A History of Ancient Britain (9 page)

Immediately in front of the glacier’s advance, massive ribs of rock had been casually heaped up, much like the ripples that form on a rug caught beneath a shoved wardrobe. Elsewhere were
great mounds of material, boulders carried for miles by the advancing ice, now lying wherever they had been unceremoniously dumped – left behind like rubble in the wake of messy builders.
Entire mountain ranges had been humbled, bulldozed entirely or roughly lowered and reshaped as jagged shadows of their former selves. Everywhere the rock bore fresh wounds, scars cut by the ice and
the same that would be found many thousands of years later by Louis Agassiz during his Highland tour with the Reverend William Buckland. New valleys had been driven through the mountains as well,
making ways through the landscape for rivers, animals and people alike. In places they were filled
with water – either the returning sea or lochs and lakes of melted
ice. The famously fiddly west coast of Scotland was being drawn too, in familiar form, as ice-cut troughs became deep fjords like Lochs Alsh, Broom and Fyne.

All of Britain was a work in progress as nature set about reclaiming the land. The period of hundreds of thousands of years known to archaeologists as the Palaeolithic – Lower, Middle and
Upper – was over. The remote world of the mammoth-hunters of Paviland, even the lives and times of the Creswell artists and the butchers of Cheddar Gorge belonged to the past.

The ice of the Big Freeze had drawn a line that separates them from us, then from now. On our side, a new Britain was born. It had been a messy birth and the first centuries that followed were
nearly as traumatic. Relieved of the weight of trillions of tons of ice – that had pushed it down into the mantle of the Earth like a heavy head pushing one end of a lilo into the swimming
pool – the landmass of Britain began to rise up. Scotland and the north had borne the weight and so it was this portion that rebounded fastest. Like the other end of a seesaw, the English
part tipped downwards into the rising sea.

It is still going on – Scotland still rising and England falling – and the process will continue for thousands of years to come. And while the land rocked and the sea levels rose,
new life established itself on the dry land. Animals returned first carrying seeds from elsewhere in their guts, and as nature took its course, new plants and trees began to grow in the freshly
fertilised soils.

Before the Younger Dryas it had been a land of plains-loving beasts – wild horse, bison, the last of the mammoths. This Britain wore new clothes, forests of aspen, birch, later followed by
elm, hazel, lime, oak and pine – the trees of the Wild Wood – and through its dappled shadows moved creatures styled for concealment. When the hunters returned it was the red deer they
sought, and wild cattle, boar and elk.

Along with the rest of their equipment – weapons for hunting, clothes of skin and fur, bags and baskets for gathering wild foods, tools for making and mending – those pioneers
carried memories as well. In a time before writing they held their knowledge in their heads: not just what they had learned in their own lifetimes but also the lore passed down from their
forefathers. Perhaps some of it was tales of the glacier, or the animals that had lived on open grasslands, animals seemingly gone from the world.

The first bands of hunters to arrive in Britain 11,000 years ago were at
the front of a long line of people that had trailed all across Europe from east to west and from
south to north during the preceding millennia. Back in the so-called Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia the descendants of those relatives left behind long ago were on the cusp of farming –
thinking about taming the animals and seeding the land. Such advances – great leaps towards the world we inhabit today – would take yet more millennia to follow that same line towards
the west. For now the challenge facing the farthest-flung of the wanderers – those at the very end of the line and Britain’s latest pioneers – was how to adapt to the new animals
and new environments. Theirs was an ancient drama that had been unfolding for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, and Britain would be the stage for its last act.

If woolly mammoths and wild horses haunted their memories, along with the ancient knowledge of how to hunt them across open grassland, then the British forests must have been strange indeed. But
in modifying their ways of doing things and getting the better of the animals hiding in the shadows of the trees, they changed themselves. The alterations are plain to see in what they left behind
– tools, shelters, the remains of food and the rest – and prompted archaeologists to coin a whole new term to describe a new people. After the Old Stone Age of the Palaeolithic comes
the Middle Stone Age of the Mesolithic.

