prehistory – Page 6 – Caroline Wickham-Jones

High Fashion – Meso Style

Mesolithic Life in Orkney as imagined by Dominic Andrews — Artist Dominic Andrews made this reconstruction of Mesolithic Life for the Mesolithic room at the Tomb of the Eagles Heritage Centre in Orkney. He spent a long time discussing the details and I love it! As you can see we went for some serious clothing.

Last week I was alerted to a new publication on the Mesolithic, namely a little booklet about Mesolithic Teesside. You can download it for free.

It is a nice piece of work that discusses a wide range of things with lots of great illustrations. It introduces the reader to the concept of the Mesolithic and some of the ways in which we collect data about the period. The problems of researching a period in which settlements were often transitory and the material culture was by-and-large made of organic materials that have long since disappeared are well presented. There is a good introduction to the environment in which our Mesolithic ancestors lived, including past changes in relative sea-level and to the natural world which provided the resources from which people lived. Everything is related to local sites and there is information about sites and locations that would once have been considered obscure such as the fish trap from Seaton Carew and the submerged landscape there.

Of course, there are bits with which I take issue such as the description of Doggerland as a land bridge, or the confusion of tsunami and tidal wave, but these are minor in relation to the overall value of the booklet as a whole. Given the general invisibility of the Mesolithic in recent archaeology it is just brilliant to see something like this, which discusses such a wide range of information in clear well illustrated text and relates it to a specific area. All for free!

One aspect of the booklet in particular got me thinking. The cover is a striking image of a Mesolithic family set against local cliffs. It is very twee and clearly views the Mesolithic through the eyes of the modern, nuclear, family, but perhaps this is no bad thing if it can be used to introduce discussion about how we gather evidence, how we know what we think we know, and the biases that we bring to our understandings of the past. It is another aspect of the image that re-awakened one of my mental conundrums.

It is the clothes. Whenever we draw reconstructions of the Mesolithic we provide clothing for everyone. I do it myself when working with artists to illustrate Mesolithic life. But, there have been societies living in similar or worse climates that made little use of clothes. The Yamana of Tierra del Fuego, for example, had problems with keeping skin clothing dry and supple; for them, to wrap yourself in wet furs would be a quick way to catch cold. So they used fat to provide an insulating layer over their bodies and they took fire wherever they went in order to be able to provide warmth when necessary. It might seem like a strange lifestyle choice, but it was the helpful attempts of the London Missionary Society to hand out clothing collected in the UK that led to problems with hypothermia and cross infection. Think of the rural photographs of nineteenth century Scotland. The children are often barefoot even in circumstances that we would regard as challenging today.

I’m not saying that we should assume that folk in Mesolithic Britain went naked, but I am saying that we need to think about our assumptions. What archaeological evidence might we expect for clothing? Do we find it? I’m not sure that we have had the debate, but it would be good to start it. Meanwhile, I will continue to give my Mesolithic people clothing for now!

And if you have an interest in the Mesolithic I would urge you to download the Teesside Archaeology team’s excellent publication.

The Emotional Fallout of Loosing Doggerland

Morgan Scheweitzer's image of Doggerland for the New Scientist — This image of Doggerland by Morgan Scheweitzer for the *New Scientist* sums up the twenty-first century attitude to this ancient landmass

I’m working up a paper about the drowning of Doggerland. I’m amazed by the way in which this is described in highly emotive language by archaeological academics. To coin a phrase the ‘tags’ are all negative: devastating; killing zones; abandonment; vulnerability; increased tensions; disaster; instability; risk; stress, I have deliberately avoided assigning word to author.

At its height, at the end of the last great Ice Age, Doggerland comprised a considerable landmass and different areas of the terrain are likely to have been used by various hunter-gatherer groups. The inundation that led to the loss of this landscape took place over about six thousand years between c. 10,000 BC and c. 4,000 BC and was one of a suite of palaeoenvironmental changes that occurred at the time. It was not a steady process, at times people would have been well aware of the encroaching seas but at other times, particularly towards the end of the period, the rate of change slowed.

Our evidence suggests that many of the groups who would have been affected made use of the coastal zone and were highly sophisticated in their use of marine resources. The changes to their environment meant a rebalancing of the division between water and land. Groups in the interior may have been less flexible, as may their prey. It is interesting to ask ourselves to what extent these people felt vulnerable, or threatened, by the transitions that were taking place.

I think it unlikely that they did. Given the fact that these societies were living through a long period of environmental change, instability was their norm. They had many strategies for flexibility built into their annual lifeways and they were well equipped to survive. Low density populations; inherent mobility; sophisticated understanding of the world around them, including the coastal and marine environment; social adaptability: all of these equipped people to live in this changing world. Of course there would always be individual problems and disasters such as a particularly harsh winter, or the tsunami set off by the Storegga Slide around 6200 BC, but my interest lies in their response to the long-term transformation.

Which leaves me wondering – why the emotional reaction today to the drowning of Doggerland? Could it have more to do with our own fears? We are more populous and less flexible than our ancestors and we are very preoccupied with climate change, in particular sea-level rise and the loss of dry land. A millennia or so of perceived stable conditions have made us complacent about our lifestyle and we are suddenly worried that we may not be able to continue into the future in the way to which we have become accustomed.

It seems to me that the general theme, that surviving the loss of Doggerland must have been problematic, may relate more to our present times than to the peoples of the Mesolithic. This has been discussed in an interesting paper by Karla de Roest which is available online here and at other sites.

Whatever: Doggerland is now part of our national consciousness, depicted in a great poem by Jo Bell.

