A History of Ancient Britain (44 page)

Just as evocative as the man’s bones were the grave goods that accompanied them. The burial party had provided Gristhorpe Man with a vessel made of bark that had once been sealed and may
have contained some sort of drink, along with a wicker basket that still bore the residue of food more than four millennia after it first went into the ground. There were also flint tools and a
bronze knife that had been cast from Irish copper and Cornish tin. Analysis suggested that by the time it was made into a knife, the metal had been recycled many times over many years. It was
probably imbued with untold power. A knife may also be interpreted as the tool of a hunter; but surely the ceremony and care that attended the death and burial of Gristhorpe Man speak of a figure
revered for his fighting prowess and for his resilience in the face of many injuries suffered in battle, all of them survived.

In 2009 archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age site at Forteviot, in Perthshire in Scotland, found a unique warrior burial beneath a giant sandstone slab engraved with a spiral and an axe-head.
Forteviot has mattered to people for millennia. It is where Kenneth Mac Alpin, a fabled Scottish ‘king’, is supposed to have died, in a palace, in the ninth century
AD
. For thousands of years before that the area inspired countless generations of
prehistoric peoples to build monuments and bury their dead.

Sometime between 2300 and 2100
BC
a burial party was at great pains to create a last resting place fit for one of their finest men. First a grave was cut through to the
subsoil and lined with slabs. Then the bottom was covered with a layer of white quartz pebbles and a lattice woven from strips of birch bark, before the dead man’s body was laid down along
with items including a copper knife in a leather scabbard, a carved wooden bowl and a second container made of leather and wood. The sandstone slab was six feet square, more than a foot thick and
weighed four tons. The engravings were pecked into the underside, so as to face the dead man, and are instantly reminiscent of the burial within the Bronze Age cairn in Kilmartin Glen.

That such effort was spent, so much thought committed, makes clear the man beneath the stone was a leader of men. The knife in its sheath may well mean he was a fighter as well. Knives are
always going to be slightly ambiguous grave goods. They may after all represent nothing more than the power to possess metal. Swords, on the other hand, are only for fighting and killing other
people at close quarters. It is surely safe to assume that those facing eternity armed with such priceless items were either warriors, or those who wished they had been.

Three stunningly beautiful Late Bronze Age swords, together with a bronze pommel, a bronze chape from a scabbard and two bronze pins, were found at Tarves, in Aberdeenshire. Known as the Tarves
hoard, the assemblage has been interpreted by archaeologists as an offering buried in memory of the warrior who owned and wielded them. They date from between 1000 and 850
BC
– a time when formal burials were rare anyway. It seems believable that while the man’s remains were disposed of elsewhere, possibly by excarnation, his retinue honoured
his passing by sending his weaponry back to the Earth, or to the gods, or to the ancestors, in a grave of their own.

Sir Barry’s investigation of the wider landscape of Hampshire suggests that while the other hill forts gradually went out of use after 400
BC
, the community centred
on Danebury prevailed. Survey and excavation has found Danebury was surrounded by scores of smaller farms and homesteads. It is likely the grain pits and storage buildings were the communal
reservoir for the produce from all of those smallholdings.

Richard Bradley has suggested hill forts like Danebury might have been built almost as representations of giant roundhouses. ‘Such places may have been conceived as the houses of an entire
community who could have
used them in much the same way as an early medieval assembly,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps they were where the communal business was transacted
and where important decisions were made.’

Gradually though, the smaller settlements were abandoned while Danebury itself rose in prominence. Sir Barry and others refer to places like Danebury at this time as ‘developed hill
forts’ – although perhaps a term like ‘mega hill fort’ conveys more of a sense of their status. Maybe the charnel pit was filled – and the gateway torched by attackers
– during a time when life in that part of Hampshire had reached a point where it was almost unbearable on account of population pressure and resultant violence. Maybe the occupants of the
surrounding homesteads – those within the bailiwick of Danebury – were too exposed to constant raiding and so opted to move into the hill fort itself in search of protection.

Some observers have detected the presence of a chieftain in Danebury in the later Iron Age, presumably with some sort of elite around him. There are structures that have been interpreted as
shrines, along with evidence of ritualised burials of animals, all suggesting there may have been something of a priestly class massaging the ego of the leader, his family and their followers.

It is a long, slow pull to the summit of Danebury Hill, up a fairly steep grass-covered slope. When Sir Barry first arrived at the site in 1969 it was an altogether different place, slumbering
beneath a forest of trees that had sprung up in the ditches and across much of the interior during the millennia of abandonment. Many were diseased, making their clearance in advance of survey and
excavation less of a quandary. Nowadays the fort and its surrounding slopes are the domain of dog walkers and sightseers. The ramparts – and the distance – give the advantage to
observers at the top. Standing up there, watching people approach, you get plenty of time to check them out, assess their mood – alone or in couples or groups, walking fast or slow, heads up
or heads down, arms swinging or hands in pockets. By the time they are close enough for eye contact you feel you have a real sense of their demeanour, and their intentions. As in so much of life,
height confers advantage.

What can we say about Britain in the second half of the Iron Age, in the years before the hill forts fell from use and trees grew, like forests of thorns round enchanted castles? It was a
country of disparate peoples living many different ways – ways dictated by their geographical circumstances and that made sense to them. By the time Danebury was a ‘developed hill
fort’ some
farmers in northern Scotland were brooding behind the barred doors of their broch towers. Elsewhere folk built more modest defended homesteads, thick-walled
duns, and retreated inside them whenever strangers came calling. While communities in the east of Britain were growing their homesteads and farms into full-blown villages surrounded by open field
systems, many communities in Scotland and Ireland felt it best to inhabit crannogs. Britain had become a land of strong regional identities, allegiance paid first and foremost to the tribe. The
leaders were warriors now, chieftains controlling grain and people alike. It was also a populous place where as much as possible of the arable land was exploited to grow the crops and keep the
animals upon which power and prestige were now based. There were strong ties, focused around trade as well as kinship, with Continental Europe.

