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Rock Art with Dr. George Harold Nash - Ep 133
280 Plays1 month ago
Join us on this week’s episode, as Alan sits down with Dr. George Harold Nash, a prominent specialist in the field of prehistoric rock art from the University of Liverpool. Dr. Nash has extensive experience in researching rock art in places across the world, the US and South America. He’s currently working in Rising Star Cave in South Africa and several Upper Palaeolithic caves in his native South Wales.
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- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/133
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Transcript
Intro to Rock Art Preservation
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, i'm I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to The Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
Meet Professor George Nash
00:01:32
Speaker
Hey, gang. We're going to hear from Professor George Nash, episode 133 of your Rock Art Podcast. This time from the UK and George has had a ah flamboyant career, globe trotting all over the stratosphere and finding remarkable archaeology in rock art. You will love him. What a joy to behold.
00:02:05
Speaker
Hello, boys and girls. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm here and in primitive Bakersfield, California, talking to Dr. George Nash from the UK. Can you imagine? I don't think we've ever had anyone in the three years that I've been podcasting on this rock art podcast from the UK. So this is the first, George. We're honored and blessed to have you as a guest scholar.
00:02:33
Speaker
Well, as they say in in Welsh, sha shuaii shuma head da die so yes, I'm i'm very, very ah privileged and and honored to be here with you, Alan. And this is the only rock art podcast in the world, to my knowledge. As far as I'm aware, yes. I mean, there are there are podcasts I deal with, which are yeah basically anthropology and archaeology, but I think Pacific on rock art. But ah I can talk rock art until the cows come home.
00:03:01
Speaker
ah That's great. So the way I opened this up you know originally is you could certainly give a ah bit of background about your identification currently, but also how the heck did you ever get into this crazy profession of of anthropology, archaeology, and the study of the past, which is ah quite unusual.
00:03:26
Speaker
Well, it's ah it's a bit of an interesting story. I mean, I will say that um um I'm very, very rich in terms of the intellectual bank, but financially poor because all archaeologists and anthropologists are poor.
Social Theory in Archaeology
00:03:40
Speaker
And really, my my story starts ah way back and it's quite an interesting story and I think it applies to a lot of people. But back in the 1980s, the early 1980s, I was a trained as a commercial artist And um I did a degree in in art ah fine art and graphics and photography and got a job. But at the time in the early 1980s, the UK and I i dare say the US as well, was going through a revolution in terms of what they call new technology.
00:04:11
Speaker
And so everything that I did was done by hand and and a keen eye, but we had this thing called digitization. So I think it was going digital. So I worked with analog, they wanted to go digital and all the companies I worked for were going out of business because At the time, there were very strong union representations to say that we should stay as we are, stay traditional. And that wasn't going to be the case. And so right about 1982, 83, I got fed up with going from one art studio to another. And I just said then turned to my then wife and said,
00:04:45
Speaker
She fancied an adventure and she said, yes, of course. So I went to do a degree in, first of all, in archaeology and ancient history at the University at the university College of St. David's in Lampertone, Wales, which incidentally is the third oldest university in England and Wales, and I hated every minute of it. So in my second year, I had a chance of moving across to doing archaeology and environmental sciences, which I did and thoroughly enjoyed.
00:05:13
Speaker
At the same time, whilst I was doing the last two years of my degree, I met a couple of people who were really very inspiring with what they taught me. One was a guy called Professor Mike Walker, who was a specialist in quaternary science. So that scientific background, that baseline that I needed to carry me through to understand things like rock art, for example, and understand chronology, but in a in and in in a natural sciences approach,
00:05:39
Speaker
he gave me that information. And then I met up with a guy, also with a guy called ah Professor Chris Tilly. And Chris Tilly has just died, in fact, he died in March. But he was a ah really one of the most important people at the time to bring in what we call social theory and archaeology. So if any of you or anybody out there listening to this, and remembers Shanks and Tilly, Mike Shanks and Chris Tilly, and Mike Shanks is at actually at Stanford,
00:06:06
Speaker
They were big influences on certainly my the way I sort of took my philosophy forward. What is social theory or social architecture? Social theory is basically looking at the idea of how philosophy can ah can answer some of the questions in archaeology. Now, just remember that when you or I dig an archaeological site, we are maybe only looking at, if we're looking at a prehistoric site, only looking at maybe 5% of the total material culture.
