Barbarians Read online

  In and around the houses, ancient people dug pits. Sometimes the pits were to provide clay for plastering the walls. Others were used for storage. After serving their original purpose, pits usually were receptacles for rubbish. Archaeologists love rubbish. It contains broken pottery, which shows regional differences, changes over time and affinities with other sites. Worn-out tools and manufacturing waste tell us about ancient technology and material use. Animal bones and charred seeds enable reconstruction of the ancient diet. Waterlogged deposits contain pollen, insects and plant remains that give a broad picture of life in the settlement. A full rubbish pit can tell many tales that cannot be found in written sources.

  Finally, there are ritual sites, of which Stonehenge is the most celebrated example. Some stand out in the landscape, like stone circles, while others are hidden. The Hjortspring Boat in Denmark contained the weapons, shields and tools of a defeated invading army sacrificed in thanks by the victors. Rock carvings are abundant across Scandinavia and in the Alps. Bogs and other wet places had special spiritual significance, as did now-invisible groves of trees.

  For all this wealth of information, sites and artefacts by themselves tell us very little without the analytical techniques applied to them. Pottery and tools can be grouped by form and decoration to show similarities and differences among sites. Archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists study seeds and animal bones. Chemists find residues of animal fats from meat and milk in pottery. Burials yield ancient DNA preserved in the teeth and bones. Strontium isotope ratios from teeth can tell whether someone grew up locally or elsewhere, which gives information about movement, sometimes over surprising distances. Computers permit the study of vast quantities of information and enable visualization of artefacts, houses and settlements.

  Many people compare archaeology to a vast jigsaw puzzle. An archaeologist often responds, yes, it might be like a jigsaw puzzle, but someone has thrown away 90 per cent of the pieces, and there’s no picture on the box. A more apt analogy is trying to figure out what is in a room by looking through the keyhole, although nowadays old-fashioned keyholes are no longer found. New discoveries cause old conclusions to be questioned. Archaeologists often disagree over how ancient societies should be reconstructed, and thus nothing that we think we now know about the Barbarian World should be taken as set in stone for eternity.

  Telling time

  For archaeology to work, we need to know how old things are. There are two types of archaeological time: relative and absolute. Since a fundamental principle of archaeology is that older things are buried beneath newer things, we can establish relationships in time between two types of remains by finding circumstances in which one is buried beneath another. Thus relative time can be established only when objects are found lying in the places and layers where ancient people left them. Laborious compilation of these sequences by archaeologists over the last two centuries provides a good idea of the relative age of just about anything found on ancient sites in Europe.

  Absolute dates, which situate finds in calendrical years but really are not as precise as non-archaeologists might think, require scientific methods. When wood is preserved due to waterlogging or desiccation, the study of the tree rings by comparison to standard regional sequences of thickness that result from annual variations in rainfall can yield dates to the year or the season. Carbon-14 dating, also called radiocarbon dating, was developed after the Second World War and is based on the decay of the radioactive isotope of carbon, carbon-14, to nitrogen-14. Recent improvements in this method have led to greater precision, permitting dates to be established within a half-century. For the study of the Barbarian World, these two methods are the primary techniques to establish the calendrical age of sites and artefacts.

  C. J. Thomsen, painted in 1848 by Johan Vilhelm Gertner.

  Once the age of sites and artefacts has been established, we fit them into broader systems of relationships. In the study of ancient Europe, the basic structure for discussing larger patterns is called the Three-age System.4 Two centuries after it was devised, it continues in use for the overall division of time in ancient Europe. Today, archaeologists use the terms Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age as a shorthand for facilitating conversations.

  In 1816, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) was appointed curator of the Danish National Museum. The collections were a chaotic mess, and Thomsen needed to figure out how to display them sensibly. He had the clever idea of sorting tools according to the materials from which they were made: stone, bronze and iron. Thomsen extended his classification to other objects that were found with the implements. For example, he noted that certain pottery types were found only with stone tools, while glass beads only occurred with iron tools. Thomsen’s assistant, Jens Jacob Asmusssen Worsaae (1821–1885), took the Three-age System from museum displays to field excavations. This required careful observation of the relationships between types of finds to establish their relative dating. Such attention to the context of finds established field archaeology as a professional scholarly discipline.

  Today, the Three-age System of Thomsen and Worsaae continues in use as the overall organizing principle of prehistoric Europe. Boundaries between the stages have been blurred, and they do not have the same absolute dates everywhere in Europe, so the reader should not assume that this system is sacrosanct. More importantly, it is crucial to understand that it is a system imposed by archaeologists. Ancient people had no idea whether they were living in the Stone, Bronze or Iron Age, and they did not wake up one morning and realize that they had gone from one to the next. While this might be a trivial point, I will try throughout this book to differentiate between what was a reality for an inhabitant of the Barbarian World and what is an interpretation imposed by archaeologists. An archaeological concept such as the Bronze Age is not only a span of time but also a set of technological, social, economic and ritual practices with roots in earlier millennia that formed the foundation for what came later.

