Like many people, I had a childhood fascination for archaeology. For me, it was fuelled by many days and weeks spent hiking in Scottish and northern English landscapes where – as in parts of Ireland – neolithic settlements remained prominent: hill forts, stone circles, various kinds of tombs.
I was wrong in imagining that what I saw then was what the prehistoric people walking the same land would have seen. The bare uplands I loved are the product of centuries of sheep-farming. But I wasn’t wrong in my pleasure in the idea of continuity, in my daydreams about who had set their feet where I set mine.
It’s important to say that for me this fascination has never been about my own ancestry. Unless you and all your ancestors on both sides are now and have been living in southeast Africa, where homo sapiens first took approximate shape, for about the last 300,000 years – a low estimate; scholars differ on the number – we all descend from immigrants. A hierarchy based on who got to the North Atlantic islands first is at best inane, particularly in the context of a desire to exclude later arrivals.
So for me, the pleasure of thinking about prehistoric people was never that of laying claim to land or heritage, but the pleasure of encountering familiarity and strangeness at the same time. Neolithic bodies were like ours, and we tend to assume that the elementary experiences of pain and pleasure, hunger and satiety, fear and love are shared. But it’s a challenge to imagine the faith, music and jokes of people who leave us no words and lived so very far in time, which is one of the reasons some of my novels turn around exactly this question. How do we avoid making prehistory in our own image, how can we open ourselves to what we can’t imagine? It seems as if all kinds of excitements might lie on the other side of that strangeness.
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I was thinking about all this while spending a Sunday afternoon in the National Museum of Scotland this week. The “early people” section there is one of my favourite places in the world, not least because the modern architecture of this section of an otherwise cavernous Victorian building feels comfortable and intimate.
[ Wicklow hill fort identified as oldest prehistoric ‘proto-town’ in IrelandOpens in new window ]
I know the permanent collection well enough to wander towards my favourite cases. I love the carnyx, an Iron Age war trumpet – imagine, the music of prehistory! – but I don’t need to look at weapons, and I’m not drawn to agricultural tools. I like the kitchen implements, though as I understand it most neolithic dwellings were open-plan, cooking the central activity. I read the labels for the specificity: this object, this place, this time, but I don’t need them to explain what such things are for. The technology of the spoon has not changed in four thousand years. Bowls are bowls. My pans have handles, theirs were often suspended over the fire, but a practical modern cook would be able to meet the needs of her family using Bronze Age cooking utensils and – give or take some understandable difficulty with gas and electricity – I don’t think it would take a sensible Bronze Age cook very long to make a decent soup or stew in my kitchen.
In a case devoted to the grave goods of an Iron Age woman, there is a bead necklace I would wear myself and, somehow more moving, a few needles. The needles are a little thicker than mine, but like the spoon, the technology is unchanged. I could sew with them, she could sew with mine, and her bone needle case is very much like a Victorian ivory one I found in the drawer of my first, antique sewing machine.
I’d like to be able to conclude that maybe this clinking of spoons and needles across the millenniums suggests that human time will continue, that our species’ persistence over so many thousands of years means the present sense of doom is perhaps unjustified after all. It would be nice to think that way, but I can’t. Many people’s worlds have ended over those centuries, in horrible and unnecessary ways. The valiant domesticity of cooking and sewing is no antidote to an apocalypse, it is just that the desire for good food and pretty clothes was there at the beginning of humanity and will be with us to the end.
