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Why is Waulud's Bank empty? (Pre-History)
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Mick Harper
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This bears out what I keep droning on about: the best place to find paradigm errors is in the most basic of texts. I don't know who or when C L Mathews was but you can be sure he is speaking the purest orthodoxy. This is either because he is an amateur enthusiast and takes the minutest care to be pedantically correct, or he is an academic "simplifying for the masses".

If you read (tried to read) this same material in an academic monograph, you would never spot any of these errors because
a) they would be lost in the verbiage and
b) the writer would, probably unconsciously, hide the facts.

So, for instance, the specialist would never make the crass solecism

bringing their Celtic language with them. It is not known when this was - writing was unknown to them, so they left no record

because, although it is true, the writer would understand that it renders his entire argument ridiculous. He would ensure that the two parts appeared separately, so the reader (unless an Applied Epistemologist whose only interest is in spotting such things) would never make the connection.

By the way, "Puddlehill" may be significant. There are lots of Puddle- places in Dorset (changed from Piddle- in Victorian times) and they are associated with dewponds i.e. puddles at the tops of hills. However, it is also possible that the hearth is an iron foundry since "puddling" is some process--can't remember what--in iron smelting.
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Ray



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However, it is also possible that the hearth is an iron foundry since "puddling" is some process--can't remember what--in iron smelting.

The same occurred to me, but then I remembered that iron requires such a high melting-point that

a) a domestic stove/hearth could not have reached a high enough temperature
b) the roundhouse would become too hot for comfort if it did.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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I don't know who or when C L Mathews was...

Les Matthews, 1910 - 1989, founded the Manshead Archaeological Society "in 1951 in order to excavate, record and study the archaeological remains of Dunstable and surrounding countryside. This book is the record of its work to date." (Pub. 1963, 1989.)

(They're the bunch who recently said they knew where Boudicca copped it, on the A5. I think they were very nearly right.)

By the way, "Puddlehill" may be significant...

Interesting. It's on top of the last ridge right above Watling Street where it exits the Chilterns. Just across the road is Sewell, where "one of the earliest objects of bronze to be found in this country" was excavated. (The quarry at Sewell trimmed an edge off Maiden Bower.)
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DPCrisp


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He would've said if there were signs of smelting, since he does say of a nearby Bronze Age site
"the Society found a circle of postholes showing where his hut had stood, and nearby [not inside] a small pit dug into the chalk that had been subjected to great heat. The chalk of the pit had been burnt to a depth of 12 cm. This could only have been caused by forced heat such as that produced by bellows."

Back on Puddlehill, he says
"more of these hearths, used by later settlers on the site, were also found scattered around the hilltop. These were round pits up to 2 m in diameter sunk approximately 35 cm deep in the chalk. In the centre of each pit there were usually signs of burning, and in two of them we found large broken saddle querns which had apparently been used as hob stones. If you sat on the ground with your feet in the pit, they provided quite a comfortable position for cooking, [which is more-or-less what I was thinking] and with a matting windbreak and a log backrest, would be a suitable place to leave the old folk to tend the family stewpot!" [which goes a bit further than what I was thinking].

No "chalk burnt to a depth" this time...
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Mick Harper
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This really does bring a central tenet of THOBR into focus. If THOBR is right, and everyone is living in nuclear families, in ordinary houses, in ordinary villages, using ordinary hearths, then what Les is talking about (indeed what every archaeologist is talking about) is "special sites".

In other words, these hearth-builders are large(ish)itinerant(ish) folk. Drovers spring to mind. But they might be solstice pilgrims attending the local megalithic ceremonies. Or iron smelters exploiting a small outcrop. Or megalithic Robin Hood and his Merry Men. But it's not the way ordinary people live. Ever. Anywhere.

Even medieval iron foundries were small enough to (almost) be mistakable for domestic hearths. Do we know how Iron Age iron was made? Come to that do we know anything very much about Iron Age domestic hearths? Since archaeologists are convinced that Iron Age people lived in hippy communes, I presume their domestic hearths must have been built on a fairly heroic scale. You're a wife and mother, Ray, what does cooking for thirty people all living in a "long house" entail?
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Ray



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Since archaeologists are convinced that Iron Age people lived in hippy communes, I presume their domestic hearths must have been built on a fairly heroic scale. You're a wife and mother, Ray, what does cooking for thirty people all living in a "long house" entail?

We mustn't forget that Archaeologists have overlooked the well-known fact that since time immemorial and almost up to the present day people had summer and winter homes.

In the summer they drove their flocks up the hills or into the marshes (Somerset) and lived in flimsy ad hoc homes.

In the winter they brought their flocks back to the sheltered valley where their permanent rectangular home was built. Few if any of these are available for inspection as unlike the roundhouse tent-style homes they were in locations that were popular enough to be built upon over and over again.

The 8,000 year old grain rectangular stores that are being unearthed all over the land are proof that they were quite capable then of building solid homes. Furthermore, I've at last managed to establish that the submerged houses in the Scillies are all rectangular.

