Flint (eBook)

chapter one

Dog Skull Afternoon

Autumn had come late to the Downs that year and the leaves hung tawny and bleached green on the trees. The day was still; a minuscule shift in the air currents brought them down around us in eddies, as we walked – Frank Beresford and I – up a flint track on a pale November morning.

Frank Beresford was a retired schools inspector from West Wickham. We had met just once, that summer, at the Lithic Studies Society in London, at an afternoon talk on the artefact-logging systems of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

We were the kind of audience that shuffled in and nodded where necessary before fixing on the speaker or our feet. But that day the president, in a burst of embracive enthusiasm, asked that we each introduce ourselves and declare our area of interest. When my turn came I kept it brief, telling the group about my fieldwalking, the flint tools I had logged and the Neolithic settlement I had roughly mapped on the upper slope of a river terrace on the North Downs. What might have been truer to say was that I was a 54-year-old woman with a rock problem, but it was not a confessional, and anyway, we all had our issues.

Frank Beresford’s, it turned out, was handaxes. Frank was writing a report on the Palaeolithic tools of the Upper Ravensbourne valley; an axe had been found locally to me by a 19th-century antiquarian, and Frank said he’d be keen to join me fieldwalking, should ever I happen to be over that way, to get a feel for the landscape.

And here, some months later, we were.

I had grown up on these Downs, on the opposite side of the valley. I still live in the village where I was born, which is mostly happenstance and suggests a continuity that’s by no means true, but that is one of the great blessings of my life. From my house I can see fields and the small copses that stretch away to the wooded ridge that defines a wide horizon. I walk the Downs all the time, but not these woods and fields in my immediate view, which are farmland and mostly out of bounds.

The track we were following – a hollow way worn to mud and stone by footfall and washed deep in the middle by rain – runs at right angles from the valley floor up to the ridge, after which it doglegs down into the next valley. The fields on either side of the track have no paths across or round. A warning to trespassers on a sign close to the entrance stile, and again farther up the track, must have put the local dog walkers off. The couple of times I’d ignored the sign and walked the fields after ploughing, I’d turned up nothing for my trouble. Not even a decent nodule. I’d noted them as archaeologically sterile and geologically dull. Anyway, some places just feel wrong if you’re alone. It was years since I’d walked this way, so I was happy to be exploring afresh in Frank Beresford’s company.

The find spot of the axe Frank was studying was a small chalk quarry near the southern tip of the wood where we were headed. Frank was certain it came from the clay overlying the quarry and was unearthed as estate workers dug down to get to the chalk to use for fertiliser or to make lime for mortar.

The axe was now in the British Museum stores – part of its vast back-room flint collection. Frank showed me a picture on a printout. It was magnificent. Deep-toffee-coloured flint had been knapped – that is, shaped with a series of carefully aimed hammer blows from another rock or antler piece – into a round-tipped kite-shaped axe that would fit into the grip of a large man’s hand.

Its date – based on others of its type – was around 420,000 years Before Present. It meant that no sapiens could have made it. The hand that knapped the tool belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, a species of human that lived 800,000 to 300,000 years ago – becoming extinct around 100,000 years before the sapiens lineage emerged on the African continent.

I have held tools not touched since they were discarded 5,000 years ago in the late Stone Age. I have gathered flint flakes struck by Neolithic knappers on the banks of long-dead rivers. I’ve found fossils worn smooth by ancient human touch. But I have never held a tool made by another kind of human. I asked Frank if he’d had the axe out of its storeroom case. He said he had. I wanted to ask what it felt like to have it in his hand, but that was at once stupid and personal. Stupid because it probably felt like nothing; personal because if it did feel like something, that was between Frank and the hominin.

The hollow way was dry underfoot. Flint – variously rounded or chipped and sharp – poked through the earth and the leaves, and our feet beat a faint rap. Beneath us, beneath the metre or so of soil, was around 300 metres of chalk, sitting in turn on the clays and the greensands of the South. Walkers – such as myself – and runners can detect the shift in geology from the resonant, hollow-sounding chalk to the dense, dull greensand through their footfall.

