A History of Ancient Britain (34 page)

Today we live with the consequences of the answers our ancestors found to those questions – because in the great scheme of time we are still busy trying to find ways to relate to one
another. And their responsibility has
been handed down to us as well, like an old oak clock that has counted the passing of all the years from then to now and that keeps on
ticking.

During the later years of the time we have called the Bronze Age we came into our inheritance. Once upon a time there was more than enough for everyone. As the Stone Age ended, giving way to
worlds of metal, some few of us realised there were consequences, accounts to be reckoned and prices to be paid. Despite their caution and their thrift, too many of us began to squander what we had
been given. Whether the debt is too great now ever to be settled in our favour, only time will tell. Soon we will pass the inheritance on again – or at least what remains of it – to our
own descendants. What will they think? How will they remember us?

CHAPTER FIVE

IRON

Our ancient past is to me a
Mary Celeste
: so much of the stuff of those long-ago lives has been left behind, sound and usable – often, it seems, by owners who had
every intention of returning to pick up again where they had left off.

Before she became a byword for mystery the
Mary Celeste
was a US brigantine merchant ship bound for the Straits of Gibraltar in November 1872. She was found perfectly intact but abandoned
in the mid-Atlantic on 4 December of that year. She had been at sea for a month and still had six weeks’ worth of food and water on board. Her cargo was untouched, along with all the personal
possessions and valuables belonging to her passengers and experienced crew – none of whom were ever seen or heard from again.

As in the case of that infamous ship, the places and possessions of our ancestors sometimes appear to await the return of folk who have only this moment walked away, briefly distracted. The
stones, bones, vessels and the rest of their detritus make us ask: ‘Where did the people go . . . when, and why?’

It is archaeologists who seek to board the silent past, in the manner of a salvage team, in hope of discovering what happened there. Often they find
the places still set
upon the table, the food half-eaten on the plates. All seems well and only the people are missing. The absence of the inhabitants of those moments and millennia that went before is sometimes made
all the more poignant by the seeming richness of the cultures and societies left behind. Often it is whole villages, like Orkney’s Skara Brae, where unanswered questions pace the flagstones
like ghosts. Anyone walking around that place today must surely wonder why such a perfect home, filled with precious belongings, was cut adrift.

By the Bronze Age, in Britain, our ancestors had created an obviously complete and complex world. Not just technologically advanced – with all the practical necessities of farming life
– but socially and psychologically sophisticated as well. By at least the Late Bronze Age, from around the start of the first millennium
BC
onwards, the peoples of
Britain were deeply embedded within home-grown societies, many of which were intricately connected to Continental Europe and perhaps the wider world beyond.

Some of the people had found satisfactory (to them at least) answers to many of the eternal questions thrown up by life and the universe. All in all it was a world that was beginning to suggest
some of the forms and structures of our own. People had grown used to living in permanent settlements – in hamlets, homesteads and even villages – surrounded by neighbours whose faces
were almost as familiar to them, on a day-to-day basis, as those of their own families. They had accepted the need for daily, weekly, monthly rounds of chores – accepted too that they were
dependent upon their land and therefore bound to it. For a species that had spent the vast majority of its time living the nomadic life of the hunter and the gatherer, just these steps alone had
made for a profound and deeply transforming social revolution.

Archaeologists have also established that much of the Bronze Age in Britain unfolded during a climatic golden time, so that lives then were cradled in a reassuringly warm and settled world that
was kind to crops, livestock and humankind alike. It was a climate that helped generate and sustain a sense of permanence, a feeling that this was the way things had always been and also the way
they would remain.

That time of plenty had led to steady population growth and with more people came both the opportunity and the wherewithal to clear yet more land and grow yet more crops. Settled civilisation
seemed irresistibly on the rise and a safe, domesticated world was spreading across the land –
even into upland and other zones that had previously been unproductive,
if not sterile.

It would be wrong to imagine the living was easy, by our standards at the very least; but for a people coming of age and into their own it was a time of relative calm and security after
thousands upon thousands of years of dramatic struggles for survival and of often turbulent upheavals in society. You might justifiably say the people living in Britain in the centuries either side
of 1000
BC
had never had it so good. The crops were in the fields, the animals too; bronze finery spoke of friendships and ties that spread out over the land like
spiders’ webs; sun, Moon and stars moved above, counting the passing years as reliably, as comfortably, as the heartbeats of an old grandfather clock. Perhaps our Bronze Age relatives felt
they were masters of the universe itself.

But all those advances towards a world we would recognise as somehow modern were the product of more than just the passing of time. It had not been enough for the species simply to survive all
those uncounted hundreds of thousands of years; technological and social advance are not the rewards for just beating the odds and staying alive. Ever since I was a teenage student of archaeology I
have been troubled by one nagging question above every other: how come we advanced at all? That I have been born into a world of space travel, modern medicine, particle physics, smart phones,
budget international airlines, the Internet and all the rest of it, is a constant wonder to me, and a mystery. How – and more importantly why – have some of us come so far?

