A History of Ancient Britain (39 page)

Because the people of Britain could no longer lay their hands on the right sort of bronze, from the right sort of people, more and more of them seemingly decided to try to get along without it
altogether. Society still mattered and people still mattered – it was as important as ever to have contacts and allies as insulation against the chill of an often hostile world. The challenge
in the Earliest Iron Age was to make new friends, in new ways.

For a start, it would seem reasonable to imagine that if the shine had, quite literally, gone off bronze – if it was no longer desirable and therefore no longer being exchanged –
iron would swiftly have taken its place. But here is where the story grows curiouser and curiouser – because the main thing to notice about the first two or three centuries of the Iron Age in
Britain is the almost complete absence of anything made of iron. With the notable exception of a handful of rarities like the Llyn Fawr sickle and sword, there is simply no trace of the new metal
or the new technology in Britain or Ireland between around 750
BC
and 550
BC
.

How often do we allow for the possibility that lives in the ancient past were every bit as riven with stress as our own? It appears that in Britain 2,700 years or so ago people were struggling
to cope with unexpected changes. After a so-called ‘Golden Age’ climate change was making the country colder and wetter. What had been fertile land in the time of parents and
grandparents was now sterile. Hundreds, even thousands of people
were on the move – forced to abandon upland farms and trying to eke a living elsewhere, on land
already occupied. To cap it all the very fabric of society itself was unravelling. Bonds between families, tribes – bonds made of bronze – were suddenly brittle and unreliable. Even the
great and the good were at a loss as to how to explain the root causes of the malaise, far less to find a remedy. Late Bronze Age Britain was a world in flux, in which the old order was undermined
and the old certainties were gone. What was to be done?

Archaeologist Niall Sharples has been pondering the so-called Bronze Crisis for many years, and says that to understand what was going on we need to see past the metal. ‘When the bronze
goes, for whatever reason, you have to find something else with which to structure society,’ he said. In Sharples’s opinion the ‘something else’ in question was food. While
people during the earlier centuries of the Bronze Age had measured wealth in terms of the control and display of bronze objects, the end of the period saw a new preoccupation with livestock and
grain stores.

Giving bronze to the gods had been one way of using the metal to demonstrate power and wealth. What better way to show off to the neighbours than by snapping some swords in two and throwing them
into a lake along with half a dozen knives and the same again in axe-heads?

But once bronze lost its cachet, might not the same shock and awe be generated by the throwing of decadent feasts instead? Sharples has been excavating a site at East Chisenbury, in Wiltshire,
that seems to make his point for him. There is almost nothing to see at first. Because the site is located within a vast Ministry of Defence firing range, the territory of Challenger tanks and
heavy artillery pieces, the experience of arriving at the location is already strange. But at first glance the archaeology seems as well concealed as any camouflaged gun emplacement. It is hard to
see, however, because it is spread over a huge area.

East Chisenbury is described as a midden – a dump of rubbish – but it is on a scale that almost beggars belief. So much material was allowed to accumulate during just a few years of
the Earliest Iron Age that the midden is many feet thick and spread over whole acres of what might otherwise be farmland. ‘Under our feet are thousands upon thousands of fragments of pottery,
broken-up pieces of bone, carbonised plant remains – all the tools, implements and debris of life,’ said Sharples as he led me on a meandering walk across the site.

He would stoop down every once in a while, seemingly at random, and
straighten up holding a sheep’s jawbone, or a sherd of pottery, or a cow’s rib. The stuff
is everywhere, all of it mixed within a matrix formed in the main of uncountable tons of animal dung. People were clearly gathering at East Chisenbury in great numbers, accompanied by huge herds of
animals, primarily sheep, and it would appear that only the people went home again. Everything else was either consumed or thrown onto the ever-growing rubbish heap – even the pots and eating
utensils. ‘What I think we’re seeing is an attempt to create relationships between people scattered over a very large region, based upon feasting,’ said Sharples.

