Footmarks E-Book

Jim Leary

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 340

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'Lucid, poetic and fascinating' ALICE ROBERTS 'Engaging, authoritative and full of fascinating stories of the past' RAY MEARS 'A gentle, personal and very readable book' JULIA BLACKBURN AUTHOR OF TIME SONG 'A triumph!' JAMES CANTON, AUTHOR OF THE OAK PAPERS 'I loved this book' FRANCIS PRYOR On paths, roads, seas, in the air, and in space - there has never been so much human movement. In contrast we think of the past as static, 'frozen in time'. But archaeologists have in fact always found evidence for humanity's irrepressible restlessness. Now, latest developments in science and archaeology are transforming this evidence and overturning how we understand the past movement of humankind. In this book, archaeologist Jim Leary traces the past 3.5 million years to reveal how people have always been moving, how travel has historically been enforced (or prohibited) by people with power, and how our forebears showed incredible bravery and ingenuity to journey across continents and oceans. With Leary to show the way, you'll follow the footsteps of early hunter-gatherers preserved in mud, and tread ancient trackways hollowed by feet over time. Passing drovers, wayfarers and pilgrims, you'll see who got to move, and how people moved. And you'll go on long-distance journeys and migrations to see how movement has shaped our world.

Leseprobe

Praise for Footmarks

‘Engaging, authoritative and full of fascinating stories of the past. This book shows that life is not centred on hearth and house, as we are so often told, but is shaped by relentless movement, along tracks and trails. By focusing on mobility, Jim Leary has managed to reanimate the past, revealing the hidden but vital contribution that migration has always made to the shaping of the world.’

RAY MEARS

‘A gentle, personal and very readable book that gives life to the dynamic sequence of activity, effort and extraordinary determination that makes up our human past.’

JULIA BLACKBURN, author of Time Song

‘I loved this book. It’s a highly readable account of how and why people have moved around on the surface of the earth, across land and sea. It ranges from prehistoric footpaths to Roman and medieval roads and includes fascinating pieces on ancient ships and boats. What makes this book so special is that everything is discussed within the context of life at the time: who were using the paths or the boats and why were they doing it? Most importantly it is so relevant to us today, as we try to steer our way through times of increasing instability.’

FRANCIS PRYOR, archaeologist and author

‘Footmarks takes us on a magnificent voyage tracing the fascinating history and restless patterns of human movement. From ancient children playing and scrambling, through all manner of ambling, trudging, sprinting and roaming, Leary explores the many ways archaeology can reveal the dynamism of past lives and the way in which we both make and are made by the paths we take. Brimming with detail yet written lightly and with unashamed affection, this delightful book shows how we are all part of a vast, whirling dance that’s been going on for millennia.’

REBECCA WRAGG SYKES, author of Kindred

‘Footmarks is a joy. A dance with our predecessors, through settings that feel by turns intimate and familiar, then questing and bold. By animating the ancient past Leary reminds us that far from being distant observers of the ancient past, we are a product of it, in both spirit and substance.’

AMY-JANE BEER, naturalist and author of The Flow

‘Jim Leary takes us into the little explored realm of ancient movement. We walk with hominins and Neanderthals, explore deep caves, herd cattle, and become pilgrims, ocean voyagers and long-distance walkers. Leary is a passionate walker, who combines science with his first-hand experience and observation out and about. This beautifully written, entertaining essay melds personal experience with archaeological and historical wisdom. The result is a truly remarkable and original book that thinks profoundly about the past. Read this and be inspired!’

BRIAN FAGAN, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of California and author

‘Archaeological writing at its best: lucid, rational and deeply woven with the real lives of real people from the past. You’ll never think about – or walk around – historic sites the same way again.’

MARY-ANN OCHOTA, broadcaster and anthropologist

‘Leary awakes in the reader the desire, buried deep in the psyche of the human condition, to walk, to wander, to meander and ponder. With charm, wit and warmth, we are led through an alternative archaeology, one where movement and mobility take precedence over settlement and sedentism. Thought-provoking and sustained by a depth of knowledge only someone with Jim’s lifetime commitment to the study of human cultures is capable of, Footmarks reminds us that the restless journey and some of the most meaningful experiences along its path leave no trace but the imprints where feet have trodden.’