So forget the longhouse and the cooking for thirty. This was just summer holiday arrangement.
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DPCrisp


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Hmm. How early d'you reckon ordinary village life would have been established, Mick?

More on domestic arrangements to follow, but

i) the older finds are concentrated on the ridges: which would be out of the way of the farmed fields below; but would also be out of the way of the villages (which have yet to be dug up) I s'pose...

ii) round houses are pretty substantial and long-lived, though, aren't they? Foot-thick posts, multiple layers of hearths...

iii) the refuse is light on large animal bones: because the mature bones were put to use?; because these itinerants didn't have access to the farmed animals, but occasionally nabbed a young-un?

Remember, we've probably got Celts lording it over the English for a while... and eventually some kinda rebellion...
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DPCrisp


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A few gems from Ancient Dunstable by C L Matthews...

3. An Iron Age round house was excavated on the quarry's edge at Puddlehill (and reconstructed at the Chiltern Open Air Museum). Near the centre were two hearth pits and a clay oven. Intersecting and leading away from the clay oven was a "sausage-shaped depression" about 2.4 x 0.8 m [ not a pit or a trench, notice, just a depression ], of which he says

"The sausage-shaped hollow is a feature often found in the houses of these people. Its use is unknown, but it may have been lined with hides to hold water, either for washing or for some form of domestic processing - it is anyone's guess."

I finally scanned the picture from the book {Apologies for the picture quality: I blame my tools.}:



Feature 'A': is it not obviously where stuff was raked out of the oven (D) time and time again?

I remember this picture drawn on the blackboard at school when we did local history, but I didn't understand what I was looking at all.

Matthews says "the path of flint cobbles leading to the hearth seems to suggest that the Iron Age housewife did not appreciate muddy boots fouling the rush or hide-strewn floor. It is true to say that these early people practised hygiene. They took the trouble to build latrine pits (E and F on the plan)."

Apart from being unbearably patronising, "these early people" is telling.

Notice that the latrines are on the west side of the house: the "dead" side. Iron Age roundhouse doorways are almost always on the east side, facing the Sun. Lo and behold, doubled-up post holes 9 & 10 are facing east, with a row of post holes (13, 14, 15) apparently forming a baffle about a yard inside the door. The cobbled floor sure doesn't seem to be leading to the door!
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Mick Harper
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Talking of latrines, Puddlehill may well be a Victorian euphemism for Piddle Hill (at any rate this is what happened to Puddletown and lots of other Puddle- places in the Piddle valley in Dorset.) Why is this important? Because urine was just about the most valuable chemical resource available to "early people" and the site looks to me quite obviously an industrial rather than a domestic site.
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admin
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For technical reasons, we sometimes have difficulty transferring pix over from the Questsite along with the written material. Anybody noticing their wondrous effusions lack a pic should stick the original one in. Either anew or (if you can find it) from your original post on the Quest site.
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DPCrisp


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"Blah, blah... Emmer, Spelt, Celtic beans... blah, blah... milk, cheese, goats, cattle... blah, blah. Britain at this time must have been well stocked with wild animals, but the people were not hunters and few meal bones of wild animals have been found in their refuse pits."

"Blah, blah... loom weights and spindle whorls."


Doesn't sound particularly itinerant or on-the-fringe? Mind you, the one plough-share found in a pit might have been one they nicked, rather than one they used...

---

"They have left us very few iron objects. If they had been there, we would undoubtedly found them since iron seems to survive very well in chalk subsoil. The inference is that iron was a commodity only acquired by bartering {Definitely no signs of iron smelting round here then?}, and people living on such a meagre economy have very little surplus for trade with the travelling 'tinkers'."

Or maybe, iron being valuable and infinitely recyclable, their iron is still in use today.

---

Get this.

"Simple flint scrapers and knives were found mixed with their rubbish, but these might have been left behind on the ground by earlier Neolithic or Bronze Age peoples."

But then

"The Iron Age farmers could world work flint with skill when required {Surely, that can't be true?} as is shown by the number of round hammer stones found. {Huh?} These were fashioned from flint to make perfectly round balls that vary from the size of a tangerine to that of a cricket ball. What they were used for we do not know but they were thrown away after the whole of the surface had been bruised by hammering. They were so common that they must have been in almost daily use, possibly for striking fire. To control the sparks a definite point of impact would be needed which could be obtained by using a spherical ball gripped firmly in the palm of the hand. By twisting the ball slightly a new striking point could be obtained for each blow."

Well, he contradicts himself at the end there because, clearly, a smooth ball is what's left of a lump of flint after all the "definite points of impact" have been knocked off and it can now be thrown away.
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Mick Harper
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The real source of all the trouble is that pre-historians have this absurd view about pre-historic people. When anthropology got going, "primitive" people were universally hanging around in small groups living nomadic lives in (at best) temporary shelters. This was entirely because by the ninetenth century, when anthropology got going, the only parts of the world still occupied by primitive people were a) deserts and b) rain forests, where conditions are such that you have to live in small groups, living nomadic lives in (at best) temporary shelters.

