to the magical material.

The radiocarbon dates obtained from his skeleton and that of his companion mean they may even have been living and breathing in Amesbury while Stonehenge was a scene of frantic activity –
during the few years it took to source the giant sarsen stones and to raise them into position at the centre of the circle. They certainly lived while all the great monuments of the area were in
use – Durrington Walls, Woodhenge and the rest – so suddenly that newspaper headline about the King of Stonehenge seems less fanciful. Was he indeed part of a kind of Early Bronze Age
royalty – one of
an elite that travelled throughout Europe, visiting all the great religious and spiritual centres of the age, Stonehenge being perhaps the greatest of
them and the place where he decided to pass not just the last years of his life, but also eternity?