Field-walking with Daisy

You know how it's always people walking their dogs who discover dead bodies? Well, I don't walk my dog early enough in the morning for that. And I can't imagine anyone disposing of a recently- or not so recently- murdered victim in the field behind our house. Anyway, I still get to find stuff when running after the dog. Mostly it's barbecue waste and not-very-exciting pottery. But yesterday, while walking in a freshly ploughed field, I stumbled upon a lovely little flint blade, with a plump percussion bulb, compression rings and maybe even some retouches. I'm a little bit excited about it because apart from a pair of bronze bracelets and a possible Bronze Age barrow, I couldn't find any mentions of prehistoric activity or of lithic finds in Malpas (Cheshire) anywhere. Anything pre-Roman is really quite rare here, as far as we know, although you don't have to go very far out of the parish of Malpas to find possible Neolithic occupations and Iron Age hillforts.

So here's a picture of our little friend. It's just under 4 centimeters long, with a bit of cortex left on the distal end and a few negatives of previously knapped-off bits on the dorsal face. Given the form of the bulb, I'd say it was probably made with a hard hammer. It has an eraillure on the bulb, and it's triangular in section.

You tell me what this little guy was arrested for. Nice mugshot.

We also got a few other bits of flint, one of them largely covered in cortex and exhibiting what looks like part of a striking platform and the negative of compression rings.

Edit 14/05/12: We found another blade today, in a different field not very far away from the one in which we found the first blade. It's very different though, with the bulb and compression rings much more diffuse, possibly suggesting soft-hammer percussion. There are very extensive retouches on the dorsal face, my guess being that they were made using pressure-flaking. This is a really lovely little tool.

Unless there's a hobbyist in the neighbourhood who keeps dropping worked flint everywhere in order to confuse us, Malpas was occupied earlier than we thought.

While walking in the fields, we were quite surprised to see that there were a lot of pebbles everywhere, so we thought we might be in an post-glacial valley. It turns out, as pointed out in a 2003 archaeological assessment of Malpas by the Cheshire County Council, that "at Domesday the town [Malpas] was called Depenbech which means ‘at the deep valley with a stream in it’". I thought that the local substrate, red sandstone, could tell us a little bit more about the geology of the area, as it forms in specific conditions. According to this website, the Sandstone Ridge, made of layers of sandstone and pebble beds, formed in the Triassic era in semi-arid desertic conditions (who would have thought?). Forward to the last glaciation and the region was under a huge ice-sheet which depressed the surface of the earth and, while receding at the end of the Ice Age, dropped loads of boulders and ice-worn pebbles picked up in northern Britain while it was moving southward. Now, the pebbles make perfect sense.

I'm also posting a picture of my dog, because it's totally relevant to this article.

Daisy McWooferson, treasure hunter.

A History of Violence: Part I

In archaeology, much like in entertaining, the most popular things are often either the grimmest or the most glamorous. This new post is more about gloom than glitter: we're going to take a look at one of modern human's most ancient pastimes - no, I'm not talking about fooling around with professional booby-flashers - warfare. Of course, there is no need to dig up ancient bones to think about violence, as it is just as alive now as it ever was. But how long has Man indulged in the sweet sound of its neighbour's skull crashing under a well- placed blow? Some of the evidence, and in particular that provided by broken, mangled or badly treated human remains- still hits home thousands of years after the events with a surprising intensity, and researchers have long tried to give back to silent remains and quiet battle sites the screaming voices they have lost.

"Hank always complained about his bad back."
Neolithic violences, flint projectile meets human vertebrae.
Musée des Antiquités Nationales, St Germain-en-Laye

Warfare at its origins was probably very different from what comes to our minds when we think about war. Various parameters can be compared. How many casualties? Who are the victims? Who fights: professional soldiers, conscripted/mobilised individuals, warriors? What are the tactics used and the nature of the combats? What is the value of the life of a soldier/civilian and how many deaths are the opponents prepared to accept for a particular cause? What are they fighting, or what are they fighting for? Are they fighting at home or abroad? Are people dying as a direct consequence of military action, or because of famine and disease brought by the war?

The way we conduct and envisage warfare has evolved a great deal, and it is difficult to imagine that, while the nations involved in the Afghan war Coalition find it increasingly hard to justify and cope with the deaths of approximately 2900 professional soldiers over 10 and a half years (so far, and with over 22,600 wounded soldiers to add to the victim count),  one estimation of the number of civilian deaths suggests a death toll of  12,500 to 14,700 as of June 2011. During the recent debate between the then candidates to the French presidential elections, Hollande and Sarkozy were asked when they would finally pull French troops out of Afghanistan. France has lost 83 soldiers there, and because of doubts surrounding the reason and the relevance of its presence in Afghanistan, these 83 deaths abroad are more than the French were prepared to accept. In very different circumstances and at a time when wars were fought differently and by different people, the Battle of the Somme alone, in 1916, lasted 4 and a half months and claimed the lives of  an estimated 146,431 allied troops. The Allied lost over 9.4 million soldiers in the War.

Understanding modern warfare is complicated, not least because of the various interests, official or not, which are at stake for the groups involved. Identifying and understanding warfare through archaeological remains is another task altogether.

According to Keeley, primitive warfare is generally described by anthropologists as less deadly in terms of numbers than modern warfare. Some authors consider that wars can only occur between states or other "complex" socio-political units, but in my opinion, this assumption is contradicted by the record. I suppose it's down to how one defines the word "warfare".

No, not this kind of primitive warfare.

Researchers are divided about the degree of violence prehistoric Europeans visited upon each-other. Some see signs everywhere, others see only ritual, and others yet are a lot more cautious about their interpretations. Identifying ancient warfare isn't as straightforward as we'd think: not only is a violent death not always recognisable when there is a skeleton to look at, often, there are no remains to study at all. Any wound not affecting the skeleton will go unnoticed, and of course not every bone in the skeleton comes out of a multi-century-spanning nap in the ground all fresh and pristine, allowing the osteoarchaeologist to admire all its potential cuts and breaks. Healed wounds can be distinguished from non-healed ones, but making the difference between a lethal blow and a bone accidentally smashed by careless undertakers while burying the body can be impossible. As for some of our favourite bits of evidence for violence, they too can be misleading. A parry fracture! Someone was defending themselves against an enemy. Or a brutal spouse. Or their own clumsiness.

"Here's a flesh wound that osteoarchaeologists will detect all right"

To make it even better - we'd all hate it if it was simple -  weapons from the Palaeolithic up to the end of the Neolithic aren't just weapons, they're agricultural tools (axes, adzes) or hunting equipment (arrowheads). And even when swords and shields make their appearance, they turn out to not always be functional weapons. Even practices such as decapitation don't always point to an armed conflict: what about ancestor cults? Some unusual deposits can also be the result of a violent answer to a crisis that does not involve warfare - I'm looking at you, human sacrifice.

Of course, this is not to say that ancient warfare can never be recognised, or that it doesn't exist. There is plenty of disturbing/alarming/saddening evidence for Prehistoric organised violence, so much so that it places the horrifying historic and contemporary conflicts we have learnt about at school or followed with the News within a long tradition. I wouldn't say that by putting them into perspective, one can diminish the horror attached to them, though. If anything, the continuing nature of interpersonal, large-scale violence points to a bleak future. Erm. Enough deep thinking, it's time for me to go eat some chocolate biscuits. I'll actually start talking about the evidence for prehistoric warfare in Europe in Part II.



References (more to come in Part II):

Keeley, L.H., 1996, War Before Civilization, the Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, Oxford