ALEX LANGLANDS, author of Craeft

‘Engaging and impassioned, Footmarks is an enchanting stroll through the deep history of human wanderings across the world. This book will delight and entice all who muse on the ways in which we have ever walked upon this earth. A triumph!’

JAMES CANTON, author of The Oak Papers

‘Archaeologists have a superpower: time travel. Their digs show us cold hearths and colder graves, but as Jim Leary shows in this gripping read, the past was hot-blooded and alive with the movement of people who loved and laughed as we do. Yet history and archaeology are written as though humans and our creations are fixed, frozen entities: screenshots of past lives, not videos. Our ideas of our origins, history and ourselves today must all change, and those new ideas are not only more exciting, but tell us more about both our past and our future. They are also true.’

JOHN HARRISON, award winning travel writer

‘A book about the movements of humans could be a little dull, don’t you think? Well, not a bit of it. Jim Leary’s archaeological passion is “paths over pyramids” and Footmarks is as lively and entertaining an exploration of human wanderings as you could ever hope to read. It links our colourful and complex history to how we live today, clearing up a few notable misconceptions along the way. This compelling, highly original book will change the way you think about landscape and our place within it.’

IAN CARTER, author of Human, Nature

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-024-7

ebook: 978-183773-026-1

Text copyright © 2023 Jim Leary

Illustrations © 2023 Michelle Hughes

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain

CONTENTS

Timeline

PART 1Close to home

1The stillness of the past

2Moving matters

PART 2Treading

3Printmaking: Writing on the earth

4Footfall: Walking as performance

5Pathmarking: Lines in the landscape

6Pilgrim: Moved by the spirit

7Overstepping: Restriction and resistance

8Routefinding: Following the old ways

PART 3Trailing

9Feet follow hooves: Walking with animals

10Transhumance: Traversing the uplands

11Wanderland: Shaping and being shaped

12Wayfaring: Being lost and losing oneself

PART 4There and back again

13Roadrunning: Travelling the social realm

14Flowing: Journeying with the ferryman

15Weatherscape: Of skies and seasons

PART 5Hero’s journey

16Time’s march: Crossing continents

17One way: Routes and roots

18Seafaring: Across oceans of time

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Jim Leary is an archaeologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of York, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He has directed major excavations across Britain, including Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, the largest Neolithic monument in Europe. A passionate walker, much of his research is centred on the way people moved around in the past.

DEDICATION

For mum, dad, Piers, and Justin

TIMELINE

Before Present

Palaeolithic (‘Old Stone Age’: from around 1 million to 12,000 years ago in Britain)

3.66 million

Laetoli footprints made

1.52 million

Koobi Fora footprints made

950,000–850,000

Happisburgh footprints made

135,000

Theopetra Cave footprints made

130,000–100,000

Neanderthals already travelling to Crete by sea

80,000

Le Rozel footprints made

50,000

Humans already travelling to Australia by sea

25,000–20,000

Willandra Lakes footprints made

17,200–16,500

Tuc d’Audoubert Cave used by humans

14,000

Bàsura Cave footprints made

Before Common Era (BCE)

Mesolithic (‘Middle Stone Age’: hunter-gatherers, from around 10,000 BCE to 4000 BCE in Britain)

9300–8500

Star Carr Mesolithic site in use

7000–4000

Formby Point footprints made

5700–4000

Skateholm Mesolithic cemetery in use

5500–5000

Severn Estuary footprints made

Neolithic (‘New Stone Age’: first farmers, from around 4000 BCE to 2500 BCE in Britain)

3807/6

Sweet Track constructed

c. 3500

Horse first domesticated in Kazakhstan (although not regularly used as mount until 2200 BCE)

c. 3500

Wheel in use in parts of continental Europe from this time

3500–3000

Cursus monuments constructed in Britain

3230

‘Ötzi’ the Iceman dies

2500–2000

Major monument construction across Britain: Silbury Hill, Marden henge, The Sanctuary, Woodhenge, Avebury, etc.

