Archive for the ‘Neolithic’ Category

Ötzi the Iceman

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Erika and Helmut Simon usually liked to complete their mountain excursions in a single day; they were experienced climbers and knew what they could comfortably manage. On Wednesday 18th September 1991, therefore, they knew that by getting held up whilst crossing a glacier, and then still pressing on to climb the peak that was their aim for the day, they would have to spend the night on the hill. That was no problem as there was a refuge nearby. The next morning dawned bright and, like any other climbers, Erikaand Helmut found the conditions irresistible and decided to bag another peak. It was on their return to pick up their rucksacks from the hut that it happened. Erika saw it first: a brown smudge in the snow, which, as they came closer, took the form of a man. For mountaineers, death is always a possibility, so the find, gruesome as it was, did not unduly surprise them and they tried to prise the remains out of the ice with their axes. What they had no way of knowing is that the body, christened Ötzi for the region in which he was found, had been dead for 5,300 years. He was the oldest frozen mummy ever known.

Dressed for travelling, Ötzi wore leather trousers, a deerskin coat, and a cape fashioned from woven grass. His shoes were finely made with bearskin soles and stuffed with grass as a precaution against the cold. His cap was pieced together from odd bits of fur but it would have been warm. He also carried a backback, an unfinished bow and arrows, some tools including a fire-lighting kit, and a copper axe. He was, perhaps, as much as 45 years old when he died, a grand age for a man at this time. What he was doing so high in the mountains remains a mystery but the circumstances surrounding his death are slowly being pieced together by an international team of experts; bringing to life the sorry tale of a time almost five millennia ago.

Ötzi came from the southern side of the Alps and was born and raised in the folded valleys of the foothills. He probably left a settlement in the Val Venosta, in Italy, on that fateful morning of his flight into the mountains. We can be reasonably certain about this as the microscopic bits of stone in his gut, originating from the stone tools used to prepare his food, leave a geological signature that can be precisely located. He was dressed for the hills and carried much of what he would have needed to make an extended stay comfortable, that is, provided he did not venture too high. Ötzi also carried something valuable and new: copper. A copper axe may have marked him out as a wealthy man and, perhaps, even a leader that others followed. If so, then his reign as leader was shortly to come to a dramatic end.

Ötzi was not in the best of health; his backpack contained medicine and modern analysis of his body shows signs of frailty. Maybe others saw this as a chance to seize power. Discontent was clearly festering as Ötzi had suffered a cut to his hand just a day or so before he died. The few nicks on the edge of his axe-blade may have been as a result of this altercation although we shall never know whether he was using it as a weapon or as a symbol for his diminishing status. It seems likely that similar threats forced him to make that fateful journey into the mountains. Pollen layers in his gut show that he travelled through the low altitude hornbeam trees, moved up to a stand of high altitude pines, before doubling back and visiting the hornbeams again. Perhaps he was trying to elude his pursuers. It did not work. Eventually, and probably through sheer desperation, he followed a pass up into the mountains where an arrow, expertly aimed so that it cut an artery, caused him to bleed to death. Before he died, his assailant removed the arrow, perhaps to mask the tell-tale mark of his or her identity. To make sure Ötzi was truly dead, his assailant also struck him on the head. An ignominious end for an old man. Whoever killed him, and there may have been more than one involved, left Ötzi’s belongings, including his axe, where they lay. Again, this may have been a precaution to avoid later detection but perhaps the items were just too special and too closely bound to Ötzi that their removal could not be countenanced. Enough harm had been done that day. With the last of his strength, Ötzi seems to have reached out for his axe – even today, his arm remains stretched across his body – but it was not to be. Whether he realised the sacred object was still close by or not, it could do little for him and he died alone, frozen in time.

In a bizarre twist, Simon Helmut, the man who jointly found Ötzi on 19th September twenty years ago, shared the same fate as his sensational discovery. In October 2004, his dead body was recovered from the ice where it had been trapped, just like Ötzi’s had, so many years before.

