Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor
of Britain and Ireland, but the shores of Scotland and the Western Isles boast some of the largest. Some are massive: substantial hillocks you could build a small bungalow on. They demonstrate, among other things, that shellfish were a highly important part of the seasonal round. The shells of shellfish such as the common cockle grow at varying rates at different times of year, in response to a variety of factors including air/water temperature and the salinity of the seawater. Using the information encoded within the shells at Morton, Margaret Deith of Cambridge University was able to demonstrate that a high proportion of them had been harvested high on the beach, and that no particular season seems to have been favoured.31 If anything, wintertime, when the meat of cockles is less nutritious than in summer, was the most popular period for visiting Morton beach.
The impression gained is of opportunistic visits, the way one ‘grabs a bite’ whilst busily engaged in something else – at Morton this may have been the collection of suitable beach pebbles from which to fashion implements. The midden did however show clear signs that small temporary squats or camps had been scooped into it, perhaps as refuges from the worst of the wind. The surviving mound of shells was large, gently curving, and about thirty by 3.5 metres; its maximum thickness was 0.78 metres. At one point John Coles was able to identify a succession of five scoops or hollows which were floored with an occupation deposit – essentially crushed shells and an organic ‘dark earth’ – and showed clear signs of human use, including ‘bashed lumps’, stones that had been roughly hit to provide usable cutting edges and sharp points. But the signs of settlement on the midden were far less intensive than at Site A, about 150 metres to the south. The midden produced just 372 stone artefacts – compared with over thirteen thousand on Site A – and large quantities of fish and mammal bones, including red and roe deer, wild cattle and pig. By way of numerical compensation, it was composed of some ten million shells.
Why did these vast mounds of shells accumulate? The beach is a very hostile environment, lashed by winds, waves and storms. Heaps of shells wouldn’t last for long unless (a) they were carefully positioned to be out of the reach of storms and tides, and (b) people wanted them to build up, and took pains to see that they grew every season. I think it’s absurd to suggest that these great mounds were simply piles of rubbish, and had no other role. In any case, if a site was seen merely as being suitable for disposing of food refuse, it would surely not be regarded as appropriate for settlement, as happened at Morton, however short-lived. It seems to me that these great middens also served a symbolic role – perhaps marking out the position of a particular band’s stretch of beach – in some respects rather like the similarly-shaped long barrows of the Neolithic, which I’ll discuss in Chapter 8. If this idea has any validity at all, it knocks on the head the idea that Mesolithic people didn’t construct, or understand, monuments and the symbolism lying behind them. Traditionally the introduction of monuments has been regarded as a strictly Neolithic innovation, but a few hints are beginning to emerge that it was never quite as straightforward as that. As we will see, some very strange things indeed were happening in the area that was to become the Stonehenge car park. But more on this later.
Site A at Morton didn’t produce evidence for lightweight houses, or spaces for them, as convincing as Mount Sandel or Thatcham. Post-holes, even decayed fragments of wood, did survive, but were never arranged in patterns that suggested any sort of permanence. They more resembled windbreaks, or temporary shelters over sleeping places, than dwellings as such.
Bones from Morton revealed that cod, and even sturgeon, were eaten, but the size of these bones suggests that they were caught offshore (what my local fishmonger flags up as ‘long shore cod’), most probably from skin boats. Birds were also taken, including guillemot, gannet and cormorant, which nest on cliffs nearby and can be caught in the spring by an intrepid, or hungry, climber.
Morton wasn’t a permanent settlement or a home-base. It was a place visited at several times of the year by a mobile band of hunters whose home-base was probably not far distant. Although visited episodically, it gives us an impression of stability: it would have been familiar to the people who used it, part of the seasonal round. Maybe on certain visits, perhaps to collect suitable stone for making tools, only a few people came, possibly for a day and a night, stopping over in temporary shelters on the midden. They would have recognised the little headland and its accompanying inlet as ‘theirs’, and would have been well aware of why they were there. The landscape was becoming sufficiently populated for people to carry clear maps within their heads. The slow process of dividing up Britain was beginning to gather momentum. Soon it would become an irresistible force.
This brings me to the question of population in the Mesolithic period. It will, of course, always be difficult to estimate prehistoric populations, simply because the basic data – the sites and finds – which one has to use are constantly changing. This does not mean that one shouldn’t make the effort. One particularly well-thought-out attempt to chart population trends in postglacial Britain (excluding Ireland) was made by Christopher Smith in 1992.32 He based his calculations not on individual sites, but on the evidence provided by ten-by-ten-kilometre squares, reasoning that in highly mobile societies simply counting sites was probably going to involve a great deal of replication and distortion, because the same band of people would have occupied more than one in a single season, while an area as large as a hundred square kilometres would probably contain all the seasonal stopping-off points of a single group. It may be easy to suggest pitfalls in this hypothesis, but then, it’s very much harder to come up with anything better. So I’m happy to stay with it.
Smith’s paper was principally concerned with the rate at which population growth happened. He notes a steadily rising British population in the centuries before the Loch Lomond cold episode, then retreat, followed by growth leading to rapid growth thereafter. By 5000 BC he believes growth slowed down or ceased – only to pick up again, as we will shortly see, in the subsequent Neolithic period. He steers clear of actual numbers, but does commit himself to some broad estimates: 1100 to 1200 people at 9000 BC; 1200 to 2400 by 8000 BC. Then there was a period of rapid growth, leading to an estimate of 2500 to five thousand people by 7000 BC. By the end of the period (approximately 5000 BC) the range was 2750 to 5500.33
Smith used material he assembled for his Late Stone Age Hunters of the British Isles for his paper on population, which was published in the same year (1992). As we noted earlier, in this book he stayed clear of the more usual flinty typological approach to the subject, and instead viewed the people of the Mesolithic for what they were, namely hunters. As time passed they seem to have become somewhat less mobile, and the territories each band controlled became progressively smaller – as, for example, at Morton. Perhaps this more sedentary way of life was accompanied by a slightly greater reliance on gathered and stored vegetable foods, such as hazelnuts. It’s remarkable how productive a large stand of hazelnut bushes can be.* I imagine it would not be difficult, in an unrestricted area of mature woodland, for a group of people working full-time in the autumn to fill the equivalent of several wheelbarrows with hazelnuts, which could then be stored above or below ground, in pits.
I concluded the previous chapter with Clive Gamble’s thoughts on the nature and structure of Palaeolithic society. How did British society change in the Mesolithic? The consensus of opinion would suggest that structurally it altered very little.34 Certainly the population grew, and grew quite quickly, but there was plenty of country to absorb this expansion. In other words, people didn’t live in such close proximity that disputes and rivalry for scarce resources could give rise to social competition, which might in turn lead to the development of more formally organised, hierarchical communities.
It has been suggested that one of the signs that societies have moved beyond the simple group or band level of organisation is the appearance of cemeteries, which start to appear in the Late Mesolithic right across northern Europe, including the Baltic and Scandinavia. Cemeteries might also be taken to indicate sedentism, as they would make little sense in a highly mobile world. But for some reason they don’t appear in Britain at this time.
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