Bronze Age (2500 BCE to 800 BCE in Britain)

2380–2290

Amesbury Archer dies

2049

Seahenge constructed

c. 1800

Ferriby boats in East Yorkshire constructed

1750–1550

Nebra sky disc in use

1740–210

Uffington White Horse created

1575–1520

Dover Bronze Age boat, Europe’s oldest sea-going vessel, constructed

1400–1300

Trundholm sun chariot in use

1370

Egtved Girl dies

c. 1300

Skrydstrup Woman dies

c. 1300

Wheel introduced to Britain around this time

c. 1100–800

Must Farm settlement in use

Iron Age (800 BCE to 43 CE in Britain)

c. 600

Roos Carr figurines created

405–380

Tollund Man dies

400–200

Grauballe Man dies

350–150

Pocklington chariot burial

200–5

Sharpstone Hill Iron Age road constructed

2 BCE–119 CE

Lindow Man dies

Common Era (CE)

Medieval (450 to 1500)

500–700

Sutton Hoo cemeteries in use

750–1066

Viking activity taking place around Britain

1061

Our Lady of Walsingham shrine constructed

1066

Battle of Stamford Bridge (and the Norman Conquest)

c. 1200s

Chartres Cathedral labyrinth constructed

1285

The Statute of Winchester

1388

The Statute of Cambridge

c. 1400

Chaucer’s

Canterbury Tales

completed by this time

1414

The Pleasance at Kenilworth constructed

1450–1700

The process of early Enclosure takes place

1500

Wharram Percy largely abandoned

Post-medieval (1500 onwards)

1530

Henry VIII passes the Egyptians Act

1549

Kett’s Rebellion takes place

1700–1900

The process of Parliamentary Enclosure takes place

1858

Lourdes transformed after Bernadette has a series of visions

1870

Haussmann’s renovated Paris completed

1930

Gandhi’s Salt March takes place

1932

Kinder Scout Trespass takes place

1977

John Travolta struts his stuff in

Saturday Night Fever

2003

The death of my brother, Piers

2011

‘Occupy’ movement begins

PART 1

Close to home

1. THE STILLNESS OF THE PAST

In which a personal tragedy leads to another way of thinking about the past

Imagine the world we live in without movement. As if we all instantly froze, to be discovered centuries later, just as we are. What significance would archaeologists of the future find in the places we inhabit, or the routes that we travel? What would those archaeologists think about the place where you just happen to be right now?

Places lose so much of their meaning when you take out the movement. For too long, archaeology has sought to understand the past by focusing on things that lie still. How could it do otherwise? But life isn’t still. It’s full of movement. Stillness is death.

*

At 6.30 in the morning, on the 12th of November in 2003, my elder brother was commuting on a busy country road. Recently married, and having moved house and jobs, he was full of optimism for his new life in the Lake District. A rustle in the bushes caused Piers to jump a little. A streak like a flash of fire – a fox perhaps? A jerk of the steering wheel caused his car to swerve. The swerve became a skid, a sliding motion across the lane, out of his allotted space of movement into oncoming traffic. A crashing, crushing, grinding. The coming together of flesh and glass and metal, and a life stopped.

Piers was nineteen months older than me. Sometimes his death feels as raw and fresh as if it were days ago, not years. But life has moved on – mine, my family’s, his wife’s. I have photographs of him to keep his memory close, and look at them often, although only three are out on display in my house, the others tucked away in a box under the stairs. One of these is from when we were young, perhaps five and six, standing in our garden with our younger brother Justin, the three of us carefree in our pyjamas. Another is from his wedding day, grinning awkwardly in his suit and cravat with one arm around our mother. The third is a small, standard-sized photograph in a glass clip frame. It sits on a windowsill in the living room, propped against a ceramic bowl. The image has faded in the sun and at some point, like my memories, it will disappear altogether.

