Mike Pitts, FSA, is an English freelance journalist and archaeologist who specialises in the study of British prehistory. He is the author of several books on the subject, and is the editor of British Archaeology. His latest book, "Digging Up Britain: A New History in Ten Extraordinary Discoveries", was published in paperback in April 2021.
In the book you detail 10 archaeological projects across the British Isles where new discoveries are still being made. They’re wide-ranging: a burial ground in Weymouth; cannibalism at Gough's Cave; Stonehenge. What story are you telling here?
It’s a history of ancient Britain. As those relatively few archaeologists who have written comparable books will know, this is a challenge: it’s an almost unimaginable timespan - nearly a million years - and there is a vast amount of information to draw on, most of it described only in highly technical literature. A lot changed in those million years, and every twist is covered by a separate academic field.
I deliberately selected projects that were newly finished or still active. This was partly because they bring new revelations, even for archaeological readers, but the choice also makes the point that our distant past is constantly developing: you could take the same approach in five years with 10 quite different excavations that hadn’t begun when I started writing. And by presenting a million years through 10 digs, I am of course being very selective, leaving out great chunks of early history. That’s why I call this a story of ancient Britain, not the story. I also wanted the present of any one chapter to feel the most important place to be – rather than a prelude to something better, more civilised, or just different. I wanted ancient people in their own time to be taken on their own terms, however strange to us, and not to be compared with others.
Until recently we thought the first humans to arrive here came 200,000 years ago. We now know in fact that people were entering this region some 750,000 years ago. What has this done for our sense of self, both as British and as modern humans?
We are far from understanding the complexities of early-human histories in Britain, even to the point of knowing how many different species were here. The future prospects are tremendously exciting. I think it’s not so much about being British, as being human. Fifty and more years ago the dominant view of our evolution was that it happened pretty much in a straight line – apes at one end, us at the other – and on the African savannah. Despite an industry of bogus historians who continue to insist that a “stone-age brain” nurtured among lions and wildebeest lurks within us all, we now have a very different picture. Our ultimate origins were in Africa, but our ancestors soon moved in worlds ranging from tropical Asia to freezing winters in England – and Africa itself had a huge variety of environments. There were often several human species alive at the same time. Sometimes they met and interbred. As we contemplate the current human-induced “extinction crisis”, it is sobering to reflect that we are here, now, on the back of human extinctions. As the fossil story becomes longer and richer, we see ourselves as less a pre-ordained triumph and more of an accident. And I admit to enjoying the fact that some of that story is being revealed here in Britain, which brought its particular challenges and opportunities to those early people – and can be seen in our museums.
Nationalists often spin “the British” as a historically cohesive, even static, unit of people who boast a longstanding uniformity that is continually threatened, and occasionally penetrated, by “outsiders”. Does that claim have any real grounding in the periods of history you’ve studied?
It’s understandable that some might see historical Britons as a single people buffeted by the odd intrusion, especially if you don’t have any recent immigrants in your family. We take a lot of our childhood with us – the immutability of home, as we see it at the time, being one feature – and that can permeate a standard, an ideal, of national identity. The history we are taught, shaped by two world wars, has traditionally emphasised an unchanging British folk. It’s how Our Island Story by HE Marshall – the 1905 book beloved of Michael Gove and David Cameron – told it, and it was what the archaeological pavilion in the 1951 Festival of Britain showed. But when we take a long view with what we now know, this patently falls down. Over the millennia there have been an extraordinary variety of cultures and ethnicities within these islands, almost beyond imagination. The people who built Stonehenge, say, were entirely unlike us in their beliefs, their lifestyles, their values and even their appearance – they were darker skinned than the average white Briton today. Yet for all that, these people knew and shaped the land we know. We inhabit their spaces, and their remains fuel our imaginations. Sometimes their constructions feature in our lives. Their difference and our presence make them, and us, British.
One action that crops up across the 10 sites, and across a million years, is exchange, whether material or otherwise. Did you purposefully foreground this in order to tell a wider story of human interaction and co-dependence, or is it just absolutely central to the evolution of human society in Britain?
I think both. Physical exchange is prominent in archaeological narratives because people traded, we find stuff, and the sciences increasingly allow us to say where materials or finished artefacts came from. Such movements make good stories or museum displays. We also have new fields, such as isotopic analysis or study of ancient DNA, both of which feature strongly in the book, that give us insights into how people themselves travelled about. But it’s not just a matter of what science happens to be able to reveal to us. It’s quite obvious, especially in the long perspective, that contacts between peoples, journeys and migrations, sometimes on a scale we just don’t see today, are fundamental to the human story – and perhaps especially so to island nations.
New technologies have given us greater insight into the history, and prehistory, of Britain. But you write that we would be wrong to conclude that we can now tell the definitive story of ancient Britain. Where do you feel the major gaps still lie?
When I wrote that I was conscious mainly of new discoveries that would be coming across my desk as editor of British Archaeology magazine – as indeed they have. To offer two random examples, scientists radiocarbon-dating human remains from Bronze Age burials found that nearly half the graves had bones from two different generations in them (in one case, an old thigh bone had been made into a flute); and animal engravings on stone of a kind never seen in Britain before have been identified in Scotland that may be over 4,000 years old. Such finds flesh out the past as it were, but others, especially when we have exceptional preservation conditions, can create completely new worlds. We know very little about Neanderthal lives here, or about early humans hundreds of millennia before them – and because of geology and our research institutions, we have some of the best chances of discovering more. We have much to learn about what happened when farmers first arrived 6,000 years ago – or when Romans left 1,600 years ago.
Before the arrival of the Romans in Britain in around 55 BC, record-keeping was primitive. Beyond that point, you write, “personalities and politics fade irretrievably into oblivion”. Will the characters that lived here in pre-Roman times ever be given life, or are they lost to us forever?
In any sense we would understand, record-keeping didn’t exist here before Rome. We will never know what made Neolithic people laugh, let alone who told the best jokes. In prehistory you can hear no one scream, or laugh or debate, still less explain what they are doing. In that sense, the individual has gone. Yet one is often confronted by the personal: the ubiquitous burial, its humanity and all it says about deceased and mourners; a fingerprint on a Neolithic tool in a deep and dangerous flint mine; an exceptional craft item, where someone has taken pride in being one of the best. An exciting development is the ever-growing precision of scientific dating, so that we can now distinguish events – the building of a house in Cornwall, say, and someone’s death in Orkney – that occurred within a single generation. We are on the verge of being able to write prehistoric chronicles.
Is this loss of the individual a source of deep frustration for historians, archaeologists and otherwise?
Every archaeologist worthy of the name has sat in a trench and thought, if these bones could only speak, what would they say? But we’re used to it: we lose some detail, but gain the bigger picture. If there is frustration – speaking personally – it’s with historians who work exclusively with texts, and who find it hard to understand how archaeology can write important, engaging stories. Archaeology tells almost the entire human journey.