00:06:34
Speaker
If we sit in our offices now, we have ah an expert explanation for every bit of material culture, right down to the printer, to the computer, to the table, to the chairs we're sitting on. Whereas if we're looking at an archaeological site, say 50,000 years ago, we don't have that those explanations. we We can't work out what the what the the the critical theory or the the the meaning of of objects, because those objects have obviously obviously decayed or they've been they've been lost, they've been destroyed. And so we have to try and work out what we can say about the other 95% that's missing from the archaeological record. So theory comes into it comes into play a lot in certainly my world. So, I was taught things like phenomenology, semi-artics, hermeneutics, and these are all sort of French philosophical discourses that came through and sort of creeped into the archaeological well the archaeological um sort of studying in yeah in British universities and and certainly American universities as well ah back in the 1980s. I think the UK is, and what you're talking about for some reason,
00:07:46
Speaker
seems to be far more advanced in some ways than my colleagues in the Americas. Yeah, go go ahead. Well, as I say that, you know, the American university system was really based on anthropology. And anthropology provides some of the answers. But obviously, as we well know, that anthropology can sometimes be a little bit dangerous. And so you have to think about other things that can come into the record, be it the archaeological record or whatever, or the record of the past, I think it's a better term to use. And and and they really
00:08:19
Speaker
ah Since this is partly a ah story about rock art or you know the the element of semiotics, e I just finished a book, a 70,000-word book, on the iconicity of the U.S. Tekins, basically a semiotic study. Now, just saying that Rock art studies is still, I'd say, one of the ugly stepchildren of archaeology here in the States, because they don't I don't think they truly grasp
00:08:54
Speaker
The powerful ah database, the powerful dataset that RockGuard is or has or means ah could potentially be informative on such a great variety of topics and also the intimate association it has with meaning from an emic standpoint.
00:09:18
Speaker
i i think you're I think you're right. and I mean, the again, the the thing that I've already said is that we we are missing 95% plus of the meaning and understanding, not just of the archaeology, but also rock art as well. I mean, if you look at the the stuff you see in California, for example, i said I did some work in Oregon many, many years ago, and beautiful beautiful beautiful paintings, beautiful engravings on these rocks.
00:09:45
Speaker
but we still don't know the full meaning of them. And I mean, i mean it keeps me in a job, it keeps you in a job as well. Alan, I dare say. Absolutely. Because you can you can set out a number of theories, a number of ideas, but that meaning is trying to establish what is going on. And one thing I like to do with my students, I don't talk in years or thousands of years, I talk in generations of community. So for example, if we think about in if we look at ah at ah at a typical century, 100 years, there's probably three or four generations of community or three or four generations of family. You times that by 10 to get 1000 years, you've got yourself 30, 40 generations of community, and so on
Graffiti and Prehistoric Art
00:10:25
Speaker
and so forth. And the big problem we have at the moment is that when people were making art, if you want to call it art, or some form of visual communication systems, I prefer to call it say 20,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago, the meaning of that art or that those that that insignia is slowly but surely being lost generation after generation after generation until we get to 2024 when we haven't a clue what it means. and This is where philosophy comes into ah being ah quite an important tool to use when trying to work out the interpretation
00:11:03
Speaker
of some rock art. And sometimes the the subject can be studied in a broad way using the terminology forager theology. Yes, yes, Bomes, yes. I mean, people use the word ritual or the words ritual and symbolism quite loosely. And I think sometimes you've got to break that, even break that down if you can. And I think what I quite like, I mean, I was saying to Chris earlier on, that one of the most interesting things that I've been looking at is looking at modern graffiti.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yes. And that's really one of my sort of specialisms. I had the pleasure of doing some programs for the BBC a few years ago oh on modern graffiti, looking at particular Banksy work of the graffiti artist Banksy. And what was really interesting there is looking at the underlying meanings of contemporary art and just seeing where we can go with this when we're looking at prehistoric art. So the one thing I was interested in, in for example, was the idea of gender, looking at disenchanted youth, looking at how they express themselves
00:12:13
Speaker
because they're disenchanted because they haven't got jobs, they haven't got no money, and how they express that meaning onto a but to a wall. and And if you can look at those sort of things, and also territoriality as well, how gangs, for example, do tagging and within our cities so and and towns.
00:12:32
Speaker
around the US and the UK, and how they organise themselves around territories. We can start to work out, for example, the distribution of rock art in prehistoric times, maybe for different reasons, maybe for more religious, symbolic and ritual reasons. But it's it's a start with trying to unravel. And I thinks think it's a good word. Right. And there are analogues going on there.