This last image of him was snapped by a colleague at his leaving party just two or three days before his move north and the fateful commute. Piers stares down the camera, his collar up, index fingers out and thumbs up as if about to say ‘Ayyy!’, in the style of Fonzie from the American sitcom Happy Days. A split second captured on film; a fleeting moment in time, long gone, showing his humour and joy. He was at the party to say goodbye to his friends, as he stood on the threshold between two jobs, between one place and another, and – although he didn’t know it – between life and death.

My children only know him through these photos, as a series of static images in which he remains forever 29, and newly wed. Those of us who knew him remember that he was warm and funny and full of laughter and life. We remember his jokes, the easy way he made friends, and his distinctive swaying side-to-side walk that gave him a permanent jaunty look. But with the passing of time, he seems to have become frozen in the stillness of the past.

This is true of all history. Once, it was warm and full of life. Or cold, dark and miserable. But never motionless. My brother’s death changed how I think about the past. I want to keep it alive. I do not want Piers, or any other part of history, to become inert. I want to reanimate it – all of it!

In this book, I will do that by exploring how people have moved, over millions of years.

*

Here is a different story.

On a warm summer’s day, four young adults set off along the edge of an estuary. They walk alongside one another heading south-east. With every step their bare feet sink into the soft estuarine mud, which squeezes up through their toes and clamps around their heels. It sucks and squelches as they move. In the background are the cries of estuary birds and the sound of the gently ebbing tide, rippled by a briny breeze. Cutting through this is the excited chatter of children and the distant calls of their parents.

Perhaps they are on their way to collect something, or going home after delivering it. Or maybe they are out to do something entirely different. It could be that they are there for no particular reason at all, just out for a walk, to feel the summer sun on their necks and the cool, wet mud around their feet.

They stride at a brisk pace. At one stage, one of them sees something and veers left, crossing the paths of the others and causing them to bunch together momentarily before spreading out once more.

Nearby, a child of three or four plays with someone a few years older; perhaps a sibling. The younger of the two playfully, absent-mindedly, dances around the other, leaving an erratic array of footprints in the mud. Footmarks. The older one picks up something heavy – could it be the youngster? – and feels his or her feet sink, leaving noticeably deeper traces in the ground.

Elsewhere, a person steps out across the estuary in a straight line heading west. Certainty and purpose. This other person walks at a steady pace, despite sliding twice in the mud, and halts momentarily, feet side-by-side, before continuing.

Actions like these are the stuff of life. They could be from anytime and anywhere – today, yesterday, last century. These happened at the end of the sixth and beginning of the fifth millennium BCE,* towards the end of a period known as the Mesolithic; a time before farming and domesticated species, when people were hunters and gatherers. They happened at a place now known as Goldcliff; a series of glutinous and glistening mudflats on the coastal fringe of the Severn Estuary, south-east of the Welsh city of Newport. Few but fishermen, lugworm gatherers, and the odd team of archaeologists visit this barren landscape now, but it was once home to generations of families.

The evidence comes from footprint tracks exposed in banded sediments on the edge of a former river channel. The fine-grained silt within which the clearest footprints were found would have been laid down during spring and summer months. In some, you can see cracks in the mud suggesting that it was hot when the footprint was made. The prints were sealed by coarser-grained sandy deposits during the following autumn and winter, preserving them for future archaeologists to find and excavate.

These fragmented, fossilised tracks indicate the trails of humans and animals. From them we can record the length of their stride, as well as the pace at which each person was walking. The faster they ran, the further apart we find their footprints. A slow and steady speed leaves regular footprints, close together. From the size of their feet, we can say a certain amount about their age and body size.

More than anything, they provide tangible evidence for the currents of life that make up actual human existence. These people lived and loved and died in the world we now occupy, and came to know their physical world by the way they moved through it.

Their footprints confirm the eternal human compulsion to roam. But what they don’t make entirely clear is also fascinating. Were these people engaged in the kind of everyday pottering that we forget as soon as it’s finished, or some purposeful life journey of the kind they might have talked about for years? To an archaeologist, both kinds of movement are crucial to a better understanding of the past.

