Prehistoric India at Manchester Museum I: Archibald Campbell Carlyle

Cover design of British Museum occasional paper about the Carlyle collection (1994)

Manchester Museum is working on an HLF Courtyard extension project that opens in 2020, and collections curators are looking through their collections for anything that comes from the Indian subcontinent in preparation for the new South Asia Gallery. The new gallery will comprise eight ‘chapters’ ranging chronologically from prehistoric times to Partition, the diaspora  and the founding of South Asian communities in the UK, especially Manchester. All of the disciplines represented in the Museum collections are contributing to this exciting project and doubtless other curators will report in due course about what they have in their collections. In the archaeology collection it’s been an exciting journey of discovery and revelation as I began to realise how significant some of the collectors and donors represented in Manchester Museum’s collection were in the history of Indian archaeology.

Palaeolithic stone tool from the Vindhya Hills, India with a A.C.Carlyle label (Manchester Museum)

Detail of a Carlyle label (Manchester Museum)

Perhaps the most important of the collectors who gave us material from the Indian sub continent was Archibald Campbell Carlyle (1831-1897). Carlyle (or Carlleyle) was First Assistant to the Archaeological Survey of India from 1871 until his retirement in 1885.  Carlyle went to India to seek his fortune, initially as a tutor. At this time employment in the colonies offered security and career prospects. Carlyle worked in the Indian Museum in Calcutta, the Riddell Museum in Agra  and then joined the Archaeological Survey of India.  He was appointed by Alexander Cunningham (1814-1893), Director General of the Survey. The Archaeological Survey was part of the British imperial and colonial project in India, to survey, record, and catalogue the antiquities of the country in order to understand, administer and control them more effectively.  As Dilip Chakrabarti puts it: Cunningham ‘…was trying to justify the systematic archaeological exploration of India on the grounds that politically  it would help the British to rule India.’ (see Prof.Chakrabarti’s ‘The development of archaeology in the Indian subcontinent’, in World Archaeology 13.3, Feb.1982).

Upinder Sigh’s book The Discovery of Ancient India Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology (Permanent Black, 2004) and a British Museum occasional paper on The Carlyle Collection of Stone Age Artefacts from Central India by Jill Cook and Hazel Martingell (1994) provide a lot of information about Carlyle from which the following summary is extracted.

Occasional paper about the Carlyle collection at the British Museum

At a time when Cunningham and the other assistants were understandably preoccupied by ancient Indian sculpture, temples and coins, Carlyle was one of the few people making an effort to recover and record prehistoric stone tools. Jill Cook and Hazel Martingell’s occasional paper paints a vivid picture of Carlyle as a field archaeologist sleeping rough in ruined temples and upsetting the polite conventions of Raj society, on one occasion threatening an enquirer sent by the Raja of Nagod with a gun. Carlyle seems to have been rather prickly about his status, which may explain the alternative spelling of his name as Carlleyle,  to suggest he was from an aristocratic family. His ‘psyche-evaluation’ described him as ‘not ordinarily insane, but liable to outbursts of eccentric action and evil temper’ (Cook and Martingell:13).

The work took Carlyle into the landscape for long periods at a time, travelling on horseback, accompanied by servants on foot and camels to carry the baggage and surveying equipment. He was in eastern Rajastan in 1871-3, the Vindhya Hills and then northwards into the plains with seasons in Gorkhpur, Saran and Ghazipur during the 1870s. He excavated a site at Joharganj in 1879. In the early 1880s he worked in the Vindhya Hills again when complaints were made about him. As Cook and Martingell put it: ‘In 1882, a European with one servant, living rough, without bed and bedding and without a change of clothes or proper food for six weeks had to be mad.’ There is more than a hint of the Indiana Jones about him.

