As a British archaeologist, working on British material, I had always felt something of a poor cousin compared with those who studied the Classical world, Egypt and the Near East. But all of that was about to change. As I realised what was happening around me, I began to feel – and it was a feeling, not a consciously worked-out idea – that British prehistory really did matter. It had its own identity and integrity. It was not a devolved by-product of someone else’s creativity, a feeble copy of something magnificent in the Aegean. No, it was well worth studying for its own sake. That was enough for me: somewhere deep inside I could detect the distant sound of a huntsman’s horn. Without knowing it, I was about to start the quest of a lifetime.
THE GREAT MEGALITHIC STRUCTURES of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe demand explanation. They simply cannot be ignored. For a start, the word itself (derived from the Greek large stones) has a semi-mystical resonance. And the sites themselves are wholly captivating. It’s impossible to pass the ‘hanging stones’ of Stonehenge, or to enter the spectacular circle of Avebury, or to walk along the mysterious stone alignments of Carnac, without wondering who built them – and why? And when? One cannot call oneself an archaeologist without having at least some knowledge of these extraordinary sites: they cry out for, and demand, explanation. And that’s what Glyn Daniel’s lectures at Cambridge provided.
I’ve mentioned three of the best-known megalithic monuments, but there are thousands of others, in the Mediterranean basin, in western Spain and Portugal, right across France, all over Ireland, in north and western Scotland, in Wales and parts of England and in Holland, northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. Far and away the majority of these sites are tombs of one sort or another. Often the tombs are communal and hold (or held, as most have been robbed) the remains, or partial remains, of dozens, even hundreds of individuals.
Glyn’s explanation of megalithic tombs arose naturally from the prevailing archaeological theories of his time. It was his bad luck that the mass of new radiocarbon dates showed those theories to be mostly worthless. It was my bad luck, too: the course I had opted for was now something of a non-event. Hence the great man’s uncharacteristically lacklustre lectures. It was clear to all of us – lecturer and students – that the whole point of the course had been destroyed.
Glyn’s explanation of the monuments was based on the notion that the megalithic builders were initially a distinct community of people, a culture that had its origins in the eastern Mediterranean. This culture – these people – and their ideas spread westwards by two routes, through the Mediterranean via Spain to Ireland and the north, or across France to Scandinavia. England was influenced by both streams. The spread (or ‘diffusion’, to use the jargon word of the time) of megalithic culture was by no means unique. The concept of farming was also thought to have spread across Europe from the eastern Mediterranean, and there were successive waves of diffusion from central and eastern Europe involving Beaker pottery and metal-working in the Early Bronze Age, and Celts in the Early Iron Age. If all this to-ing and fro-ing really did take place, then prehistoric Europe must have been in a permanent state of turmoil – for which there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever. Today, with the possible exception of farming, most of these ‘diffusions’ are seen as at best the spread of a set of ideas, rather than the wholesale movement of people or populations.
With hindsight, Glyn’s explanation could not have been otherwise. Like all European prehistorians he relied on the well-documented areas of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to provide him with the dates he needed for his far-flung monuments. This method of dating held within it the seeds of its own fallibility. By looking east for a date, it was also natural to look east for an origin. And that was the fatal flaw which led to the theory’s eventual collapse: when the first radiocarbon dates arrived for megalithic tombs in Ireland and Brittany, they were found to be thousands of years earlier than their supposed progenitors in the eastern Mediterranean. It must have been a bitter pill indeed that Glyn, and many other archaeologists, had to swallow.
I finished at Cambridge in 1967, and spent two years out of archaeology. At the time I had no intention of returning to it, but events conspired to draw me back. My time out of archaeology had been very frustrating, and in an attempt to break free from the life I was then leading, I followed the advice of an old friend of the family and made my way to Toronto, where I registered as a landed immigrant in 1969.
After a few weeks of unemployment spent among the huge population of US draft dodgers in Canada I eventually got my first ‘real’ archaeological job, as a technician in the Royal Ontario Museum. The ROM was the largest museum in Canada and has magnificent collections, particularly of Chinese antiquities. The Chief Archaeologist, Dr Doug Tushingham, was an anglophile and was proud of the museum’s collections of prehistoric European material, which included a fine assemblage of Bronze Age metalwork that had been dredged from the Thames in the early years of the century.
I worked directly for Doug Tushingham, as his technician, for about a year. At the time he was writing up a site he had excavated in Jordan, at a place called Dhiban. My job was to prepare maps and plans for publication, draw and repair pottery and glass, and work through the various sections he had drawn in the field. Sections are a vitally important part of archaeology, and can be difficult to understand. But the principles behind them are straightforward enough.
Because the Near East is so dry, people have tended to live in the same places, usually those with good access to water. Over the millennia the houses, which were usually built from unfired mud bricks, collapsed and new ones were built; rubbish accumulated; new roads were constructed; and slowly the ground surface began to rise, in some cases forming huge man-made hills, known as tells. Early in the history of modern archaeology it was realised that if one cut a deep trench into these hills it would expose all the layers that had accumulated over the years. The wall or side of the trench would tell the story. These vertical faces were known as sections.
The situation in northern Europe was completely different. Here, if tells occur, as they do in parts of Holland, they were deliberately built up to keep people clear of rising water. The damp climate and the widespread availability of water meant that people could settle down and live almost anywhere, so it’s unusual to find deep sections on excavations out in the countryside. In towns and cities, like London or York, where people have been living on the same spot for two thousand years or more, the sections can be fairly substantial – but even so, they’re shallow by Near Eastern standards.
Sections are important, even on shallow rural sites, because they show how the deposits within a particular feature accumulated. Let’s suppose that someone once dug a hole to receive a post. These postholes are the commonest of archaeological features, and are the bare bones of vanished buildings, or timber circles – or whatever. The hole is dug and a post is dropped in. Earth and stones are then back-filled and rammed home around the post to keep it firm. The post forms part of a house, which is then used for a generation. Thirty years later, the occupants die or move away, and eventually the roof falls in. The post then rots, usually at ground level first, and finally collapses. Within a few years it has entirely rotted away, above and below ground. As it rots below ground level, topsoil slowly accumulates where the wood had once been. This topsoil is darker and finer than the stones and soil that had been rammed into the hole all those years ago. Quite often the dark soil accurately preserves the shape of the original post; this is known as a post-pipe. If excavated carefully, the