Digging up Britain: ten discoveries, a million years of history

Time and Mind The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtam20 Digging up Britain: ten discoveries, a million years of history Rob Ixer To cite this article: Rob Ixer (2020) Digging up Britain: ten discoveries, a million years of history, Time and Mind, 13:2, 214-216, DOI: 10.1080/1751696X.2020.1765467 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2020.1765467 Published online: 18 May 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 14 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtam20 214 BOOK REVIEWS has performed important work in taking the study of Thor away from vague speculation about origins and back to the texts themselves. Reference Hall, A. 2007. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Jeremy Harte Bourne Hall Museum bhallmuseum@gmail.com © 2020 Jeremy Harte https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2020.1765466 Digging up Britain: ten discoveries, a million years of history, by Mike Pitts, London, Thames & Hudson, 2019, 304 pp., £24.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780500051900 Editor of the bimonthly magazine British Archaeology since seemingly forever, Mike Pitts has been privy for decades to all the archaeological news, feuds and gossip in Britain, and sometimes an active participant. More importantly, as an accomplished and respected excavator and researcher, mainly within the Stonehenge Landscape, he is routinely given free access to sites as they are being dug. It would be counter-productive for a site director to do otherwise; research funding is so tight that timely, positive and continuous publicity is essential to maintain a chance in the dogged competition for grants. Pitts, therefore, has a profound insider’s understanding of what has such importance that ‘it will rewrite history’: this must be archaeology’s equivalent of the ‘journeys’ we hear about on reality shows, less the intense lip trembling. Digging up Britain is his take on this century’s current journey. It is a very fair take, a personal one, but its running gag (aDNA proves many outside incursions onto our precious islands) is of its time. Had it been written ten, even five years ago, the central themes and concerns would have been quite different. Unlike geology, whose last great paradigm shift (plate tectonics) was fifty years ago, archaeology regularly juggles its spinning plates. Carbon14 dating led to the ‘New Archaeology’; at the turn of the last century, stable metal isotopes, especially those of lead, revolutionised archaeometallurgy; more recently non-metal isotopes on organic matter, including hominin bone, have fleshed out humanity’s lives, tastes and spatial movements. But perhaps – it is still far too early to tell – the most earthshaking of all are recent abundant DNA and aDNA analyses. These have totally changed our views on mankind, its evolution, rise, spread and role. Much of this (but sadly almost no archaeometallurgy and not much provenancing of material culture) is given context and explained by Pitts using ten example sites, ranging in age from an eleventh-century burial pit overlooking Weymouth filled with chopped-up Vikings, to the footsteps of the earliest hominins to walk our Norfolk beaches, almost one million years ago ‘in a country very different from our own’. TIME AND MIND 215 In addition to those two, his choices include some obvious, highly publicised, members of the archaeological first eleven – Stonehenge, the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard, and Must Farm – plus the less public but archaeologically wellknown locations of Star Carr, Cheddar Caves and Roman London. It is surprising that the discovery of Richard III and the subsequent use of mitochondrial DNA from modern descendants to match and prove the identity of his body is not given a chapter. Certainly, it would be on most other people’s lists, but his 2015 book Digging for Richard: The Search for the Lost King may have exhausted Pitts’ interest in that monarch. There are few other omissions. The well-publicised Ness of Brodgar is spectacular as are the slightly known Yorkshire Iron Age chariot burials; it may still be too early to give those a good summary. But lists are personal and this is a decent one. Pitts has been working at Stonehenge for years and because the site is ever newsworthy – is there anywhere, other than the Pyramids, more systematically abused by the writings of cranks and experts? – he devotes a chapter to its origins. This is the most personal part of the book, and Pitts enters one of the (many) central controversies: why is solstice-aligned Stonehenge exactly where it is? He dismisses the incipient ‘Mesolithic Folk Memory’ myth: aDNA suggests that by the early Neolithic, ‘Mesolithic genes’ were rare in Britain. Much as American and Australian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history shows us what happened to hunter-gatherers when meeting more sedentary and technologically sophisticated people, so Mesolithic genes disappeared from the mainstream. Rather, Pitts suggests that the siting of Stonehenge is a chance. Chance has been an explanation before, the solstice-alignment of Ice Age rills in the local chalk is a popular and enticing suggestion, but Pitts favours the natural juxtaposition of local sarsen blocks, citing the pits that once may have held them. One lies next to the Heelstone, an orthostat that Pitts is very familiar with and another