Charles Seidler’s letter in Manchester Museum

When Cunningham proposed that the Archaeological Survey be disbanded, Carlyle lost his job and came back to Britain in 1885. He was 54. Living in straitened circumstances in London,  Carlyle disposed of his archaeological collection by sale or by donation to a number of  museums and individuals. A dealer in antiquities, Charles Seidler, wrote letters to collectors including Sir John Evans, and Canon Greenwell,  antiquarian societies, and the Manchester Museum. David Gelsthorpe, Curator of Palaeontology, found some archive correspondence from Seidler relating to the sale of prehistoric stone artefacts from Carlyle’s collection (see image above). The slips of paper that accompany the letter give details of the objects and where they found. Presumably, the various objects were wrapped in these slips of paper. This information was used to compile the entries in the Manchester Museum accession register (the ‘O’ register) and from these we learn that some of the flints came from a very important site called Morhana Pahar in Mirzapur District, Uttar Pradesh. Bridget Allchin identified this as one of a group of sites in the Vindhya Hills escarpment overlooking the Ganga Valley about five miles north of Hanmana village near Bhainsaur. Carlyle excavated the site but didn’t publish it in full (B.Allchin and R.Allchin -1982 –The Rise of Civilisation in India and Pakistan, p.82). He may have kept the information to himself, thinking he would go back some day to investigate it in detail but his ‘retirement’ prevented further work.

Chariot rider ambushed by bowmen at Morhana Pahar. It appears that Carlleyle painted over the original red pigment with white paint in order to capture the details photographically. Photo: courtesy of Prof Ajay Pratap, Head of Dept of History, Banaras Hindu University

The cave or rock shelter site at Morhana Pahar yielded thousands of worked flints and there were cave paintings or mural art. Some of the images must have been painted later in prehistory because they show men driving chariots being ambushed by men on foot using bows. Carlyle’s notes  described them as showing ‘in a very stiff and archaic manner scenes in the life of the ancient stone chippers, others represent animals or hunts of animals by men with bows and arrows, spears and hatchets…’ They seem to depict people living a hunter-gather lifestyle confronting chariot-drivers of the Indian Iron Age, so there must have been considerable overlap of what might be considered chronologically distinct material cultures. Chenchu hunter-gatherers in India were photographed during the 1930s, showing how resilient this way of life is (see Allchin and Allchin p.85). Carlyle seems to have been the first to propose that the cave art was undertaken by people in prehistory. When he was working it was commonly supposed that cave paintings couldn’t have survived for such a long time, and it was only the discovery of Altamira later in the 19th century that opened people’s eyes to the existence of prehistoric cave art. It is a shame that so far we  have not been able to find a photograph of Archibald Campbell Carlyle. Over to you gentle reader….

Carlyle Collection microliths from Morhana Pahar in the Vindhya Hills, in northern central India

The flints from Morhana Pahar are known as microliths and include lunates or crescent shaped artefacts, rhomboids, trapezes, trapezoids triangles, bladelets, drill points and so on. Some of them were mounted in wooden shafts to create barbed weapons. Some were found still ‘glued’ in position in their wooden armatures using bitumen at the prehistoric site of Mehrgarh in Pakistan. The tools are very small and some archaeologists assumed that the people who made them must have been themselves of small stature or pygmies, hence the name for the tools: pygmy flints. They are very similar to the stone tools found on the Pennines around Manchester and during the early 2oth century an associate of William Boyd Dawkins at Manchester Museum, Revd Gatty, argued that northern Britain had been settled by so-called pygmy people from northern India! The flints date from the Mesolithic period, c.9,000-4,000 BC.

Other material includes more microliths from Gharwa Pahari,  Baghe Khor and Likhneya Pahar, Palaeolithic implements and Neolithic axeheads from Marfa in Bundelkhand, and other stone artefacts, including a Madras type hatchet from the Gaur River.

As a footnote to this discussion I might also add that the list of museums holding Carlyle material in Cook and Martingell’s occasional paper in 1994 does not include Manchester Museum. So far 82 artefacts that Carlyle collected have been catalogued, one of the largest of the collections after the British Museum and National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh).

I leave the last words to Carlyle:

‘The question now, therefore, is not -‘where are stone implements to be found?’ but rather – where are they not to be found?’ For so far as my own experience goes, they appear findable almost everywhere in India.’

Dilip Chakrabarti (1999) India an Archaeological History Palaeolithic Beginnings Early Historic Foundations (O.U.P.), p.95

Next time: Frederick Swynnerton.

 

See also The Mystery of Colonel Mayne

 

 

Radiocarbon Dating, the Neanderthal Demise, and the Arrival of Modern Humans in Europe

This year’s William Boyd Dawkins lecture will be held at 18:30 in University Place, lecture theatre A, Oxford Road, on December 9^th, and will be given by Professor Tom Higham (University of Oxford), on:-

“Time for the Palaeolithic:Radiocarbon Dating, the Neanderthal Demise, and the Arrival of Modern Humans in Europe”.