00:12:58
Speaker
There is definitely definitely a structure of meaning, the meaning of meaning, semiotics. But also, ah ah looking at this imagery yes absolutely absolutely yeah from my work and and yours, yeah there are times, there are cultures, there are are circumstances where we get to peer into the past because of the preservation or the consistent 2,000 years of continuous activity where the theology is maintained and preserved.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yes, and also you could also, I think it's an important point to consider, Alan, as well. You start to sort also see sort of changes. I mean, the one thing you can do, certainly within the European context, and I don't like using the European context too much, but you can see these sort of waves of style coming through, yeah and their synchronous right through the European continent, they even spread ah even further east into Eurasia as well. We have, for example, you know, well, Magdalene is a good example, the Magdalene period, which is, you know, the latter part of the Upper Paleolithic, you've got figurative animals being beautifully painted, and then it stops suddenly. it You then go to sort of more geometric forms, and then you go back to, then then then in the Mesolithic, you are going towards portable art,
00:14:24
Speaker
And then in the the Neolithic, you're heading in towards more ah geometric and abstract forms. And then in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, you get figurative stuff and it occurs all the way throughout. But again, it's synchronous all the way through. And again, if you wanted to so take it even further than that,
00:14:42
Speaker
I mean, I've done work in South America and obviously obviously
Neanderthals and Early Art
00:14:45
Speaker
work in south ah South Africa as well. And the similar sort of thing is going on. These patterns seem to be reemerging all the time in waves. I will call it chronological waves so ah throughout prehistory.
00:14:58
Speaker
i like that I like that terminology. I've never heard it before, but i like i like I like that particular way of describing the chronological waves. We see that in COSO rock art, yes and i had never and I had never discovered that before. And and it's it's only been recently that we can explicate some of the earlier archaic elements that that to me, potentially, may be preshemonic in sort of the existence of this cultic phenomenon, this this mother of game or this animal mass mistress or this ah lunar goddess phenomenon that may have occurred early and then it's basically gone.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, i mean it's it's it's i mean it's I mean, the further you go back, obviously, the more problematic the material culture is to try and understand. I mean, I've talked about the the magic 5% or 95% missing from the total material culture. yes But if we go back if we if if we go back to that,
00:16:02
Speaker
that time. And there's an interesting time area that I'm looking at the moment, between 40 and 50,000. This is where we start to see in Europe, Neanderthals are dominant at 50,000, they are there at 40,000. But suddenly, they start to sort of deplete and go away.
00:16:20
Speaker
yeah But with it, yeah they're taking away their material culture and part of that material culture I'm sure is rock art. And the question I'm asking a lot of my colleagues is, are we teaching Neanderthals how to do art or are they teaching us?
00:16:36
Speaker
And again, ah and that's an important point, because again, is if you look if you look at the legacy that Neanderthals have had, or the bad press they've had, yes certainly certainly with yeah British archaeologists over the last 120, 150 odd years, yeah they these are these are brutish animals. But but clearly now we're starting to see that that is not the case. now know they they believed They believed in abstract thought,
00:17:02
Speaker
they were burying the dead in a particular way. And also, I would argue, and we've now got proof of this, and I will talk to you a little bit about this a little bit later on, but we've certainly got evidence, certainly within two or three caves, where we've picked up the DNA of Neanderthals producing rock art. so okay And this is in Europe. So it's ah it's it's yeah it's it's a really interesting sort of, I think we're on a very interesting sort of cusp. Oh, we are, we are, yeah.
00:17:30
Speaker
every Every day, there's revolutions in this particular discipline of ours. I think this is a great place to stop a segue and move to our next segment. yeah sure See you in the flip-flop, gang.
00:17:44
Speaker
Welcome back, gang. We've got Professor George Nash, who is ah from the UK, and he's online. We're going to talk about his active research areas and learn more about his his discoveries and his wonderful nature in terms of his perspective on the study of anthropology, archaeology, and rock art.
00:18:08
Speaker
God bless you, George. It's all yeah it's ah it's all yours. Go ahead. Well, yeah actually, I think I need to sort of go go back quite a few years, in fact, Alan. and I think what is quite important is that, as I said to you before, one of my biggest influences was a guy called Chris Tilly, Professor at UCL.
00:18:27
Speaker
And um I started, ah he he was instrumental in me doing my masters and I did my masters on portable art from the Danish and South Scandinavian Mesolithic. So basically basically I was looking at decorated bone, antler and amber. And these are so sort of portable items that will be carried around a landscape.
00:18:49
Speaker
around southern Scandinavia and also in the UK as well and they would have geometric forms on them. Sometimes they would be figurative, they'd be red deer carved on these little pieces of bone and antler. ah Sometimes the amber was shaped into animals and they would be drilled with drill holes so you'd be wearing them as pendants.
