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Warrior Scarlet - Episode 22
163 Plays6 years ago
Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff is a book set in the transition from Bronze to Iron Age, but that's the least interesting thing about it. I talk to Dr. Helen Chittock of the University of Oxford and Dr. Julia Farley of the British Museum about the history of archaeological theory as demonstrated by this book written in 1958.
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Transcript
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You're
Introduction to the Podcast
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listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
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Welcome to episode 22 of the Prehistories podcast with me, Kim Bedelf. Now, having got 21 episodes under my belt, I'm just starting to relax after like two years of doing this. I'd really like to hear from you. If you think that our views on the books that we discuss here, me and my guests, are a load of rubbish and you want to tell us otherwise, then get in contact with me and let me know.
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You can find me on Twitter at Kim Biddelf. That's B I double D U L P H. I know it's a little bit of a difficult one, but I'm sure you can go. Or just at Arc Podnet so that you tell us if I'm right, if we're right or wrong.
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If you think that the book is better than we think, if you think that it's not so good, or if we missed a particular topic, or missed the point of the book entirely, I'd really like to hear more from you guys.
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So let's get straight to introducing my guests. My first guest is Dr.
Meet the Experts: Dr. Helen Chittick and Dr. Julia Farley
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Helen Chittick, a postdoctoral researcher on the European Celtic Art and Context Project at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Hello, Helen.
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Hi. Hi. Thank you very much for joining me here today. Thanks for having me. It's going to be so good to talk to you about this. We've had a little bit of a pre chat, haven't we? So there's quite a lot to get into with this with this book. And it's, yes, so I'm very, very happy to have you here. Thank you.
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Let me introduce my second guest. Thank you, Helen. Let me introduce my second guest is Dr Julia Farley, the curator of the British and European Iron Age Collections at the British Museum, and a recent, well, co-curator of the recent Celts exhibition at the British Museum that moved on then, didn't it, to Scotland, to Edinburgh. Hi, Julia. Hello.
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Thank you so much for joining us and I know you've had a bit of a trek getting home tonight, haven't you? You've been to record this with us. I think London is
European Celtic Art and Context Project
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still recovering from the snow. Yeah, hopefully it'll all be melted in a couple of days and we won't know, you know, we'll think what was all that fuss about? There was nothing that much. I think it's just one of those things.
00:02:28
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Yeah, it's just down here in the south. We don't know how to deal with it. Yes. So I wanted, first of all, I would like you to kind of tell us a little bit about your work. Helen, what is the European Celtic Art in Context project all about? Well, this is a project and it's hosted at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford. It's led by Professor Chris Gostin and then it's funded by the Leaving Trust.
00:02:56
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And it's a project that's been running for almost three years now. I've been working on it for nearly a year. And I've been working on it with my two colleagues, Peter Hommel and Courtney Nomura, who are both fantastic people to work with. And the sort of aims of the project are to characterise Celtic art across the whole of Europe. So from Ireland in the West, all the way over to sort of Bulgaria,
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in the east and to then sort of link the phenomenon of Celtic art to art from much further east across sort of the Eurasian steps. So we're looking at sort of a big scale connections between very distant communities.
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Oh, that's interesting. I came across some burials from Western China that seem to be, they were mummified, but naturally, they seem to be very Western looking, for want of a better word, Caucasian.
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with blonde, there was a woman with blonde plaques and she had a painted face. I can't remember where it was now, but it was perfectly preserved. And they were described as Celts in Western China. I haven't heard of those ones. I'm sure. I'm going to have to find that link now and find out where it was. I wish I could remember. Yeah, so my colleague, Dr. Hall has been working on all the Easter material, but there's been listeners
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want to know more about some of the material from the East that we've been looking at during our project, visit the Sillians exhibition at the British Museum, which is currently on until sometime in January. It's fantastic and it does have a lot of sort of the comparative material that we're looking at in the East.
00:04:51
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Yeah, I haven't got along to that yet. It really must go because I've been seeing loads of reviews and comments from people going and saying how amazing it is. Were you involved with the Scythians exhibition, Julia? No, I wasn't. That was created by Syngin Simpson and he works in our department of the Middle East, interestingly.
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Ah, interesting. But you were involved in the KELTS exhibition, which was a big, big exhibition a couple of years ago, wasn't it? I actually worked in that exhibition with school groups for the Education Department in the British Museum.
00:05:28
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It was absolutely odd. It was just one of the highlights of my life to work and to work in and to be able to talk to kids about the Gundestrup cauldron. I mean, it was just the most amazing feeling. I mean, particularly that object, the cauldron, I had never seen it in the flesh until we unwrapped it when it was being installed in the exhibition. And it was literally being unwrapped because it was wrapped in this kind of
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clear. I mean, it looked almost like a clean film, like sort of a clean film. And as we were slowly kind of unwrapping it around the cauldron and these faces were emerging, it was absolutely phenomenal. Oh, those iconic faces. So this cauldron is from Denmark. Well, that's where it was dug up. It might not originally have come from there, though, is that right? So from the style of the sort of silver work, we, and from some of the objects and things which are depicted,
00:06:25
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we think it's a curious object, so we've got one off, but it looks more like kind of Thracian silverwork, which would be down in kind of southeastern Europe. And so there's this idea that maybe it's kind of been made down in the Balkans, but perhaps reflecting and depicting objects which are being used further west, and then somehow has ended up in Denmark. So it's obviously got a fabulous story, but being as it was found sort of dismantled in a bog,
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We have to try and piece it together if best we can. And it was found in the 19th century, wasn't it as well? So it's difficult because there's a lack of context there for us. Absolutely. I mean, we're really lucky that it survives. I think actually it was found by workmen who were digging peat in the bog.