Archaeology has tended to show us cold hearths and colder graves, but the past was hot-blooded and alive with activity. When we incorporate our own restless ways into how we see the past, everything changes. Ideas about our origins, and about ourselves today, become much more exciting.

Without journeying, humankind would have struggled a brief while in Africa, then vanished. Our ability to walk over long distances, driven by our innate curiosity, explains how we have occupied almost every corner of the planet. Moving makes us everything that we are and ever have been.

*

Mathematicians often talk about feeling as if they exist in two parallel worlds: one their real life, the other an underlying mathematical world ordering and connecting everything together. I feel the same about archaeology. I have my normal, daily life in which I operate, but all around me is another, more shadowy one. A sensory, synaesthetic world, made up of echoes from the past. I take note of lumps, dips and ridges in fields, and lines of hedgerows, or an out-of-place building and an unusually shaped street. And, whether I want to or not, my brain clicks and whirrs and tries to make sense of it all; tries to order it, and understand how it came to be. As I walk down a path, I note the features and plants alongside it, how deep the path has been eroded, whether it is lined with earthen banks, drystone walls or a hedgerow, and if so whether that hedge is mature or grown-out, predominantly hawthorn or made up of other species. As we’ll see later, these tiny details can be telling. While I walk through a landscape I mentally reconstruct, as best I can, its history and try to feel the feet of the past.

I suspect all archaeologists are like this.

I don’t know at what point I became interested in archaeology, but I know Piers was involved in the process. Long before me, he had wanted to study archaeology at university. As it happens, he went down more of a historian’s path. But I think our interest started much earlier. We lived in Cyprus when we were young. Our house was surrounded by Mediterranean scrubland that was scattered throughout with pieces of Roman and Ancient Greek pottery, like olives in a salad. On one occasion, snorkelling in the sea near home, Piers pulled out a chunk of amphora he’d spotted washed into the shallows. Terracotta in colour, it consisted of just the neck and handle, and was about a foot long. But for the chalky encrustations of the sea, it would have been smooth to the touch. What struck me at the time, treading water and turning it around in my pruned and salty hands, was not its age, or shape, or what it might say about trade, but something else altogether. A thumbprint, presumably the maker’s, had been impressed and then fired into the top of the handle. This print spoke to me of the physicality of the making process, the feel and smell of the soft, pliable clay, the humanness of it all. History, Ancient History, and Classics could intimidate me with their vast scale, but here I felt a personal connection to another human – someone, as I imagined it, just like me.

After Piers died, I took the amphora fragment. I still have it, and I still have that sense of connection to the past. That connection has a name: it is called archaeology.

*

Walk past a construction site today and you may well see teams of archaeologists uncovering the pits and postholes of past lives before the new building – homes, offices, or whatever it is to be – destroys them. This world of development-led archaeology is how I took my first steps in the profession, in the 1990s, after I finished my degree. On those digs, we were like Forrest Gump dipping randomly into his box of chocolates: we never knew what we were getting next. Would it be deep medieval or Roman deposits within the city walls? A sequence of Saxon houses in Covent Garden? Or nothing at all, just modern rubble on top of natural ground? I loved it! Friendships flourish with uncertainty and in difficult situations, and love can blossom over shared conversations and a packed lunch. I met my future wife in a muddy archaeologists’ Portakabin.

We excavated within the basements of buildings, the process of demolition going on around us, but more often we dug in the open air, either surrounded by the ruins of the earlier building, or on a brown, rubble-strewn site surrounded by wooden hoarding. (Just occasionally – rarely, but it did happen from time to time – we found ourselves on a pleasant greenfield site.) Working alongside us we often had a crew of, by then, quite elderly Irish men. They would be there to dig holes for services for the new buildings, but they also looked after our ever-deepening trenches, ensuring they were safe, and shored when necessary. They might also monitor and maintain our growing spoil heaps. Frequently these men were our lifeline. Friendly, charming and endlessly entertaining, these old boys, who stood out on site in their wrinkled and dusty linen jackets, were expert diggers, genuine craftsmen of the shovel. A skill learnt over decades of physical work. They also knew the value of a good cup of tea, and a cracking joke. The machine drivers were important too. A good driver could make a site. The best of them, at the time, revered by all who met him, was a man known as Grease Gun Jimmy, named because of his propensity to extrude grease into the arm of his digger every few minutes to create smoother movements. Watching him at work was like watching an expert ballet dancer; man and machine as one, the mechanical arm and bucket an extension of his own arm and hand. Many of these men had moved to London from Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s to work in construction. Migrants in search of work, adventure, and a different life. Few are left now: a lot of them returned to Ireland during the financial crisis of the noughties, and I daresay – although it pains me to think so – many are probably no longer with us.