Radiocarbon dating by AMS is the key method for understanding the date of the movement of the earliest anatomically modern humans (AMH) into Europe and the concomitant demise of the Neanderthals. Work in Oxford has shown that many previously obtained radiocarbon dates have been severely compromised by contamination that has remained unremoved in many cases. New approaches, using more robust techniques, have resulted in a significant changes to the chronologies of key sites and to a change in our understanding of the timing and pace of cultural changes in the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic. This is the period during which Neanderthals and other Archaic humans were replaced by populations of anatomically modern humans (AMH). Prof. Higham will describe some of the work he has undertaken in the last 10 years, including improved chemical pretreatment methodologies and their application, and describe some of the results. Other important developments in genetics have recently transformed aspects of the field. Finally Prof. Higham will talk about the key issues that need to be tackled if scientists are to further improve our understanding of this key period and the bio-cultural shift that occurred in Eurasia between 50-30,000 years ago.

Lithics Collections at Manchester Museum

Manchester Museum on Oxford Road

Manchester Museum has a very large and varied collection of prehistoric lithics collection, including hundred-thousand-year-old Palaeolithic hand-axes from southern England, Mesolithic microliths from the Pennines around Manchester,  neolithic rough-outs from so-called ‘axe-factories‘ in Great Langdale in Cumbria and Craig Llwyd in Wales, Bronze Age stone mauls or mining tools from Alderley Edge in Cheshire, more recent material collected from indigenous peoples in the Americas, and Australia, and stone tools, flint flakes and other objects of all periods from the UK, Europe and other countries around the world.

Danish flint dagger with carefully flaked handle

The richness of the Museum’s lithics collection is due to the first curator, William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929). Though primarily a geologist, Dawkins was an expert on the identification of prehistoric animal remains and wrote what was regarded at the time as the text-book about cave archaeology called Cave Hunting (1876). Dawkins is perhaps best known for work at Creswell Crags, conducted, at least initially, with Revd Magens Mello and Thomas Heath. Star finds include Neanderthal stone choppers and a beautiful Font Robert point dating from around 29,000 BC.The Museum has a very important archive of finds, photographs and other documentation relating both to these Victorian excavations and to later work undertaken by A.Leslie Armstrong (1878-1958).

Work at Creswell Crags

Dawkins’ successor at the Museum was J.Wilfrid Jackson (1880-1978). Like Dawkins, Jackson had wide-ranging interests, excavated prehistoric sites and published important regional summaries of lithic discoveries. As a result of the collecting activities of Dawkins and Jackson, the Museum’s archaeology collection contains large quantities of flint and other stone implements, not to mention prehistoric metal, pottery, bone and antler objects. They built up collections of stone objects, including fakes, as reference material and for teaching purposes. One individual by the name of Edward Simpson alias ‘Flint Jack’, ‘Bones’ or ‘Fossil Willy’ was notorious for selling his dodgy flint artefacts to gullible collectors and museum curators, served time in prison and ended his days demonstrating flint-knapping for  gentlemanly antiquarian societies.

Flint Jack’s ‘Flint Jacks’ – forgeries of early Bronze Age barbed-and-tanged arrowheads

Many of these objects are displayed in the Museum’s Ancient Worlds galleries, where, thanks to the range of disciplines represented in the collection it has been possible to show axes with ornate binding and rafia sleeves for comparison from New Guinea and Borneo – where the Stone Age finished as recently and precisely as 10am on 8th March 1933 – from the Living Cultures collection.

Stone axe with interwoven rafia wrapping from Bourneo/New Guinea

The intellectual focus of the Museum displays shifted in the latter part of the 20th century in favour of the Classical world but research on the lithics collection continued. For instance, many of the Museum’s stone axeheads were sampled petrologically during the 1970s and 1980s and the results published in Stone Axe Studies; researchers such as the late Roger Jacobi (1947-2009) carried out detailed work on the Creswell Crags archive, even identifying joins between fragments of the same implement in different museums; and an important landscape study of Alderley Edge was undertaken by Prof John Prag of Manchester Museum. The Museum also subscribed to excavations in the Middle East and received a proportional share of finds including lithic artefacts from sites such as Abu Hureyra in Syria, Jericho on the West Bank, and from the excavations at Mount Carmel in Northern Israel directed by Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968).

