A History of Ancient Britain (29 page)

Most fascinating of all is the possibility he had a hand in that final building phase. Maybe he was drawn to the already famous, sacred location, a place of pilgrimage – only to find
himself involved in the design and completion of its most famous form. Perhaps rather than the King of Stonehenge, he was one of its architects.

Or did his journey to Stonehenge culminate in a wedding? It has been suggested by some archaeologists that so-called Beaker Culture spread by means of marriage alliances – husbands and
brides being exchanged between communities, even over great distances, along with the knowledge of how to make metal. Maybe the Archer travelled from central Europe to Britain as a husband-to-be,
promised to the daughter of a powerful man living close to this magnificent stone monument.

I even wonder about that wounded, wasted leg of his. How strange and how appropriate that one of the first men to arrive in Britain with the ability to source and perhaps also to work metal
– a true pioneer in every sense of the word – should have been disabled like the smiths of later legends. Like Wayland, overseer of the tomb that bears his name, and Hephaestus of Greek
myth, the Amesbury Archer was lame. Like the fictional characters that would follow him – the creations of imaginations yet to be born – our metal-worker may have ended up unable to
stray far from his forge.

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss went so far as to say all creatures born of Earth understand that they are lame by nature – that they know the Earth does not easily
give up those things taken from her. Just as the flint miners of Grime’s Graves left offerings to pay for what they had taken, so perhaps the metal-makers understood there was a debt. It
seems people in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age were among the first to sense that their very existence in the world had consequences and that their actions were capable of changing things
for ever.

Wrapped up in it somewhere, it seems to me, is something that smells like guilt. If there ever had been a time when
Homo sapiens sapiens
lived as guiltless as a child, then it was over by
the Early Bronze Age. As a species we were growing more mature. We had become aware in a way we had not been before. As well as learning to worry about the welfare of ancestors,
and paying attention to the cycles of the sun and the Moon, we began to see ourselves as active rather than passive participants in it all. We could change the world – and so,
maybe, we should. In times to come the metal-workers – the world’s first scientists and alchemists – would be portrayed as lame, perhaps symbolic of how they were weighed down,
tied more tightly to the Earth than other men, by what they owed her.

All in all the Amesbury Archer offers many questions and few definite answers. His skeleton, surrounded by all his finery, is on permanent display in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, in
Salisbury. The display of human remains is a controversial subject now. There are many who find it distasteful, for all sorts of reasons, to have the dead on show inside glass cases. They argue
there is no justification for such a morbid practice, irrespective of whether the body has been dead for hours or for thousands of years. As an archaeologist I find nothing morally wrong with such
exhibits; in fact I will confess a fascination for looking at the remains of our ancestors. But there is nonetheless a strange feeling to be had from coming close to the dead, however ancient
– a feeling you have crossed a line. Seeing those Mesolithic footprints in the mud of Goldcliff, in south Wales, made me feel I was prying, viewing private moments I was never meant to see.
There is undeniably something similar to be experienced while looking at, or handling, the bones of people who had every reason to expect they would spend eternity unmolested by other mortals.

The Amesbury Archer lies in a low case that contains a reconstruction, as far as possible, of the condition and position in which he was found. Curled on his side he seems more human, somehow,
than if he was on his back. It is such a familiar position, that of sleep, that even a curled-up skeleton seems strangely less dead. And then of course there are his grave goods, those things the
people he left behind felt he should have with him on his final journey. I was even allowed to handle them – always a nerve-wracking experience – and the first thing that struck me
about the copper knives was how small they were. At just a few inches in length they are the size of penknife blades and yet, while the Amesbury Archer had them, they would have been of
incalculable value.

