A History of Ancient Britain (17 page)

They almost always contain just a relatively small number of dead and clearly were not intended as the final resting place for the whole community. Instead it seems burial within the tomb was
deemed appropriate only for certain individuals or perhaps some sort of representative sample. When such a person died the body was laid out where animals and birds could do the work of removing
the flesh and this may have been in the passage of the tomb, or perhaps on specially built ‘excarnation’ platforms. Once nature had taken its course, the bones were gathered up and
placed in the appropriate chamber – and not always as an intact skeleton. Sometimes the skulls and bones were moved around, separated from their owners and perhaps even removed from the tomb
for a while.

Tombs like West Kennet were left open while they were in use. For the duration of the 25 years or so while the bodies and bones gradually accumulated inside, the living – or some of them
at least – could enter as well. It might be more helpful to think of them as temples or churches. The dead are buried within and around Christian churches but that is only one of the
functions of such a building.

While West Kennet and the rest of the Cotswold-Severn tombs seem to have been about the recent dead, of just a generation or so, gradually there was a move to amass anonymous piles of bones. A
practice developed of sorting skulls, long bones, vertebrae and the rest into piles, so that the dead ceased to be individuals. Instead they became part of one collective entity, one presence
– that of the ancestors.

We are left to imagine what it must have felt like inside such a tomb, for people who truly believed their loved ones and the rest of the honoured dead were somehow present there – that
they were all around, watching and aware. Surely the faithful entered only with the greatest reverence, with the hairs prickling on their necks as they wondered what would happen next in that
eternal gloom.

Eventually, within a generation of construction, the active life of the
tomb was brought to an end. Having decided access to the ancestors was no longer appropriate (or
required), the farmers dragged into place the great stones of the façade. Once these were raised upright, with Herculean effort, the community of the ancestors was off-limits to that of the
living.

But, open or closed, tombs like West Kennet performed a more simple, earthly function as well. They are often found surrounded by fertile farmland and by building such obvious structures loaded
with the potent presence of their ancestors, the incumbents were making a statement of ownership. Like farming, like making pots of fired clay, like polishing axes and building houses for the dead
– this was new to Britain. From the time of the first farmers, a powerful notion took root and began to grow: this land is ours; it is mine.

Formal burial of individuals seems to have been highly unusual in the Neolithic. The truth is we simply do not know for certain what happened to most people when they died. If they were not
among the tiny proportion destined for the tombs, where their remains would be preserved for the attention of archaeologists in the future, they may have been left in the open for the scavengers,
or consigned to fast-flowing rivers. There were graves of a sort for some, usually in circumstances where the remains perhaps enhanced the sacred nature of some part of the landscape set aside as
‘special’. As time passed, a few more of the farmers were granted graves of their own, and there was always the occasional rite of cremation; but the treatment of the general dead in
the Neolithic remains a mystery. Human remains are often found in houses and within settlements, so it is possible people preferred to keep the bones of loved ones close by. Perhaps inclusion in
the tombs was often temporary, so that loved ones were eventually recovered and taken home. (I have always felt cemeteries and graveyards to be lonely places and I suspect the custom of putting the
dead away, out of sight, is a relatively recent one born mostly out of concerns about hygiene and disease. Surely the older human instinct is to keep the beloved dead, particularly children, near
at hand.)

Farmers are at the centre of a cycle of life and death. Seeds are planted, crops grow and before they die they produce more seeds. Female animals give birth to young that in turn grow to
maturity – and before they die they make new life for the future. So it was for the people themselves. Generations came and lived and passed life and land onwards into the future, to their
children and grandchildren. The cycles a tribe could prove, the
deeper its roots and the stronger its claim on the territory where it had all happened.

With the planting of those roots, constructing tombs and owning land came the need to ask, for the first time, ‘Where are you from?’ And from now on there was an answer to be given.
And with the building of tombs filled with ancestors it made sense to ask the question, ‘Who are you from?’ as well.