With the redevelopment of the new Ancient Worlds archaeology galleries, more of the Museum’s historically important lithic collections was put on show. The recent updating of the National Curriculum so that it includes the Stone Age offers another opportunity to work with teachers and school groups to interpret this material for the younger generation. Meanwhile new digital technology and augmented reality are providing more stimulating ways of engaging with the artefacts.

We will be having a special activity day about flint knapping at the Museum on Wednesday 18th November if you want to see how it’s done and maybe have a go yourself.

 

Some Reading

W.Boyd Dawkins (1876) Cave Hunting: researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe (London, Macmillan and Co.).

J.W.Jackson (1936) ‘The Prehistoric Archaeology of Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 50 (1936), 65-106.

J.W.Jackson (1936) ‘Contributions to the Archaeology of the Manchester Region’, The North Western Naturalist 11, 110-119.

T.H.McK Clough and W.A. Cummins (1988) Stone Axe Studies II Research Report no.67, Council for British Archaeology, 218-221.

 

 

 

Caught Knapping

Preparation for a knap-in

Manchester Museum is holding a knap-in on 19th November and on Friday Dr Elizabeth Healy and a PhD student Ray Nilson came to talk to Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, and me about the arrangements and to see some examples of worked flint artefacts. At the event, which is limited to 65 participants and ticketed (£10, or £8 concessions)  visitors will be able to watch enthusiasts striking or knapping raw materials and making a range of implements. There will be opportunities for people to try this for themselves under supervision of course. There is a real interest amongst visitors to the Museum in discovering how people in the past made things, some of them of considerable quality and demonstrating breath-taking crafts working skills.

Debate about one of the stone implements

I got out a selection of some of the wonderful flint and other stone objects in the lithics store at the Museum. A fine ground and polished early Bronze Age stone axe-hammer (below) is a wonderful exhibit although sadly we know little about where it was found. It was transferred to Manchester by  Salford Museum some years ago and I live in hope that some day information about the circumstances of discovery will turn up in an antiquarian publication…This kind of material was the focus of research and collecting at Manchester Museum during the later 19th and early 20th centuries when William Boyd Dawkins was Curator. From the 1970s the focus shifted to Classical antiquities but now prehistory in back in fashion, not least because of changes to the National Curriculum.

Anna with early Bronze Age axe-hammer

One of the added benefits is asking the flint-knappers who are coming to the event on 19th November to make copies of stone tools that were used on Easter Island or Rapa Nui. Manchester Museum will show material from the island in a temporary  exhibition opening in early April next year. Exhibits will include a stone statue called moai Hava that was brought back to Britain by HMS Topaze in 1868 and presented to the British Museum, and a range of artefacts borrowed from a number of other museums in the UK. We’re working closely with Prof Colin Richards of the Department of Archaeology at the University who has been conducting fieldwork on Easter Island. We will recreate for the exhibition part of the quarry at Puna Pau where Prof Richards has been excavating with his team. This was where islanders carved pukao or topknots that sat on top of some of the statues or moai.

We will dress the reconstruction of the quarry in the Museum with replica tools made by the flint-knappers for greater authenticity. Large numbers of stone implements or toki have been found in the quarry where the statues were obtained as if the work was suddenly interrupted and the islanders downed tools. It is not clear whether the islanders ceased to honour the statues after ‘first contact’ with Europeans or whether the notorious ‘blackbirding’ raids to secure labourers for Chile compelled the workers to drop their tools and flee or whether discarding the stone implements tools was part of the islanders’ belief system in relation to work on the statues.  It’s a very exciting project and it’s nice to know that the knap-in is contributing to the exhibition.

Prehistory Makes a Come Back

Twilight session on Prehistory with teachers

One of the surprises in the  National Curriculum has been the inclusion of Prehistory. For the first time teachers find themselves in the position of being asked to teach a subject they have not had to teach for many years but one which presents certain challenges. For me this was summed up at a recent meeting at the Natural History Museum in connection with a proposal to tour elements from its Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) exhibition to partner museums. One of the representatives from Creswell Crags said that the Visitor Centre there had received an enquiry from a worried teacher who said she knew that Creswell was an Ice Age site but she had to teach the Stone Age and could they offer any advice and recommend a site to visit with school pupils…

Jack talking to teachers

So when Debbie Doran from Manchester Museum’s Education team asked me to support what is sometimes called a ‘twilight session’ on Prehistory  for Manchester teachers I was more than happy. Manchester Museum is very well-placed in this respect to offer this kind of support because the first curator, William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929) was an expert on the identification of prehistoric animal remains and wrote the text-book about cave archaeology Cave Hunting which was published in 1876. Dawkins’ successor in this field, J.Wilfrid Jackson (1880-1978) too was fascinated by the subject. As a result the archaeology collection is stuffed with flint and other stone implements, not to mention prehistoric metal objects, pottery, bone and antler. The intellectual focus may have shifted in the latter part of the 20th century in favour of the Classical world but the prehistoric collections remained, quietly waiting for their moment again in the sun. And maybe this is it.