00:19:09
Speaker
And so this is where I really, in many respects, this is where I expanded my sort of interest into archaeology and anthropology. Because what I wanted to think about was the idea about how these things move around, how do ideas move around a landscape, or in this case, an island scape. And so I did a lot of work on this for for for one year. And then I think i I did a good job because I was then asked to publish a book on it and I did.
00:19:37
Speaker
So that was really the start of my sort of academic career in many respects, as well as a few papers. And then I was still in contact with Chris Tilly, and he said, well, we could do now then, George. yeah And I said, no idea, Chris, he said, rock art.
00:19:52
Speaker
And that was this. And so I shifted then from the University of Wales to NTNU in Trondheim in Norway. So I did my PhD in Norway, and my PhD was on rock engravings from from the Norwegian coast, coastalized the fjords of of central Norway. And did I did a comparative analysis with that lot with levanine Spanish Levantine rock art.
00:20:20
Speaker
which was painted. Now, forget the medium, forget they were carvings and paintings. What I wanted to do was look at the underlying mechanisms that make people want to do art on to rock, and in particular, how to fish or gatherers. So I looked at all manner of things, I looked at a lot of i lot of anthropological and ethnographic examples both from the US it especially really northern northern US and and also Canada as well and and I did a comparative analysis and that was finished 35 years ago also like that and and really that set me on course really um i I mean I had a choice so I had a choice at the time when I finished my PhD
00:20:59
Speaker
was to shy i so forget rock art and go and do sort of excavation, which I do still do excavation, or do I pursue rock art as a an academic pursuit? And that's what I've been doing for the last 35, 40 odd years.
00:21:14
Speaker
And I've gone from really looking at things like, as I've sort of mentioned already, modern graffiti, quatet contemporary art, but really I specialize
Prehistoric Art in Wales
00:21:24
Speaker
or have been specialising in geometric forms from Neolithic burial monuments, especially in north in in Western Europe, Atlantic Europe. And I'm now at the moment, and again, this is a story you just couldn't make up, but I i left my job in 2021.
00:21:41
Speaker
I think I was bullied, but i had to let I think I lived. It wasn't an academic position. It was a commercial position I had. And on November the first and then on November november the sixth, I got an invite to go to work in the UAE, the United Arab ah arab Emirates.
00:21:59
Speaker
and I said yes straight away and the best thing I ever did because i got I got absolute freedom to do what I really wanted to do which was basically to do more cave work looking at paintings in particular and the reason why I say paintings rather than than engravings was that we have a revolution going on, a technical revolution going on in in Europe at the moment, whereby we can now start to understand how pigments are produced. We can also see pigments that we couldn't see before, and I'll come to that in a minute. and so Really, in many respects, my sort of philosophical philosophical background has slowly been so slowly but surely been turning it turning into something a lot more hard science.
00:22:44
Speaker
And so a lot of my colleagues were working with a thing called Decorrelation Stretch, which is a color algorithm, which I dare say you've got in the US. And it was actually invented in the US yeah by a guy called John Hartson in 1995. And it's an absolute godsend for people like me who've got poor eyesight anyway. But the one thing it does give us, it allows us to look at panels in caves in particular, where there's been very little sort of um problems with erosion or weathering.
00:23:14
Speaker
and ah you can tease out the even the most minutest fractions of pigment on cave walls and that has been a big revolution certainly certainly within our field. In the UK it's hardly used but where I teach in Portugal and Spain it's used a lot.
00:23:32
Speaker
And so i now I've now teamed up with ah with colleagues of mine, actually colleagues who I was a supervisor to and examined their PhDs. We've got a team called First Art and there's five or six of us from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Wales, not England. wow and we go around the world and so we've been doing a lot of work all over the place and I've been also working with somebody from Canada as well and so we've been working in Jordan, Israel before but obviously before this trouble started. I've been working in South Africa, Spain, Portugal and also we have it in my native Wales. Now the wonderful thing about Wales is that
00:24:15
Speaker
i I call Wales a northern frontier and what I mean by what i mean by northern northern frontier is that the glaciers the last glacial maximum which occurs between say 15,000 and 40,000 years ago came down from Scandinavia, across the North Sea, into the British Isles, but stopped, thank goodness, just a few kilometres north of the current South Wales coastline. um Within that coastline, it's a limestone area, so there's lots of caves in there, and all the caves that I visited 30, 40 years ago, without looking for rock art, I'm now looking for rock art, and I've now got seven caves now under my belt.
