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, which has lowered the land surface and shrunk peats, so that areas that were once high are now low, and vice versa. Something similar applies at Paviland Cave, which today sits just above the high-tide mark. In the Upper Palaeolithic the sea level was massively lower than it is today, when the waters of the Bristol Channel have inundated a broad coastal plain. But at low tide it’s still possible to stand on the floor of the drowned coastal plain and look up towards Goat’s Hole Cave, just as people would have done twenty-six thousand years ago. It’s a very striking and affecting sight; but more important than that, it’s a setting that accords well with the situation of comparable important places in the religious and mythological lives of people with shamanistic religions – people like the San.34
There’s always a danger of delving into ethnographic and anthropological literature and doing a Little Jack Horner: inserting a thumb to select a plum, whilst ignoring less palatable fruit that doesn’t happen to fit with our ideas. This was the fatal flaw of many late-Victorian writers, who would assiduously comb through a vast range of anthropological writing, classical authors and travellers’ tales, selecting plums to bolster a particular theoretical view of the world. Sir James Frazer, one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, was guilty of this academic sin,35 and today very similar things are done at the weirder extreme of so-called ‘alternative’ archaeology (the realm of ley lines, Atlantis, aliens, UFOs, etc.). If you pull a huge array of plums out of their original contexts it becomes easy to draw far-fetched conclusions, particularly with regard to things as imprecise as simple landscape features like lines of posts, or stones or pebbles. So the great ceremonial straight ‘roads’ on the high plains of southern Peru could be compared, for example, with Neolithic cursus monuments in lowland Europe (I shall have more to say about these later). It seems not to matter that each is taken out of context to ‘prove’ that ancient people were in regular contact over immense distances, or came from the same alien or extra-terrestrial source. To return to the earlier analogy, plums are being pulled out of two quite separate pies, whereas it’s the pies themselves that ought to be looked at.
To return to those ivory rods, it’s reasonable to seek illustrative parallels from a culture that is comparable in other respects to that at Paviland, but one should also be on the alert for other uses of rods in that culture – perhaps to support a temporary roof, or whatever.36 More to the point, one should beware of drawing parallels that are too specific – and the use of ochre-stained rods within a ritual might well be such a case. Only time will tell. On the whole, it’s safer and ultimately wiser to seek broader parallels that might help explain why and how people chose to do different things. A good, and very relevant, example are the criteria that lie behind the selection of special places by recent societies that practised shamanistic religion. That might help explain why Goat’s Hole Cave was selected for special treatment. This takes us back to the low-tide mark at Paviland.
Viewed from here, Goat’s Hole Cave ‘appears as a south-facing cave clearly visible from some distance and set into the high cliffs of a promontory defined, on either side, by slades or valleys’.37 It’s a very striking landmark, and there are anthropological accounts of shamanistic mythological beliefs that link caves in such striking positions with, for example, the creator of mountains, or the spirits of mountains. In one wonderful Siberian account, caves are seen as the holes left by the great mammoth who created the mountains; caves in mountain or hillsides are particularly interesting because they can be seen as a stage or resting place on a mythical ladder between Heaven, earth and the Netherworld. Shamans would have performed the ceremonial tasks of climbing and solemnising the various stages of this symbolic ladder.38 Given this context, the Red ‘Lady’ burial can be seen to fit into an established sequence of possibly regular visits to a very special place.
Clive Gamble has already been mentioned as a prehistorian with an extraordinary ability to stand back from the detail of a subject and see things from an unusual or unexpected angle. Writing about the social context of Upper Palaeolithic art, he pointed out that societies may have been organised in small groups, but this did not mean that their concerns were entirely parochial. Far from it. In a paper written in 1991 he provided convincing evidence that people at this time were in communication over extraordinarily