A selection from the prehistoric archaeology collection at Manchester Museum.

I brought out a selection of material from the Museum’s prehistoric lithics collection  including some Palaeolithic hand-axes from southern England from several hundred thousand years ago, some Mesolithic microliths, some Neolithic stone axe rough-outs from Cumbria, replicas of the beautiful early Bronze Age gold armillae or armlets from Malpas in Cheshire and an Iron Age bridle bit from Bigbury Camp in Kent. One of the difficulties the teachers face is that when they have to teach the Stone Age there is almost an expectation that they can take a box off the shelf and teach the subject in the same way they would with a box of ancient Egyptian or Roman objects. But prehistory lasts (in Britain – as the wonderful temporary exhibition at the Natural History Museum makes clear) for the greater part of a million years. And which bit of the Stone Age should you concentrate on? It’s sobering to think that when the Dutch arrived off Easter island in 1722, the inhabitants were using stone implements. In fact the Stone Age in the New Guinea Highlands ended at 10am on 8th March 1933 when gold prospectors landed there in a plane.

One Million Years

Even if we just look at the Stone Age in Britain, the timescale is incredibly long and within that million years all sorts of changes have taken place. Ice Ages have come and gone with ice-sheets over a kilometre thick in places. Sea levels have fallen about 100 metres lower than they are today before re-establishing themselves. Britain has at times been linked to the European continent by a land bridge across what is now the North Sea and then cut off from it. Many exotic animal species have lived in Britain at times when the climate was much warmer: hippopotamus and hyena are known from their bones and teeth to have lived at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, only an hour away from Manchester.

Creswell Crags

Over such a long period of time it is not surprising that the kinds of human beings living in Britain have changed too. In the dim and distant past human beings lived here who, we cannot be absolutely sure of this, were of the species Homo erectus or  perhaps ancestors of Homo heidelbergenis. Later Neanderthals lived here. They were like us but different with stocky frames, short limbs and prominent brows, apparently adapted to living in a cold climate. It is mind-boggling to think that civilisation in the Middle East started around 3000 BC but that Neanderthals colonised Britain many times between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago. The subject is explored in the Natural History Museum’s Britain One Million years of the Human Story. There’s a piece on this in the NHM’s magazine ‘evolve’ (issue 18, winter 2014 – now that’s planning ahead!) featuring interviews with lead scientist Prof.Christopher Stringer and lead exhibition designer Elin Simonsson (pp.6-11).

Neanderthals from the AHOB exhibition

As Christopher Gosden points out in his little book called  Prehistory A Very Short Introduction (2003) ‘part of learning about the past is an unlearning of the present’ (p.26).  So it was not entirely surprising to hear one teacher say that Stone Age people used flint until they realised it didn’t work for them and they invented something better like bronze and then iron. The relationship between technological development and ideas of what constitutes progress, influenced as it so often is by Darwinian evolution, is so pervasive that we really need a course along the lines of the seminar Stephen Welsh, Curator of Living Cultures, and I regularly offer to university students which explores this question. That’s no fault of the teachers of course but it does mean confronting some rather deep philosophical questions before we reach for the box of teaching objects labelled ‘Prehistory’.

 

 

Turned Out Nice Again: The Young Archaeologists Club Outing to Formby (17th May 2014)

 

Young Archaeologists at Formby in June

It seems like a long time ago now but it is only a matter of a couple of weeks since I accompanied the Manchester Museum Young Archaeologists to Formby in Lancashire. We try to take the children out on a trip once a year and Formby was great because it wasn’t too far from Manchester, there was some fascinating archaeology to see and there was plenty of space for the children to run around. It was the first time I’d been to Formby but it is hard not to fall in love with the place. From the moment you draw up at the National Trust car park where you can see red squirrels running around the pine trees to the moment when you crest the rise of the sand dunes and you see the foreshore for the first time before you it’s a delight.