The anonymous collections of bones in some tombs may have been an attempt to show how long the tribe had been there, how ancient was their connection to the land. Perhaps the best claim,
therefore, was one based on a lineage – real or imagined – reaching all the way back to the hunters who had been there in the first place. Descent from ancient hunting stock may have
represented the strongest claim of all, so someone known (or at least believed) to have been the direct descendant of the last of the hunters may well have been one of those considered worthy of a
place within the community of the dead.

Part of all this is memory as well; there is an urge within
Homo sapiens sapiens
to remember and to recall. All of us reach a point in our lives when we feel more of our time is behind us
than in front. As we get older, the remaining days and months and years seem to pass faster and faster so that they run through our fingers as uncontrollably as sand. To make matters worse, we
appear to have no control over what we actually do remember. Rather than obeying our commands to retain chosen events and people for ever, memory makes its own decisions on our behalf. Memory has
been described as like a dog that lies down where it pleases and, as the French philosopher Henri Bergson has said, ‘It is the function of the brain to enable us not to remember but to
forget.’

As a species we are therefore fighting forgetfulness all the time and so we have to prioritise and make decisions about just what – and who – needs to be remembered; we then have to
find some external place where all this important stuff can be stored. Eventually it became possible to write things down, first on stone and then on paper. Now we have computer servers capable of
hosting vast amounts of data. But even so, we still have to make decisions about what to keep and what to lose.

This is editing and it seems it is nearly as old as the hills. It seems to me that, as well as building communities for the ancestors and highly visible statements of ownership, the architects
of the tombs were also creating houses of memory. Our Neolithic ancestors realised they had no way to
keep track of it all. There was no possibility either of remembering
everyone, or even storing all of their bones. Instead decisions were made about who was to be kept, and what each individual would represent in death. This was part of the lore of the tribe. A tomb
became a reservoir of important things – the things that seemed to matter.

But while the need to remember is part of being human it was the concept of ownership that had the more immediate consequences. Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire is primarily famous as the site
of an Iron Age hill fort. But people placed an importance on high ground long before the advent of metal tools; and Neolithic farmers armed with axes of polished stone found reasons to settle on
the hilltop as well. The view is almost a justification in itself – out over what feels like the whole of the Severn Valley with the Malvern Hills, the Forest of Dean and the Black Mountains
all there to be sensed out on the horizon and beyond.

Today the view is dominated by the modern city of Gloucester itself, surrounded by satellite towns and villages dotted through a familiar checkerboard pattern of fields. But 5,500 years ago when
Neolithic farmers looked out from their lofty summit they would have seen a landscape comprised mostly of woodland and broken only by the occasional farming homestead and associated cleared fields
– all the more reason to value the high ground that provided a sense of overlordship and control. Anyone wanting to lay claim to all of that valuable, fertile land would do well to have a
presence up on the hill overlooking it all in every direction.

By the middle of the fourth millennium
BC
farmers had enclosed a large part of the flat land on the summit by digging a vaguely circular ditch. They left at least two
gaps – causeways to let people and animals in and out – and at some point they felt the need to strengthen the defences by building a timber palisade with gated entrances at the
causeways, on the inner side of the ditch. As it turned out they were right to be worried about security. Sometime around 3550
BC
a body of armed intruders attacked the
settlement with lethal force. Archaeologists have recovered more than 400 flint arrowheads from Crickley Hill – almost all of them pointed towards the settlement and clustered around the two
entrances.

The arrowheads are undeniably beautiful – flaked into exquisite teardrop shapes so perfect they briefly distract from their lethal purpose. But these weapons – together with evidence
of burning of the gates, the palisade and homes inside the enclosure – are testament to a watershed in our history: the arrival of armed conflict.

Five and a half thousand years ago the longbow was the height of fashion among discerning hunters – and warriors. The ancestor of the weapon that would reach
legendary status on the battlefields of Agincourt and Crécy, it was just as effective in the hands of Neolithic farmers with a taste for conquest.

