Britain's stone 'pyramids' offer up ancient secrets
Stone Age communities on the Atlantic coast were
more advanced than previously thought, Oxford professor
Barry Cunliffe tells The Globe's MICHAEL POSNER
MICHAEL POSNER
Saturday, June 9, 2001
History has taught us that the Celts brought civilization to the British Isles from ancient-day Europe.
Until the continental invasion, six millenniums before the birth of Christ, the textbooks say England, Scotland and Ireland were populated by backward tribes of hunter-gatherers, bit players in the great drama of humankind's social evolution.
Well, beware of what history tells us, says one of England's foremost archeologists. In his new book, Facing the Ocean,Oxford professor Barry Cunliffe argues that conventional wisdom may not be so wise. At least, it is not challenge-proof.
Cunliffe says civilizations that developed along the Atlantic on parts of the coast such as Glicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland and Spain during the Mesolithic period (from 6000 to 4000 BC) were more advanced than previously thought.
"There's been a tendency, and still is, to see Europe from a Mediterranean-centric point of view," Cunliffe said in an interview this week. "To assume that all things begin there. But one should look at centres of innovation. One centre undoubtedly is the Mediterranean, the Greeks, the Egyptians and so on. But the other is what I call the Atlantic façade, which has been played down."
In addition to being sophisticated boat builders and fishermen, people in these Atlantic communities also mined tin, copper and gold, Cunliffe says.
He says the much-disparaged hunter-gatherer societies that fished off the Atlantic coast or the river estuaries were, in fact, sedentary, stable and well-established. With access to secure and diverse food sources in the ocean, they could settle in one place and develop more complex social systems.
"We have this embedded belief that the more settled agricultural (Neolithic culture) is better than hunter-gatherer," he observes. "But that isn't necessarily the case. The latter can lead a much more stable life."
Proof of the sophistication of these communities, Cunliffe says, is buried in their waste -- huge "middens" or refuse dumps that grew larger over time. Found from the Iberian peninsula to the Orkney Islands, they show remarkable similarities. For example, Stone Age people buried their dead with antlers and red ochre (to represent blood, Cunliffe presumes) in middens and created huge tombs, standing stones and circles that still dot Britain and Ireland.
These tombs were massive monuments to the dead, neither as ambitious nor as complex as the Pyramids on the Gizan plateau, but, nevertheless, highly decorated and architecturally complicated. Some of them were oriented to solar phenomena with a mathematical and cosmological precision that still defy easy explanation. (Stonehenge dates from the end of this era.)
The site at New Grange near Drogheda in Ireland, for instance, contains mounds about 85 metres in diameter and 14 metres in height. These passage tombs, as they are known, have corbelled vaults, capped with stones weighing 20 to 40 tonnes.
"The old view, before 1965, was that these tombs were developed in the Mediterranean and spread to Spain and Portugal and then north," Cunliffe says. But now radiocarbon dating has proved "that these burials were developing in Britanny in the fifth millennium BC, much earlier than in the Mediterranean and are almost certainly an indigenous phenomenon."
In Cunliffe's view, the Atlantic is a "corridor of communication." Its oceanic communities were not only linked by shared ideas and methods and perhaps a Celtic language; they infused inland cultures with their customs. The notion of hermetic or insular Christianity as first practised by the Irish saints (in the fifth to eighth centuries), he argues, spread via the sea to Iona, Lindisfarne and later to continental Europe -- a distinctive expression of Atlantic culture.
"So there are times when this Atlantic rim is a very innovative and energetic place, and not a backwater."
Certainly, it's clear that the maritimers actively exported tin and gold to the Mediterranean, where they were used to make weapons of war and for prestige. "From 1300 to 700 BC," Cunliffe says, "there is a distinctive cultural Bronze Age complex along the Atlantic," with intense trading of metals used for everything from swords and spears to spits for roasting.
The issue of a common language is more contentious, he concedes. "The accepted view is that the Celts, from western Europe, spread east and west to France, Britain and Ireland. But there is no evidence at all of significant migration to Ireland from Europe. The idea of a Celtic language group was invented in the 18th century by someone who studied Welsh and Irish and Breton, and said they were all part of same group and decided to call it Celtic."
Cunliffe thinks that the seagoing contact spread a common tongue (with dialects) from the Azores to the Shetlands, one that may later have had Celtic inland influences.
Calling himself a geographical determinist, Cunliffe says Eurocentric Roman civilization dramatically reduced the energy and importance of the Atlantic world. "All roads, in a sense, really did lead, inland, to Rome. It's only after the empire breaks down that the seaway bursts again into action." Witness the extraordinary navigational exploits of the Portuguese, French and British in the 15th and 16th centuries, he says.
And even today, the concept of an Atlantic identity has not been entirely eradicated. Within the European community, he notes, there i something called l'arc atlantique,a trading group of nations (including Norway and Denmark) set up to counterbalance the centrifugal weight of central Europe.
As for his broader thesis that Atlantic innovation has been overlooked, Cunliffe says he has been pleasantly surprised by the positive reception his book has received. "I think we must always challenge our preconceptions of the past, turn the map on its head and be ready to reinterpet the evidence."
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