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And the Celts exhibition, it was really interesting look at the Celts, wasn't it, over a long period of time and over a wide area.
00:07:24
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like Helen has just been saying. Yeah, the exhibition spanned from 500 BC to the present, really. Because the word kelp is very evocative, and everybody seems to know what it means.
Understanding 'Celts': Historical and Modern Perspectives
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What does it mean? When you think about it, as you say, you can use it from 500 BC to the present, and there are people who describe themselves as Celtic today, very proudly, and rightly so.
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Let me just admit that I have wanted to, I have tried not to use the word Celts to talk about pre-Roman Iron Age people in Britain for my entire career.
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I think, for us, I'm really pleased that you phrased the question like that, like, what does the word Celts mean? Like, what do you mean when you talk about the Celts rather than who are the Celts? Because the former question is much easier to answer, neither is completely straightforward. And but when we talk about the Celts, really, generally, people are referring to one of two, not completely disconnected, but distinct groups.
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And one is the ancient peoples who lived particularly in continental Europe from around 500 BC until, you know, sort of the time of contact with Rome and obviously kind of cultures and connections are changing. And so in the first centuries BC and AD. And those are people that writers like Caesar talk about as being called the Celts and calling themselves Celts.
00:09:11
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And it's very difficult we have, you know, the Roman perspective of that. We don't know exactly how that word was used and the extent to which it was used by the people that are being kind of given being ascribed that name. But I think certainly in continental Europe,
00:09:29
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almost certainly, particularly in what's today France, that clearly are groups of people who are, on some level, referring to themselves using the words like no Keltaille. We've received it, I'm sure slightly garbles through kind of Greek and Roman authors, but those groups exist and that name is being used. That name is never used in ancient times. So in that kind of first millennium BC, to refer to people from Britain and Ireland.
00:09:53
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fast forward now because the word then kind of falls out of use completely in the sort of post-Roman period. Nobody's calling themselves Celts. Nobody's using the word Celts. It's it's sweeping. And from the kind of 1500s, but particularly from the early 1700s,
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people of what today are the Celtic nations of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany and the Isle of Man, and they are looking for a word or a name to describe their languages and their identity as distinct and it is distinct, they are distinct from the English and from the French.
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And they seize upon first in language, and then that word gets transferred, you know, later to other aspects of culture and heritage. The word Celtic, and they are borrowing that really largely from Caesar and some of these kind of, you know, classical works that we discovered during the Renaissance and spread the invention of the printing grass. And so from, I mean, the first mention of Celts in Britain is in the 1500s, George Buchanan, he's a Scottish historian writes about it.
00:11:02
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And he's talking then about kind of like waves of migration and things. But it's used to apply to the languages in 1707. And then after that starts to refer to lots of other things. So then comes this kind of second use, which people are often using when they say the pelts.
00:11:17
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and which is this idea that it's the peoples of the modern Celtic nations. Both of those uses are completely sensible and completely valid, but they are not the same. And I think the confusion has arisen because
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the same word is being used for two things that they're not completely disconnected, you know, people have been, you know, living and making art in Western Europe for all of that time in between, and that word can get tangled up with lots of those things as well. And that they are distinct.
00:11:51
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Thank you. And Helen, so does your project look at the Thracian area? What's the modern country that Thrace would be now part of, as it were? So we are not really looking at the Thracians, not because we don't think that they, sort of, Thracian art
00:12:21
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had influence on art further west, but solely because of time constraints. That's the short answer to that question. I'm very sorry about that. Yeah, no, that's fine. And Denmark. Was Denmark ever part of Celtic Europe? Well, that's another tricky one, really. So our database, we've been working on collecting together a huge amount of data on
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on different Iron Age objects from Europe. And our database that we've compiled, I think, does have two objects from Denmark in. One of them is probably the Gundestag Cauldron. I'm not sure it is off the top of my head. But Denmark, it's not usually included in the Celtic heartland, if you want to call it that. But I guess if you were thinking of
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connections within Europe in the middle of the Iron Age. Maybe there's a little bit of interaction with the central area of Europe.
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Yeah, I find it interesting because all of the recreations of people from Iron Age, when you see drawings of them done by modern artists, are wearing clothes that have been found in Denmark. Because that's where we find clothes, basically, for that period. So it's interesting. It just blurs all of this kind of
00:14:02
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What is Celtic-ness is a really difficult thing to get a handle on, isn't it? We use Celtic to refer to so many different things, not just about two distinct time periods. The project that Helen's working on is looking at Celtic art. By that we mean this distinctive kind of
00:14:24
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swirly abstracted curvy form of early European art. And we call that Celtic, again, borrowing the name from Caesar and whatnot.