Think of the store we set by new gadgets today – the latest mobile phone or whatever – and then consider the impact of owning something made of an utterly new material, something
never seen before by the people you show it to. Most breathtaking of all his belongings are the golden hair tresses. Until you see them for real you cannot fully appreciate how tiny
they are, and how fragile; when you hold one in your hand it weighs almost nothing at. Aware at all times of their value, how irreplaceable they are, I felt my hands jangling with
nerves. After just a few moments I had to put the things back down in their case, for fear an involuntary twitch of thumb and forefinger might crush them flat.

But there he lies: a man who, 4,500 years ago, was accustomed to international travel. When he came to die he was over a thousand miles from the land in which he had grown to manhood, a stranger
in a strange land. He was among the very first to show metal to the people of Britain, a man who, more importantly, knew how the precious material could be obtained. He had ridden the wave that
brought the future, even the modern world, to these shores. Despite a terrible injury to his leg, a wound that lamed him for life, he had risen to prominence among his peers and when he died they
saw to it he had the richest funeral imaginable. In life and in death he was nothing less than extraordinary and even now his bones, in a glass box, surrounded by a few scraps, have the power to
enthrall and to make some of us long for a world in which a little copper knife was more magical than any Excalibur drawn from a stone.

Whatever the truth of the Amesbury Archer he was certainly part of that movement of people and ideas known sometimes as the Beaker Culture. Its arrival – their arrival – in Britain
was a landmark moment in the history of the islands. Before the Beaker People all of the materials of day-to-day life were simply gathered from the natural world. Stone, bone, shell, wood, antler,
animal sinew – all these and more besides were used in countless ingenious ways. By the time of the Early Bronze Age people in Britain had also been familiar, for a thousand years and more,
with the idea of using fire to harden clay. But along with their metal, the Beaker People brought new ways of thinking about themselves and their fellow human beings.

Due in no small part to the birth – or at least the coming of age – of the science of archaeology in the 1960s, the subject has always been coloured by some of the politics of that
time. For those who had grown up in the aftermath of the Second World War and who were living through televised conflicts like Vietnam, there was a comfort to be had in looking into the distant
past and imagining people had lived differently there. Not for the hunter-gathers the horrors of war, or the oppression of the weak by the strong. Instead it was popular among 1960s archaeologists
to imagine our ancestors in the Stone Ages enjoying vaguely egalitarian existences, sharing the stuff of the natural world and happily co-operating with one another.
If they
had been savages, at least they were noble savages – and with left-wing sensibilities to boot.

Caved-in skulls became, for a time, mere aberrations – either exceptions to the rule or evidence of some or other ritual practice. Arrowheads within ribcages were not proof of cause of
death, but rather grave goods, symbols lovingly placed on top of the dead bodies to identify them as hunters, archers.

But even the most ardent, ‘right-on’ archaeologists had to admit something changed in the ancient world under the influence of metal. For one thing there was the conspicuous evidence
of altered burial practices. By the Early Bronze Age, the communal tombs of the Early Neolithic were ancient history, sealed and long forgotten. Gradually it was to become more about single
burials, of a few individuals being treated to an elaborate send-off while the rest were left out for the birds and foxes. The tendency towards singling out special people for special treatment
– like the occasional cremations associated with tombs such as Knowth and Newgrange, or at Stonehenge – had begun in the Neolithic. But the undeniable existence of social hierarchies
became more blatant still once there was metal to play with. From then on the centralising of personal wealth in the hands of the few – together with the status wealth confers – was
unmistakable. They had not only enjoyed it in life, but also had the clout to ensure they took it with them into death.

Metal-workers like the Amesbury Archer were apparently able to transform more than just ore from the ground. They changed the nature and shape of society itself, from one in which all men had
been more or less equal into another, in which wealth and power created them . . . and therefore us.

Stone Age Britain had reached a peak of sorts with the creation of those massive, cosmically aligned monuments. There was still then some relic of a belief in the collective entity that was the
ancestors. But the incomers, with their Beakers and other oddities, brought a sense of self, a sense of individuality. The Amesbury Archer was buried on his own, and with valuable possessions that
told eternity who he had been, what he had done in life. His funeral and afterlife were a statement about his status. For the Beaker People all of those things mattered – but for the British
people they first encountered, it was radical thinking.

