Issue 76

May 2004

Contents

news

Avebury older than Stonehenge - and the ring gets bigger

Small town, big archaolagy

Is Viking ship under hedge?

Rare henge builders' homes revealed

In Brief

features

My Lord Essex
Exclusive report on the unique Anglo-Saxon chamber tomb

Old stones and the sea
Joanna Wright and Kate Seddon consider island prehistory

Riding into history
Angela Boyle reveals details of the latest chariot burial

The folk that lived in Liverpool
European capital of culture with a rich heritage

So tyger fierce took life away
Sarah Cross reflects on a souvenir pottery mug

letters

War graves, community archarology and metal detectors

opinion

Gordon Noble writes

spoilheap

Neil Mortimer rocks with Anglo-Saxon scholar

books

The Celts: Origins, Myths & Inventions by John Collis

Defying Rome: the Rebels of Roman Britain by Guy de la Bédoyère

Environmental Archaeology: Approaches, Techniques & Applications by Keith Wilkinson & Chris Stevens

Landscapes & Desire: Revealing Britain's Sexually Inspired Sites by Catherine Tuck & Alun Bull

Food, Culture & Identity in the Neolithic & Early Bronze Age by Mike Parker Pearson

Celts from Antiquity by Gillian Carr & Simon Stoddart and Megaliths from Antiquity by Tim Darvill & Caroline Malone

Life & Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda & its People by Alan K Bowman

The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Worthy Park, Kingsworthy by Sonia Chadwick Hawkes with Guy Grainger

Boundaries in Early Medieval Britain by David Griffiths, Andrew Reynolds & Sarah Semple

Sealed by Time: the Loss & Recovery of the Mary Rose by Peter Marsden

Piltdown Man: the Secret Life of Charles Dawson & the World’s Greatest Archaeological Hoax by Miles Russell

Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott

CBA update

my archaeology

Ray Mears is moved by aboriginal Britain

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

my archaeology

A passion for ancestors

Ray Mears found an Australian visit changed his perception of the British landscape

Growing up on the North Downs in Surrey, I wanted to know how to live as an aboriginal of Mesolithic Britain. Today people would call that field archaeology, but to me it wasn’t. Archaeology smacked of stuffy Victorian halls, and cases, bending over on your knees scraping on the ground.

I wanted to know how our ancestors saw the land. It’s a question I’m still asking: I don’t know all the answers. That passion I still have, it still burns deeply within me.

I look at our ancestors and I see scientists. Those people had a need: they made an observation; they came up with a hypothesis; they tested it and if it worked they followed it.

I had to figure out a lot of things for myself. One was the use of stinging nettle fibres for cordage. All the literature said you had to ret the fibres and then comb them, basically an industrial process. I went out into the woods and I thought, this is nonsense.

This was very early in my learning, long before I had worked with aboriginal groups, and seen how directly they interact with their environment. In my own way, that’s what I was doing. I played with a nettle, and I learnt how you could strip out the fibres that you needed to make the cordage in a few seconds with just your hands.

Flint working became an absolute passion. But it’s one thing to make the tool, it’s another thing to actually live with it. I’ve gone out and spent periods of time living with just stone tools. When Ötzi, this body in the Alps was found, I reconstructed the tools that he had. I read Konrad Spindler’s assessment of what he had with him, and I laughed, because if he had lived with the fungi and the cordage that the man had, he would have known the answers. That knowledge still exists, it’s still alive. But if you only study in a university or in a college, you don’t have access to that.

People tend to describe everything as being of spiritual significance, with very little evidence. I’ve seen a lot of that in recent archaeology. But why? You never hear anyone say, ‘this was a Neolithic fairground’. But we know people traded. When people trade, they get together, they like to party. Our culture and the culture of the past are not so dissimilar. There are certain basic human needs.

The anthropology of today is the archaeology of tomorrow. The time that became most obvious to me was working with some Aboriginal people in the deserts of Australia. After a long period, they started to reveal their spiritual beliefs, which was what I wanted to see, because this is an intrinsic part of their survival in a very physical way.

We went out with a woman in her eighties. We came to this cave where we couldn’t film, but we were able to explore—amazing art on the walls, very sacred. This woman remembered camping there as a child. I was looking round the base of this massive boulder outside, and there were these little chips of flaked quartz. She said that was my grandfather, and she could remember the day when he did that.

And she said when she was a little girl she used to climb up on this big boulder and her mother used to say to her, ‘Come down, or you’ll fall and hurt yourself’. If I had walked there and seen those flaked chips without that woman, what would I have read? Now when I go to sites in Britain where people rock climb, where we know that our ancestors stopped at, I look at those rocks and I see children climbing over them, and their mothers just as they would today, saying, come down or you’ll fall and hurt yourself.

I don’t know, I think that’s quite important.

Essential Bushcraft (£9.99) is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
Ray Mears talked to Mike Pitts

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