To see for myself how powerful a longbow can be – even in untrained hands – I arranged to visit the scene of the crime with an expert in ancient weapons. Will Lord is the son of John
Lord, the man who had earlier coaxed me through my Mesolithic day and night on the island of Coll. Will is evidently cut from the same bolt as his father. He arrived with a longbow he had made
himself just weeks before from a single piece of seasoned ash. It was a thing of beauty, but one crafted for the arms and shoulders of a man much stronger than I; it felt as though someone had put
a bowstring on a telegraph pole.

Undeterred, Lord Junior showed me the arrows we would be shooting (never firing – firing is only for weapons like rifles and pistols that use gunpowder and so emit a flash of
‘fire’). Like the bow, they were his own work – the shafts, the perfectly knapped points fixed in place with pine resin, the crow’s feather flights, all of it. (I handle
things like those – made by people who have taken the time to acquire the skills that were a matter of life and death for our species for hundreds of thousands of years – and I ask
myself, seriously, ‘What use am I?’)

Despite my lack of strength or experience with such a weapon, I was soon stunned to discover how effective Lord’s handiwork proved to be. Having hung a fresh side of pork from a tall frame
of timber poles, he invited me to have a go from a distance of about 30 yards. There, on the site of a 5,500-year-old battle fought with longbows of exactly the same design, I took aim at the
lifeless flesh and bone and loosed my first arrow – and watched as the arrowhead and then half the shaft passed through the meat as if it were newspaper.

Whether it had been judgement or dumb luck that guided my hand, it was a breathtaking moment. I had had the strength only to draw the bow about halfway – it was as unyielding as a
doorframe – and was struck first and foremost by how slow the arrow seemed in flight. Lord said it was always the case – arrows were visible in flight and in battle their intended
targets would sometimes have seen them coming.

The apparent lack of speed is mostly an optical illusion and in any case the damage is done not by the arrowhead but by the power of the bowstring,
stored and carried in
the arrow shaft. The point penetrates the target but the energy of the bow – over 200 pounds of it in the case of ours if it had been drawn to its limit – piles in behind the point and
forces it through the target like a hammer drill.

All the archaeological evidence from Crickley Hill suggests longbows were decisive on the day of the battle. Though there is no physical evidence of actual harm done to the defenders of that
particular enclosure in the form of human remains, there seems little doubt the place was the scene of vicious fighting. There is also no shortage of proof elsewhere that our ancient forebears knew
all about inflicting, and suffering the effects of, extreme violence.

In the cupboards and drawers of the store rooms of the Natural History Museum in London there are numerous examples of damage caused to Neolithic men and women by grievous bodily harm: skulls
caved in by hammer blows, fracture lines running from ear to ear; dimpled depressions on skulls – evidence of blows that healed. It bears remembering too that only certain kinds of traumatic
injury leave evidence on skulls or bones. A severed femoral or carotid artery, damage inflicted by a flint knife, would be just as lethal but would leave an unmarked skeleton.

Archaeologists took some time to come round to the idea of ancient conflict – often preferring to imagine that our forebears inhabited a more peaceful world than our own. With this
mindset, finds of arrowheads and other artefacts nestled within the bones of skeletons were routinely interpreted as grave goods, objects lovingly gifted to the dead in the hope they might prove
useful in the afterlife. No doubt this was often the case but sometimes such finds, in such contexts, have to be seen as the cause of death itself.

An adult male found buried beneath a collapsed section of the rampart of the Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Hambledon Hill in Dorset had an arrow in his ribcage. This might once have been
interpreted as having a ritual overtone but nowadays it is seen as proof of a violent end, possibly during a battle like the one at Crickley Hill. Similarly an arrowhead recovered from the neck
bones of a male skeleton found inside West Kennet Long Barrow was no gift from a grieving relative but more than likely his ticket to a place in hallowed ground – a fallen hero, killed
defending hearth and home. These are by no means isolated cases. Studies of human remains from the early centuries of the Neolithic suggest that as many as one in every 15 people had suffered a
traumatic head injury. In other words,
people living in the first centuries after 4000
BC
would have known about, witnessed and likely suffered some
sort of physical violence.