00:14:38
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But then that's different, again, to, you know, saying people who might have believed that they had the same kind of ancestry or something like when you're actually thinking about back in the past. So obviously, the people up in Denmark had some idea and concept to be look at something like just a cauldron of objects like talks, you know, big metal neck rings and carnuses, war horns and things that were being
00:15:00
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used maybe further west in what we would think of the Celtic world, but they're connected to that. But they're not making that kind of swirly abstract style of art. So we always like to think that there's going to be one nice neat name that is going to sum up like a language and a people and a culture, because that's how our modern kind of nation states work. But back in the past they didn't have that and they probably wouldn't have understood that concept.
00:15:26
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No, it's so much more complicated than we can possibly think, really, which I think is where storytelling can come in a little bit, actually. Anyway, we'll get onto that. The book that we're going to look at today is called Warrior Scarlet. It was written by Rosemary Sutcliffe in 1958, or published in 1958. Rosemary Sutcliffe is just such a fantastic children's author.
00:15:56
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from the 50s, 60s, 70s as well, winning various awards for her writing, better known for writing about the disappearance of the 9th Legion with Eagle of the 9th, but she did write a couple of prehistoric novels, set novels as well, and this is one of them.
00:16:16
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Now it's set in about 900 BC. Oh, that's what she says.
Celticness in Literature: 'Warrior Scarlet'
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It's really more about maybe eight, 700. That's just my little nickel. And so this is why I wanted to talk about Celticness. Does that kind of Celtic art go back that far? No, no, it doesn't. So Celtic art sort of first starts appearing
00:16:46
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in Europe, about 500 BC. And sort of the earliest examples of this type of art are sort of found to the north of the Alps in that kind of region. And then they appear in different parts of Europe at slightly different times. So in Britain, the earliest examples of the objects we call Celtic art will probably be about 400 or 350 BC.
00:17:13
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So it's quite a bit later than in the period of time that our Sutcliffe's book covers.
00:17:21
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But I think that she's drawing on a lot of those ideas about Celtic-ness, isn't she, in the book? Anyway, we'll talk about that after the break. Before we go to the break, I just wanted to say the oldest thing I seem to remember in that I talked about, because I got really into this object, Julia, in the Celts exhibition, was the flesh hook. Yes, it's done its best.
00:17:46
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which is about 1000 BC, is that right? Or is it earlier than that? Yeah, no, that's around about right. So it's towards the end of the Bronze Age. That's much more at this kind of time that is being depicted in the book. So it's on the cusp. So that's so fabulous because it's got these five little birds on it. Three birds that look like a little kind of family of swans or waterbirds and two little kind of ravens or crows facing each other on the handle of this flesh hook.
00:18:16
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And this is some of the really early kind of figurative art from the metal ages. Because we're just on that cusp where we're moving from much more kind of geometric designs and kind of like sort of circles and, you know, line based geometric shapes and decoration towards kind of figurative abstractive kind of animals. Yeah.
00:18:38
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It's a beautiful object. I'll put a link to it in the show notes, everyone. Now, we're going to take a quick break so you can listen to these messages, and we'll be back in a moment to get much deeper into this book, Warrior Scarlet.
00:18:55
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00:19:18
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00:19:31
Speaker
Welcome back. Now, we haven't really talked a huge amount about the book yet, which is unusual for my podcast. But I wanted to, I really love the question of Celticness, so I wanted to talk about that. And I think it's good background. So Warrior Scholar is really a children's book as many of Rosemary Sutcliffe's books are, but it's one of those really rich stories that you can read and enjoy as an adult who, the thing about Rosemary Sutcliffe
00:20:00
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is that people of a certain age, like myself, kind of grew up on her books. Although I say that, I only read one of her books when I was young and it was Robin Hood because I absolutely love Robin Hood and I think her version of it is my absolute favourite. What about you guys? Did you grow up with Rosemary Sutcliffe?
00:20:25
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Yeah, sorry, we're both waiting for you. I certainly grew up reading Eagle of the Ninth and the Silver Branch as well, I think. And yes, several of her other books. I'm not 100% sure if I read Warrior Scarlet as a kid. I thought I had, but on rereading it, I'm not. I'm not
00:20:51
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you, Helen. And, well, me, I'm, I, I don't think I've actually ever read a Rosemee Sutcliffe book before now.
00:20:59
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This is my first reading of Sutcliffe, and I absolutely loved it. Oh, good. Yes, I just love her storytelling. I think she's a reason why I got into historical fiction. And I think there should be more children's historical fiction writers out there. It's wonderful. I mean, obviously, I wax lyrical about a lot of authors, but Rosemary Sutcliffe has got quite a special place in my heart.