Dune crossing at Formby

We went to Formby to see the famous footprints in the ancient land surface preserved underneath the sand. They are only revealed at low tide so obviously we had to time our visit very carefully. Fortunately time and tide on this occasion were very favourable to us and we enjoyed several very agreeable hours on the foreshore looking for footprints. Nor did  our efforts go unrewarded because we found a track of foot shape impressions in the ancient land surface that could not possibly have been recent.

Human footprints track at Formby

 

Foot shaped depression in the ancient land surface at Formby

Many similar tracks have been recorded over the years and there is a dedicated website where you can see them. They  date from the prehistoric period and some of them may go back to the Mesolithic period about 8000 years ago. A range of different animals have been identified, not to mention the footprints of men, women and children who went out on the foreshore to hunt wildfowl and to gather crustacea and other sea foods.

Wolf print

On this occasion the Young Archaeologists discovered what we think was the imprint of a deer and what looked like a wolf’s pawprint. Afterwards we had a picnic in the pine forest and then called at Liverpool Museum to see the story of Liverpool displays which feature material from Formby.

Impression of human footprint from Formby in Liverpool Museum

This was an excellent day out and all thanks to Clare Pye for organising all aspects of the day including the warm sunny weather.

 

Cult of Youth?

January 2014’s History Today magazine

Shortly before Christmas I picked up a copy of History Today  (vol.64.1, January 2014). One of the articles, about the discovery of a ring that may have inspired Tolkien’s fantasy epic, caught my eye but as I flicked through the pages I came across a short article by Michael S.Cummings and Simon Maghakyan ‘When Youth Ruled the earth’ (p.7). the authors argue that because, for millions of years, most humans didn’t live much beyond their teens, young people today are genetically predisposed to take a leading role and that, therefore, they ought to be brought into the political process much sooner.

Cummings and Maghakyan say it was our youth-ancestors who, in their teens and early twenties, created tools, social organisations, languages and culture and they credit young people with jump-starting civilisation no less. The authors go on to say that the contribution made by youth-ancestors got overlooked as life-spans increased. Nowadays excluding young people from decision-making, they argue, not only flies in the face of young people’s genetic disposition to lead but that of evolution itself. The authors then suggest that understanding the important role young people have played in prehistory might help to understand and deal with childhood problems such as bullying. Bullying and other demonstrations of physical ability (!), provided ways for young people to gain influence and so act out their genetic predisposition…

By this point my mental alarm bells were ringing off the scale. To be fair to Cummings and Maghakyan a reference to another paper giving a different reading of longevity amongst hunter-gatherer societies is given at the end of their article. Unfortunately their example of an early achiever – Alexander the Great who conquered much of the known world when he was in his twenties – may not be well chosen. Alexander’s bodyguard, Lysimachus, and one of his generals, Seleucus, were still squaring off one another at the ages of 74 and 77 years old. A member of Alexander’s companions, Ptolemy, set himself up as king of Egypt and died – one of the relatively few to die in bed – at the age of 84. And a formidable contingent amongst the armies of Alexander’s successors were the veterans known as the Silver Shields, not one of whom was less than 60. The Hellenistic period seems to offer better examples of power continuing well into old age than it does youthful achievers…

Leaving that aside, the real problem with the article, it seems to me, is its endebtedness to evolutionary psychology, the discipline that looks to evolution by natural selection to explain aspects of human behaviour. Put simply, in the course of the Stone Age human beings became adapted mentally, because of  natural selection, to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The adoption of farming and living in towns and cities over the last 6000 years or so is but an eye-blink in evolutionary terms so it is argued that we are still catching up, our hunter-gatherer brains maladapted to our relatively recently adopted sedentary lifestyle. Evolutionary psychology has been used to explain human being’s supposed preference for paintings depicting green landscapes and water as this was the preferred habitat of human hunter-gatherers during the Pleistocene… Critics have commented that such trite and cod explanations have the feel of one of Kipling’s ‘Just So’ stories. More controversially some cases of mistreatment of children by their step-fathers have been attributed to psychological traits supposedly acquired during the Stone Age when it is argued males might kill the previous offspring of a female partner in order to ensure the success of their own children.