In addition to the persuasive archaeological evidence at East Chisenbury – and at similar sites including one at Runnymede Bridge near Windsor, and two more at Potterne and All Cannings
Cross, in Wiltshire – there are compelling parallels to be found in the modern world as well.

Among the peoples of the Pacific North-west – tribes like the Haida, the Kwakiutl and the Tlingit – the word ‘potlatch’ is used to describe grand ceremonies that are all
about giving away or destroying huge quantities of items including blankets and foodstuffs, in front of as many guests as possible. Among some tribes in Papua New Guinea there are similar events,
at which a ‘big man’ seeks to underline his status by collecting as many pigs and other valuables as he can before giving them all away, as ‘mocha’, to the members of a
neighbouring tribe.

Anthropologists have coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe the behaviour but in all instances the principles remain the same. Status and prestige are there for the
taking by those in a society with the clout to lay hands on huge amounts of valuable food and belongings and then give it all away. By their apparent disdain for the trappings of wealth, they
parlay mere blankets and pigs into something deeper and more lasting. The food is consumed in a matter of hours, but the memory of such largesse might last a lifetime.

Although the potlatch was once commonplace, the practice is now largely abandoned, even outlawed. In days past, the ceremony was essential when two high-ranking individuals were vying for the
position of top dog – and it might take weeks or months to acquire. Relationships would be exploited, favours called in and debts settled, in order to ensure the rival would have neither the
time nor the opportunity to collect as much – or more – ‘ammunition’ at the same time. If one claimant to the throne timed his potlatch just right, his rival would be
powerless to respond in kind. Such acts were therefore acutely competitive – about losing and saving face – but
in the end they boiled down to the bare-faced
destruction of wealth, rather than its hoarding.

Sharples has argued that people in the past sought to achieve precisely the same effect at places like East Chisenbury. The importance of a person was being measured in terms of access to
surplus crops, access to the finest livestock, the best pottery. He also believes it is possible to see evidence of fine pottery taking the place of bronze as a commodity suitable for exchange. The
best wares seem to have been moving between communities – although relatively locally, rather than over often great distances, as before. He has suggested it may have been the case that, as
well as forming and defining relationships with their neighbours by inviting them to feasts, hosts might have expected their guests to bring food along, contained in their best ceramics. While the
food was eaten, the bowls were left behind with the hosts.

Sharples is even open to the possibility that the conspicuous consumption tactic might have arisen even before bronze went into decline as a basis of order and power. He has suggested there
might have been an attempt to subvert or to overthrow the bronze elite by finding a new way to show off. Scattered populations still needed connections; but instead of forging them with distant
groups by means of exchanging bronze axes and swords, in the Early Iron Age there was a premium placed upon relationships closer to home.

It is not hard to imagine, either: for years there must have been have-nots condemned to obscurity and powerlessness by their inability to access the bronze networks. Now there was the prospect
of a revolution – or at least a concerted attempt by some in society to turn their backs on the old ways and find their own path through life.

There are even the mortal remains of some of the festival-goers themselves. On land belonging to Suddern Farm, at Over Wallop in Hampshire, archaeologists have excavated what was effectively an
Early Iron Age cemetery. Unlike the urn fields of the Late Bronze Age, here people were interred intact. One of the bodies – that of a man – has been dated to around 600
BC
. If he was a farmer, as seems likely, then he was probably dealing with a tougher climate than any experienced by his forefathers. To try and cope with the colder, wetter conditions
he may have experimented with new crops. Perhaps he kept more animals than before, using meat to compensate for the comparative shortage of grain. If he was primarily a livestock farmer then it is
highly likely he would have been in the habit of attending
ceremonial feasts, at which some of his own animals would have been slaughtered and consumed.