Communal burial in stone tombs was soon passé, to be replaced in the Bronze Age with a near-obsession with barrows – round mounds centred on individual burials. A handful of other
souls might be incorporated
within the same mound later on, like satellites held in place by the gravity of a planet; but it was the planet that mattered.

But for all their impact – the arrival from far-off lands of foreigners capable of making stone into metal, who carried themselves with the haughty demeanour of those who think themselves
a cut above – the earliest Beaker People were peddling a sub-standard product. The smelting of copper is certainly magical, a showstopper by any standards, but copper’s effectiveness as
a material for making tools is distinctly limited. It looks wonderful but try cutting down a tree with an axe made of the stuff and see how far you get. It is simply too soft. It blunts easily and
is also tricky to cast. From a purely practical perspective, flint is superior to copper in almost every way; and if copper had been all the incomers had up their sleeves they would never have
lasted.

Copper, therefore, was only the appetiser. Some of the Beaker People knew how to make an even more extraordinary substance, another metal – one that took and held a sharp edge, that poured
easily into moulds, that could be used to make bigger, longer, better things. That metal was bronze and it would transport Britain from the shadows and anonymity of the Stone Age into the
technological forefront of Europe.

Bronze is an alloy – a mixture of around 90 per cent copper and 10 per cent tin – and tin is hard to come by. Because it mixes so readily with others, metallurgists describe tin as a
‘sociable’ metal. The problem is its scarcity, occurring as it does in just a few places on the planet. In prehistoric Europe it was to be found only in the area between modern Germany
and the Czech Republic, in Spain and in Brittany. A particularly rich new source however was Cornwall and Devon in the south-west of England, and the discovery there of such a valuable resource
meant ancient Britain was all at once transformed into a focus of international attention.

Unlike copper, pure tin does not occur naturally anywhere on Earth. Instead it is always within a compound of other materials. In prehistoric times it was obtained exclusively from the ore
cassiterite. (Indeed, when the Greek historian Herodotus was writing in the fifth century
BC
he referred to a group of islands lying in the sea to the north-west of Europe,
certainly Britain, as the Cassiterides, the ‘Tin Islands:’ ‘from which we are said to have our tin’.)

When cassiterite does occur it is often in association with igneous rocks like granite; and it is likely that ancient metal prospectors, sailing alongside the south-west coast of Britain,
spotted black ribbons of the stuff running
down through the Cornish cliffs. That discovery was to make all the difference – a stroke of geological luck. Some part of
the process of the making of the British Isles, millions and billions of years in the planet’s past, had seen to it there was tin within the rock of their south-west tip. These islands had
been latecomers to the Copper Age, but the discovery of cassiterite, so much more rare and therefore so much more valuable, would propel them to Europe’s technological forefront.

A lump of cassiterite is strangely heavy, almost more like metal than rock, and the tin it contains, once extracted, is quite beautiful. An ingot of tin is as bright as silver but much, much
softer – so that it can be bent in the hands. If you hold it up to your ears, as you do so you can hear tiny sounds, crackles from within – the so-called ‘cry of the tin’
– and in fact you can persuade yourself the sound is like someone far away shouting the very word, ‘tin!’ in a high-pitched voice.

Rather than just looking at Bronze Age artefacts in a museum, I had the privilege of spending time with Neil Burridge, who specialises in reproducing such objects himself, using traditional and
ancient materials and methods. While I worked the bellows, keeping a steady flow of air passing through the flames of his workshop fire, Burridge described the superiority of bronze over copper.
‘Copper is no match for bronze,’ he said. ‘An impact that would crumple a copper point will have no effect whatsoever on one made of bronze. It was simply the hardest metal of the
ancient world.’