00:24:57
Speaker
which have yielded prehistoric art. Two of those caves I've now successfully dated to the Paleolithic, so I'm very, very, very happy about that. it's So it's telling me that in these harsh climbs during the glacial maximum, and and I'll give you some idea of how cold it was, it was right about minus 10 in in the so in in in the summer. So it was very much a Siberian winter within the summer and we were we as modern humans, we were following migratory herds of mammoth, horse, bison, elk and reindeer.
00:25:35
Speaker
and later on a red deer as well and we were butchering them and we were creating these utilisation sites where we were extracting marrow, making bone tools, eating the flesh but luckily it was all around the cave sites around South Wales because we're picking up all this bone evidence in these bone caves and a lovely story. I was taking students to a site called Cat Hole Cave and again I can probably go into more detail a little bit later on about this one but I found rock art in there and got a date of I think around about 14,505 bp before present and that was a stalagmite flow or a stalflow or calcite flow
00:26:17
Speaker
over in an engraved reindeer carving. and so I had a minimum date of 14,505 plus or minus a couple of hundred years either side. so It was then then the oldest rock art we had dated, a minimum date.
00:26:33
Speaker
in the whole of northwestern Europe at that time. Obviously, I've now pushed those boundaries further back because I've been looking at another site which has yielded an even much much earlier date. so Some really exciting things going on at the moment and and have been with me for the last 30-odd years. and it started It started off with really with looking at nearly thick-chambered tombs and looking at the idea about how agarian societies were utilizing landscapes usually and utilizing in particular ritual landscapes and that's culminated in several books and there's one book which is just about to be published in fact called The Chambered Tombs of Wales and it'll be published in about two weeks time so it's ah ah I wish, ah which note you don't know my age but I'm um' over over a certain age but I wish I was 30 years younger. to yeah boy and do more digging and more excavation and more yeah more perspective of these sites. But um the the wonderful thing about the the book I've just done is that I've also brought in rock art as well because you may not know but in
00:27:41
Speaker
it's only in North and Western Europe and Atlantic Europe there are many thousands of near thick chambered tombs and of those thousands of chambered tombs there's about 10 to 15 percent of those monuments that at some point in their life are either painted on or carved upon and so in Portugal for example or in Spain there's a lot of ah painting and engraving within the same monument. However, as you will imagine, and we always joke about this in Britain, the the the British weather, the British weather unfortunately has denuded and decayed any potential painting. However,
00:28:20
Speaker
This is the beauty of it. There's a lot of engraved rock art. About, again, between 10 and 15% of all chamber tombs in Wales, for example, and there are about 250 extant monuments. So there's about 20 to 30 monuments within the within the record, within the megalithic record in Wales that have either simple cut marks on them or grooves or cup and ring marks.
00:28:44
Speaker
And in some cases, you get this what we call megalithic art, where you get chevrons, spirals, concentric circles being put into the chambers of these monuments. These are passage graves. And again, for those people who are listening to this, who don't know what a passage grave is, it's basically a circular monument, which has, guess what, a passage, which leads to a chamber. And within that chamber, that you may have side chambers, and those side chambers are ah are being decorated. So where fortunately we fortunately, we have that. Now, what I've managed to prove is that one particular stone, there's only one stone in the whole of Wales, which I've looked at, which is a stone called C16. It hasn't even been a name. And it's at a site called Barclady Gowers in an island called Anglesey, or if you're Welsh, you're in Asmon.
00:29:36
Speaker
and this is a passage grave. It dates to around about 3000 BC, so 5000 years old, and up until it was excavated in the 1950s, the whole of the chamber was buried with with accumulated soils, which had accumulated since its since it's term demise as a passage grave monument maybe around about 2000 BC. so Between 2000 BC and 1952, in fact, when they started excavating, there was a really good stratigraphic deposition of natural deposits in the in the chamber. These were excavated and revealing and revealed from that excavation were five stones which had been excavated, including C16.
00:30:20
Speaker
When I did de-stretch on the stone for a laugh, I found minute fragments of red hematite pigment inside some of the pecked areas of the stones. It wasn't just engraved with pecked designs of chevrons and a spiral and zigzag lines, but it was also painted as well. and I think this is the first painted site that we have from the Neolithic in this part of Europe. So, you know, very exciting. It's just by chance, I would say in many respects, if you say to me, oi Nash, do you think you've been lucky? I will say hell yes. i'm Really, really lucky. It's just being in the right place at the right time. but And also maybe having that sort of that sort of open mind with philosophy, hard science, and the the approaches to to to ah to doing that, you know, to do to ah ah approach society in that particular way.