More interesting than those suppositions about his life, however, are the facts of his funeral. Like all the others in the cemetery, he was buried in a pit. But if that sounds casual, as though
he had been almost thrown away, then it is important to note there was a degree of thoughtful ritual at play as well. He was buried in the foetal position with his knees drawn tightly towards his
chin, suggesting he went into his grave bound in some sort of shroud. For a long time the tradition had been for cremations. The switch to inhumation is therefore noteworthy – because a
change in the way people were being treated in death usually implies a difference in their way of life as well. By 600
BC
, in southern Britain at least, death, and so life,
had changed.

Some of the giant midden sites also contain evidence that things were being made there as well as consumed. Traces of metal-working, textile-making, pottery-firing – all these and more
besides have been found mixed in with the rest of the rubbish. This was new behaviour. During most of the Bronze Age production of valuable items, pieces suitable for exchange, seems to have been
restricted, controlled within specialised settlement sites. If pots, metal, textiles and the like were now being made out in the open, among huge gatherings of the general population, then this
might be yet more evidence of the weakening of a previously all-powerful, controlling elite.

All these ideas are fascinating to me, suggestive as they are of thoughtful and sophisticated approaches to the business of getting along with the neighbours. We can only ever hope to know the
half of it but we can imagine a whole etiquette, so that in the Early Iron Age human relationships were conducted with the precision and attention to detail required by the most complicated dance
steps. There might have been all manner of nuances – together with endless possibilities for faux pas and unintended slights.

But if all of these eccentricities sound as though they might chime happily enough with twenty-first-century morals and sensibilities, at least one aspect of Iron Age behaviour requires a
stronger stomach entirely.

At some point around 450
BC
, people living at Fiskerton in Lincolnshire found the need to build a long wooden causeway over ground that was either waterlogged or
completely flooded. It was maintained for generations to come and from time to time people using the thing were in the habit of
making offerings of precious items by
dropping them over the side and into the water. When archaeologists excavated the site in the early 1980s they found hundreds of artefacts, including spears and swords as well as tools for working
wood and metal.

Also dropped in among the weapons and the rest, however, was the rear portion of a man’s skull. Other than a couple of other small bones, nothing else of his body was recovered so it is
not possible to say exactly how he came to die. At some point someone had hit him on the back of the head with a sword – hard enough to remove a section of bone – but a forensic expert
decided the blow would not have been enough to kill him.

Since part of his head had ended up in the same place as other votive offerings – precious objects surrendered to the gods – the archaeologists on site allowed themselves to imagine
‘Fissured Fred’ (those dealing with human remains have a tendency towards dark humour) was a human sacrifice. If that really was the case, if those were the remains of a victim of a
deliberate, ritualised and stylised killing, then Fissured Fred was not alone. There have been numerous finds – some in Britain but most in other parts of northern Europe including Ireland,
Denmark, Germany and Holland – of Iron Age people deliberately killed, their bodies consigned to watery graves.

It is the very fact they were placed in watery contexts that has led to their preservation. What were once marshes or lakes have subsequently turned to peat; and within the peat their remains
are sometimes so perfectly intact it is often possible to tell exactly how they died. Hanging and strangulation were apparently popular means of disposing of such people (often the noose or
garrotte is still there around the neck); but plenty of others were simply hit over the head with blunt objects or had their jugular veins laid open with sharp knives so they bled out.

Always those dead are in special places – watery places of the sort that mattered to our ancestors for millennia. As well as bodies, such locations usually offer up swords and axe-heads
and the rest of the items apparently deemed acceptable to the gods. And since people were placed there too – immediately after being killed – it seems likely they were sacrificed for
the greater good as well.

The most famous British example was found in Lindow Moss, in Cheshire, in 1984. Peat-cutters spotted the remains and specialists from the British Museum were called in to complete the
man’s return to the daylight after thousands of years. The acidic, oxygen-free conditions within the peat had
conspired to stop most of the forces of decomposition in
their tracks. He had been squashed by the weight of material that had formed above him but in many ways he was perfect, with skin, hair and even some internal organs intact.