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 open to extract marrow, nor were they smashed, burnt and broken like many of the animal bones found in the cave, which surely are the residue of food preparation and consumption. Perhaps soft parts of the head – especially the brain – could have been eaten, as still happened very recently in New Guinea, where it is believed that ceremonial cannibalism of this sort is a means of transferring experience and wisdom from the dead to the living. Maybe. We just don’t know.
It is clear, however, that the bones at Gough’s Cave were expertly and carefully treated, and this suggests that the way in which the body was disposed of may have involved more than one stage. In many human societies the transition from the world of the living to the next world is a gradual process.7 There are many reasons for this: it allows the bereaved immediate family more time to mourn their loss, it gives far-flung relatives time to reach the funeral, and it provides a prolonged period of ceremonial during which the myths and legends that bind the community together can be learned, rehearsed and repeated by everyone. Death, like other so-called rites of passage such as birth, puberty and marriage, was a time when societies, tribes and families could meet, celebrate or commiserate, just as we do to this day.
There are many forms of multi-stage burial, cremation or exposure. The latter is the process, sometimes known as excarnation, whereby the flesh is removed by birds or other natural means. The removal of the flesh symbolises the soul’s journey to the next world, and the clean bones are often ignored, piled together in ossuaries or, as happened in later prehistoric times, in purpose-built communal tombs. In the case of Gough’s Cave, the careful dismemberment of the cadavers suggests that the detached limbs were placed in a special area reserved for bodies or souls that were still in a transitional state, either in the cave or perhaps on a platform outside, in the open. Again, we don’t know precisely what was going on, but the general picture – of a two-stage funerary process – seems fairly clear.
What is also abundantly clear is that prolonged and elaborate funeral rites didn’t suddenly appear six thousand years later with the arrival of the Neolithic period around 5000 BC. This is when we have the introduction of farming and houses and a more settled style of life; it is also when we find the first large communal tombs, barrows and other evidence for people coming together to mark or celebrate rites of passage. But the social processes, and in particular the human need to mark a person’s passing in this special way, have roots which go down very deep. As we will see in the next two chapters, there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that the hard-and-fast barrier that archaeologists have traditionally erected between the distant world of hunter-gathering and our world of farming and settled life simply isn’t there.
The Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland provided evidence for contacts over enormous distances. Of course, those contacts need not have been direct. I’m not suggesting that the people who used the Paviland caves commuted to the plains of Russia; what I am suggesting is that they may well have met people who knew people who did – just as I have met people who knew someone who was a friend of another person who died in the World Trade Center disaster of 11 September 2001. Both are examples of contacts within societies where people move around a great deal.
Gough’s Cave also provided evidence for long-distance contact, although this time the distances were not quite so massive; but the evidence was also much stronger, and not based on something as hard to pin down as the style of art used to decorate those three bone spatulae.
So far in this book I have concentrated more on people than on the flint tools they left behind them. This is not because I dislike flint – on the contrary, writing reports on flint artefacts has been my bread and butter for many years. However, to a non-specialist the technological differences between the various types and styles of flint can be hard to remember. Indeed, it took me a long time to master them with any degree of assurance, and when I eventually did so, I found I knew very little extra about the people behind the technology – and that, surely, is what our story is about. But now I have no alternative,