00:31:16
Speaker
And also I've been helped really with a lot with a lot of very, very good colleagues of mine. we We set up a thing called the Welsh Rock Art Organization back in 2004. And basically what we had to do was basically look for rock art, because again, an interesting point is that in 1999, when there was a book published by a guy called Stan Beckinsall, and he reported, I think around about 15 sites in Wales, about four or 5,000 in Scotland and in Northern Britain, but only 15 in Wales. And so it was our job from 2004 onwards to increase that number. We've now got about 170 sites from just by prospecting. People getting getting in contact with me on Facebook and social media saying, dear Dr Nash, we have a site here which has, we think cut marks on it.
00:32:01
Speaker
Is it or isn't it? And so I'll go and visit that site some at some point and then verify whether we wherere whether it's not, it's Rockhart or not. So for example, last week, somebody got in contact with me, they were about to give a talk at a local archaeology society. They said, we've I've got a rock here with some cut marks on it. Is it or isn't it? And they just showed me the photographs and I instantly knew it was Rockhart. It was probably Bronze Age in date. So between say, 900BC to around about 2,200-2,500BC. So, you know you would instantly pick up that though though those those ah stylistic engravings on these on these portable rocks and also on sites, and you can easilyly tell you I can instantly tell you where they where they come from and where the influences come from as well. so that's an
00:32:50
Speaker
you're just a joy and your and your enthusiasm and your your knowledge is so engaging and so so deep and so wide and so so powerful. i look forward to I look forward to sharing a beef burger with you at some point, Alan. Yeah, but we have but we have to close out this segment and go to the next. So we have the Flip Flop gang. Well, gang, we're here for the final segment. It's your episode 133 with
Welsh Chambered Tombs and Rituals
00:33:20
Speaker
Dr. Nash from the UK.
00:33:22
Speaker
And he is just a joy and just a bundle of energy. Take it away, Dr. Nash. Right. Well, the final segment was ah ah as a difficult one to think about really, because without being too big headed to be too big headed, I've done a hell of a lot. And so I was thinking about, I mean, I've done stuff in Mount Carmel in is Israel, and that's probably one of the most wonderful experiences I've had in terms of looking at cave art and finding it and discovering it.
00:33:48
Speaker
I've also worked in Chile and Brazil. with but I'm going to stick with my native Wales. There was a site I've just done recently. It actually was on my sort of radar for quite a few years. Again, going back to krista Christopher Tilly, who was my so big influencer in many respects at university as an undergraduate. so he persuaded me to do an undergraduate dissertation on looking at the architecture of megalithic chamber tombs and I thoroughly enjoyed that and I've already always kept that and in the back of my head even when I've been looking at rock art and so when we set up the Royal Welsh Rock Art Organisation in 2004
00:34:26
Speaker
We started to think about looking at um megalithic sites, which have which have ah an element of rock art incorporated into them. And again, for people listening, if you don't know what ah what I'm talking about, I'm talking about sites which are made of stone,
00:34:42
Speaker
and they form a burial monument where you bury the dead. It could be a single burial, if it's a portal dolmen, or if it's a passage grave, it could be multiple burials within that within that monument. And basically, whatever monument you mean monument you're looking at made of stone, and it's a burial monument, it has five components. It has a passage.
00:35:02
Speaker
an entrance, a façade, a mound and it has a chambered area chambered area where the burials will go. Incorporated either inside or outside is sometimes rock art. We're not quite sure if rock art was actually applied to the monument whilst it was being constructed or was it a fad, a sort of ah a so hip and trendy thing to do at around about 3000 BC and they start to incorporate on some but not all. and as As I said to you before, it's usually between 10 and 15% across Atlantic Europe where we're seeing monuments are being decorated and there are also a lot of monuments which are not decorated. Although again, as I said to you before, we have a big problem with with weathering, certainly as you go towards the the British Isles where it's quite substantial
00:35:50
Speaker
weathering on rock and therefore anything which was painted will have disappeared a long time ago. sure In 2004, we started to look at a number of monuments, so we did over a 20-year period from 2004 to 2024.
00:36:06
Speaker
We looked at about five different excavations, all in Wales, and all of these monuments had rock art and other mental rock art within them. However, the one which was really, I think, the most most interesting for me was a site called Trellithy Ant. Trellithy Ant is a ah and a Welsh-chambered tomb. It's a dolman site.