00:21:24
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But I hadn't read this when I was a child. So, it would be nice to start with what we like about the book and then maybe we can pick apart a little bit. So, Helen, you said you loved it. What was it about the book that you really... I mean, let me give a pracie. I mean, basically, it's set as I say. She says it's set in about 900 BC, but it's set when, in the late Bronze Age,
00:21:49
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But a trader brings an iron knife to the village, so it's really at the beginning of that switched iron. And it's set on the South Downs in southern England, probably in Sussex because that's where Rosemary Sutcliffe lived.
00:22:08
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So she knew the landscape really well. And it's about a boy called Rem who was born or maybe had some kind of illness as a child that left one of his arms useless. So he only has one arm and he has to go through all of the rites of passage that a boy of his time and place had to go through in Rosemary Sutcliffe's world, obviously. But he has to do it with one arm that doesn't work for him.
00:22:39
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and it's all about the trials and tribulations of him growing up. So you follow this boy's journey, which obviously draws you in a lot. So Helen, what was it about the book that you liked? Okay, so firstly, I think reading it as an archaeologist, I really enjoyed sort of looking at the little details she put in and going, oh yes, that's what she's referring to. I think she
00:23:08
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there's an incredible attention to detail in her writing in terms of making sure on the whole that she sort of sticks to what were at the time sort of accepted archaeological theories. But aside from sort of the archaeological aspect of it, I thought her descriptions of sort of the natural world were really, really evocative and beautiful. And
00:23:36
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And the way that the language works in the book is lovely as well. So there's just a few simple, obviously the characters in the book speak English, but there's a few little words that they change. So for example, yes, is Tsar. And it's just those little touches that make the people in the story just seem a bit more distant from us. And I think it works really well. Yeah, it's the power of language, isn't it? Yeah.
00:24:05
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Julia, did you enjoy the book? Yeah, no, I really enjoyed it. I always enjoy Rosamie Sutcliffe. I think for me, it's the richness and the texture of the world that she creates. So just, you know, the
00:24:20
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the touch and the taste and the smell of it, you know, she invokes that really beautifully. And because that's what we we miss in, you know, the archaeological record, we have so few kind of like organic remains preserved, like you were saying about, we often borrow clothes from kind of Bronze Age Denmark to clothe the rest of Europe for prehistory.
00:24:43
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because we have them preserved in these fabulous kind of oak log coffin burials. But she draws in so much of this kind of rich organic world and food they're eating and what it's like to see the way a shaft of light falls across the
00:25:00
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doorway of a round house, like all these things, she really kind of brings them out. And I think she's quite good as well at the sort of sensitivity to the inner lives of the children often that she's writing about and sort of what matters to them. And I think that really just kind of draws you in and brings the book together.
00:25:22
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Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that she wrote from this, from Drem's point of view, from a boy's point of view. And apparently that was just a thing that all children's writers did at the time was to write from a boy's point of view. Yeah, I know. I did some research last year, I think, kind of the history of children's books.
Gender Roles in Historical Children's Literature
00:25:46
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And there is this, there was a kind of
00:25:51
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a message being told to everyone, to writers and to schools and things like that in the 50s and 60s, that boys were not reading. Boys don't read. Write books with boys as the protagonists to get boys reading because girls will read them anyway.
00:26:08
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And I just, I thought to myself, my God, we're still saying that even today. A lot of people are saying boys are not reading, they need adventure stories, write more books for boys. And there's so many books for boys out there. It's ridiculous. There's so few with girls as the protagonist, and especially as I've been researching into books about prehistory. I would have loved to read the book from the perspective
00:26:34
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of, I mean, there is no main female character, but one of the only named female characters is a girl called Bly, who is Brem's kind of, oh yeah, there's this girl and like, I don't really care about her very much, like, I can't see what role she could possibly play in this story. Not to give any spoilers away. Yeah, don't spoil her.
00:27:00
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Yeah, yeah, that's not obvious. Yeah. Interesting. And I would have, you know, I would it would be a completely different book, but I would love to read a story told from her perspective. Yeah, it would be really great to hear more about the in general about the female life that
00:27:17
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I just touched upon in the book, but not quite elaborated on. Yeah, I mean, I was going to save the role of women for later on as of quite a big subject. But as it's come up, we may as well talk about it now. Because this is also something that I found in a couple of books about how women are complete. I mean, it makes
00:27:36
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There is this tension. There is a tension between showing women in particular roles for children so that they learn, particularly female children, young girls learn that they can do what they want and they're not tied to a particular role in life, which is clearly something that a lot of people want to do. But then when you write about history or prehistory in this case, and life was difficult for women,
00:28:03
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then how were you meant to show that they had a great life and yet also were somehow locked into a particular gender role? But were they? Were they locked into a gender role as well? How do we know that? That's really difficult to answer. But all I was going to say is that there is
00:28:32
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I think we can look a bit more at the archaeological evidence that inspires stories like this, because there is evidence out there for women that have slightly different roles in society and women that were powerful. The burial evidence from Iron Age Britain, for example, has just a few examples of female burials, buried with very powerful objects. And that just shows that these were women, important women in society.
00:29:03
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and that it wasn't necessarily all sort of hard work. Yeah, the wet wang princess springs to mind. Yes, yeah, that was one of the ones I was still referring to there.
