I have much enjoyed Neil MacGregor’s BBC Radio Series ‘Living with the Gods’. It is so nice to hear information from prehistory discussed alongside that from historical sites, all put into the context of everyday life today. Or, rather, everyday lives – his outlook has a chronological and geographical scope that is truly impressive. Continue reading Lion Man
If you travel to Shetland today you will find a rather beautiful island chain that essentially comprises a series of steep hills. The topography is abrupt and dramatic; the landscape is gentler towards the coast, but in most places Continue reading The northern reaches of Doggerland
A recent paper in The Conversation, a news platform based on academic writing and research, asks ‘Where were all the women in the Stone Age?’.
It is a good question and the author is to be credited for posing it. Unfortunately, the ensuing text is full of contradiction and occasional bias. Nevertheless, it is a topic that should, perhaps, be required thinking for all of us who work in prehistory at least once a year. To approach it, we need to go back to the basics.
Much has been written of the way in which natural places are significant to hunter gatherers and we assume that this was the case for those who lived in the British Isles in the Mesolithic. Not for them the dominance of the green earthen bank, the white quartz (or chalk) façade, the grey stone megalith. Instead we imagine that they related to locations that were more a part of the natural world. Locations where familiar things (water, trees, rocks), took on unfamiliar form.
The problem with this is that it can be hard to prove. In many cases, the very nature of the place will have been unlikely to survive the passage of the millennia since they were in use. Where they have survived, it goes against the archaeological grain to investigate a potential site that may, to all intents and purposes, ‘not be there’. There are, however, a few locations that seem to tick the box and I know of two that are under investigation. I have been lucky enough to visit both.
High in the Cairngorms, at the point where the path climbs up into the exposed pass that we now call the Lairig Ghru, a waterfall, known as the Chest of Dee, cuts across an exposure of rock to fall to a series of dark pools. From here the River Dee makes its way eastwards out of the mountains and through fertile woodlands to the sea at Aberdeen. Footpath maintenance below the waterfall in 2005 revealed a handful of flint tools among which narrow blade microliths were recognised. Since then excavation by students from the Universities of Aberdeen and Dublin (under the direction of Gordon Noble and Graeme Warren), has discovered plentiful evidence of Mesolithic activity.
At the opposite end of the topographical spectrum, at the southern edge of the Wiltshire Downs, the River Avon connects to a natural pool in the chalk, known as Blick Mead. Today, the pool lies within relatively recently planted woodland, but visitors are stuck by the atmosphere. It is a weird, yet peaceful place. The water is apparently still, yet it moves in an endless series of animated circles. This is not the action of fish, it is the result of bubbles as warm spring water comes to the surface. Excavation by students from the University of Buckingham and local volunteers (under the direction of David Jacques) has yielded abundant Mesolithic stone tools and other evidence.
In both cases these sites are linked in to a wider landscape. Mesolithic evidence extends to other sites in the close vicinity. Curiously, both have associations with great Mesolithic pit features: Blick Mead lies just over 2.5km from Stonehenge where a series of pits close to the henge site are interpreted by English Heritage as totem pole-like posts erected between 8500 and 7000 BC. Slightly further from the site at Chest of Dee, but along the same river, is the site at Crathes, where a line of carefully curated pits has been dated to around 8200 BC. Though these pits lie some 75km from the waterfall site, half way between the two is the narrow Pass of Ballater, where mineral deposits shine in lurid colours high in the rocks. Traces of these minerals were linked to the materials within the pits.
Our understanding of the way in which our Mesolithic forebears saw the world and their place in it will always be hazy. But there is increasing diversity in the sites that we recognise and this is exciting. Not only do we need to refine the ways in which we study the traces they left behind. We also need to distance ourselves from our twenty-first century appreciation of the world around us. At sites like these, we can start to enter a different state of awareness.
You can read more about these sites here:
Jacques, D. and Phillips, T. 2014. Mesolithic Settlement near Stonehenge: excavations at Blick Mead. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural history Magazine, 107, 7-27.
Chest of Dee – we have submitted a paper to Antiquity, but in the meantime here is a video of the work on the site.
Thinking about photographs has prompted me to think about sight. I prefer to take landscape views rather than close up shots. And I think I tend to be better at noticing the grand scale of things rather than what is by my feet. I have certainly felt that my long distance sight has improved since moving out of the town. My horizon now extends for a good 25 miles on a clear day, rather than just across the street. It has made me notice more.
I wonder whether living in towns has encouraged us to develop a different type of vision? So much that we now do is small scale, even driving a car rarely requires us to look far ahead. And, of course, we focus on screens – when I was a child you were told not to sit too close to the television; today we think nothing of working a foot or so away from our computer screens. Our lives require good, close sight.
Those who came across hunter-gatherer groups in the nineteenth century often commented on the amazing long sight of their contacts. It was something noted by Lucas Bridges in his wonderful account of life in Tierra del Fuego at the end of the nineteenth century: The Uttermost Part of the Earth, but he was not alone; I have come across it elsewhere. It is usually described as part of the skills of the hunter, but of course it also serves other purposes: the ability to forsee danger; or the recognition of way markers along an obscure (to us) routeway.
In 2009 a study concluded that men have better distance vision due to their hunter-gatherer past, whereas women are more adept at observing close range, reflecting the skills required of the gatherer (Stancey, H. & Turner, M. 2010). It is not just a matter of vision; it is also to do with how your brain processes space.
I can’t comment on the study, but it is a reminder just how much we have changed, or not, since our hunter-gatherer past. Our circumstances do help to shape the senses we need and the way we are. Over time, I guess, the effect is cumulative. I doubt that many of us (outside the profession of deer stalking) retain the vision to spot an animal at a distance that would allow us to approach it downwind and get close enough to shoot it with bow and arrow. Or even, perhaps, the vision to spot possible prey at closer range. I remember a trip out with a rabbit hunter once and he saw the bunnies long before I had noticed them.
Meanwhile, I do enjoy the way my eyes have (re)adjusted to distance since moving north. Curiously, I find it much more restful to contemplate the broad sweep of landscape rather than the detail. I’d like to think that I’m tuning in to my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but I suspect it is something more prosaic.
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