A History of Ancient Britain (35 page)

Yaghan and Ona alike had shamans in their midst – priest-like figures gifted with special powers such as healing and foresight. But for all their thinking and dreaming, understanding and
questioning, not one shivering Yaghan ever bothered to make him- or herself a blanket, or to take up an animal skin for a cloak.

The Fuegians’ realm remained trapped in a Stone Age while the Old World of Europe was convulsed, down through the millennia, by one technological or philosophical upheaval after another.
Magellan’s sailing ships arrived on their horizon like craft from a distant planet. And so perhaps the Fuegians’ lack of technological invention in the face of what most of us would
consider necessity is better explained by their remoteness from all others.

However their earliest ancestors reached the end of the Earth (explanations for their presence in the archipelago include everything from descent from far-travelled Australian Aborigines to
long-forgotten connections to native American populations further north), they established themselves upon a group of islands that are remote even from much of South America itself. While they
managed to survive and to perpetuate themselves among the windswept, icy plains and waterways, they were and remained forever cut off from other humankind. Denied the throughput of the new ideas
that comes from contact with incomers, their material culture remained basic and primitive. Not for the Yaghan or the Ona the arrival of immigrant farmers, itinerant metal-workers or evangelists of
new religions. The possibility of food surplus and craft specialisation never came and in their absence there was no time for social sophistication.

We in the north and west of Europe have benefited, for millennia, from the constant arrival of the new. At the end of the last Ice Age our hunting ancestors penetrated the land that would become
Britain. They were alone there for a long time but were eventually joined by those who could teach them the skills of agriculture and stock-rearing. Later came the magicians who could source and
conjure metal, and after them a steady flow of
incomers, bringing more and more of the modern world. Ideas of all kinds blew in like seeds, and kept on coming. No doubt
revelatory ideas occurred to individuals among the Yaghan from time to time as well; but for want of enough like-minded fellows to help and to encourage the thoughts, the seeds fell on stony ground
and failed to germinate.

By luck the people of Britain are descended from populations that learned ways to grow so numerous there was both the time and the opportunity for ideas and technologies to take root and
flourish. Furthermore they found themselves, by a fluke of geography, at the end of a long road – one marched over again and again by travellers moving from east to west, technological
evangelists carrying the future in their wake. While the natives of Tierra del Fuego had lived – and then died out – in stultifying isolation in a cul-de-sac, the inhabitants of Britain
prospered at one end of the busiest cultural motorway the world has yet seen. Then as now it was connections, or the lack of them, that made the difference.

It has been estimated that Late Bronze Age Britain, from around 1000
BC
onwards, was home to about half a million souls. Since at least the onset of the Neolithic,
perhaps 4000 years
BC
, people there had been finding ways to make and maintain connections between one another – with neighbours close at hand, populations on the
mainland of Europe hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and many others in between.

It had started out with the designation of special meeting places in the landscape – huge enclosures where scattered families and tribes could come together at certain times of the year to
share food and ideas, find marriage partners, settle territorial disputes and generally catch up with one another’s lives and times. Gradually the ways in which people sought to maintain
those connections became more and more sophisticated. Eventually many of them found it most effective to demonstrate and reinforce their ties by giving and receiving gifts. At first it was objects
of stone – axes in particular, and preferably made from rock obtained from distant mountaintops – that were passed between groups. But archaeologists have long accepted that the advent
of metal technology served to intensify the obsession with the exchange of special possessions. Eventually it was items fashioned from bronze that became crucial to society – the metal acting
as a kind of glue that held the whole intricate system together.

And along the way towards the establishment of that Bronze Age status quo, there had been a subtle realisation for at least some of the people: it was not just the metal objects that were
portable and transferable. So too
were the power and prestige that special things represented. Once it had been a priestly class that emerged as society’s elite
– those whose understanding of the movements of the heavens, and apparent sensitivity to the moods of the ancestors, set them apart from others. By the later stages of the Bronze Age,
however, it was the control and movement of metal that separated the haves from the have-nots.