00:29:18
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Yeah, I'll put a link to her in the show notes. She was buried with a chariot inlaid with coral. And there was a replica of it in the Kelt exhibition, wasn't there, Julia? Yeah, there was a replica of the chariot. And there's another female burial from up in WetWang as well. And we had another female chariot burial, I believe.
00:29:42
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And we have one of the objects from that, the bean can, which is a strange object. It's not really a bean can, but it looks about the kind of size and shape of like a sort of tin of baked beans. But it is decorated with this beautiful swirling Celtic art. It will certainly be in Helen's database.
00:30:04
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And one of the ideas about it is that it's a kind of like an instrument that might have had something like, you know, dried beans or something in it that you could shake and make a kind of rattling sound or that it might have been some kind of potent, powerful kind of magic object. It's weird because it's completely sealed. So whatever it was inside it, it's not like a box that she could open.
00:30:29
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It's something that sort of is just completely sealed. And yeah, there are plenty of evidence that women certainly could and did hold positions of power in the Iron Age and perhaps quite interesting positions in their society. And I think, though,
00:30:48
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much the way I wish this wasn't true, often kind of grade goods and things like weapons, you know, they are, you know, gendered, they're buried with biologically male individuals. And, and you could argue like looking at the book, and then actually, it's a powerful story about this bloke called Drem. And he's got, you know, he makes choices in his life, and he does things and does this and that.
00:31:12
Speaker
But he is absolutely bound because he has to become a warrior. And if he doesn't become a warrior by managing to slay the wolf, then he doesn't he doesn't really have a place in his society because that is the role for men in his society. And, you know, it's all kinds of about people for him and difficulties, obviously, because he's got the problem with his arm. And so I think.
00:31:34
Speaker
There's nothing to say that you can't tell an interesting story about someone just because they have a gender role. And I think it's about the choices that you make and the battles that you fight within that world. We all live in a world that constrains us in particular ways, and that would have been true in prehistory just as much as now. Yeah, I think you're right. Good point. But the role of women in the book does seem very, very slight. Yes.
00:32:01
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I mean, Drem's mother, who we finally find out what she's called, don't we? I think it's Saba or something. We don't know that right from the beginning. I'm trying to remember. I think she's only mentioned a few times.
00:32:20
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she's mainly weaving, that's basically all she does. None of the women seem to leave their houses. Yeah, no, I think it's very problematic in the book. I do think it was possible for such a thing to happen that a woman from the late Bronze Age, or like early Iron Age reading this would probably think, Hmm, yeah, there's something missing here.
00:32:46
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But, you know, I think as well, I have a certain, you know, I want to see another book written from a woman's perspective. But I think Rosemary Sutcliffe has written this book as if it's from the perspective of a young boy. And so, you know, what, what does a young boy care about the lives of adult women, in some ways, like I'm playing devil's advocate, because representation of women in literature and in stories is hugely important. And that's where role models come from and things and
00:33:13
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And I want to see that other book about the women, and it's rubbish that that didn't get written. But it's written from a very particular perspective. Yeah, I think you're right. Sorry, go on, Helen. I was gonna say, maybe that's kind of an invitation for a current author to write a book from the perspective of life. And maybe she goes off and, you know, has her own story.
00:33:39
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Yes, that would be good. Yeah, I think you're right that he's kind of almost as trapped by his own gender role, Julia, as his mother is and as Bly is. And when he doesn't... Oh no, I don't want to give any spoilers. He has problems fulfilling this role.
00:34:01
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then yeah, it's so devastating for him. And there are social conventions about how he treats the women, even his mother, and how he has to be a swaggering warrior and all that stuff. So it must have been very difficult for him too. Yeah, absolutely. Moving on. I mean, one of the rites of passage that he has to go through is to hunt this wolf. Now, Julia, I remember
00:34:31
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I think it was maybe the third room or fourth room along in the Celtic exhibition and obviously from reading as well. There's a suggestion that young
00:34:44
Speaker
quote marks, Celtic men, might have had a right passage of going and hunting on a hunting expedition. Am I remembering rightly? I don't know. We certainly would have said that things like hunting might have been important. I don't think we know enough to know what things might have been a right passage or anything like that. I don't think it's a ridiculous suggestion at all. But I think we just don't have that information
00:35:13
Speaker
But weren't there little boar figurines that were said to... I remember that one of the interpretations is that young men might have gone out and hunted a boar to prove themselves or whatever. That is certainly possible. The boar is really important in Celtic art. There's quite a small pantheon of animals that they actually kind of represent. So like on the flesh hook, we have birds.
00:35:42
Speaker
But we also, if we look at other things, we see boars, we see dogs, and beyond that, there's sometimes horses who are on coins and things, but it's limited. And I think that does suggest that boars must have played quite an important role. And whether that's something that people have bought us
00:36:07
Speaker
jewellery sometimes, like those hideous bracelets in Outlander. Nice reference there for anyone who remembers that. So obviously they are kind of like hunting and bringing down these animals and it would have been something absolutely impressive to do because they are huge and they continue.