00:36:26
Speaker
and it it is is it is located within a county called Pembrokeshire which is in southwest Wales and the site is near a small fishing village called Newport and it's part of a number of monuments, maybe I think about nine monuments, that encircle a river valley called the Nevin Valley and it's quite What is quite clearly going on here is that megalithic builders, people building these monuments, are fascinated by putting their sites on the areas of landscape which overlook this particular river valley. It happens elsewhere within Wales, but this is a particular sort of trait that we're so we're seeing with these particular monuments. And quite interestingly, of those nine sites, there's about four of them which have rock art on them. And the rock art is very simple. It's usually
00:37:19
Speaker
cut marks on the top of a capstone. And in prehistory, when these monuments were being utilised by Neolithic farmers, they would have created a mound around the the chamber, but the chamber capstone would have been exposed to the weathering. And so what is quite interesting is that the site ah of Trelefiance, which I excavated between Well, as excavated the wrong word, I investigated it between 2014 and 2019, and I published the results in 2021-2022. And what was really interesting about that was, as we had found with other sites, is that we have not just the site itself, but there are also other things going on within the landscape.
00:38:08
Speaker
what the Welsh Rock Art Organisation comprised of were, obviously, myself. There were two archaeologists, Carol James and Tom Wellicombe, very, very good archaeologists. and We had two geophysicists who did the geophysics and it also looked at the LIDAR surveys as well. and What was really interesting is that this site and a site nearby which we excavated a site called Trafal, it had I mean, an amazing buried landscape. And that landscape had been buried, but all the features that all the lumps and bumps that you see from a old normal archaeological site had been buried by a deposit called Lewis. This Lewis is a very, very fine sediment, which is
00:38:52
Speaker
brought in by the by the western westerly winds picking up these very very fine sediments from beach sediments and then depositing them on the land and that slowly gets built up over three or four thousand years so it wasn't just the monument itself that was of interest but it's also the landscape around it because the geophysics told us that we were dealing with two hinges so think about stonehenge but without the stones so two hinges a series of trackways, a series of bronze age later Bronze Age barrows. And so it was just a very, very busy landscape. So we first of all looked at the stone itself. And what was interesting was that nobody had ever, ever recorded the cut marks on top of the capstone. There had been sort of attempts to produce a stylistic record, but nothing in any any accuracy at all.
00:39:46
Speaker
And so what we did was, we did what we call oblique lighted photography. So we used the side lights in the middle of it, in darkness hours, used an oblique light, and then we photographed from above. And we got some absolutely fantastic imagery of this capstone. And quite clearly, although I'm going to get lambasted for saying this, but I think that the cup marks represent star constellations. Oh my word. Wow.
00:40:12
Speaker
Well, this is a trait we're seeing right through western britaint the Western British Isles, where we see cut marks being placed on top of capstones. So, for example, we counted 75 cut marks from this stone. Nearby Trefea, which I excavated in 2012 with the Welsh Rock Art Organisation, we had around about 80 to 90 cut marks.
00:40:36
Speaker
my colleagues, the geophysicists, and I have just done work at a site called Agaric Far in North Wales, which is a ah Neolithic axe factory, plus chambered monuments, plus stone circles. and And we've got about 148 cut marks on there. So it just gives you an idea about what is going on. And if you look hard enough, I mean, I've tried to use an astronomer to say, well, can you see anything in terms of castard constellations there? He said, no, it's just a mass of cut marks.
00:41:03
Speaker
So, I somehow think, and again this is my theoretical head coming out now, I think these are replicating star constellations and this idea about going either to the underworld or the overworld is occurring within the Neolithic ritual ah society ritualised society. Fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. Yeah.
00:41:25
Speaker
So we got that. So we did the recording on that. And then we did the geophysical survey around the around the monument. We did four segments of 20 square meters. So 880 meters in total. And we come across these two henge sites.
00:41:42
Speaker
And so we decided to do two small excavations and they were speculative excavations, although targeted, but we knew we were we were excavating over the hinges, but we didn't know what we were going to find. and So we started digging and we noticed that the stratigraphy was a running around about, and I work in American feet and inches, we went about a foot below the the the the the ground level, 30 centimetres.