Anyway the anthropologists told the pre-historians exactly how "primitive people" lived and so the whole idiotic "hunter-gatherer" myth was born. It never occurs to these cretins that "hunting" and "gathering" is just about the most inefficent means of staying alive anybody ever thought of which is why only people living in deserts and rainforests actually go in for it.

Everybody sensible lives in normal, temperate places where there are large all-year-round food stores available. And the only thing you "gather" is vast agglomerations of shellfish or similar, and the only thing you "hunt" is by trapping small game.

You also live in large groups, in villages, in permanent family dwellings. Which is handy if you want to go in for the only efficient form of hunting (as opposed to recreational hunting) which is driving herds over cliffs. The point being that humans are intensely social animals who like nothing more than their home comforts, and only live in isolated small groups and keep on the move when they absolutely have to.

As soon as domesticated animals came in, all the problems were solved (with a bit of transhumance on Ray's model thrown in if necessary, but mostly it's not necessary). Ditto, with knobs on, when cereal cultivation was introduced.

But no, it was too late, the pre-historians were stuck with their noble savages eking out a lonely existence so you get this ridiculous picture either of drovers endlessly on the move or isolated "Celtic" farmsteads. Ah, poor dears. Even when civilisation comes along, we get the same picture. Apparently everyone's now living in lonely, isolated Roman villae! It's only when some weird bunch of barbarians take over (in our case the Anglo-Saxons) that we get villages. It's so-o-o ludicrous.

But of course the pre-historians keep turning up all these high-status big-jobs where lots of people seem to live. Of course they do, but thanks to the Noble Savage myth, it never seems to occur to pre-historians that EVERY goddamn society that ever existed needs Big Jobs littering the landscape. It's where the Big Knobs hang out, you know the people running the show or did you think our forefathers really were hippies, capable of conducting unstructured societies? As a denizen of many hippy communes in my time, I can report that hippy communes last about five years whereas pre-historic cultures tend more to the five thousand year time-scale.
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DPCrisp


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It never occurs to these cretins that "hunting" and "gathering" is just about the most inefficent means of staying alive anybody ever thought of which is why only people living in deserts and rainforests actually go in for it.

Surely hunting/gathering is the norm for every other form of life on Earth! It's the state of nature from which we've diverged only slightly. It's only a matter of how much effort goes into the hunting and the gathering, how far afield you have to go, what you look for, what you do about variety and competition... Ants do some farming... but it's only another form of symbiosis.

And cutting with the other edge, that means cultivation, forest management and stuff are indefinitely old.

There are simple facts of the matter as to what ancient lifestyles were like... the tricky part is finding out what they were. The key thing is human sociability. I moaned on GHMB once that everyone talks as though small bands of people set off into the great unknown, never to see or be seen again; but then managed to convene an annual shag-fest! (The problem throughout the study of history is that people in the past are not treated simply as people.) People live together-and-apart.

The question remains at what point did Britons start structuring their settlements in the now-familiar way? Whether or not farming is the norm is surely a big determinant of the sizes and locations of the settlements.

Why are you so sure that farming is a better way of life, Mick? People sure seemed to have suffered for it when it started. (Which to me is proof of a near-death experience.)

You also live in large groups, in villages, in permanent family dwellings.

Among primates, brain size correlates to troupe size {Social interaction is the most complex thing anyone ever has to do.} so human-ness is certainly founded on the largest of social groups {Neanderthals had bigger brains...}, but why permanent, necessarily?

Which is handy if you want to go in for the only efficient form of hunting (as opposed to recreational hunting) which is driving herds over cliffs.

Since when is recreational-style hunting (and trapping and fishing...) not sufficient? How is herding over cliffs efficient? And where is it applicable?

it never seems to occur to pre-historians that EVERY goddamn society that ever existed needs Big Jobs littering the landscape. It's where the Big Knobs hang out, you know the people running the show or did you think our forefathers really were hippies, capable of conducting unstructured societies?

All these reality TV shows, especially the one on the Scottish island, annoy me by suggesting that "everyone has to do their share of everything", which means forcing people to do what they loathe and are bad at and preventing them indulging (taking advantage of) their preferences (i.e. doing their fair share). Majority rule is clearly demonstrated not to work. Specialisms and hierarchy are obvious from the beginning.
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DPCrisp


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I saw an episode of Extreme Archaeology, where they risked their lives in the mud flats of the Wye (second largest tidal range in the world: 12 metres) to get a sample for dating from a pile in a bridge pier.

The result was remarkably flippant:

i) No dendrochronology date because this tree was "recording a micro-climate".

ii) Carbon date: 60 - 70 AD, "which tells us that the Romans crossed into Wales at Chepstow".

Big sigh.
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DPCrisp


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In the one bit of Ray Mears I saw the other night, he said the archaeological record shows that ancient Britons used stinging nettle fibres to bind arrow heads to shafts.

So much for nettles being brought by the Romans as a food crop then!
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