Review by Simon Holy Hose

Last summer I got interested in standing stones in Wales. I bought a book by a local author, the conclusion of which was that basically we haven’t got the slightest idea what standing stones are for. The temptation is to put it down to whistfulness, except the effort involved in cutting the stone, dragging it across country (sometimes for hundreds of miles), and then erecting it in the middle of nowhere, would have been almost incredible.

Well that got me piqued. I wanted to see into the mind of these people if it was at all possible. That’s how I came to start reading this book, Prehistoric Europe – an illustrated history edited by Barry Cunliffe.

I finished reading it last night (started on 13th August 2005). Did I get the insight I wanted? Not much. For a start I knew that they liked carving spirals and arrows into rocks. Again nobody knows the significance of these shapes in spite of them being found throughout europe. I also knew about places being named after greyhound bitches, and they’d found traces of fish stews with frogs at burials.

This book also told me about how uninhabitable Britain has been over most of the last 100,000 years. It blew my mind that traces of humans had been found in caves dated before the last ice age: they were here, then their remains were buried in caves under miles of ice, which in turn melted away again.

I learnt how long before we had writing there was a fairly comprehensive trading network in place across which artifacts flowed between Europe, Africa, and the Far East. It even blew my mind to discover that tin was exported from Cornwall into North Wales to make bronze.

I’ve mentioned that climate change had quite a significant impact on populations. It’s all very interesting stuff.

The main problem I had is that the text of some chapters was, I think, pitched at the level of archaeology undergrad text-book, and lots of technical terms were lost on me (potzol – a type of soil formed from decomposed pine needles!!) nevertheless it underlined just how little we know about our ancestors.

Did you know that there are people able to date and locate the source of an arrowhead by its shape? Heavy work.

But a lot of the book wasn’t what I would call “pre-historic” in subject matter. It covered what was going on in the rest of Europe while the Greeks and Romans had their moment in the sun. This was also quite interesting. Everyone has heard about vandals and goths and huns, but without knowing who they were and what they did.

I particularly enjoyed reading about the Kurgans. If one of the chiefs snuffed it, then perhaps as many as a hundred of his warriors and their horses would be sacrificed and STUFFED in order to be buried with him in his mound to accompany him in the afterlife. Totally hard.

And then too, the consideration of mindset and religious change that accompanied the change from burial with gravegoods to cremation. I’d not thought about this but it is significant: it seems to suggest that a paradigm shift took place in that the physical body was no longer deemed necessary for an afterlife. In other words, they started to believe in a soul.

But most remarkable of all is the unstoppability of waves of vigorous and opportunistic peoples from the East. It happened repeatedly, and even the Romans who had conquered most of the world were ultimately swamped and overcome by them. Strength does indeed lie in numbers.