percussion with a hard stone hammer on a specially prepared core, and have trimmed-up indentations near the base, presumably to make mounting onto a shaft easier. But the fact remains that they fly in the face of what was happening to flint industries outside Ireland.
But why was this? The answer has to be: insularity. Ireland was separated from Britain for a sufficient length of time to allow differences to develop between the types of animals that lived on each island. Red deer, for example, had to be introduced to Ireland from England – and then of course there are those snakes that St Patrick is meant to have banished. We have seen that Ireland had to be colonised, or possibly recolonised, by boat; and as time passed the channel between Britain and Ireland grew progressively wider – in effect it developed from a strait into a sea. The Irish, as they have always done, set about solving the technological problems that confronted them in their own manner, and the result was the unique ‘Bann flake’.
In the next chapter I shall briefly describe the processes whereby Britain physically became an island. But this is a book about people, not geomorphology, and I will leave the final words on what Britain’s newly acquired insular status was to mean to the development of British society in general to someone else. They’re by Christopher Smith, whose ideas have contributed much to this chapter on the Mesolithic, and to my mind they express a recurrent theme of British history and prehistory: ‘It is characteristic of societies in large islands that have substantial populations isolated from other groups that they develop rather idiosyncratic responses to social, economic and technological issues.’
That, surely, is the story of Britain and Ireland in a nutshell.
CHAPTER FIVE DNA and the Adoption of Farming
LIKE MANY CHILDREN, I adored dinosaurs, and by the time I reached the grand old age of sixteen this fascination had evolved into a growing interest in marine biology. I don’t know why this was, because it isn’t an interest that has lasted – maybe it simply reflected the fact that I enjoyed fishing when we went to Ireland for our summer holidays. Anyhow, by great good fortune I discovered that a teacher at school was planning a trip for teams of two boys each to join the crew of a deep-sea trawler out of Grimsby, and take pot luck: some would go to the fishing grounds of north Norway and the White Sea, others would fetch up somewhere off north-east Iceland. I was assigned a berth in a ship heading for the latter.
I remember the day I arrived at the Fish Quay. It was cold, wet and windy. The sea looked rough and the crew were rough, although later I was to learn that theirs was the hardest life going, and you had to be tough just to survive. I also learned not to judge people by their appearance. The cook, an enormous Pole who had worked in the coalmines of his native country, and then as a lumberjack in Canada, had an abiding interest in Chopin, and could fry the best fresh plaice it was possible to eat.
It was April, and as soon as we left the protection of the harbour we hit the north-easterly spring gales of the North Sea. The trip lasted three weeks, and I have never been so cold and sick as I was for the four days it took to acquire my sea legs. The two weeks we spent in the Iceland fishing grounds were largely remarkable for the activities of two Icelandic World War II Catalina flying boats that tried to stop us fishing inside their self-declared twelve-mile limit. Whenever it was stormy, we painted out our identification numbers with fuel oil and went well inside all existing limits, while the Catalinas circled overhead like frustrated gannets.
At night the fishing grounds were a floating city of a thousand disembodied lights that stretched between the invisible horizons. There were hundreds of trawlers from all European nations, and massive Russian factory ships. Even the crew of our ship, some of whom stood to lose their jobs if the ‘Cod War’ went Iceland’s way, admitted that it was absurd, and couldn’t continue for long. On our way back I felt excited and hugely invigorated by my first experience of an undiluted adult world. Just outside the Humber Estuary we hit a storm, and perhaps because the sea is relatively shallow there, we had to contend with waves as high as the vessel’s bridge. I didn’t know it then, but had we been at that precise spot just before Star Carr and Thatcham, around say 8000 BC, we wouldn’t have needed a ship. We’d have been on foot, standing on dry land, and perhaps looking anxiously towards the storm raging around the North Sea coast some ten miles to the north.
When I first learned about the relatively recent formation of the southern North Sea I was incredulous – partly, I suppose, because of my trawler experience. How on earth, I wondered, could something as huge, grey and brooding as the North Sea just swamp dry land and swallow it up forever? Even now my head accepts the fact, but something deep inside me retains irrational doubts. Today we have hard and fast proof of the relatively recent advance southwards of the North Sea, in the form of offshore borehole records and other scientific data.
A recent paper by a team assembled by Professor Ian Shennan of the Department of Geography at Durham University has collated all this information with some sophisticated computer wizardry, and produced a sequence of authoritative – I hesitate to say definitive – maps showing how and when the process of inundation happened.1
The root cause of the sea’s triumph over land is ultimately the rise in sea level consequent upon postglacial warming, but there are many other factors that Ian, his team and their computers have had to contend with. For example, as the burden of ice was removed, the land beneath tended to rise, thereby counteracting some of the effects of increasing sea level. It was like taking one’s finger off a cork in a glass of water: it (the land) bobbed up. But this bounce-back, or to use the correct term, this ‘isostatic recovery’, was not a universal or even a homogeneous effect: in some places it didn’t happen at all, whereas in others the land actually began to sink.
So the relationship of land to sea level is by no means a simple picture, and as we will see, its consequences in human terms, too, were to prove far from predictable. This is because these important developments in the shrinking geography of the north-western European Plain coincided with what was to be a hugely significant long-term change in the way people gained their livelihoods, after which our world would never be the same again.
Archaeology is the study of past human societies from artefacts and other material remains found in or on the ground. But it’s also rather more than that: it is profoundly concerned with the processes of cultural change. We must now confront what has always been considered one of the biggest changes in human history, namely the switch from food acquisition, in the form of hunting, fishing and gathering, to food production, in the form of arable farming and animal husbandry.2 With hindsight – of course something fundamental to archaeology – this switch looks more dramatic than in fact it was. Its consequences were indeed revolutionary, but the original processes of change probably weren’t. In fact, they were remarkably gradual. This confusion between cause and effect, plus an imperfect appreciation of the timescale involved, has led archaeologists in the past to view the period of the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition as somehow special, and even traumatic to people living at the time. Personally, I doubt this.
The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers belonged to the Middle Stone Age, and the farmers to the Neolithic or New Stone Age. It is important not to lose sight, however, of the lithic, the ‘Stone Age’ suffix of their labels. To my mind both were the same Stone Age people whose roots lay back in the Upper Palaeolithic, at sites like Paviland or Gough’s Caves. The fact that they decided to adopt the techniques of farming did not make them culturally different – at least not at first. What it did do was allow them to populate the landscape far more densely, because farming is a vastly more efficient means of producing food calories than hunting or gathering.3 It allows many more people to live in the landscape,
