Issue 71

July 2003

Contents

news

New Neolithic settlements found on Orkney

Medieval double watermill found at Stafford

Iron Age hilltop ‘town’ found at Margate

Prehistoric landscape of settlement, ritual and magic

Coins reveal how Hannibal bankrupted the Romans

In Brief

features

Underground warfare
Ken Wiggins on the archaeology of mines and countermines

Great sites
David Gaimster on the importance of Henry VIII's flagship

Islands in the Neolithic
Gordon Noble on how farming came to Britain via its islands

Tale of the limpet
Caroline Wickham-Jones on a shellfish with a long history

letters

Roman burials, medieval fields, and Saxons in Scotland

issues

George Lambrick on the looting of antiquities in Iraq

Peter Ellis

On archaeology and today's mentality of hurry, hurry, hurry

books

A History of Childhood by Colin Heywood

Conserving landscapes reviewed by Christopher Catling

Roman Lincoln by MJ Jones

Farming in the First Millennium AD by Peter Fowler

CBA update

favourite finds

Paul Pettitt on an antiquarian book found in a junkshop

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Simon Denison

Medieval fields

From Mr Michael Thomson

Sir: Your news report on Sue Oosthuizen's most recent work on the field patterns in South-West Cambridgeshire was welcome in helping to show that there are other ways of understanding the past than excavations and finds.

As to specifics, many parish boundaries across the parts of England that had open-field agriculture exhibit the shallow zig-zag pattern that Ms Oosthuizen's parishes show, which is traditionally said to reflect fossilized open-field strips. I also know of at least one such boundary, on the West Middlesex claylands, where the estates either side were in different hundreds in 1086. This combination may indicate the antiquity of the system in question, but there could be other reasons.

All pre-Inclosure maps show open field systems at or near the end of their possible 1,000-year life. Yet manorial extents from the 1200s onwards often indicate considerable changes in the area of the lord of the manor's demesne and its management. Some pre-Inclosure maps indicate consolidation of strips in demesne, even though these remained 'open' in terms of being available for common winter pasture. Such consolidation may also have been combined with the nibbling away of earlier boundary baulks of waste land, although land hunger in the early 1300s may also have contributed. These could have helped produce the shallow zig-zags shown on parish boundaries when they were first officially mapped over the period 1750-1840.

This process may not have operated in South-West Cambridgeshire. I simply make the point that relatively late reorganisation may be the reason for some zig-zag parish and hundred boundaries.

Yours sincerely,
Michael Thomson
Gerrards Cross, Bucks
16 March

Scots and English

From Dr Alex Woolf

Sir: Doug Tankard refers to the inability of the team from the tv programme 'Blood of the Vikings' to distinguish between the Scots and English on the basis of dna tests (Letters, May), and asks 'is it suggested that the natives of Caledonia were also driven out by Anglo-Saxons?'

Leaving aside the fact that Caledonia is an 18th century fantasy (the Caledones were a single tribe inhabiting an area roughly equivalent to Highland Perthshire), the answer to this question may well be yes. A very large proportion of the most populous parts of Scotland - roughly equivalent to the modern regions of Dumfries & Galloway, Lothian and Borders - were for several hundred years part of 'Anglo-Saxon England' and retained their Anglian character, by and large, even after the political hegemony of first Strathclyde and then Alba extended over them in the 10th and 11th centuries.

On top of this all of Scotland's medieval burghs were founded with colonists raised in eastern England, Flanders and the low-countries in the 12th and 13th centuries. The decline in Gaelic in the eastern lowlands north of the Forth is largely the result of the gradual extension of urban hinterlands between about 1150 and 1450. It is therefore extremely likely that a very high proportion of Scots are of Anglo-Saxon descent - though we must remember that genetic descent is not unilineal, and like most people in Britain today the Scots can probably mostly claim descent from Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic forebears.

Moreover, many of the difficulties in isolating English genetic traces probably result from the fact that Irish and Scottish people have flooded into England over the last four or five hundred years and most English people probably have at least some Gaelic-speaking ancestors.

About a quarter of all adults, in traditional high-fertility high-mortality societies, do not produce children who reach breeding age. This results in the paradox that although the population of Britain has been growing at an exponential rate since late prehistory (with the odd hiccup like the Black Death), the proportion of prehistoric people from whom we are descended is exponentially decreasing. Despite the current fad for referring to prehistoric people as 'our ancestors' the vast majority of them are not the ancestors of anyone living today.

John Collis's remarks (Letters, May) about the caution we should exercise when reading the past from modern dna studies are extremely sensible. We need far more tests on modern people and we need to build up a statistically valid sample of ancient dna identities before we can begin to draw any sensible conclusions.

Yours sincerely,
Alex Woolf
University of St Andrews
20 April

Roman burials

From Mr Bernard Mulholland

Sir: I found Alison Taylor's article ('Burial with the Romans', March) rewarding, but I wonder whether it might be useful to investigate burial practice in Roman Britain by analysing texts produced by the more literate members of the Roman Empire, for example in the Middle East. The Babylonian Talmud, for instance, deals with the period from 600 BC to 500 AD and is as good a place to begin as any.

Ms Taylor describes bodies which were 'weighted down with large stones'. The Babylonian Talmud describes stoning as a means of execution exercised by the Beth din, carried out in the following way. The victim was pushed into a pit about 6 cubits deep, roughly two to three times their own height, by the first witness to the crime. If they fell face down, they were turned over so as to face upwards. If the fall had not actually killed them then the second witness would throw a stone down onto their chest. If this also failed to kill the victim, the crowd would stone them until they were dead.

Criminals were marked beyond the grave by having their means of execution buried with them, and even those who were excommunicated by the Beth din were marked by having a stone placed on the coffin. These explanations of burial practices sound more plausible to me than the idea that stones were placed on a body to stop spirits from wandering after death.

It is also clear that the process of decay was thought to be harmful to the dead, and the action of worms in the corpse were thought to be as painful as a needle to the living flesh. This may be a reason why bodies were placed in shallow temporary graves, so as to speed up the process of decay.

Yours sincerely,
Bernard Mulholland
Portadown, Co Armagh
7 March

Magic jewellery

From Dr Norman Hammond

Sir: Alison Sheridan's 'Supernatural Power Dressing' (May 2003) notes that jet and amber were used from the Early Bronze Age onwards, and that in historical times were believed magical, perhaps because of their electrostatic property.

Both substances were also especially associated with women in folklore, and it is interesting that, as she says, most necklaces including jet or amber found in graves were with female burials.

We can go a little further, however. The similarities between Early Bronze Age spacer-plate necklaces made from jet and amber suggest that these materials were considered equivalent, linked by their weird properties.

Some necklaces also used what are usually called 'shale' beads; and there is one variety of shale, sapropelite, related to cannel coal, which also takes up static electricity. It would be interesting to examine the shale necklace components and see if they are indeed sapropelite, and if so, whether they are from women's graves.

Were this to be the case, there would be good grounds for suspecting that the folklore linking such electrostatic substances with women has deep roots in prehistory.

Yours faithfully,
Norman Hammond
Harlton, Cambridge
16 April

We welcome letters from readers. They may be emailed to Mike Pitts the Editor at editor@britarch.ac.uk or faxed to 01904 671384. They may be edited.

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