Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor
CHAPTER THREE Hotting up: Hunters at the End of the Ice Age
I’D LOVE TO TRAVEL to the moon. In stellar terms it’s so near, but I know it’s somewhere I’ll never visit, no matter how much I’d like to. True, I’ll probably never visit the Australian Outback either, or certain suburbs of Torquay – but then again, I might. Such journeys aren’t impossible, in the way that a trip to the moon is. And that, in a rather roundabout way, is where we find ourselves now, in the later part of the Upper Palaeolithic, with the final glacial maximum just behind us. We’re on the archaeological moon, looking out towards earth, with the planets and stars of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic light years behind us.
We ended the last chapter with the glacial conditions that prevailed eighteen thousand years ago. The best evidence now suggests that the area later to be known as the British Isles was reoccupied around 12,600 years ago, about five hundred years later than nearby parts of the continent.1 The climate suddenly reached a warm peak around thirteen thousand years ago, when it was actually slightly warmer than today. Then it grew colder again, reaching another near-glacial period which began around eleven thousand years ago and ended a thousand or so years later. This final colder period was by no means as severe as the last glacial maximum, and is known as the Loch Lomond sub-phase. When it ended, around ten thousand years ago, our own, postglacial or Flandrian, period began. During the Loch Lomond sub-phase, glaciers covered areas of the Scottish Highlands. So it was pretty cold, but not nearly as bad as the earlier glacial maximum, which peaked around eighteen thousand years ago, and ultimately took Paviland Cave out of the picture.
Most late glacial or Later Upper Palaeolithic sites in Britain predate the Loch Lomond sub-phase, and many are from caves (although open sites are known) which are found in England south of the Humber and in south Wales. Although Britain has yet to produce the quantities of superb art found on the continent, there are one or two examples of carving on bone, ivory and stone. My personal favourite is a very confident yet delicately executed horse’s head on a fragment of horse rib, found in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.
The Late Upper Palaeolithic is a field that has seen a great deal of recent activity, with many exciting new excavations; but I shall confine myself to just one site, Gough’s Cave, in Somerset.2 In a way it selected itself, because what it has revealed is both extraordinary and, frankly, a little bizarre.
Gough’s Cave is in that spectacular tourist attraction the Cheddar Gorge, on the southern slopes of the beautiful Mendip Hills. It has been excavated twice, in the 1890s and the 1980s. The earlier excavations brought the site to public attention, but in the process they removed most of the important archaeological deposits. Other chance discoveries were made in the early years of the twentieth century as Gough’s Cave was converted into what it is today, a show cave for visitors. As a result of this earlier activity, the dig of the 1980s was of necessity small, and was partly undertaken to assess the reliability of the earlier work and the extent to which ancient deposits still survived intact within the cave.
I remember the first time I came across a modern account of Gough’s Cave. It was in the archaeological journal Antiquity for March 1989, which I read from cover to cover for the vainglorious and slightly embarrassing reason that I had published a paper in the same issue on my efforts to turn my own site at Flag Fen, Peterborough, into a visitor attraction.3 Normally I’d have skipped over the short report on the Natural History Museum’s dig at Gough’s Cave as being outside my own particular field of study. I’m glad I didn’t, because it rekindled a flame that was almost extinguished within me. I don’t believe that anyone, least of all a prehistorian – even a specialist in the later periods of prehistory – can ever afford to lose sight of our Palaeolithic roots.
The excavations by the Natural History Museum took place between April and July 1987, following a shorter project the previous year by one of the team, Roger Jacobi, who was then a lecturer at Nottingham University. As I’ve already noted, Gough’s Cave had been a popular visitor attraction for a long time. The basis of its appeal was as a vast, echoing cave rather than an archaeological site, and its preparation for visitors in the early twentieth century involved a great deal of cleaning up and general prettifying, during which numerous human bone fragments and archaeological artefacts were unearthed.4 All the bone was superbly preserved in the calcareous environment of the limestone cave, which was to prove extremely important when it came to the running of DNA analyses in the 1990s. When I first studied the Palaeolithic in the sixties, Gough’s Cave was generally thought to have been rendered archaeologically sterile – or nearly so – by this preparation work. Accordingly, there was much professional interest when Roger Jacobi carried out a short programme of research into a deposit that seemed to have survived the depredations of the last century relatively intact.
Jacobi’s dig in 1986 was in a small pocket of archaeological deposits which lay hidden behind a massive fallen rock on the floor of the cave. The meticulous excavation revealed fragments of flint and several isolated human teeth, making it clear that the deposit was indeed archaeological and seemed to have survived intact, and was generally undisturbed – at least in modern times, if not in antiquity. These results, as happens with most good excavations, posed more questions than they answered, and a larger dig was planned for the following year. The aims of the 1987 project were to decide whether the deposit really was undisturbed, how it got there in the first place – and therefore what it signified – and to map its full extent. If it was shown to be at all extensive, measures would be taken to ensure its survival in the future. I’m happy to report that it’s still there, and likely to remain there, intact, for a very long time indeed.
I mentioned that bone at Gough’s Cave was superbly preserved. In fact it was in such good condition that even the lightest, tiniest of surface scratches survived. These proved extraordinarily revealing. The excavations uncovered the remains of at least three adults and two children, aged from eleven to thirteen and three to five years. The bones at Gough’s Cave differed from those at Paviland in that they weren’t from deliberately placed or arranged burials. Instead they were loose, disarticulated bones that probably derived from a midden, or refuse deposit, as they were found jumbled in amongst flint tools, pieces of antler, bone and mammoth ivory. Does this mean that human remains in the Later Upper Palaeolithic were treated as mere debris, like the animal bones that lay with them on the floor of the cave? The answer is an emphatic no. And the justification of that denial lies in those light scratches on the bones’ surfaces.
The bones were from modern humans: Homo sapiens sapiens, to give us our full scientific name. The surface scratches were studied under the microscope by Jill Cook.5 There was absolutely no indication of healing, so the marks had been made post mortem, but probably not very long after death. They had been made by flint knives wielded by a person, or persons, who knew what they were doing and what they meant to achieve. I recall press headlines at the time screaming the case for cannibalism, and there have been better-founded and more considered such claims subsequently.6 Certainly the marks suggested that the corpses had been carefully dismembered. There was even evidence for skinning, and for the careful removal of a tongue from the mouth. Cannibalism is and has been a widespread phenomenon all over the world, and there’s no reason why Britain should not have experienced it several times over in its half-million-year-long prehistory. Maybe it did happen at Gough’s Cave. I don’t think it matters very much if it did, because this wasn’t the casual consumption of human flesh as a lazy substitute for, say, a haunch of venison when the larder was empty. No, it was something ceremonial, symbolic and special. It could have been an act of hostility to a vanquished foe, but more likely it was an act of respect to a departed relative.
What happened to the corpses after their dismemberment? Sadly, we don’t know for certain. We do know that they weren’t broken