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The Winter Solstice in Prehistory

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Humans probably always noticed the movement of the sun across the sky, and celebrated the extremes of its rising and setting on the days of the solstices, but it is only when people began to build monuments during the Neolithic, about 3,000 BC, that we have clear evidence of the importance of these times. 

Stonehenge is perhaps the best known of all the Neolithic monuments and is generally associated with the summer solstice, but this may have more to do with modern use of the site rather than ancient practice. New research at adjacent Durrington Walls reveals a Neolithic village, although the makeshift nature of the houses suggests that people did not live there all year round but only visited at special times. These were clearly rowdy occasions, as the copious remains of butchered pigs attest, and sumptuous feats were definitely on the menu. But the remains tell us something else. Most of the pigs were around eight or nine months old. Assuming that they had been born in the early spring months, people were eating them around the winter and not the summer solstice. Since these same people almost certainly held ceremonies at the neighbouring stone circle at Stonehenge, it suggests that it was first and foremost, a winter monument. 

Walking towards the stones from the avenue that winds up from the river, the setting sun of the midwinter solstice bisects the circle as it sinks across the plain and into the underworld of night. Perhaps this was the most auspicious and dangerous times for these communities and a great monument and attendant celebration was necessary to ensure that the sun returned the next morning and, with it, the lengthening days that promised new life and the continuation of their world. 

It may also be significant that a timber circle contained within Durrington Walls was aligned to the rising sun at midwinter (as were the ‘walls’ themselves). If people returned to the village after watching the sun set at Stonehenge, they did not have far to go to see it rise. Maybe this was the dichotomy they sought: death at Stonehenge and life at Durrington Walls. 

The dichotomy of life and death may also be evident within burial tombs, most famously at Newgrange in Ireland. Here, a shaft of sunlight from the midwinter sunrise pierces the passage to the burial chamber and lights the interior. Was this a way of symbolically bringing the dead back to life or a means of making their transition to the afterlife smoother. At another tomb, the Clava cairns in Scotland, it is the setting sun at midwinter that enters the tomb and lights the interior. Clearly, the meaning of the attendant symbolism was more complex than a single site can reveal. 

The Dorest Cursus, a ceremonial route running 10 kilometres across the land, was orientated so that anyone observing the setting sun on the midwinter solstice from within the western terminal of the earthworks would observe the glowing disc descend behind (or, in their eyes, perhaps within) a round barrow located on an adjacent ridge. It must have made a powerful spectacle. 

Similarly, at Long Meg and her Daughters, a stone circle in Cumbria, the outlying stone called Long Meg delineates the position of the setting of the midwinter sun for anyone situated within the circle. Like the Dorset Cursus, people had to be included and allowed into a sanctified space for the event for it to be truly appreciated. 

The inclusion of a special few, whilst excluding others (and this would have been especially pressing within the tombs, assuming the living witnessed the event at all) may hint at the politics of power that surrounded the solstice. An attitude that is prescient of all that has happened since, when the returning sun, has to many, become the returning son.

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Tombs of Rebirth

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

This is the third of five edited extracts to be posted this week from my new book, Prehistoric Belief: Shamans, Trance and the Afterlife. After the Mesolithic yesterday, we now move into the Neolithic, when people began to build monuments and vast tombs to hold the remains of their dead.

We stand before the entrance to a large tomb. The stones that form the threshold are massive and provide an eerie presence in the flickering torchlight. The body of the dead woman lies just before us and, sitting over her, is an old man with long greasy hair and, from what we can tell, no teeth. It has been a while since the shaman, for this is what the old man is, ingested the drugs and he is beginning to sway, his chant getting louder. Just then, some younger men to his right start drumming, pounding their hands onto skins, pulled taught over wide-brimmed pots. The shaman gets up slowly and moves into the tomb. There is a gasp; he is now entering the otherworld of the spirits. He emerges almost immediately, his arms filled with bones, some with bits of flesh still hanging off them, and he jabbers incoherently at the small group of mourners about us. The drums continue to pound and we start to feel light-headed ourselves. The entrance to the tomb seems to take on enormous proportions and we know that to enter its confines means never to return. Suddenly, the shaman grasps the corpse of the woman and drags it roughly into the tomb. We can just see him scatter the remains of half-rotted bodies to make enough room. He then disappears from sight, swallowed completely by the tomb. It will be some time before he emerges and we wait, in awe of his powers.

