Andrew Sherratt offers a mind-bending explanation of the origins of farming
It is an ironic fact that in the 1960s, when many of today's younger professors were, well, mildly spaced out, the predominant interpretation of the prehistoric past was couched in terms of economic pressure, intensification and stress. Today, however, when our lives are characterised by, well, economic pressure, intensification and stress, we are beginning to see the possibility that our ancestors indulged in the consumption of mind-bending drugs.
The particular drug for which we now have evidence is hyoscyamine, which occurs in certain members of the Solanaceae. Yes, gardeners, the Solanaceae - the potato family. This one division of the plant kingdom has produced more mind-altering substances than any other. The nightshades, of course, are close relatives; and so are the mandrake, thorn-apple and various kinds of tobacco, as well as the pitcheri which Australian aborigines put behind their ears, where it diffuses transdermally like a nicotene patch.
The various members of this family have led a privileged life in human usage of the vegetable world, and some have even had a religious significance. Thorn-apple, for instance, was sacred to the Aztecs, who made decorated pots in the shape of its fruits to hold its powerful products; and the related species, Jimsonweed, was widely used in eastern North America in the early contact period as part of initiation ceremonies.
A plant of this family has now been associated with a set of cultic paraphernalia long recognised as typical of British Neolithic religion: Grooved Ware pottery, and the sort of ritual structures with which it is often associated. These folks, with their astronomical alignments and ceremonial enclosures, surely are the nearest prehistoric equivalents to 1960s hippies; and in Scotland, we can now put a name to the mind-bending drug these Neolithic hippies used: it was henbane, Hyoscyamus niger.
Why henbane? I was talking last year to a Danish Viking specialist who had excavated a lady buried in the cemetery of the Viking fortress of Fyrkat with a belt-pouch containing over 100 seeds of this plant; and she remarked that it was traditionally used in Jutland in chicken-stealing, to stun the intended victims. Ah, I cried, hence the English name: henbane, like wolfsbane or cowbane, is potentially poisonous to certain species; but can be taken by humans in limited amounts, and with psychotropic properties. These are the kinds of plants long known as the Saturnian herbs, and associated with witchcraft or the esoteric knowledge of monks. The witches' phantom flight on a broomstick (for the ointments can be effectively diffused transdermally through the vaginal membranes) is thus a version of the old shamanic spirit-flight, in which the shaman visits the realm of the dead and may even accompany the souls of the departed. So it is perhaps not coincidence that the first prehistoric European evidence should come from a timber enclosure interpreted as part of a mortuary structure.
The structure in question is one of two long rectangular enclosures from a site with an extended existence as a ritual centre: Balfarg/Balbirnie in Fife, which was excavated in the 1980s by Gordon Barclay and Christopher Russell-White. Already the archaeological evidence was shouting loudly about mysteries and the dead: the structures may have been used for the exposure of corpses, and the vessels which contained the (surely) ritual meals were carefully collected and buried as if (in the words of one ceramic specialist) `ritually charged and dangerous'. How literally this metaphor might be taken was revealed in the botanical report which found remains of henbane in a lump of carbonised porridge adhering to one of the sherds. Here was an esoteric knowledge worth possessing: how much to fly to heaven with the souls of the dead, and how much more for a one-way ticket with no return.
Fascinating, you say; but not part of the really important story that archaeology can tell, like how farming was introduced to Britain, or how it was discovered at all. Or is it? Those native Australians I mentioned had no agriculture, but still went miles for pitcheri, and traded it for hundreds of miles further. Native Americans got to know their flora, and I don't suppose the potato was the plant which first engaged their attention. The Near Eastern groups which pioneered farming no doubt had other things on their minds besides cereals. All these people went the extra mile not because they needed the calories, but because they wanted the special effects which they got from certain sorts of plants.
The beginning of farming probably wasn't a planned exercise in raising calorific productivity, but more likely a matter of swapping around certain valuable plants with special products, which then led on to the practice of `growing your own' with some less exciting but carbohydrate-rich species. Food for thought, anyway.
Dr Andrew Sherratt teaches archaeology at Oxford University. The book Consuming Habits, eds Sherratt, Goodman and Lovejoy, was published by Routledge last year.
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