A History of Ancient Britain (36 page)

This much is straightforward enough but the concept becomes more challenging when extended to objects. If we follow the theory to its logical conclusion, then the items so treasured by
archaeologists and museum curators and which are used to categorise whole ages of our history – polished stone axes; carved flint mace-heads; bronze axes, knives, cooking pots and swords
– can only be fully understood if seen through ancient eyes. More and more archaeologists are of the opinion that many, or even most, of those objects were moving between groups, often over
great
distances, not as commodities but as symbols of relationships, dependencies, obligations and friendships. From this perspective it is therefore all but meaningless to
look at a bronze axe and see it just as a mere personal possession, or something for working wood – likewise a sword, a brooch, a cauldron or indeed perhaps any other portable object.

It seems that when two groups sought to establish a relationship between one another, they would mark the connection by exchanging valuables. The items themselves were almost meaningless without
the relationship – so that a bronze axe might be better viewed as a signature on a contract: without the agreement it confirms it matters hardly at all.

The groups may have exchanged people at the same time – perhaps the one providing a wife for a son of the other. Items offered then would have had some vague similarity to wedding gifts.
(Were archaeologists in a thousand years to unearth a twenty-first-century canteen of cutlery it would be a shame if they only marvelled at the workmanship of the knives and forks and overlooked
the fact that it marked the beginning of a lifelong union between two families.) It follows as well that, once established, the relationship between the groups would be ongoing; the return of the
canteen of cutlery would hardly be sufficient to annul the marriage. For the duration of the relationship established by the first giving and receiving of gifts there would likely be further
gift-giving, so that a whole chain of obligations and debts would develop, binding groups and their descendants inextricably.

In the final paragraphs of his novel
Metroland
Julian Barnes wrote that ‘Objects contain absent people’. And there is the point: if we are to have any hope of understanding
the world of the Bronze Age, sometimes we have to see beyond the objects to the people who both made them and invested them with meaning.

I will happily admit I have struggled with all of this – what often seem like fanciful concepts – for years. To me an axe is mostly just an axe and surely the primary reason for
having one is to make it easier to cut down trees? But that is the thinking of someone born in Britain in the last third of the twentieth century. How can I avoid seeing objects as just useful or
desirable possessions, when that is what my world has taught me?

And it is of course important and sensible not to let the trees completely blind us to the existence of the wood. Hard though it might be to grasp, an appreciation of the ancient grammar of gift
exchange is vital to any attempt at understanding the Bronze Age. But tools and weapons would clearly also
have been desired and acquired for their obvious uses. The
evidence from the Salcombe wreck paints a clear picture of metal-traders engaged in the movement of the raw materials of bronze; and surely at least some of the products of that trade would have
ended up in general use in the hands of craftsmen, warriors and housewives.

What must not be overlooked, however, is the certainty that many objects in the archaeological record were invested with meaning and significance that far exceeded their value as metal tools. I
think about my own consumerist point of view – how things are mostly just things to me – and then I remember losing my wedding ring just three months after we were married. To this day
I do not know exactly what happened to it. I had been out shovelling snow and ice off our front path, taking my gloves on and off as I did so, and it seems likely the ring slipped from my cold
finger at some point when my hands were bare. But it was only when I was back in the house hours later, looking at my hands as I typed something on my laptop, that I suddenly spotted the absence.
We made a claim on our insurance and within a few weeks I was able to replace the original with one exactly the same. But of course it is not the same. The ring I lost was the one my wife put on my
finger, along with a promise. The identical platinum band I wear now is just a ring.

We should also try to look beyond the so-called ‘Three-Age System’ of classifying the past, pioneered by the Danish antiquarian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788-1865). Surely
everyone has heard about the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages – and how archaeologists once sought to rank ancient civilisations in terms of their tool-making technologies? The assumption
underlying all of it was that humankind was on a steady path leading towards ever-greater sophistication, so that people living in the Stone Age might be said to look up to people in the Bronze Age
– but not as much as they looked up to those in the Iron Age.

Bronze may have made for more refined objects than stone, but that was not the only reason people opted for the one over the other. Having access to bronze – particularly for the majority
of people, living in areas where neither copper nor tin occurred naturally – implied precious connections to people far away. Bronze was the visible proof that they were rich and powerful;
but their wealth and power were really based not on what they knew, but whom.

During the Bronze Age it became highly valuable to know people living in two particular parts of Britain. The south-west tip of England was hugely
important to the whole
of the Old World as one of the very few European sources of tin. Not for nothing would the ancient Greeks learn to refer to our archipelago as the ‘Tin Islands’. But another, smaller
finger of land pointing out to sea further north – beside the modern-day Welsh town of Llandudno – was enormously rich in the other half of the bronze equation.

The Vikings called it the Great Orme – meaning great worm, or more likely great serpent. Viewed from the deck of a boat approaching Llandudno from the sea, the limestone headland, pointing
north-west into the Irish Sea, does indeed suggest the shape of some giant sea monster slithering offshore. The place is rightly popular with tourists who come to take in the views, and perhaps
glimpse some of the herd of feral Kashmir goats acquired from Queen Victoria; but the Great Orme has mattered to humankind in another way for more than four millennia. It was likely the largest
copper mine in the whole of the Old World.

Copper was first collected there as surface deposits around 4,000 years ago – an entire millennium before the time of the Salcombe wreck – but once the naturally exposed material had
been exhausted some brave and resourceful souls began to follow it underground. Using only tools of stone and bone, the pioneering miners somehow found the strength and the will to burrow more than
60 feet below the surface through solid limestone, in pursuit of the magical green rock. What they left behind is truly a wonder to behold – a wonder of the ancient or even of the modern
world.

