of Boxgrove, a minimalist view with which I have increasing sympathy – despite the proven wonders of Boxgrove and the controversy about whether they did or did not hunt prey there. It’s very difficult not to take sides in Palaeolithic archaeology, and in this instance I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being on both sides at the same time.
In Gamble’s view, people of the Lower Palaeolithic lived in a small-scale ‘landscape of habit’, rather than a truly social landscape. Communication was essentially a face-to-face process that happened between two or more people at the same time. Indirect reference to people elsewhere in time and space would not have taken place. Language, in other words, was used ‘as an attention device rather than as an organising principle’. He sums up their world thus: ‘they had lives of great variety within a small social neighbourhood of possibilities’. I can think of many worse ways to spend one’s time on this earth.
His second phase is that of the more complex society of the Neanderthals, between 300,000 and twenty-seven thousand years ago. It is a period which sees the appearance and growth of true social networks. In the previous period, when relationships were essentially one-to-one, and based on close family ties, they were probably very strong, simple and unambiguous. In the Neanderthal world this was to change, largely because communication improved – but not just through language. Objects themselves can communicate. For example, in my family, like many others in England, it is traditional to give children a small engraved mug on their christening. That mug carries the child’s name and the date of its christening. Sometimes, as in my case, the mug formerly belonged to a dead relative, whose name and date of christening appears above mine. That mug is communicating all manner of things to me and others. It is telling me that I am part of an established family, that I am a baptised Christian, and that my parents loved me sufficiently to have a mug engraved for me. So symbolically it’s expressing my place in society (Church of England) and family. It’s also symbolic of me to other people. Its actual function as an object – i.e. a mug to hold liquid – is of minor importance.
There is no evidence to suggest that any of the manmade objects from Boxgrove carried such a burden of communication. They were hand-axes, admittedly beautifully made hand-axes, but they were made to be used. They were not passed on from one community to another, and they didn’t express anything more than the need to butcher a carcass. But from 300,000 years ago material things can be perceived as communications: as symbols of individuals, of families and family ties. As Gamble puts it, ‘after 300,000 BP [Before Present] chains of connection were extended in all regions of Europe’. With the growth of social networks came more subtle close and long-distance human relationships. The simplicity of the one-to-one, me-to-you, close and unambiguous family relationship was supplemented by a host of new, subtle and ambiguous relationships.
This was a period when there was greater teamwork and cooperation in hunting, which doubtless reflected the larger scale of social networks that were being achieved. But it was not a society that modern people would feel at ease in, still being very restricted in all manner of ways. Clive Gamble sums it up well:
These Neanderthal societies, the product of large-brained hominids, equipped with language to talk about themselves, alive with gestures and incorporating objects, were, for all that variety and creativity, still exclusive, local and complex. Theirs was a most successful hominid society. Well matched to the longer rhythms of the ice ages.15
The third of Clive Gamble’s Palaeolithic periods is the one we have been concerned with in this and the previous chapter, what he styles ‘transition and complicated Crô-Magnon society (sixty to twenty-one thousand years ago)’. The Crô-Magnons, you will recall, were the first examples of our own species, Homo sapiens, to appear in Europe. The main innovation of the time was what Gamble has called ‘the release of our primate heritage of proximity’. The term may sound daunting, but when that release happened, we were free to develop a truly complex social life. Let’s return to ‘proximity’ for a moment; if we understand what it is, we can appreciate what it is to be without it. The idea is actually quite straightforward: when two primates, such as chimps, meet, they groom each other, communicate in various non-verbal ways, and when they part they effectively cease to exist for each other. Absence really does mean just that. Then, as soon as they meet again, the relationship is continued where it left off. In other words, the relationship only happens when two or more individuals are in proximity.
When we are released from the ties that bind relationships that only happen in proximity, we are able to continue relationships across time and space. You may not see your grandchildren in Australia, but it’s possible to have a growing and evolving relationship with them by phone, letter, e-mail, presents, films and photographs, etc. By the same token, in the past it was possible to have relationships at long distance between people who were illiterate, by way of gifts and other material gestures of affection, aided sometimes by a helpful third party. Modern human beings (and in ‘modern’ I include the Crô-Magnons) can go even further. They can have loving relationships with objects (Clive Gamble mentions sports cars), pets, or something as bizarre as archaeological theory.
Gamble characterises social life in his third period as being truly complicated, rather than simply complex. I will let him sum up what life at the closing stages of the Ice Ages was about. He is writing about the ability of people to create social, personal and symbolic networks, which for the first time included both human beings and objects. I have no problem in identifying with the lives they led, even if I couldn’t have survived in their world for very long: ‘The surrounding environment in the Upper Palaeolithic was now richly layered with meaning and symbolically linked. Social occasions with rituals and resources now structured the seemingly unfettered life of the Palaeolithic person.’16
One of the aspects of earlier prehistory that I find the hardest to come to terms with is the extent to which the immediate surroundings of what was shortly to become the British Isles changed. Perhaps my inability to feel at home with the colossal transformations of the entire North European Plain simply reflects the short-lived, ephemeral world in which I spend my professional life: a matter of perhaps five millennia. In terms of what had gone before, the Iron Age (700 BC-AD 43) is a mere blink of an eye. In later prehistory we deal with events on a human scale, events we can relate to, such as those years when rivers flooded and farmers were forced to abandon their lowest meadow pastures. These may have been catastrophic events at the time, but in terms of the Upper Palaeolithic they are storms in thimbles, let alone teacups.
During the height of the last glacial maximum, around eighteen thousand years ago, when the climate was at its coldest and vast amounts of fresh and seawater were locked up in ice caps and glaciers, the North European Plain (whose remnants survive in parts of north-western Germany, the Low Countries and eastern England) extended right across the southern North Sea. A narrow channel was all that separated Scandinavia from Scotland. The Hebrides were part of mainland Britain. The climate then warmed a great deal, reaching a peak about thirteen thousand years ago when, as has been mentioned earlier, the climate of Britain was if anything warmer than today. This is the warm spell that preceded the final or Loch Lomond cold sub-phase. Shortly after the warmest period at twelve thousand years ago, the North Sea extended very much further southwards, and Orkney and Shetland were beginning to look more like islands-to-be. Despite this shrinkage of the North European Plain, there is still a huge width of ‘land bridge’ available to those settlers who recolonised Britain to set up the Creswellian tradition around 12,600 years ago.
We have reached a turning point in our story. The ice has melted, the climate is suddenly growing warmer. It’s ten thousand years ago – and it’s that time of year to change the clocks. In this instance we’ll pretend it’s spring, and we’ll turn the clocks forward two thousand years. So, ‘ten thousand years ago’ will become ‘8000 BC’. There’s no good reason for this, other than the fact that many archaeologists, myself included, are happier working in years BC after the Ice Age. It’s also symbolic, and after what has