What seems to lie behind all this is the assumption that as human beings we owe more to our genetic inheritance honed over hundreds of thousands of years by natural selection rather than the culture of the times in which we live – the old nature ‘v’ nurture argument. Using Alexander the Great and the supposed genetic predisposition of young people to lead as an argument for involving teenagers in decision making seems to me to be erroneous. It may be good in principle to allow children more of a role but this short article based as it is on evolutionary psychology doesn’t make the case.

See Alas Poor Darwin Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (eds.) London: Johnathan Cape, 2000.

Stone Age Cartoons

Dysonsaur

Robert Thompsons’s brilliant cartoon in the Metro a fortnight ago (‘Neanderthal man kept an orderly cave’) manages to both contrive a witty pun on dinosaur/Dyson vacuum cleaner and invoke the popular (but wildly inaccurate) cliche about cave men being alive at the time of the dinosaurs. And all this as a humorous aside on an article about Neanderthals keeping their caves neat and tidy.

This reminded me of another entertaining cave man cartoon that appeared in New Scientist  ‘Chewing gum gave Stone Age punk a buzz’ (18th September 1993) in which it was reported that 9000-year-old chewing gum had been found in Sweden:-

ruined the carpet

“It could only have been a teenager” observed a Swedish archaeologist!

Both cartoons are very entertaining but there may be a deeper underlying meaning. The cartoons seem to suggest (though 17 years apart) that the house-proud Neanderthal has the edge over the Homo sapiens teenager spitting chewing gum on the rug. This provides an ironic backdrop to a debate that has continued pretty well since the discovery of the first Neanderthal skeleton in the mid-19th century.

It was argued that because Neanderthals became extinct, they were, in Darwinian terms, backward, primitive and definitely inferior to Homo sapiens, who inevitably replaced them. More recently, Neanderthals  have enjoyed much more sympathetic treatment. Their demise has been attributed not so much to their backwardness but to factors over which they had no control such as changes in climate, disease and the increasing isolation of Neanderthal populations. Their brains were larger than ours and, if the latest findings are correct, their treatment of their domestic space shows they were certainly not backward in organising their domestic space.

It is not so long ago that it was reported that Neanderthals created Europe’s first bone tools, adding to growing evidence that Neanderthals were much more intelligent than previously believed (‘Bone tools dispel myth that Neanderthals were stupid’ The Daily Telegraph 13/8/2013 p.10). That cartoons contribute to this debate is a fascinating side-line to prehistoric archaeology. How archaeology comes to be transmuted through popular culture is an area of increasing interest.

A very happy Christmas and New Year to all readers of the Ancient Worlds blog. Joyeux Noel. ευτυχισμένα Χριστούγεννα. Счастливого Рождества.

More on late Glacial hunter gatherers

Poulton le Fylde elk and barbed point

Recently I wrote about a controversy  over some barbed bone points or harpoons from Holderness in East Yorkshire that took place during the 1920s. Another discovery that sheds some light by association on the Holderness points is that of Poulton-le-Fylde. During the construction of a bungelow animal bones were discovered together with a couple of bone points. The animal had suffered a number of wounds at the hands of prehistoric hunter gatherers. One of the points had even pierced its hoof. Presumably the animal tried to escape the hunters by swimming but, weakened by its wounds, it drowned and the carcass was never recovered. Thousands of years later the animal’s skeleton was discovered during building work. The Poulton-le-Fylde elk can be seen in the Harris Museum in Preston and a truly magnificent exhibit it is too!

The results from the radiocarbon-dating showed the elk died some 13,500 years earlier. This would put it in the late Glacial. Between about 23,000 and 19,000 years ago a large ice sheet covered much of northern Britain. As Ice Age drew to a close the climate got warmer and the ice sheets retreated but this improvement was not sustained and there was a sharp cold ‘snap’ about 13,000 years ago that lasted about 500 years before the climate improved again and warm conditions prevailed similar to those we enjoy today. The elk in the UK dispappeared  because of pressure of hunting, or climate change or a combination of both factors.

The Poulton-le-Fylde elk provides an example of an animal hunted using very similar bone points to those found by the Morfitt family. The association of points with a large mammal skeleton can be compared with the point from Skipsea Withow. The date at which this happened is also of interest. The contested Holderness harpoons have never been dated. Having been boiled in glue by the early 20th century antiquaries in order to conserve them means they cannot now be accurately dated. However, a barbed point discovered in a quarry at Gransmoor in Holderness during the 1990s was dated to about 13000 BP, again comparable to the Poulton-le-Fylde example.