00:36:25
Speaker
they must have been much bigger than they get now, and a much healthier population, I guess, as well. There is a lot of focus on hunting in the book when there is supposed to be farmers. There's not a lot of focus on the farming. It's mentioned every now and again, but I guess it's just not very interesting.
00:36:50
Speaker
Oh, I love the farmers. So like, I want to live with the half people who farm the sheep. Like you keep the sheep because their lives just sound like way more chill. Yeah, they sound like the sort of the more reasonable bunch to be honest. Yeah, well, I think if on that point, I'm going to call a break. So you can listen to these messages, dear listeners. And then when we come back, let's talk about these half people.
00:37:19
Speaker
Interested in archaeology? Want to hear from experts in the field about the latest discoveries and interpretations? Check out The Archaeology Show every other Saturday and let hosts Chris Webster and April Camp Whitaker take you deeper into the story. Check out The Archaeology Show at www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology and subscribe, rate, and comment on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and the Google Music Store. That's www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology. Now back to the show.
00:37:48
Speaker
Hello, welcome back. So one of the things that we haven't touched on until right at the end of the last section was these half people, or they're called the little dark people in a very strange position that they hold in this society. Who wants to describe that? Julia, you quite liked their lives? What did you? Yeah, well, I think I just, I quite like sheep.
00:38:17
Speaker
I'm a big like spinner and knitter and stuff so I was just like oh cool I can hang out with sheep all day. Yeah so this is a kind of a separate group of people
00:38:34
Speaker
who live, instead of living in this kind of village where Drem grows up and with his people, they live out with the sheep and farm sheep. But they're kind of part of the same society but not allowed to be kind of warriors because of who they are and their kind of ancestry. And the idea
00:38:58
Speaker
if we're going to talk about the kind of bigger stuff and archaeological things it's based on.
Theories of Britain's Prehistoric Society
00:39:03
Speaker
And I think it's the idea of this kind of Britain being peopled by multiple sequential invasions, which was quite popular in the 1950s. And when Rosemary Sutcliffe was writing, this is the idea she's she's borrowed.
00:39:16
Speaker
And the idea is that these people's ancestors were one of these earlier waves of immigrants and Drem's people are like the latest arrivals, this golden haired sort of Celtic people who've rocked up later and taken over.
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, writing just post-war, it just felt very uncomfortable to me reading what she was writing about the two different groups of people and what the golden people said about the little dark people. Oh, gosh, horrible.
00:39:47
Speaker
Yeah, it is this horrible kind of like racist, like weird, like double system. And I'd like to just take a moment to say that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that anything remotely like that existed in Bronze Age or Iron Age Britain.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it does seem strange that there would be some people who would do the agrarian agriculture and some people who would just be the shepherds, and they're supposed to have different religions. So let me just read you a bit, because Drem spends a bit of time with them.
00:40:24
Speaker
And he worries about the fact that he's going to lose his religion. He says, many of the half people bowed themselves to the sun lord, but he was going not only to the half people, but to Doli, to the little dark people. Oh, right. So there's kind of two different groups. The half people and the little dark people are kind of separate. The children of Tarnu.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, and he knew that little by little he would lose his own faith that was sharp and fierce and bright as a spear blade, turned from the sun father and the open sky to the older face of Dolly and his kind to the warm, suffocating darkness and the earth mother who gave all things birth.
00:41:06
Speaker
And that's another theory that was kicking around in the 50s. Well, earlier, I guess as well, that kind of whole mother goddess. I mean, really, in the late Bronze Age, what can we say anything about what they were worshipping? My feeling would be no, not specifically to the level of deities.
00:41:28
Speaker
There is some things that seem to be kind of like, you know, referencing the solar kind of world. So things like these things that we call cult chariots, they're like little bronze models that are buried in graves. And there are a couple that seem to show like kind of horses pulling a kind of sun symbol along and there is various things that show kind of an interest in the sky, but that's pretty generic.
00:41:57
Speaker
And people seem to quite often bury things or make offerings in wet places. So water and the kind of watery world seems to be important cosmologically and in their religion. But I wouldn't think that we could go any further to say, you know, what God or gods they were worshipping or whether they had the concept of deities in that way.
00:42:19
Speaker
No. I mean obviously the links to the sun go back a lot further as well if you go back to the Neolithic and various monuments having links to the midwinter sunset.
Reconstructing Ancient Belief Systems
00:42:35
Speaker
in particular, in Britain at least. I'm not entirely sure about on the continent whether that happened. So the kind of difference between religions does seem constructed. It's interesting though, this is one of the things I love about the storytelling is that Rosemary Sutcliffe had to invent this world. And of course people would believe things. So she would have to invent what she could.
00:43:03
Speaker
But it's in the 1940s, isn't it? Just before when Christopher Hawkes has his ladder of inference, that religion is one of the things that you really cannot get anywhere near, according to him.
00:43:17
Speaker
But that's why I love fiction so much, because we can explore what that might be. Yeah, and I loved a lot of the little throwaway things that were obviously just completely random and completely fictional, but like, you know, Mortrix hadn't been out hunting with the boys because earlier he had stepped in the shadow with Midia, and so he had been taboo until sunset.