This was also the period that caught my attention while I was an undergraduate at Glasgow University in the 1980s. The notion that these were the first people to set foot in the place after the
ice was especially fascinating – like finding out the names of the people who lived in your house a century before your own family, or seeing the signatures on a brittle marriage certificate
of long-forgotten ancestors. It was nothing less than an opportunity to start the story at the beginning.

My own first experience of digging – of excavating – was on a Mesolithic site beside a reservoir called Loch Doon, in Ayrshire, in Scotland. It was a life-changing experience, not
least because of the character of the man who directed the dig – a former Spitfire pilot-turned-botanist-turned-archaeologist called Tom Affleck. Tom was a unique and special man: part
Biggles, part joker and part professor, but gifted with the ability to infect everyone around him with his passion for his subject, which was Scotland during the Mesolithic.

The dig itself was a near-washout – blighted by summer rains so unremitting the water levels in the loch rose by several feet in a matter of days
and flooded the
trenches. But before the inundation there was enough time to find hundreds of flakes of flint and chert, left behind by people thousands of years ago as they made and sharpened some tools. Like
most Mesolithic sites, the traces were ephemeral, all but erased by weather and time. (The term ‘Stone Age’ is a loaded one – a reflection of the fact that things made of stone
last longest. All the other stuff – made of animal skin, fur, bone, gut, sinew, horn, antler, ivory and teeth, or of wood, bark and plant fibre – tends to disappear without a trace
after thousands of years, so that we have imagined a Fred Flintstone past, made of stone, that is no more realistic than a cartoon.) But it seemed like a wonder there was any trace at all, evidence
of a few inconsequential moments in lives lived impossibly long ago when Britain was still brand new.

Nobody studies the Mesolithic in Britain without hearing and reading about a site near Scarborough in Yorkshire called Star Carr. It was discovered in 1947, during the digging of a field drain,
and excavated by Professor Grahame Clark of Cambridge University for several years in the early 1950s. It represents very early post-glacial occupation of Britain, not long after the end of the Big
Freeze, and has been of such importance that archaeologists still excavate there every chance they get.

Unlike so many Mesolithic sites, much more has survived at Star Carr than a few flakes of flint. Melt water from the glacier formed lochs and lakes all across the landscape of Britain, and one
such was in a roughly triangular hollow bounded by the high ground of the North York Moors, the Yorkshire Wolds and the Howardian Hills. Today it is a low-lying plain called the Vale of Pickering
but 11,000 years ago the land there was submerged beneath a shallow lake bounded by reeds, filled with fish and a magnet for all manner of animals and wild fowl.

All that prey attracted hunters and for centuries during the Mesolithic people were in the habit of spending time living around its shores. It was no casual occupation either. Something like
10,500 years ago some of them were living in a permanent house there – a circular structure 11 feet across built of substantial posts with walls of animal hide and thatch. As well as a house
– the oldest discovered in Britain so far – there was also a wooden platform extending 18–20 feet over the surface of the lake itself. Mesolithic carpenters – for that is
what they were – used stone tools and wedges to split tree trunks into long, thin planks to create a stable, partially floating surface that consolidated part of the water’s edge.

Partly because the people were living so close to the watery shore, and
partly because many feet of peat built up over the site during the millennia that passed after it
was abandoned, the preservation of organic material at Star Carr is astonishing. Items excavated from within the waterlogged deposits include wooden tools, beautifully worked harpoon points of
antler and bone, and jewellery made from North Sea amber and animal teeth. There is also a piece from a wooden oar, meaning the people were using boats or canoes to get around too.

So much evidence of domestic life, of the everyday, makes the site a priceless treasure house for archaeologists; but it is for one other particular class of find that Star Carr is
understandably famous. During the original 1950s excavations Clark and his team recovered no fewer than 21 headdresses carefully fashioned from the skulls and antlers of red deer. Each one
represents a huge amount of skilled labour. Bone in general is hard enough to work with but antler, a specialised form of bone, is of a whole different order of magnitude – so incredibly
tough that in a world without metal it must be charred with fire before it can be cut and shaped with stone tools.