Some of the grassy slopes at Deckler’s Cliff, in the East Portlemouth area of Devon overlooking Seacombe Sand, are marked by a patchwork of fields. The boundaries that define them are best
viewed from a distance. On closer inspection it turns out the straight, dark lines, so obvious from a mile away, are swathes of bracken growing downslope from long, low banks of heaped earth and
stone. It is the banks that are the true boundaries but those have been so eroded and reduced by the passage of time, smothered by encroaching pasture, as to be difficult to appreciate up close.
They are in fact the remains of field systems laid out by farmers during the Bronze Age, and would once have been used for growing oats and rye, or managing sheep and cattle. The portion that
survives (largely because it is on land too steep to have been of interest since) may be as little as one sixteenth of the original system. Only the Dartmoor reaves were more ambitious. These are
yet more survivals of ancient everyday life – the lifestyle of the mass of the population, and one that changed hardly at all for thousands of years.

Evidence of part of what was new and different about the later Bronze Age is, however, to be found not on land but beneath the sea, further along the Devon coast. The South West Maritime
Archaeological Group began diving the clear, shallow waters off the coast at Salcombe some 15 years ago and were accustomed to finding metal items and other artefacts dating from various historical
periods. In 2009 armed with their specialised underwater metal detectors, they began recovering small lumps of copper scattered near the base of a rocky reef. Soon the number of finds had increased
to the point where it became apparent they had to be part of the cargo of a sunken vessel.

Shipwrecks are hardly unusual off the Devon coast (or indeed any other part of the coastline of these British and Irish isles) and the SWMAG divers are familiar with many. This one was
different, however. During the past couple of years the volunteers have recovered over 300 ingots of copper and tin, bronze knives, fragments of gold jewellery and an almost perfectly preserved
bronze sword blade. Analysis of the finds has established that the
cargo they have been recovering belonged to a vessel that foundered a few hundred yards offshore from
Salcombe no less than 3,000 years ago.

Having made my first real dive on Garry Momber’s Mesolithic boatyard, in the notoriously soupy conditions of the Solent, Salcombe Bay sounded positively Caribbean by comparison. There was
talk of white sand and no less than 10 metres of visibility on good days and I was persuaded to double my tally of open-water dives by going in search of a Bronze Age shipwreck.

Dave Parham, a marine archaeologist from Bournemouth University, was my guide for the day – and the man tasked with persuading me it was perfectly reasonable to go into the sea with a
battery-powered metal detector. No matter what they tell you, there is undoubtedly something surreal about donning headphones 30 feet underwater and listening for telltale electronic bleeps and
squawks – evidence of lost metal – in precisely the same way any metal detectorist would do in a farmer’s field. Strange or not, the simple fact that three millennia had long
since done for the vessel itself meant it was only by finding more of its cargo of metal that we could hope to pinpoint the location of the wreck.

The water was every bit as clear as I had been promised (and also mercifully free of the powerful tidal pull that had added to my overall anxiety when I had floundered around, half-blind, in the
sediments on the seabed off the coast of the Isle of Wight), so that I was even able to relax and pay attention to the sub-sea terrain. Clearly visible, rising up from the white shell-sand of the
seabed were vertical cliffs of rock – presumably some of the same that had contributed to the demise of that Bronze Age ship. No doubt bad weather had been the primary cause of the disaster
that had befallen vessel and crew, with waves agitated by reefs of rock conspiring to overwhelm them and send men and metal alike straight to the bottom.

