It began to be apparent to me that my interest in landscape development was fine as far as it went, but it was too impersonal. To see things from the perspective of once-living people, I had somehow to take myself back; and in such a way that I could imagine what their histories might have included. What, for example, might Bronze Age folk have seen as The Beginning? All societies need Creation myths. Today, if we are unbelievers we have the Big Bang, if we are Christian we have Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and there are hundreds of others. Creation myths justify our place in the world and give us a sense of belonging.
The story of human beings is essentially one of continuous change and gradual development. There are few times when the whole world is suddenly turned on its head. One such occasion was undoubtedly the Industrial Revolution. In archaeological terms it was remarkably swift – a mere two to three hundred years at the outside – and nowadays there is hardly anywhere on the globe that has not felt its effects. Hidden within the Industrial Revolution were other revolutions, which could not have taken hold without the new context created by the industrial world – revolutions such as the Agricultural Revolution or the Medical Revolution. Currently we all have to grapple with a great-grandchild of the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, which some of us have attempted to master with greater or lesser success.
There is something rather attractive about the idea of revolutions. They imply phenomena bigger than mere human beings. A revolution is something that happens despite our wishes; it has a momentum all of its own. There is more than a hint of the hand of God. So when in the 1930s someone suggested the notion of the wonderfully portentous-sounding Neolithic Revolution, the archaeological community greeted it with acclamation.
The Neolithic Revolution was quite simply the invention or beginnings of farming. From this came settled life, the production of pottery and a number of other typically Neolithic traits, such as the use of polishing, instead of chipping or flaking alone, to make stone axes. Communal tombs and villages also came with the Revolution. It was an attractive idea, and in certain parts of central and southern Europe the spread of the new Neolithic way of life must have seemed like a revolution.
I was taught about the Neolithic Revolution at university; then the first radiocarbon dates, those ultimate spoilsports of our subject, came along and showed that, as revolutions went, this one was slow (in Europe it lasted for about three millennia). Further dates then demonstrated that it happened at various times in different parts of the world, which makes the use of the singular word ‘revolution’ problematical.
The core of the original Neolithic Revolution concept was the invention of farming. This too was sometimes given a portentous-sounding definition – like, for example, the shift from hunter-gatherer to food producer. Unfortunately the basis of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ was flawed. It assumed that a clear, distinct and rapidly-formed fault-line separated food producers from those who hunted and gathered. But it was not as simple as that.
Research into modern hunting-and-gathering communities has shown that they don’t simply breeze through the woods plucking ripe mulberries when the mood takes them. Their way of life is far more rich and complex. For a start, they conserve and husband their resources. And it’s not a big step from husbanded resources to animal husbandry – which of course is an important form of farming.
Another precept behind the Neolithic Revolution was the idea that hunter-gatherers spent most of their time and energies gathering nuts and berries or stalking elusive deer. Farmers, on the other hand, were thought to have the time to sit around the family hearth, recite myths and legends, and generally develop a rich and complex ideological world. I remember attending a lecture in Canada by the University of Toronto anthropologist Richard B. Lee, in which he turned this idea on its head. He showed that the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa were so efficient at procuring their food that they had plenty of time to weave the richest of ideologies; the same can be said for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Meanwhile farmers had to spend wearisome hours guarding their crops and flocks, while in constant pain, unable to focus their thoughts, as dental caries ate into their teeth – a condition rare amongst hunting societies.
Research into the lives of hunting people has also shown that they conserve prey with great care. They encourage beasts to congregate in the same places, such as clearings made around watering-holes, so that the hunters are not forced to take part in long-distance stalking. The idea is to hunt efficiently and not to expend energy unnecessarily. The difference between encouraging wild animals regularly to enter a clearing, and actually farming your own domestic flocks, seems pretty minimal.
Large parts of lowland Britain were covered with forest after the retreat of the last Ice Age some twelve thousand years ago. We know this from the patient work of archaeological scientists over the past sixty or seventy years. In the 1930s and forties Sir Harry Godwin and other pioneers of pollen analysis were able to reconstruct past environments by identifying and counting prehistoric pollen grains preserved in lake beds and peat bogs. Their work was to inspire contemporary archaeologists and other environmental scientists, who then turned their attention to our subject.
One might reasonably ask how hard science can possibly help us investigate something as deeply rooted in the world of the imagination as a myth of creation. The answer is that archaeological science has become far more than a mere ‘add-on’ to conventional archaeology. Science, and most particularly environmental science, allows us to recreate the surroundings in which people lived. We have learned that past communities did not merely react to changes in their natural environment; they helped to cause changes, then modified the landscape and the way they lived within it once the changes had happened. We now know that this relationship between people and their landscapes was both subtle and complex. And we owe many of these insights to science.
Some archaeologists have acquired a full scientific training; they still see themselves first and foremost as archaeologists, but with specific scientific skills. Like any non-scientific archaeologist, such as myself, their main interest is in past people. Science is just a technique that allows them to approach this ultimate goal.
One of my oldest friends and closest colleagues, Charly French, is Canadian. He was a key member of the various teams I led from 1975 until 1989, and he wrote his doctoral thesis, for the Institute of Archaeology, London University, on the ancient environment of Fengate and the Peterborough region. In those days his main techniques were sediment and molluscan analysis, which perhaps need a few words of explanation.
Sir Harry Godwin showed how the analysis of preserved pollen grains could help recreate the numbers and types of plants that were growing in the past at any particular time. This general approach works well for other things too. The shells of molluscs, of which snails are the most commonly found, resist decay quite well and are often preserved in the ground. We’re all familiar with large garden snails, a common species of which was introduced to Britain by the Romans as an edible snail. But there are also hundreds of other, much smaller snails which lurk in shady spots, in water, in ditches or even underground. Snails are fussy about the conditions they require.
The technique of molluscan analysis takes all snails, great and small, from a sample of ancient soil and uses the ‘fussiness’ of the individual species to draw a picture of conditions in the past. So if you find species of snails that like it wet alongside those that like it dry, you can reasonably assume that the local environment was regularly flooded, but dried out in hot seasons. Unlike pollen analysis, which receives pollen grains from miles away, molluscan analysis paints on a smaller canvas; but sometimes the pictures can be remarkably accurate.
Charly’s other skill in our early days together was sediment analysis. This is a geological technique which examines the physical composition of a soil or sediment. The size range of particles within a sample can tell how it was formed: whether, for example, it was laid down by flooding water, or whether it washed down the side of a hill. In the Fens hill-wash is rare, but thick layers of water-borne clay, known as alluvium, are