00:43:37
Speaker
And then that's what I never mentioned again. And stuff like that where I'm like, that's completely crazy. But those small kind of little quirky kind of beliefs and taboos that would be very hard to explain to a modern person, they totally would have had those. So I really I like that she's put that level of detail in it, even though I mean, we can't know what the specifics were, but there would have been things like that.
00:44:00
Speaker
And also, I think it's a tour de force, the way that she reconstructs the landscape. And Helen, you mentioned that you liked the way that she talked about the landscape. Yeah, well, she's got this beautiful sort of evocative way of describing the way that people are moving through the landscape. And there's some lovely sort of passages where Drem is moving from his house, sort of through the marshes,
00:44:29
Speaker
up the Ridgeway, along the Ridgeway, down into the forest. And I thought it gave a really nice sort of feeling of how the village where Drem lives was situated within the landscape and gave a nice feeling of the sort of activities that would be going on on a sort of daily basis. So for example, at one point, it's springtime and Drem's walking along near some woods
00:44:57
Speaker
And it's the time for harvesting wild garlic. So he's smelling plant garlic because it's being harvested. And I thought she really paid attention to those little seasonal activities that were so important to communities during the Bronze Nine Ages. Yes, I remember that because there was all the lots of links about color as well, about the whites of the garlic flowers.
00:45:24
Speaker
and the white of the did it was it when he when he killed that swan as well yeah oh it was amazing um but yeah he went down to the so they all live on on the chalk
00:45:35
Speaker
up on the hills and near the Ridgway. And then they sometimes go down, as you say, into the terrible valleys. And it particularly says this about the marshes that I just wanted to read. No one lived in the marshes that lay inland of the chalk, for at night mists rose from them and evil spirits prowled abroad in the mists to give men the sickness that filled their bones with shivering fire.
00:46:02
Speaker
And even at high noon in summertime, there was always a dank smell of things wet and rotting, for the cleansing wash of the tides that came up and went down again twice in every day over the sea marshes could not reach so far through the chalk.
00:46:16
Speaker
And it's so evocative about recreating that landscape. Sometimes I walk through the fields around here or other places and it's so difficult to imagine what life would be like before they were fields, before they were carved up. But what I want to point out is that
00:46:41
Speaker
Again, this is a product of the 50s,
Evolution of Archaeological Understanding
00:46:43
Speaker
isn't it? The fact that people were thought to live up on the chalk, because it was nice, light soil for ploughing with an art, and you didn't go down into the valleys where it was all thick soil and marshy and horrible. But more modern excavation has kind of turned this on its head, really.
00:47:00
Speaker
I think particularly later as well, so as we're moving into the iron age when people can be plowing those heavier soils more easily. But yeah, and certainly, I mean, if you look out in the kind of marshy areas, we absolutely know that people were exploiting those and were working in them. I mean, it's in a different part of the country to where this is set, but if we look at excavations and places like flag then,
00:47:25
Speaker
And, and, um, things that are coming up, like, you know, of course people are, um, you know, all working and living in the exploiting this landscape. And running me bridge. Yeah. Yeah. Um, touching on, um, must vomit speaking as well. One of the things that jumped out to me is kind of.
00:47:41
Speaker
sort of like oddly incongruous, is they're all like almost naked all the time. And just like wearing loincloths. Even though they spend so long spinning and weaving, the women are doing nothing but spinning and weaving. But the men only ever seem to be wearing loincloths. It's very strange. Yeah, it's a good point, actually. I hadn't thought of that.
00:48:02
Speaker
Yes, there is a lot of nakedness. And in England as well, I mean, in New. And we know that the reason that Mustphon made me think of it is, of course, we say really organic preservation. So, you know, we're kind of left guessing about textiles, but they found that they're doing a lot of work with flax, which, of course, grows down in that kind of wet, marshy landscape out in the Fenn. And they... And Lime Bast.
00:48:24
Speaker
Actually, quite a lot of the fabric there was the best of the lime tree as well. Also, up at White Horse Hill Kissed, on Dartmoor there was some nettle fibre. Actually, it's only because we don't find it, but it's not preserved very well in dry soil. Yeah, and you can see how finely spun it was and things when we do get textiles.
00:48:53
Speaker
beautiful examples from from Halstadt in Austria. It's kind of beautiful. Well, I guess you describe them as played or maybe almost like tartan patterns. Showing these amazing, amazingly fine weaves that were really kind of sophisticated.
00:49:14
Speaker
Yeah, they're amazing. I mean, I went to Halstadt in the summer because it's been placed and I've wanted to go for just about 20 years, probably longer. And it's, yeah, the stuff that is preserved in, because it's a salt mine, that's another way that a lot of organic stuff can get preserved and it's absolutely amazing.
00:49:33
Speaker
And as you say, I find this a very strange thing. I read another book, children's book, that was a bit like this. And I can't remember. Oh, what was it called now? Anyway, it was terrible. And then it was basically had metal workers in a hillfall making amazing jewellery. And I kid you not, the author described everyone as wearing basically sacks. Yeah.