  The geography of the Barbarian World

  Over sixty years ago, the British prehistorian Grahame Clark (1907–1995) recognized two broad divisions of Europe reflected in the archaeological record.5 He called them ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Temperate’ Europe. Mediterranean Europe consists of lands bordering that body of water and extending west to include Spain and Portugal. Its natural vegetation consists of Mediterranean evergreen forest, the result of summer drought and winter rains. In this zone, the great civilizations of Greece and Rome arose from their local precursors.

  Temperate Europe is the region whose natural vegetation, before its transformation by farming and industry, was covered by deciduous forest. It reaches from the Atlantic coast and the British Isles, across central Europe and southern Scandinavia, into European Russia. Seasonal differences in this zone are sharper, as are variations in terrain. The Alps provide the highest relief, followed by the Carpathians in the east and the Scandinavian mountains in the north. Immense flatlands such as the Pannonian Plain and the North European Plain permitted easy movement, as did major river arteries such as the Danube, Elbe and Rhine. Between the North European Plain and the Alps is a zone of rolling uplands and hills, as are also found in the British Isles.

  Across this landscape, people distributed themselves in different ways. Their attachment to particular regions led to distinctive forms of pottery, tools, weapons and ornaments that vary from one area to another. Moreover, these styles changed over time. After the breakthrough of the Three-age System, archaeologists in the nineteenth century soon realized that these geographical stylistic differences were key to reading the pre-literate record across Europe. The Swedish archaeologist Oscar Montelius (1843–1921) worked out the mapping of bronze artefact types in northern Europe, while the German archaeologist Paul Reinecke (1872–1958) established the chronological framework for the first millennium BC in central Europe. Other archaeologists developed the study of the interplay between geography and stylistic variation further, including the nationalistic Ge
rman archaeologist Gustav Kossinna (1858–1931) and the celebrated Australian-British prehistorian V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957).

  Geography plays another role in the study of the Barbarian World, namely the interaction between people and their environment. Climate change has always been a part of the human experience, and the Barbarian World experienced episodes of relative warmth and relative cold. Rainfall differed from one year to the next. Such variability had an impact on important matters such as agricultural production, and people needed to adjust to different conditions. Raw materials are also not uniformly distributed. Flint, salt, copper, tin, amber and gold are found in specific places, and thus their procurement and distribution had to take into account both their extraction and their transport to places where they were desired. Finally, people had an impact on their environment, usually for the worse. The area of western Ireland known as the Burren is a stark limestone landscape today, but before clearance and grazing during the last several centuries BC, its thin soil supported grass and trees. The use of wood for building and burning and the grazing of livestock that prevented forest regeneration dramatically changed the natural environment of Europe well before the industrial era.

  Luminous regions and ordinary people

  The story of the Barbarian World revolves around particular regions, which appear over and over as locations for important developments and landmark sites. We can refer to these as the ‘luminous regions’ of European prehistory.6 They are usually clusters of important monumental sites, rich burials and unusual concentrations of finds. Luminous regions tend to have abundant resources like fertile soil, or they were situated at the intersection of important trade routes. Archaeologists are drawn to them because there is always something to be found, and it is likely that it will be as remarkable as previous discoveries.

  In the Barbarian World, a luminous region might be an entire country, like Denmark or Ireland, whose archaeological record by itself comprises a textbook of prehistory. Sometimes, it could be a smaller region that attracted prehistoric settlement or monument building. In the British Isles, the Orkney Islands or the central part of southern Britain around Salisbury Plain – the ancient kingdom of Wessex – are such places, while in Poland, we might consider regions like Małopolska or Kuyavia to be luminous. Sometimes a luminous region is specific to a particular period, such as the watersheds of the upper Danube, Rhine, Seine and Rhône during the middle of the first millennium BC, after which it glows a bit less brightly in comparison with neighbouring areas.

  This book will devote considerable attention to some of the luminous regions, because their sites and finds are a good way to tell the story of the Barbarian World. There is a temptation, however, to treat these areas as having undue significance, and it is important to remember that outside of them people also lived, prospered and struggled. Whether or not they built spectacular monuments or buried their dead in lavish tombs, ordinary people whose names we do not know made the choices and did the work that made the Barbarian World possible, whether they lived a kilometre or two from Stonehenge or in some remote Carpathian valley.

  Northern part of the Barbarian World with locations of sites mentioned in the text.

  Organization and themes

  The goal of this book is to provide a very high-level overview of the Barbarian World by taking advantage of the ability of archaeology to explore time and space more broadly than most historical accounts. It could be expanded considerably, and the Bibliography provides pointers towards very good books and journals that go into greater depth. At the end, the reader should appreciate the heterogeneity of the Barbarian World. Unlike the impression given by many historical accounts that report contact with pre-literate peoples at a specific time and place, there was no uniform ‘barbarian culture’.

  Instead, this book can be considered to be a tour of the Barbarian World. As with any itinerary, the traveller chooses places to visit selectively to obtain a representative impression of things and practices found in an area. It is impossible to be absolutely comprehensive. Instead, the hope is that the reader will get the general picture and wish to return to the Barbarian World again and again.

