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(Page 3 of 4)
I asked David Miles, chief archaeologist of English Heritage, the government agency charged with protecting England's archaeological sites, what purpose such a procedure might have served. "Ancestor worship," he speculated. "The single individual was not so important. The idea of a collective ancestry was. The dead are excarnated—perhaps flesh itself was regarded as dangerous or evil. Then carefully selected collections of bones are used in ceremonies."
Orkney also boasts the single-bestpreserved Neolithic village ever found in Britain, Skara Brae, which was first uncovered by a violent storm in 1850. Today the visitor can wander pathways without invading the "houses" themselves, which lie open to the sky. The most surprising aspect of these domiciles is that even the furniture stands in place—stone dressers, hearths, bed platforms, and stools, all arranged in a uniform pattern within each house. At first the houses feel cozy. Then I noticed crawlways between them, a secret chamber in House 1 that could be reached only by crawling under a dresser, bar holes beside doorways to lock houses against intruders and peepholes to spy on outsiders. A tension of distrust seems built into Skara Brae's very architecture. What's more, as experts point out, the houses of the Neolithic denizens strikingly mirror their tombs.
At the same time that archaeologists remain baffled by some of the most basic questions about Neolithic culture— from the language its people spoke to the engine that drove the economy— they have wrung a surprisingly rich understanding of daily life from the tombs of Orkney. We know that the adults of that period were not much shorter than today, men averaging 5 feet 7 inches, women 5 feet 3 1/2 inches. They were muscular but prone to broken bones; their teeth were surprisingly free of decay but ground down from grit in their food. The life expectancy was about 35 years. Perhaps one in three babies died in childbirth.
Was Neolithic life, then, nasty, brutish and short? In many ways, certainly; but the scarcity of fortifications and weapons found in the archaeological record suggests that the epoch was relatively peaceful. It's even possible that the act of building massive monuments to ancestors was the glue that held society together.
Four years ago, in Norfolk, the county that juts like a fat paw into the North Sea 120 miles northeast of London, a local beachcomber, John Lorimer, stumbled upon one of the great prehistoric finds of the century— and touched off a furor. Walking the beach near Hunstanton, Lorimer noticed a huge, upside-down tree trunk sprouting from the sand, halfway between the high- and low-tide mark. Then, 25 feet from the stump, he picked up a metal object. A self-taught antiquarian, Lorimer guessed he had found a Bronze Age ax head. An archaeologist proved him right, dating it to 1600-1400 b.c. A few months later, Lorimer noticed that the upside-down tree trunk had company: three posts sticking several inches out of the sand. On subsequent visits, he found more posts, and soon recognized that they were laid out in a circle, with the tree trunk at the hub.
Lorimer had discovered what the press soon dubbed Seahenge. The first archaeologists to visit the site, scholars from the Norfolk Archaeological and Environment Division in Norwich, knew at once that the post circle was ancient and important. But precisely what it was perplexed them. As early as 1925, evidence of henges made of wood—entirely vanished today—was discovered from the air by patterns of posthole rings in the ground. (Stonehenge itself, experts later concluded, had been made of timber a thousand years before the stone trilithons were raised.) Never before, however, had any original timbers been found. Seahenge was that rarest of things—an apparent wooden henge with wood intact, miraculously preserved by the deep bed of peat that lay above it. A dendrochronologist cut a wedge out of the central inverted oak and, using the most advanced radiocarbon dating techniques, came up with a date that is stunningly accurate—the central oak and posts were felled in 2049 b.c.
Evaluating the site in 1998, the Norwich team determined that Seahenge was in immediate danger due to the erosion of the protective peat. Though the policy of English Heritage is to leave artifacts where they are found, the urgency of the perceived threat led to a decision to remove the timbers. But as archaeologists prepared to do so in May 1999, all hell broke loose. Some of the same New Agers and neo-Druids who would celebrate the solstice with me at Stonehenge flocked to the Seahenge beach, determined to block the excavation. They were joined by locals who also felt that the timbers should be left in place. "There was lots of verbal abuse," Maisie Taylor, a specialist in waterlogged archaeological sites, recalls. "The young archaeologists took the worst of it. We had hate mail and even death threats. Eventually we had to have police protection." Ultimately, the excavation went forward. Slowly, as each high tide brought with it muck and sand, the team, led by archaeologist Mark Brennand, made some intriguing discoveries. Bronze Age axmen (or women) had cut notches into the trunk of the giant oak stump, most likely to keep it from slipping when maneuvering it with a rope. Indeed, rope fragments, unbelievably still in place, proved to be braided of honeysuckle; nothing like them had ever before been found. As for the ellipse of timbers, from 15 to 18 feet across, it turned out not to be a henge at all. There was no trace of a surrounding ditch, and the timbers stood tight to one another like a palisade, with no apparent doorway. (Brennand thinks a single forked post may have served as the entryway; initiates would have had to clamber through the forked V to get inside.) Finally, in August 1999, the last post was taken out of the sand. Each timber was carried by military stretcher to a trailer and driven to Flag Fen laboratory in Peterborough, where all 55 of them were submerged in preservation tanks filled with constantly moving water.
Archaeologist Maisie Taylor gave me a tour of the Flag Fen facility, which is open to the public. Delicately, she lifted one six-foot log out of the water and held it for my perusal. I was instantly struck by the ax marks that had trimmed it—the first evidence of tool use ever found in Britain. "What little Bronze Age woodworking we've ever seen demonstrates an amazing sophistication," Taylor said. Using state-of-theart laser-scanning techniques, experts identified the "fingerprints" of some 38 different axes that, remarkably, had been used to hew the timbers of Seahenge.
Comments
I found this article very fascinating. i am 45yrs old now and i remember the timbers at holme-next-sea beieng exposed yrs ago when i was a child of before my teens. So the expert David Miles sat behind his desk who probably has never visited Holme, opinion counts for nothing! yours C Lee
Posted by C Lee on May 21,2008 | 12:52PM