00:49:58
Speaker
But why would they have beautiful jewellery made of gold with coral inlay and whatever and wear sacks? I get very upset about clothes when they're wrong. It's one of my, because I dress up myself. So I like trying to work out exactly what people were wearing and to try to show how sophisticated it was. Anyway, that's a B my bonnet. Yeah, I had an inquiry from somebody
00:50:27
Speaker
who wrote to me, so we get a lot of public inquiries at the British Museum. I loved it. It's a great part of the job because people ask the really sensible questions that you're like, oh yeah, what would that be the case? And someone wrote to me and said, oh, I'm an author and I'm writing a story about some people in the Iron Age and they go on this really long journey. Would they have had shoes? And it's times like that where you just want to think, like, yeah, yeah, no, they would have had shoes.
00:50:51
Speaker
At what point can we say that like, you know, even though we don't find a lot of these things, we know enough to know that they definitely had shoes. They definitely had shoes. Yes. We do find shoes. We do find shoes. I don't even like to see the Iceman much earlier, obviously, but he's got some pretty big shoes. So, yeah.
00:51:12
Speaker
Yeah, the earliest ones I've found from Eurasia are in a cave in Armenia, 5,300 BC, I think. So I try and find all of this stuff, but it's all over the place really, so it's hard. I've had people who've asked me whether people in the Iron Age were our species. Wow. We're really not getting our stories out there at all. Someone asked me at the end of a gallery talk whether they had the moon in the Iron Age.
00:51:42
Speaker
Had the what? The moon. When did they have the moon? Like the big thing in the sky at night? Did they have the moon? I'm sorry, I'm just trying not to laugh. And it was one of those things where initially I thought, oh, that's hilarious, you don't realise they have the moon. But then I thought, and this was a grown man, I just want to say, not a child. But then I thought, well, actually, if you've never had an education that links up things like the idea of a kind of like geological frame of time and like the formation of the universe and like history,
00:52:10
Speaker
And you don't know, you have no idea when the moon was formed or how that would work. But I guess it's not actually obvious, is it? Yeah, exactly. I mean, for having thought it was a really stupid question, but it saddens me that someone could have got through their whole life and be asking me a bit, you know, they're with it enough to have come to a gallery talk at the British Museum on the Iron Age, but they still have to ask the question to the curator that did they have the moon? Like, that shouldn't be how that information is getting out.
00:52:39
Speaker
No, I think, yeah, there's an issue with a lot of getting our stories out, whether it's in science communication or archaeology or history. And yeah, we have to, well, obviously, we're all doing it. Helen, you did it with your wonderful moustaches of the Iron Age. I love that. We have to have a link to that in the show notes.
00:53:04
Speaker
with doing public exhibitions. I mean, that's a fantastic way you get thousands of people coming. And I try and do it through this podcast, which brings me beautifully. We could go on for another hour, but it's now getting late for my guests and I think they need their beds soon. So I'm going to say thank you so much.
00:53:29
Speaker
to Helen and Julia. And if people want to know more, can they contact you at all? And like, perhaps just on Twitter or something? Would that be okay to share your details? Absolutely. Lovely. So I'll put those on the show notes. Julia, is that all right as well? You are on Twitter, aren't you? I'm on Twitter, I'm at Julia underscore Farley.
00:53:56
Speaker
Lovely. So I'll put those links on if anybody wants to, you know, pop you a little tweet to say thank you. And I think I just finished by saying one of the things that Rosemary Sutcliffe said, and why she loved writing these stories is that history is people.
Connecting History with Human Stories
00:54:15
Speaker
And it does link back so nicely to a Mortimer Wheeler quote that we dig up people, not pots. And I think that's why I love so much the fiction linked to prehistory is that it really brings those people to life.
00:54:31
Speaker
So thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you very much for having us. Yeah, very well. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me. And I think we've had fun tonight. So hopefully the listeners will will enjoy this. I'm sure they will. So thanks so much, you too.
00:54:52
Speaker
Well, thank you very much for listening, everybody. If you want more of the Prius Stories podcast, in about a month or so, I will be talking to Caroline Wickham-Jones about the Boy with a Bronze Axe, which is set in Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands. So watch out for that one.
00:55:11
Speaker
Before I go, I'd like to give a shout out to one of my listeners, Robert Stolting, for sending in a recommendation. He has recommended that I read The Legends of Spirit Cave by Dennis Cassinelli, I think it is. So I'm going to have to get hold of that and give that a read, and hopefully we will address that in a later episode of the podcast. If you have any other recommendations of books set in our prehistoric past,
00:55:38
Speaker
because I know that this podcast has been very Europe-centred. Please send me them from around the world. That would be fantastic. I would love to read some books set in other parts of the world, other than Europe. That would be wonderful. So please send those in.
00:55:54
Speaker
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00:56:21
Speaker
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00:56:50
Speaker
Thanks very much for listening, guys, and I'll speak to you in a little bit. This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and was edited by Chris Webster. 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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.