If archaeologists and others have tended to lump centuries and millennia together and give them names, in an effort to impose some sense of order, then they have done something similar with the
people as well. There has certainly been a mania for cataloguing the products of the past, making every broken thing fit into something like a periodic table. By ordering the artefacts – the
pottery, the knives and swords, the brooches and pins – we have sought also to find neat labels for whole swathes of population.

One of the most problematic words in the archaeologist’s lexicon is ‘culture’.
The Oxford English Reference Dictionary
offers several definitions, including: ‘the
arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively . . . the customs, civilisation, and achievements of a particular time or people . . . the way of life of a
particular society or group.’

In the endless quest to tidy the place up a bit archaeologists have split past time into ages, determined by technological achievement. With greater audacity, however, they have had much fun
defining past peoples by cultures. If enough similarities are found between two sets of artefacts, unearthed hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, then it is to be assumed those who made and
used them must have been united across that distance by a shared set of values and beliefs. They were in a sense one people, unified by a culture.

It is not, of course, just the Iron Age that has been treated this way. The earliest copper and gold objects in Britain were recovered from graves alongside clay beakers. Similar graves found
across Europe, containing metal artefacts and the same sort of drinking vessels, enabled archaeologists
to define an entire ‘Beaker Culture’. By now there is a
culture to fit just about everyone. The nagging worry in all of this, however, is the fact that we cannot know how the people actually described themselves – who they considered themselves to
be, what ‘culture’, if any, they felt they belonged to.

Archaeologists have pressed ahead regardless, posthumously unifying the departed into groups they have invented for their own convenience. Just as the Mormons have been in the habit of baptising
the dead, giving them the benefit of the doubt and hope of redemption, so archaeologists examine the contents of graves and place their occupants into one culture or another.

In 1846 Johann Georg Ramsauer, a mining engineer by trade but an antiquarian on the side, found an ancient cemetery near the lakeside village of Hallstatt, in his native Austria. His excavations
on the site eventually revealed more than a thousand graves, some of which contained items that had been imported from the Classical world of the Mediterranean. It was not long before
archaeologists were spotting similarities between artefacts found elsewhere and those turning up in vast quantities in Ramsauer’s astonishingly rich Austrian graves; and so the Hallstatt
Culture was born. It is generally accepted that it was dominant in central Europe during the first half of the Iron Age – that people living in the swathe of territory now occupied by the
modern countries of Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Slovenia and Slovakia in the years between about 800 and 450
BC
– were all doing things the Hallstatt
way.

During the second half of the Iron Age, however, the Hallstatt Culture seemingly evolved into something slightly different. Finds made in 1857 in the shallows of a lake in the Swiss canton of
Neuchâtel were identified as belonging to a younger culture – called La Tène after the town nearest to the original finds – so that now the entire Iron Age of much of
central, northern and western Europe could be seen in cultural terms. Hallstatt was an evolution of earlier, Bronze Age traditions and La Tène was its successor, each seemingly shaping
people’s lives and thinking until the advent of the Roman Empire. This is fair enough as long as we bear in mind that the cultures in question are the creations of archaeologists, not the
people themselves. The Division Bell rings and the strengthless dead of the Iron Age are ushered into one lobby or the other, Hallstatt or La Tène.

All of which brings us to the problem of the Celts. If culture is a concept to approach with caution, then the other ‘c-word’ is a hazard of a whole
different
order of magnitude. Before considering its many meanings, it may be better to start with some art.

Within the collections of the British Museum in London are some Iron Age artworks that are considered to be without equal. They were made in Britain by British craftsmen and the best of them are
nothing less than sublime. In among all else that was going on – the building and rebuilding of hill forts, the storage and display of grain as a basis of power, the outbreak of wars and the
rise of the warriors to fight them – domestic art too produced its finest flowering.

Imagine my trepidation, then, on learning I was to have the opportunity to handle a few of its priceless, irreplaceable creations. Once the museum was closed to the public I was ushered into one
of the quiet galleries. There, on a table covered with a black cloth, lay an iron spearhead and a bronze shield. Just seeing them outside their glass cases was a shock, but the knowledge that I
could actually touch them was enough to make my hands tremble as I approached.

The spearhead had been recovered from the River Thames and more than two millennia in wet mud have resulted in the loss of most of one half to the slow smoulder of corrosion. There is more than
enough remaining of the whole, however, to take the breath away. Apart from anything else it is a testament to the care and skill of the conservator who has stablised the piece, putting the rust to
sleep.

Longer than a man’s hand, it is an elegant, slender leaf shape with a finely wrought spine running down its centre, giving it strength as well as symmetry. What makes it a marvel, though,
are decorative strips of bronze, two on each face, that transform it from mere weapon into ceremonial talisman. Surely it was never meant for combat, commissioned instead by a warrior who had
already triumphed and who could command the very best in honour of his prowess.

The craftsman has used a sharp-edged tool harder than the bronze, presumably one made of iron, to stamp the surfaces with a painstakingly fine pattern of curves, swirls and circles –
designs typical of La Tène metalwork. The so-called River Thames Spearhead is thought to have been made between 200 and 50
BC
and to hold it in your hands is to
confront a reality more affecting by far than any abstract notion of a culture. Before the coming of the Romans there was an appreciation in Britain of fine things, the very finest, and whoever
designed and fashioned that spearhead was already the master of anything the conquerors might seek to teach.