Many of the shafts and tunnels are big enough for adults to walk through while fully upright; but beyond the section of the mine that is open to tourists there exists a honeycombed warren of
serpentine passages so tight they must surely inspire nightmares in all but the most self-possessed and cold-blooded of explorers. I was granted privileged (if that is really the best word to
describe access to a place of mental and physical anguish) to just a sample of the five and half miles of tunnels excavated by archaeologists and mining engineers during the past 20-odd years. More
than half of the network still remains to be exposed and investigated, but it has already been possible to estimate that enough copper ore was mined from the Great Orme to produce around 2,000 tons
of bronze. No other prehistoric copper mine yet discovered anywhere in the world is on anything like the same scale.

As I put on my regulation navy-blue boiler suit and bright yellow hard hat, complete with head torch, a guide in the visitor centre offered the following advice: ‘This may sound blindingly
obvious, but do try and bear
it in mind when you get into some of the tight bits,’ she said, while I struggled to adjust my chinstrap. ‘If you feel you’re
getting stuck, you really have to try and not panic.’ I felt my stomach shrivelling, and all the while she kept talking. I knew she was only trying to help but I really wanted her to stop.
‘If you get stuck, and you allow yourself to panic [that’s actually the word she used – allow] the first thing your brain will do is signal to your body to take a deep breath.
It’s part of the flight reflex but it’s the worst thing you can do in a tight spot – because it will just make your body bigger. And if you really are stuck before you breathe in,
imagine how stuck you’ll be after!’

I nodded sagely. Part of me knew what she was saying made perfect sense, but I am still not sure it was what I most wanted to hear during what I felt might yet prove to be the last moments of my
life spent in daylight. The sections of the mine open to the public – those tunnels around five or six feet in diameter – were absolutely fine. Strung with lightbulbs as they were, it
was possible to persuade yourself you were walking through part of a theme park experience. Beyond the ropes, though – beyond the signs reading ‘No Public Access’ and well past
the reach of mains electricity – the ceilings quickly lowered to the point where it was only possible to proceed on hands and knees, and then flat on the stomach.

Throughout the mine there are hammer stones and picks of bone, lying precisely where they were dropped thousands of years ago. It beggars belief that 10 or more miles of tunnel were excavated
through solid limestone using just human muscle, large pebbles and the rib bones of cattle, but those are the facts. The hammer stones fit naturally into the hand and the ends are chipped and
crushed by hours, days and weeks of use.

The miners followed the veins of copper ore as they twisted and wound through the limestone – so that the tunnels left behind are often crazily corkscrewed. Every ounce of ore and every
lump of unwanted limestone had to be kicked and shoved back down the tunnel, in the miner’s own wake as it were, as he or she inched steadily, wearily onwards. The mind-numbing, bone-crushing
labour of it all is almost as staggering as the knowledge this was how so many generations spent their waking lives.

In the worst stretches I had to wriggle desperately onto my back, or onto one side and then the other as dictated by the helter-skelter contortions of the tunnel walls. For some reason I can
still vividly recall the rough and strangely amplified sound of my cotton boiler suit scraping inch-by-inch past the limestone, and the slightly more distant accompaniment provided
by the desperate flailing of my steel toe-capped boots. If barely contained panic has a sound, then that is it.

All the while I struggled, puffed and moaned I had to battle to stop my mind confronting me with the reality of my situation: that I was deep underground in a tunnel fractionally wider than my
shoulders; that the only way to go was forwards – perhaps 30 feet towards the next space wide enough to turn round in; that if I was to get stuck there would be nothing to do but wait,
trapped like a rat in a trap and deafened by the sound of my own pained breathing, while someone wriggled towards me, taking up even more space, blocking out more of the light and breathing more of
the air; that even when they reached me there would be precious little difference they could make; that it would still boil down to my finding a way to free myself and carry on. As I say – I
did my utmost not to let those thoughts crystallise in my head. On the plus side, the guide had informed me, was the privilege of knowing that since the Bronze Age no more than a handful of souls
had ventured through the tunnel I was in now. I was joining an elite club. I could easily understand why. All in all, it was hellish.

Some of the tunnels are so narrow and so deep underground that modern mining engineers have wondered just how much breathable air would have been available to prehistoric miners working in them.
Their only means of providing themselves with light would have involved fires or oil-burning lamps and it has been suggested such luxuries would have consumed too much of the oxygen the miners
themselves depended upon. In short, the Bronze Age men, women and, presumably, children who spent their days in the Great Orme mine may well have passed much of their time head first at the end of
the tiny tunnels no wider than their bodies, scraping and chipping away at the rock in total, smothering darkness.

The centrepiece of the visitor experience in the Great Orme copper mine is an enormous, rock-cut chamber. It is right in the heart of the mine and marks the point where many of the copper veins
once converged in a giant Gordian Knot of geology. As a by-product of removing the rock and the ore, those ancient burrowers inadvertently created a subterranean space as large as a modern theatre
auditorium. It is a vast, towering, echoing cavity and yet every cubic foot of it was excavated by humans working with rocks and bones. It is thought to be the largest man-made chamber anywhere in
the world and it is nothing less than humbling. Spend some time considering the inch-by-inch effort involved down there and you will never
again be quite as impressed by the
machine-cut Channel Tunnel, or the London Underground.

Back on the surface – back in blessed daylight – the overwhelming impact of the Great Orme mine is the industrial nature and scale of it all. That so much copper was sweated and
toiled for in just one location is a measure of the Old World’s appetite for bronze in the millennia between 4000 and 1000
BC
. The amount of raw material available as
the Bronze Age progressed makes a person wonder what use it could all have been put to. There are, after all, only so many bronze axes a community can absorb, so many brooches its women can wear,
so many swords and shields its men can wield.