In order to make each headdress a craftsman had first carefully to remove the top half of an adult animal’s skull, with the antlers still in place. Presumably to keep the weight down for
the wearer – and also perhaps to stop the unwieldy points of the crown catching in overhead branches – he then removed all but the lower foot or so of the antler shafts. So that the
piece could be worn, he finally carved two holes, side by side, in the front part of the skull to allow for some kind of cord or thong that could be tied under the chin.

Some archaeologists have suggested the headdresses might have been worn as part of a disguise, enabling hunters to stalk closer to their prey without detection. But the more you look at them,
the less likely this explanation seems. Even pared down, the antlers would still have been a cumbersome handicap for anyone trying to move quietly through a wood. Altogether more believable is the
belief that they were part of a ceremonial costume – worn by a shaman perhaps, or a priest. While wearing the headdress and presumably a cloak fashioned from the animal’s hide, he would
be neither man nor beast but something in between, a fusion of the two. (In the Staffordshire village of Abbot’s Bromley the locals still perform a dance every year in which the men carry and
dance with great crowns of reindeer antler. The origins of the ritual are almost certainly pre-Christian and in the past it was performed at the winter solstice as part of a ceremony to ensure
fertility and new life in the year ahead.)

The headdresses found at Star Carr were all recovered from deposits laid down within the lake, having been thrown or placed into the water in ancient times. Harpoon points
and other items had been surrendered to the lake as well by the Mesolithic hunters, suggesting the timber platform had been made so people could walk out over the water for the purpose of making
offerings. The veneration of water – lakes, lochs, rivers, waterfalls – as special, magical places, is therefore a tradition as old as the recolonisation of the land itself after the
last Ice Age.

Such a realisation – about the sophisticated, sensitive and complex ways in which those first hunters were thinking about the world – is crucially important. It has become almost a
cliché to say the first pioneers passed lightly over the landscape, like ghosts, leaving few traces. But while the hunter-gatherer lifestyle may have made comparatively little physical
impact on the landscape, still their connection to their world was profound. Living within nature, as indivisible parts of it, meant the people of the Mesolithic were deeply embedded in their
environment in ways it is impossible for twenty-first-century people like us to empathise with. They may not have influenced the land as we have done; instead they were influenced
by
it, so
that the world was less something they lived
on
, more someone they lived
with
.

Steve Mithen, Professor of Archaeology at Reading University, is one archaeologist who has dedicated many years of his career to trying to see the world through Mesolithic eyes. Since a first
visit to the Scottish Hebrides in 1985, much of his professional and personal energy has been focused on attempting to understand how the small islands off the west coast of Scotland were exploited
by hunters in the millennia that followed the final retreat of the ice: ‘My passion for the Hebrides arose from finding an engagement with nature that was lacking in my cosseted surroundings
of Cambridge,’ he said. ‘In the Hebrides I could not only study hunter-gatherers who hunted deer, otter and seals, but also watch those same animals in the wild today; I myself could
gather and eat shellfish from the shore just as they had thousands of years ago; I too would need to watch the weather for gathering storms and know about the tides. In effect, I could begin to
walk, see and think like a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer myself. Or at least, there was the possibility of doing so.’

The Highlands of Scotland, together with islands off her west coast, have been good to archaeologists. Much of the soil is thin and poor today, as it has always been. Only the hardiest and most
stubborn creatures – animal
and human – have bothered to hold onto the land there. While the area was, even relatively recently, much more populous than today,
there has never been anything like the levels of settlement known further south and in the rest of Britain. There has therefore been much less in the way of recent modern development –
road-building, house-building and the like – so that more of the landscape, especially in the islands, has been spared the kind of damage that destroys delicate traces like those left behind
by early prehistoric peoples. It is for this reason that so much evidence of the Mesolithic is still being unearthed there.