lies close to the centre of the circle. It just happened that ‘the two pits with their half buried stones lay roughly on the solstice axis’. His idea, as good as any, should be seen as part of a general upswelling of interest in sarsens that may or may not have existed within the Stonehenge Landscape. He is helping to move the bluestones downstage for a while, out of the academic spotlight. ‘Cannibals’, an exploration of Mesolithic cannibalism at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar, was perhaps the chapter least to be expected from the former editor of The Stones Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes from Stones Restaurant. Evidence for the practice seems clear and a raft of ideas for cannibalism is floated, although it is hard to swallow the suggestion that it was human-defining high art: perhaps it was, in the hands of Gericault. Pitts uses the chapter to comment on a later inhabitant of the cave, the blue-eyed swarthy Cheddar Man, and his portrayal in the popular press as an English icon. The last historical chapter, ‘The Elephant Hunters’ (reminiscent of Jean Auel’s The Mammoth Hunters, though that was set in much later times and with a different hominin species), introduces the problems of accurately dating colder climate stadials and warmer interstadials within the Ice Age, and the importance of recognising lateral facies changes within a stratigraphical sequence. Timing has been and remains of the essence in archaeology. Incidentally, Clacton on Sea plays a role – there is something about that seaside resort beyond the candy floss, as it occurs in archaeology twice, once for a type of flint scatter (as in this chapter) and again for the delightfully named Neolithic RinyoClactonian Ware, sadly now known as Grooved Ware. The final polemical chapter is titled ‘Journeys’, ironically, it is to be hoped. Pitts evidently prefers to serve in heaven, as he berates the Paradise Lost/Sceptred Isle myths of British/English nationalism. Myths without any foundation have been perpetuated by the government. He rightly suggests that our ‘real ancestry’ (mixed mongrels 216 BOOK REVIEWS that we are) ‘is to be found in that wider Europe . . . and that what makes us different is the place we live, its climate, landscape and resources . . . and the particular stories buried beneath our feet’. Surely sentiments that are on the side of the angels. This book is easy to read and the well-researched science and archaeology are sandwiched between more accessible anecdotes, sub-folksy vignettes, and recollections that are rarely intrusive. They are certainly not as jarring as the chapter-separating poems, paintings and art photographs that have become such a pronounced feature of the many archaeology books intended for the interested ordinary reader. There are plenty of black and white illustrations and 22 in colour including Stonehenge and that Beaker Age superstar, the Amesbury Archer. The book remains slightly text-heavy but is informative to the end, finishing with a set of notes and suggested readings (which include primary literature) and a good index. We live, as they say, in interesting times, most closely akin perhaps to the late 1960s and early 70s. Pitts’ snapshot of the dominant themes within British archaeology is well informed and clearly demonstrates how many of them result from the application of external techniques and data, which range from electronic microscopes (sic) through fine-scale precise absolute dating, to gene-splicing. And he shows how these now influence what it now means to be human, European, British or even English, as liberally interpreted by him. This is another useful, well-written, incisive Mike Pitts book. It is a slight departure from his usual work, which is more tightly themed and sticks to one topic – a balanced Stonehenge study is overdue from him. Digging up Britain is more of an amuse-bouche. You can measure how good a popular text is by the number of occasions you put it down to google some new fact. This is full of them. It is definitely a book of its time, the miasmic influence of Brexit clouds much of the text but is a good read especially if you want to learn how archaeology is now being done and if you want to feel the current concerns of citizen archaeologists pouring forth in our new post (David) Reichian age. Rob Ixer Institute of Archaeology UCL r.ixer@btinternet.com © 2020 Rob Ixer https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2020.1765467 Engaging with the dead: exploring changing human beliefs about death, mortality and the human body, edited by Jennie Bradbury and Chris Scarre, Oxford and Philadelphia Books, 2017, 288 pp., £55 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-7857-0663-9 This pleasantly presented, large format hardback edition of the thirteenth volume in the Studies in Funerary Archaeology Series is ambitious but falls somewhat short of its claims. Based on papers given at the summative conference for the Invisible Dead project at Durham University in 2014, it presents a substantive amount of data, seeking to cover a variety of cross-disciplinary topics to ‘highlight the current viability of death studies’. However, its cross-disciplinary desires are never quite fulfilled, with a heavy archaeological bias somewhat outweighing the few other true disciplines mobilised. Whilst certain papers remain both accessible and useful to scholars in Museology and Anthropology, this is an archaeology volume for an archaeological audience.