  Southern part of the Barbarian World with locations of sites mentioned in the text.

  The tour will proceed along a straightforward chronological track, starting in the Stone Age after the retreat of the ice sheets and ending with the establishment of literate polities across northern and western Europe. Archaeology is explicitly comparative, so regional differences will be highlighted. Case studies of particular sites and areas will illuminate broad themes, with an admitted bias towards the topics that I find interesting and sites that I have visited or studied in depth.

  Let me encourage the reader to be on the lookout for major themes in the study of the ancient peoples north of the Alps. They include the following: innovation and expertise: the mastery of materials including wood, flint, stone, bone, antler, pigments, copper, bronze, iron, silver and gold; connectedness: the emergence of long-distance travel as far back as the Stone Age, as indicated by evidence for watercraft, seafaring, wheeled vehicles, trade in materials such as copper, tin, salt, luxury goods and wine, and finally evidence from isotopic analysis of human movement; enclosure: the practice of demarcating areas by ditches, banks, ramparts and palisades, to provide separation, protection, control or boundaries; monumentality: the construction of large structures that inscribed the landscape and sent a powerful message to all who saw them, as reflected in megalithic tombs, standing stones, barrows and cairns, ship burials, stone circles, hillforts, oppida and large and unusual buildings; ritual: the practice of commemorating and ceremonializing values and beliefs, which appears repeatedly in the form of elaborate burials, offerings in bogs and rivers, feasts, pilgrimages and rock art; wealth: the accumulation of material goods to demonstrate status and power among societal elites, which we see repeatedly in spectacular burials containing luxury goods and differentiation in architecture, eventually leading to political power in the form of chiefs and kings; and ordinary lives: the people who lived in farmsteads, kept livestock, tilled and harvested crops, made everyday goods, were victims of violence and disease and formed the core of the societies that populated the Barbarian World.

  ONE

  HUNTERS, FISHERS, FARMERS AND METALWORKERS

  To begin to describe the Barbarian World, we need to pick a starting point in the European portion of the grand narrative of the human experience. This point will be arbitrary, and it could have been just as valid to start millennia earlier or centuries later. For now, however, we begin the story on Salisbury Plain in southern England around 2300 BC. During the third millenium BC, people were converging in this region, which later took the historical name of Wessex, to experience a remarkable ceremonial landscape, of which Stonehenge is but one element. We have come to know some of the people who lived there through their skeletons and the offerings buried with them. Archaeologists call one of them the ‘Amesbury Archer’, and we begin the Barbarian story with him.

  The Archer’s story

  In 2002, archaeologists conducting a routine investigation where a school was planned at Amesbury in southern England, about 5 kilometres (3 mi.) south of Stonehenge, found the grave of an adult male surrounded by artefacts, lying on its left side with the head pointed northeast.1 By the skeleton were sixteen triangular arrowheads and two wrist-guards, flat pieces of stone tied to the wrist to protect it from a bowstring. This is typical archery equipment of this period, and thus the man became known as the Amesbury Archer. In addition to arrowheads and wrist-guards, lying beside his skeleton were three copper knives, five ceramic vessels, four boars’ tusks and two enigmatic gold ornaments thought to be hair or ear decorations.

  Reconstruction of the burial of the Amesbury Archer, in the Salisbury Museum.

  The Archer’s bones and teeth were full of information. His skeleton lay in a crouched position. He was between 35 and 45 years old and stood about 1.75 metres (5 ft 9 in
.) tall. A knee injury earlier in life crippled him until his death. Carbon-14 dating of the Archer’s bones indicated he died between 2400 and 2300 BC.

  Oxygen and strontium isotopes in the Archer’s teeth provided information about where he grew up. Tooth enamel forms in childhood and takes in oxygen and strontium from food and drinking water. The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 is higher in warmer climates than in colder climates. Strontium isotope ratios are derived from the local geological structure, and the ratio of strontium-87 to strontium-86 differs geographically.2 Together, oxygen and strontium isotope ratios record where an individual spent his or her childhood. The isotopic evidence indicates that the Archer spent his childhood and perhaps teenage years in central Europe, probably in the foothills of the Alps in southern Germany or Switzerland, because the oxygen isotopes indicate an area colder than England, but the strontium isotopes exclude most northern areas. Although we have an idea where his tooth enamel formed, and thus probably where he was born, we do not know the route the Archer took to reach England or how long he lived there before he died.

  Archaeologists call the ceramic vessels in the Archer’s grave ‘Bell Beakers’, which were found throughout central and western Europe during the final centuries of the third millennium BC. Bell Beakers are highly decorated, handle-less drinking cups that resemble an upturned bell. They are typically found in graves like that of the Archer: a single, crouched male with arrowheads, wrist-guards and often copper tools and gold ornaments. Interestingly, the copper in the Archer’s knives came from western France or northern Spain, consistent with the distribution of Bell Beakers in Atlantic Europe.