I wanted to know more about the alien axe. Frank said he had pondered its use. Southern England at the time the axe was made basked in a lush, swampy warmth known in geological terms as the Hoxnian interglacial. It was not an England anyone today would recognise. Among the beasts that roamed the landscape was the now-extinct straight-tusked elephant, a creature at least twice the size of today’s African elephant. In parts of Europe – notably Essex, just fifty miles from where we were walking – large male elephants in their prime had been speared and their carcasses butchered using tools such as Frank’s axe. Or perhaps the axe gutted a rhinoceros or a Barbary macaque. Or perhaps it smashed the scavenged bones of a lion for its marrow.

Birds sang overhead. A plane came over low, heading for Biggin Hill. It was hard to imagine a lion carcass butchered on the downland I could see from my home.

The woods thinned. We were high now and could see back across the valley to the village. I could just make out the roof of my house at the farm’s edge. I pointed it out to Frank. He spoke about the river that had likely flowed in the valley between – down where the road was now. I imagined the hominins walking down to the river (stately, and in slow motion). Frank said it was almost impossible to know the form the landscape took at the time of the axe-maker’s people. Before these groups colonised Britain, great glaciers from a period known as the Anglian Stage – the most severe ice age in the last two million years – stretched their fingers as far south as Hornchurch in Essex, just twenty-eight miles north of here. Then, the land we now stood on had been tundra. The extreme, rock-shattering freeze-thawing at the epoch’s end turned the ground surface to warm slurry cut by fast-flowing rivers. The surface in turn refroze and cracked, then baked, then flooded. The shifting conditions turned the whole area into a great periglacial stew made of churned upper levels of the chalk, the flints that had originally lain within it, and all the soil and vegetation that had been present before the freeze. What we were walking on – the clay with all the flints in it – was dried stew. When the ice finally retreated, the area became a swamp, which warmed then sprouted tropical vegetation, providing a handsome and food-rich habitat for hominins living at the northernmost edge of the world.

This was deep human time. Not as deep as deep Earth time and nowhere near as vast as space time, but just as hard to grasp. If I held the hand of my mother, and she held the hand of hers and so on, we would create a chain of 20,000 generations before reaching our indirect ancestors who lived in this valley – a chain that would stretch twelve-and-a-half miles, or twice the entire length of Frank’s and my proposed walk.

We wandered on up the track, and the woods thickened. It was time to abandon the path, and we cut left through the trees to the field’s edge. From across the valley this field appeared a dull brown. I had assumed it had been ploughed and never reseeded. I was wrong. The crop – something I couldn’t even recognise – had not been reaped and had gone to seed. It seemed wasteful and sad. It probably would have cost more to harvest than the crop was worth. The brittle stalks reached almost to the top of Frank’s head. Between were all manner of weeds. Below our feet the ground was gravelly – flint in all colours on a gingery clay, including some small chips the toffee-gold of Frank’s axe.

We skirted the crop’s edge until I found a way through. It was a worn path, made by badgers, foxes and deer, by the size of it. Not quite suitable for humans, but it was what we had. I went first. Burrs from the dead crop snagged our clothes and caught in our hair. Thistle seeds escaped as our shoulders brushed the weeds among the skeleton stems. We stepped carefully over animal scat, bending every few moments to check the flint. The path opened into a clearing some four metres wide where the earth was especially gravelly. Frank gathered samples but they were just that. No tool fragments, no waste flakes. Just old rolled flint.

We were walking on ancient stuff, a thousand times ploughed, with vegetation that was completely humanly created. And yet the path, the field and the whole rise from the valley had a profound wildness to it. I felt the soft, mothy flutter of panic. The wild, trickster god whispered, and I was scared. I swallowed it down, narrowing the gap...