Of course, the advances are not uniform. The world of man-made wonders that we inhabit is not evenly spread across the face of this Earth. All around, in parts of Africa, India, Asia,
Australasia and even the northernmost parts of North America, are peoples still living lives that would, in large part at least, be recognisable not just to our Bronze Age ancestors but even to our
most distant hunting and gathering relations as well. The world of our ancient past is therefore not nearly as far off as we sometimes allow ourselves to believe. We have been primitives before and
maybe we will be cast down there again in the future, by hubris if nothing else.

Ferdinand Magellan was the commander of the first fleet of European ships to encounter the land and inhabitants of the most southerly extremes of the continent of South America. Portuguese by
birth, he had nonetheless thrown in his lot with King Charles I of Spain in order to secure the backing
for an expensive voyage in search of a westward route to the
so-called ‘Spice Islands’ of Indonesia.

Having departed the city of Seville in August 1519, Magellan and his men finally succeeded in finding a way through the southern tip of South America, from the Atlantic Ocean and into the
Pacific, by the end of the November of the following year. Having passed All Saints’ Day (1 November) en route, Magellan named the 370-odd-mile passage from east to west ‘Estrecho de
Todos los Santos’ – All Saints’ Channel. The way is known nowadays, however, as the Magellan Strait.

It was therefore from the bridge of his flagship,
Trinidad
, that Magellan became the first European to lay eyes on those lands just east of the Pacific side of the strait. Because the new
ocean he encountered there seemed so calm he called it ‘Mar Pacifico’, but he was at least as curious about the myriad fires he saw dotted all along the forbidding coastline of the
archipelago making up the continent’s southernmost tip, off the
Trinidad
’s port side. So numerous were the bonfires and campfires, so much a part of the landscape did they seem,
he named the place ‘Tierra del Fuego’ – the Land of Fire.

Magellan correctly assumed they were lit by native peoples living in those lands; and in fact he feared the locals had gathered to prepare an ambush for any landing parties. It was therefore
Europeans on subsequent voyages through the Magellan Strait who first spent time among the tribes that had passed the millennia since the Old World’s Ice Age facing the challenges of
‘the uttermost part of the Earth’.

They are mostly gone now, those original inhabitants of the Land of Fire – dispersed like the smoke from their ancient hearths. They are remembered collectively by history as the Fuegians,
but once upon a time they had names of their own, like the Yaghan and the Haush, the Alcaluf and the Ona. All of the tribes on those islands were nomadic, living by hunting and gathering, but there
were considerable differences between their individual cultures, languages, lifestyles and temperaments.

No lesser an observer than Charles Darwin spent time, during the voyage of the
Beagle
(1831–6), documenting the ways of the peoples he found clinging to life in that unforgiving and
often inhospitable environment. He found the Ona, who lived inland, to be physically larger than their neighbours and to be given to warlike and terrifying behaviour, so he named them ‘the
wretched lords of this wretched land’. The Ona at least wore clothes of animal fur and shoes of skin or leather, and adorned
themselves both with jewellery made from
the bones and tendons of the animals they hunted and also with body paint. Fighting was their principal distraction, however, and they spent as much time as possible making life miserable for their
more peaceable neighbours, like the Yaghan, who greatly feared them.

The Yaghan spent as much time in their canoes, exploiting the marine resources, as they did on land (maybe in no small part to steer clear of the Ona). With harpoons they hunted sea mammals and
fish, as well as collecting shellfish from the shallows. Unlike the bellicose Ona, however, the Yaghan wore almost no clothing. Despite the hardships of biting winds, and of ice and snow encrusting
the landscape for much of the year, they made do by smearing their bodies with oil from fish and other prey. The fires that had been spotted from offshore by Magellan were absolutely central to the
lives of Yaghan and Ona alike – the Yaghan even going so far as to keep fires burning within their wood and bark canoes while they braved the coldest sea crossings.

Darwin himself wondered at the hardy nature of people he watched moving about nearly naked and barefoot in an often frozen land; and it is important to remember that the members of these tribes
continued to live that way right up into the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries.

The discovery of gold, and then oil, would eventually bring an intolerable flood of Europeans, as well as Chileans and Argentinians from further north, into the undisturbed fastnesses of the
tribes. What hitherto unknown Old World diseases like smallpox and measles could not accomplish by themselves, the genocidal practices of land- and mineral-hungry incomers completed. After more
than ten thousand years on the archipelago the native peoples – the peaceful Yaghan and the warlike Ona alike – were wiped out in a few decades, so that today not even their languages
survive.

But it is not the end of those tribes, who lived out of sight and out of mind of our complicated modern world for so long, that should fascinate us most of all. Rather we should be preoccupied
by any people, like the Yaghan, who survived as long as they did in such a physically demanding, even cruel environment without ever finding either the need or the wherewithal to make clothes to
proof themselves against the always enervating cold? Some anthropologists have supposed life was so hard there on that southernmost tip of South America that material culture was reduced to an
absolute minimum. The constant demands of hunting and gathering food, and tending the fires around which they erected their flimsy shelters,
apparently left no time for
anything but the barest accomplishments.

For all the absence of personal belongings, of things, the cultures of the Fuegians had allowed for complex mythologies and attempts at understanding the world around them. The stories they told
each other as they huddled by their fires were populated by fantastic heroes who had carved the islands, and the waterways that separated them, and by sacred hummingbirds and sea lions, albatrosses
and foxes.