00:42:07
Speaker
and we came across two fantastic pits which contained about 30-40 pieces of pottery from from one pot. Now just bear in mind that the soil within the this part of the British Isles is very very acidic and usually pottery, human remains or bones, animal bone of human bones, teeth do not survive the archaeological record but for some reason this pottery had and it's more than likely that it was probably a pot which was put into something like a leather receptacle and that ah allowed some form of preservation of this pottery. Now what we were really fortunate about when I picked up the first piece of pottery from that pit
00:42:51
Speaker
i said to my team, for goodness sake, don't clean it, don't wash it, just give it to me and it'll be excavated in the laboratory. So we excavated the pottery in the laboratory, because we managed to take off the residues from inside the pot. So very you so if any of you got a dirty saucepan in your kitchen, which you haven't cleaned for a long time, don't because it has food residues on it. And you can date the food residues and we did this we use a new a new dating system.
00:43:22
Speaker
which was dating the lipids from the from the food residues on the inside of the pottery. And we got a date of 3,100 BC. So that tells us that the hinges and the monument, the monument was probably a lot a lot earlier, in fact, probably the actual stone monument, the extant stone monument with the cut marks on top of the capstone were probably ah about 3,500 BC, but these were around about 3,100 BC. So it tells me,
00:43:50
Speaker
that we're looking at a dynamic dynamic landscape. So we've got something which is kicking off in the early Neolithic at 3500, 3600 with an extant monument, a portal dolmen called Troliphiant. And then later on, we've got hinges, burrows,
00:44:07
Speaker
cairns or manner of prehistoric later prehistoric monuments forming around it. So they're probably using that extant monument as a focus for further ritual activity. Now to make it even more interesting is that we found also from our excavation two shale beads which were perforated.
00:44:27
Speaker
And again, I would classify that as art with a small A. not They come from that we know where these artifacts came from, because about 25 kilometres to the south of the site is a site called Nabhead. And Nabhead is a little sort of jut, which goes into the into Cardigan Bay into the kind of the southern part of the Cardigan Bay.
00:44:52
Speaker
and it's a Mesolithic site. So we now know it's not just Neolithic and Bronze Age we've got there, we've but we've also got evidence of probable Mesolithic occupation or activity around Trellofian. So, you know, a really interesting sort of history, which was probably so spanning around about 6,000 to 7,000 years. So that is probably one of the most important sites I've had to look at in terms of rock art,
00:45:17
Speaker
with my interest in rock art and the near lithic and also the landscape as well because the landscape is again paramount with understanding why people build monuments where they do and also the most important thing which I've missed out really in many respects is that there's a blueprint running right through the near lithic in western Britain whereby at one point we're constructing portal dolmens which are the earliest burial monuments we have in western Britain And these dates, as I said you before, between three and a half thousand and three thousand eight hundred.
Explore Rock Art Yourself
00:45:53
Speaker
but they also get used all the way through the Neolithic, right through to that transition between the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and maybe even going into the Bronze Age as well. Fabulous. But as I said to you before, this particular group of monuments around the Neven Valley, including Trelifiat, has, in my view, some of the most wonderful rock art incorporated into the architecture of each of these monuments. So Dr. Nash, if you were to, yeah if you were to put a bow on it and give give a takeaway to our listenership about what it is to yeah do what you're doing.
00:46:30
Speaker
and what relevancy that has for them and for the cosmos yeah yeah at large. What would you say? and One thing I would say, Alan, is is that ah it's it's easy to read a lot of really good primary sources for these sites. But the one thing you need to do, and um I urge any listener in particular, where we know where you're based and in the US, if you're looking at rock art, is go look at the site yourself and look at it again. Because we can you can put 100 anthropologists in one room, and there'll be 100 answers to one site. And what you got to think about is that every interpretation of that site is as valid as any professor would so would have an interpretation of that site. So I think it's really important that
00:47:20
Speaker
people go and visit these places and make up their own minds about what might be going on. Some of these ah some of the some of the interpreters interpretations may be wacky, but some also may be very very valid as well. i mean I've had students throughout my career who have come up with ideas and a lot of them make sense. yeah and so ah you know And the one thing we we yeah we don't know, we don't know the full answer even even to looking at stuff which is from the the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, or the Neolithic in in Europe. And also, I would argue, if you're looking at some of the the the rock art you have in California, for example, or in Oregon, I did some work in Oregon. And again, unless you understand the myths and the legends of Native American Indians, for example, I don't know if that's the right term to use,
00:48:08
Speaker
yeah it's only they will know the answers to some of these questions but even they are stuck in some respects in understanding their their their ancestry and the art that was produced say even just 200 to 300 years before white settlers came into those those parts of the of the United States. Superb. Thank you Dr Nash. God bless you and we're signing off and this has been quite the adventure the yeah geographical and philosophical tour of the UK and all throughout the world. God bless everybody seeing this flip flop.
00:48:52
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:49:24
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.