My own attempts at submarine metal detecting proved fruitless: neither bleep nor squawk was to be heard and I even began to wonder if the whole exercise was an elaborate practical joke at my
expense. But after just a few minutes one of Dave’s diving colleagues approached and signalled we should follow him. He led us along the face of a reef and made straight for a large boulder
on the seabed. Underneath it he had planted his most recent finds, made just moments before. Into my Neoprene-gloved hand he dropped what looked at first glance like a couple of sea-worn pebbles,
except their weight was out of proportion to their size – they were strangely heavy. They were in fact lumps of copper about the size of gaming chips. Three millennia spent rolling around
among the sands and rocks of the
seabed had given them knobbly, irregular shapes – like candle wax that had melted and then hardened once more. But they were,
unmistakably, pieces of metal.

Through the earpiece in my diver’s mask I heard Dave explaining they were fragments of a large copper ingot – part of the stock in trade of men who made their living transporting the
raw materials of bronze around Britain and Europe 3,000 years ago and more. Though their vessel had long since broken up, I imagined them aboard something like the Dover Boat.

Back on the dive boat we returned our finds to the air for the first time since the tragedy that had consigned them to the deep so very long ago. In the summer sunlight they had that familiar
warm, rosy glow that makes copper instantly recognisable. Dave said the total weight of copper and tin recovered by the team already amounted to something like 13 stones – a huge amount to
have survived so long on the seabed – and that they had found much more than just ingot fragments.

Next he revealed the beautiful bronze sword blade, elegantly shaped like a lizard’s tongue – the same that had done so much to prove the age of the cargo. If the ingots were
strangely impersonal, like any scrap metal, the sword spoke of an owner, and of a life lost at sea. Dave suggested the crewmen aboard the vessel would have been well aware of the colossal value of
the material they were transporting, and would have armed themselves so they could fight off any would-be pirates bent on helping themselves to the loot. No Bronze Age man would willingly have been
parted from such a blade.

It turns out the ingots tell their own story – one almost as engaging as thoughts of ancient mariners and their forgotten fates. Analysis of the copper and tin recovered from the Salcombe
wreck reveals they were not mined from the south-west of England – nor, in fact, from anywhere in Britain. Copper is not all the same and varies in composition from place to place. Science
can therefore reveal the place of origin for any given sample. The atomic signature of the Salcombe finds suggests the majority of the metal had come originally from locations scattered across the
European mainland.

By the time of the Salcombe wreck, trade and exchange of bronze had created an intricate network of connections reaching throughout Britain and Continental Europe. While it is possible the men
lost off the Devon coast had been moving their cargo around Britain as part of a domestic
supply chain, it is just as likely they were part of a long line of international
trade. The Salcombe wreck is therefore a snapshot of metal trade in action. Scattered on the seabed off that part of the Devon coast is a cargo actually en route – heading either to or from
Britain. Given the volume of metal on board it is reasonable to think of the Salcombe craft as a sort of bulk carrier. That the metal is a collection of material from many countries is as clear a
demonstration as we could wish for of just how interconnected the disparate populations of Late Bronze Age Europe actually were.

Trade is a concept easily understood in our own modern world – but generally only on our own modern, consumerist terms. Commodities that are either necessities of life – like fuel,
food, clothing and means of shelter – or innumerable luxuries – like white goods, electronic gadgets, jewellery and toys – are sourced at their point of production and transported
into the hands of those able and willing to pay for them. At the moment money changes hands the commodity – be it a bag of coal, a barrel of oil, a mobile phone or a cuddly toy – is
seen to belong to the buyer. He or she has established ownership of it. It is all quite cold-blooded, straightforward and devoid of any deeper meaning.

But in order to begin to understand what started to happen during the period of time archaeologists have called the Late Bronze Age, it is vital to allow that, for perhaps thousands of years,
people in the past may have interpreted the comings and goings of things in a profoundly different way from us – and that ownership often had nothing whatever to do with it.

Many archaeologists are increasingly open to the possibility that individuals in the ancient past might not have seen themselves as owning much of anything. The land they lived on and from which
they produced their food, the food itself, the stone and timber from which they built their homes, the fuels they collected to provide warmth and light – none of it belonged to any given
individual in quite the way we understand. Land and resources were held in common by the whole group.