For many traditional people, death has two stages: leaving the world of the living, followed by joining the world of the dead. Between these stages, the spirits of the dead are thought to stay close to the living and, if such a view prevailed in the Neolithic, this may explain why burial places had so much activity that went beyond mere disposal of the corpse. In effect, whilst they remained between the worlds, the dead became a resource that could be approached and perhaps, by undertaking trance journeys, even spoken to as if they were still alive.

It is likely that entire corpses were placed in the entrance passageways or even left outside of the tomb, where they would putrefy and rot. When the remains started to fall apart, certain bones might be removed and used for ceremonies in which the dead spirit may have been contacted. As the bones hardened and lost all resemblance of flesh, some were returned to the tomb, to be sorted and stacked with matching bones that already lay in the far depths of the chamber. Only now would the deceased pass to the afterlife and enter the realm of the dead. The individual had, perhaps, become an ancestor.

Although the interiors of these tombs were sometimes spacious, they were presumably crowded with bones, and the passageways leading to them were often small and cramped. Moreover, the space was probably highly charged with the presence of the dead and may have been considered dangerous even taboo. It is likely that only a certain few had the necessary ability to enter the tomb and remain among the dead. These were the people who regularly moved between this world and the otherworld as part of their vocation: the shamans of the community.

If the shamans were to interact with the spirits of the dead (and even to survive what must have been a hellish experience of being among so many rotting bodies), they needed to shift their consciousness into trance and, besides taking drugs, drumming may have been one way they achieved this. In fact, it seems that some of the tombs were designed to heighten the sound of the drum and to achieve the exact frequency required to facilitate trance. In some Welsh and Irish tombs, there are engraved patterns and these have been matched to the phosphene shapes seen in trances induced by psilocybin mushrooms. Perhaps this was the drug taken by the shaman we saw. Some of these images seem to mark significant stages of the journey into the tomb, perhaps marking places where the spirits needed placating. Even the form of the tomb itself, with a passageway leading to the realm of the spirits, closely matches trance journeys to the otherworld and the shared imagery would have been readily understood as referencing both experiences.

Within some tombs, there is tantalising evidence of the sort of thing shamans might do when they entered the chamber. At Barclodiad y Gawres, in Wales, for example, a stew made from the remains of fish, amphibians, a grass snake, and small mammals, was boiled and then poured over the smouldering remains of a fire, before being covered with small stones and shells. Although the full import of this event can probably never be understood, it is striking how the animals chosen for the stew mirror the realms of water and earth and the amphibians and snake that are at home in both worlds. Perhaps the stew also referenced the ability of the shaman to move between comparable worlds and was therefore a highly symbolic offering to make to the dead.

When the dead had served their community for as long as they were required, they were returned to the tomb to join the serried ranks of the ancestors. The bones now lost their individual identities and it appears that they may have even been sorted into matching groups, each with its own distinct place within the tomb. For the dead spirit, this was probably the time when it was thought to finally make the journey to the afterlife, leaving contact with the world of the living behind.

At a very small number of tombs, the way to the afterlife may have been guided by the rising sun, shining down the entrance passageway and illuminating the chamber itself. Such tombs are generally aligned so that this happens on a significant day, such as the solstices or equinoxes, and this is what happened at Newgrange in Ireland. On the midwinter solstice, the rising sun shone through a slot above the door, constructed so that the beam could be angled correctly to reach all the way to the inner chamber. It was a sight few would have witnessed (and those outside the tomb may have had to form a clear route for the sun’s rays to penetrate) but perhaps it was never meant to be seen by the living. When the sun reached the chamber, it hit a small section of wall, low down on the right hand side. Engraved on the wall were three joined spirals and these flare brightly under the glare of the sun. Is this the sign the dead spirits were waiting for: the illumination of the spiral that symbolised access between the worlds?

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