The anatomy of hunting

A modern take on becoming the animal, from Lunar Festival 2015 — A modern take on ‘becoming the animal’ from Lunar Fest 2015

I’m reading Richard Nelson’s little book of stories about hunting in the north, Shadow of the Hunter. It makes fascinating reading; the stories are gentle, nothing too gripping, but it evokes a powerful sense of landscape, of different types of snow and ice, and of the decisions made by those who rely on their own senses to make a living there.

It brings home the way in which a successful hunter has to ‘become’ the prey, relying on empathy with the targeted animal in order to anticipate its movements and make a kill. Indeed he discusses this aspect as part of the everyday round.

I’m also struck by the way in which those who hunt and butcher in order to bring meat and other materials home must have a detailed knowledge of the anatomy and workings of the animals they seek. I know this is blindingly obvious, but it has never sunk in before. It got me thinking about the detail we see on Palaeolithic Cave art and other representations like some of the Pictish designs. Rather than being surprised at the apparent anatomical knowledge displayed by the artists it seems to me that the surprise is when they don’t depict it. The motivation behind more stylized illustration must have been interesting.

Another element of the book is the way in which the stories are played out by men. Women have little role in most of the chapters. This is largely due to the author’s own aims: he set out to record specifically hunting techniques. I know there are other books that record the role of women, like Daughters of Copper Woman and now I must go and revisit them.

Thoughts about sea crossings

Prehistoric Lakedwellers with a boat — ‘Lakedwellers’ from an anonymous illustration in 1937

I’m interested in the relationship between people and the sea. Perhaps it is something to do with living on an island and looking out at the sea every day. And with my research interests in hunter-gatherers and their mobility.

Visiting a local exhibition by Patty and Ralph Robinson on ‘Allegories of Migration’ in aid of the Scottish Refugee Council, I was very struck by some of the pieces and the thoughts they inspired. What role, for example, will the current sea-crossings in the eastern Mediterranean play in the stories that are told hereafter? Although we often see the sea as a boundary (we are an island nation after all), in many of our stories journeys across the sea act as gateways to adventure. Of course the classic tale is the Odyssey, but the theme holds good closer to home as well. From the the account of Rognvald’s journey to the Holy Land in the Orkneyinga Saga to Treasure Island, there is something about setting out by boat that we know in advance will serve to test our abilities with the possibility of great reward at the end.

But reading these stories at home is a very safe pastime. We rarely think of them as threatening. Perhaps we should. I listened fascinated (and horrified) to an interview on Radio Four the other day as a Syrian refugee family spoke calmly of the boat crossing they were about to make, of the fact that the boat would be sunk before they reached land, and of the fact that most of them could not swim. The dangers are huge. And yet the reward is so great, and their present situation so bad that the chances of being rescued make the journey worthwhile.

I wonder about the sea stories told by our Mesolithic ancestors. And whether the crossing of water has always been so laden. I suppose it probably has, from the moment we left Africa. It is very easy to be lulled into a false sense of security today, when one has a warm fire, a mug of tea and a good book. Even more so when our sea crossings are done in the comparative comfort of a modern ferry. Few of us in the UK set out across water in the knowledge that we might not return, or make it to the other side. Perhaps we should look differently at our tales of the sea and the way in which we write about past sea crossings, and we should remember that it has not always been so.

Cultural exchange in prehistory

One of the big, and fun, debates in British archaeology relates to the way in which farming was introduced some 6000 years ago. We know that there was already a population of hunter-gatherers well established in the islands, how did they react to new ways?

This week I went to a great lecture in Aberdeen which got me thinking about this. Robin Torrence and Jude Philp (from the Australian Museum and the Macleay Museum, respectively) were talking about their work researching the ethnographic collections of Sir William MacGregor, the first Administrator of British New Guinea in the late nineteenth century. Much of MacGregor’s material ended up in Aberdeen when he retired home. The interesting thing is how the material changed from first contacts to once the relationships had been established. Apparently when the British first came into contact with a new tribe the material they were given comprised mainly objects that reflected the uncertain nature of the contact, and the people they first met, like clubs and mace heads. Later on, when everyone had got the measure of each other, the material changed to more domestic items. So you can see a difference in the collections from different areas over time. Also it seems that here, at least, excavation of the mission settlements and the local settlements suggests that each had very few of the others’ artefacts. I’m wondering what it says about culture contact and material object and particularly to our archaeological evidence for the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in the UK. We need to be very careful of erroneously drawing direct analogies from ethnographic work, and in the UK it is likely that this period of transition saw many different scenarios. But it is obvious that we need to think outside the box a bit.

Sir William MacGregor (source: University of Aberdeen website)

MacGregor was very aware that the advent of colonial rule would change the way of life of the people he was living among and he was keen that the material he had collected be used for the education of people at home. I’m hoping that he would have been pleased to know that it is still provoking debate over 100 years later.

Mesolithic in the Cairngorms

I had a fab day on Saturday in the Cairngorm Mountains with the National Trust for Scotland and archaeologists from Aberdeen University. The team from Aberdeen were excavating at one of the ancient find spots that we have recently found. It was a training excavation to give students a change to try their hand at excavation as part of their studies and the NTS had organised a day of Mesolithic activities for people to get an idea about life in the mountains some 8000 years ago when the first hunter-gatherer groups passed through. We were lucky with the weather, and though the midges were out in force, they did not make it up to the waterfall at Chest of Dee where the excavation was taking place.

This site is particularly significant because it provides some of the elusive evidence that our ancestors knew and exploited these upland landscapes. We saw some great flintknapping and learnt how to make nettle string, before ending the day with a Mesolithic-style pit-roast haunch of local venison. What more could an archaeologist ask for: interesting conversation, beautiful scenery, exciting finds and an excellent meal!