Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor
diet surely suggests regular access to the sea – and with it a way of life that must have involved a great deal of travel. The contrast with Boxgrove, which was closer to the sea, but where there was no evidence for fish-eating, is remarkable; but then, so too is the huge time-span (roughly 480,000 years) that separates these two Palaeolithic sites – it’s easy to forget that the Palaeolithic takes up about 98 per cent of British prehistory.
There are remarkable aspects to the Paviland burial which illustrate some of the far-reaching changes that were in the process of transforming humanity. That may sound grandiloquent, but the Upper Palaeolithic was the first period in which many of the defining characteristics of modern civilisation become apparent. Put another way, without the social and intellectual developments of the period, what was subsequently to be known as civilisation would have been impossible. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the achievements made by the people of the Upper Palaeolithic period. We may not always be aware of it, but we owe them an enormous amount.
There is far more to Paviland than just the famous burial. The cave floor also produced numerous flint implements and the by-products of their manufacture, together with charcoal and ash, all of which were found in contexts that must predate the burial. Radiocarbon dates suggest that this earlier occupation preceded the Red ‘Lady’ by three thousand years (i.e. about twenty-nine thousand years ago), and there is evidence that the cave was intermittently occupied both before and after that date, as well as after the Red ‘Lady’ burial. This extended use would indicate that the Goat’s Hole Cave was well known to people at the time.
The Red ‘Lady’ burial was accompanied by a mammoth ivory bracelet and a perforated periwinkle pendant, numerous seashells and some fifty broken ivory rods. Marker stones were placed at the head and foot of the grave. The staining, which most people regard as being derived from heavily stained clothes or wrapping, still colours the two ornaments and the bones, but there is a colour difference between the bones of the arms and chest and the hips and legs – which perhaps suggests that the young man was buried in a two-piece garment of some sort. The feet were only lightly stained, which would indicate that he wore shoes. The ochre, a natural product, was obtained locally. The body was headless, and it’s quite possible that it was deliberately buried in this way – other headless burials are known from this period – but the removal of the head could also have taken place later: perhaps it was carried away by the sea, which is known to have broken into the cave. The archaeological term for disturbance of this sort, which takes place after a deposit, such as a burial, has been placed in the ground, is ‘post-depositional’. It can sometimes take a great deal of skill to distinguish between an action that took place when a body was placed in the ground and a subsequent, post-depositional, effect. It’s something I always have in the back of my mind when I’m excavating.
Paviland Cave also revealed three remarkable bone spatulae. They are small things, roughly six inches (fifteen centimetres) long, and are beautifully shaped, with unusual curves and bulges that don’t seem to make immediate practical sense. As well as the spatulae, there were a number of worked pieces of mammoth ivory, including a well-known perforated pendant that was thought to have formed part of the burial assemblage. Radiocarbon now shows that these objects were slightly later than the Red ‘Lady’ burial, and indicates that the cave was repeatedly used between about twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago.
To sum up, there was a main phase of settlement in the cave around twenty-nine thousand years ago, with intermittent occupation both before and after. Then came the burial, at twenty-six thousand, and later use of the cave between twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago. It’s no wonder that Paviland Cave is the richest Upper Palaeolithic site in Britain – but does this pattern of use and reuse tell us anything more about the site? I believe that the Goat’s Hole Cave was a special place of some sort. If archaeologists have a fault it is to describe everything they find as special, unusual or remarkable. That’s because it is to them personally, who have spent weeks, months or years slaving away at whatever it might be. But is it to the world in general? In the case of Paviland it most certainly is, for the following reasons.
Paviland Cave lies at the extreme northern edge of the Early Upper Palaeolithic world, and it was used remarkably late in the sequence, when the climate was getting very chilly. Those unique bone spatulae and the episode of mammoth-ivory working happened at a time when the climate was rapidly deteriorating and evidence for settlement elsewhere in Britain was virtually unknown. If we also bear in mind that nearly all well-preserved occupied cave sites have extensive living areas outside the cave itself, and that those at Paviland have been removed by the postglacial rise in sea levels, then the use of the cave so far into the developing glaciation, or mini-Ice Age, is truly remarkable – and demands explanation.
Let’s look at the artefacts before turning to the burial itself, and first at those strange, red-stained mammoth-ivory rods discovered by Dean Buckland.30 They don’t appear to have any practical purpose, other perhaps than as blanks for ivory beads, but as there’s no indication that any had been notched or cut up prior to being more closely worked, that idea can probably be rejected. That leaves us with the archaeologist’s catch-all explanation for anything he can’t understand: ‘ritual’, or religion, to use a non-jargon term. If we do decide to invoke religion as an explanation, we shouldn’t do so on negative grounds alone; it always helps if we can provide some positive evidence that supports the suggestion. And in the case of these peculiar ivory rods there is a positive suggestion, but it comes from an unexpected source.
In 1981 the anthropologist J.D. Lewis-Williams published a detailed study of the rock paintings of a southern African people known as the San.31 Like the communities of the Upper Palaeolithic, the San were hunters. Their realm was the Kalahari desert, and they lived in small, mobile groups of a few dozen people. Their houses were light and temporary, as befits a highly mobile lifestyle, and their religion was based around shamans and rock art. The San used ochre-painted rods, very similar to those from Paviland, in their religious ceremonies. This could just be coincidence, but the close similarity of the way that the two sets of people were organised and lived their lives does give it greater weight. The red colour of the ochre plainly recalls blood, and with it the symbolic expression of animal or human life-force. It goes without saying that the sight (and meaning) of blood was an everyday occurrence to a hunting people.
As for those three oddly-shaped, but beautifully made, bone spatulae, they’re unique in Britain, and probably in western Europe. The closest parallels for them are in Moravia, or the plains of Russia, where they occur in context dates of twenty-four to twenty thousand ago – precisely contemporary with the later use of Paviland Cave. So what are they? They may have been used to perform a useful purpose of some sort, but then the same can be said, for example, of the Christian paten and chalice – the platter and goblet used in the Eucharist. The workmanship employed on the spatulae is wholly exceptional, and if we compare them with similar items from contemporary sites on the Russian plain it’s possible to see links, for example, with highly stylised images of the female form.32 While not necessarily objects of veneration in their own right, these decorated spatulae could have been closely involved in religious ceremonies. It’s certainly very odd that three were found together. This would suggest deliberate disposal, or laying to rest after use, rather than casual loss in the normal course of daily life. As we will discover shortly, by this late time in the Paviland sequence we are drawing ever closer to the last great glacial maximum of eighteen thousand years ago, when conditions outside the cave were becoming extremely cold. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that some fairly strong incentive must have been required to tempt people so far north. As Professor Richard Bradley and others have shown,33 certain places, and the stories attached to them, had extraordinary pulling power for people in the past – and of course in the present too: Lourdes springs immediately to mind.
I find in my own work in the East Anglian fens that the shape and form of the modern landscape can often mask patterns and landforms that would have been obvious in prehistory. In the fens this has been caused by the wholesale drainage of the past three centuries,