What we seem to have is evidence across northern Britain of hunting at an early date, after the melting of the ice sheets. Waterlogged landscapes like Holderness and the Fylde  enabled the survival of large mammal skeletons intact and the barbed points of spears associated with them. the Morfitts’ points may be even older than they were said to be during the 1920s.

The Curator Strikes Back

This Blog continues the series about the relationship between Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull Museums and the Morfitt family of Atwick in Holderness. In the last instalment Leslie Armstrong claimed two bone points or harpoons in the Morfitt collection were Maglemosian or mesolithic, i.e. about 10,000 years old. Thomas Sheppard insinuated that the bone points were forgeries. A committee of enquiry was called to investigate the matter…

Casts of the Holderness harpoons in Hull Museums (the originals are in the British Museum)

A fortnight after the  British Association meeting in Hull Mr M.C.Burkitt, Prof.J.E.Marr and Dr A.C.Haddon met in Cambridge to compare the Holderness barbed points ‘harpoons’ found by the Morfitt family with similar specimens from Kunda in Estonia. The ‘Cambridge committee’ as it came to be known concluded that ‘in type, general facies, colour, and in the partially mineralised condition of the bone, the Holderness harpoons were identical with those from Kunda… both the Holderness harpoons are genuine antiquities’. However, another committee consisting of Sir Hercules Read, Prof A.Smith Woodward and Prof. P.F.Kendall was appointed by the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute to investigate the matter in London on 6th December 1922. Its conclusion was curiously ambiguous:

‘In general we see no evidence in the objects themselves that is conclusively against their genuineness… A curious feature is that the workmanship of the barbs is so similar as to point to their being the work of the same individual’.

This enabled both parties to claim victory. Leslie Armstrong and other supporters of the Morfitt family felt vindicated because the committee had said there was nothing against them being genuine but Shepaprd seized on the same committee’s comment that they seemed to have been made by the same individual. Admittedly there was a lot of  confusion over the context or layers in which the points were found. The Skipsea point was said to have been found ‘in silt beneath 5 feet of peat.’ When Beaumont Morfitt was called to the podium at the British Association Meeting in Hull in the autumn of 1922 he said “the points were 12 or 14 feet down and resting on boulder clay”. Sheppard argued that no-one could dig that deep on the Holderness coast and beds of peat of that depth had never been found. And if they were indeed made by the same individual it didn’t make sense. If they were found in different contexts deposited with an interval of hundreds, if not thousands of years, in between them, then that person must have lived an awful long time!

Thomas Sheappard

The Morfitt family had kept details of the discovery of the bone points in note books but the books were not produced in evidence before the committees, very likely because the entries would not have reflected well on the Morfitts, who made spelling mistakes and often wrote in what can only be described as ‘stream of consciousness’ style. The Hornsea point was said to have been found ‘on the margin of the mere whilst excavating for a new gasometer at Hornsea at a depth of 16 feet below the surface in a lacustrine bed amongst the roots of sedges and reedso. The discovery is dated 1915. A sub-committee satisfied itself that no such bed of peat deposits existed at Hornsea.

In publications the dates of discovery of both the Hornsea and the Skipsea points shifted in a way that suggested to Sheppard at least that the claims were mischievous. The Hornsea bone point is also recorded as having been found in 1905; the Skipsea example in 1902 . As there is a letter from Canon William Greenwell to Mr Morfitt dated 27th January 1902, I think the date of 1902 for Skipsea is reliable even if other dates were later published for its discovery. It seems this confusion may have been more down to human error and shoddy note-keeping by the Morfitt family rather than conspiracy. Even if one committee had ruled in favour of their genuineness, the second had raised doubts which Thomas Sheppard exploited ruthlessly. Ultimately it all looked rather damning for Armstrong and the Morfitts.

The London committee had also concluded ‘Mr Sheppard appears to have had strong grounds for doubting the authenticity of the harpoons, but the evidence on which his judgement is based is  no longer verifiable.’

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt with one of their prized discoveries (Beaumont is on the right)

No what on earth did that mean? To answer that question we really have to fast forward to 1929 after the last member of the Morfitt family, Beaumont, had died. Thomas Sheppard finally revealed the strong grounds for doubting the authentity of the ‘Holderness harpoons’. But that’s the subject of the next blog in this series…