I was always struck by how all this action and noise above ground – the movement of hand- and machine-dug earth and endless flows of people – contrasted with the static and silent understanding we imposed on the lives we were excavating below ground.

Years later I excavated some magnificent ancient monuments working for what was then called English Heritage (later it became Historic England). Marden henge in the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire was one of them. We will hear more about this huge Neolithic monument later in the book, but in 2010 and 2015, excavating inside it, we uncovered the well-preserved chalk floor of a 4,500-year-old building. A large hearth dominated the centre, and around the fire, scattered over the floor, were pieces of pottery and flint flakes, lying exactly where they were originally dropped. Outside the building was a pile of pig bones, representing joints of meat roasted on the bone. Mixed in with them were pieces of a type of Neolithic pottery known as Grooved Ware, so called due to the incised geometric grooves that decorate it. The larger Grooved Ware pots are big and flat-bottomed, resembling a bucket, and were likely used for cooking, particularly pork; the smaller ones probably held food and drink, including milk, but perhaps also beer. This pile was not a rubbish dump that had accumulated over time, but the result of a single action; the remains of a feast. Covered over with a Neolithic bank of earth, it had been preserved for us to find thousands of years later. This scene was an astounding discovery – once in a lifetime – but what really struck me was how much it looked like the morning after the night before; the music stopped, debris strewn around, and all partygoers gone. In the Neolithic, this feast would have been accompanied by music, dancing and whirling; storytelling, chanting and chatter. I’m saying that like I know – of course I don’t, but it’s not unreasonable to think so, considering what we know of human nature. We routinely don’t think about such things. It would have been heady and sensuous with the smell of wood smoke, roast pork and beer, combined with flickering flames, garish costumes and, well, who knows but perhaps the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

But archaeologists always miss the party.

And this stillness we uncover feeds into how society generally learns about the past. Newspaper headlines, when a well-preserved archaeological site is discovered, describe it as ‘frozen in time’. ‘Britain’s Pompeii’ is another favourite. The implication is that something cataclysmic happened, rendering the site motionless. People stilled, like statues, with their arms raised up in horror. With the advent of movies about the past, this mindset has started to change. Thanks to films like Jurassic Park, for example, it’s easy for people today to imagine the movement of dinosaurs, whether or not the film is really accurate. But archaeology is still too often presented as a still photograph. The significance of movement is overlooked.

The enormous Neolithic mound of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is another wonderful English Heritage monument I worked on. For over a year in 2007 and 2008, I led a team of archaeologists to excavate a tunnel into the centre of it to allow engineers to stabilise a collapse that could be seen on the summit. We also hoped to understand something of how it was made, and glimpse at possible reasons why. One of the most striking things we discovered during our time in this tunnel was how, from the moment the mound was created until at least the medieval period, and probably much later, it was in constant motion, being added to and dug into, changed and altered. Quite a contrast with the way it was being managed, and still is now; covered in short-cropped grass, like a suburban garden or a golf course, all traces of humanity removed, as if preserved in aspic or covered by a bell jar. A precious artefact in need of protection from a dangerous world. Quite right too, you might say, but it does have the effect of imposing stillness that wasn’t there before. It reminds me of the way oral stories are passed down generationally from parent to child: living things that alter as times change but which, once they are written down, become static and not to be messed with. And that can be deadening.1

*

When I mention to other archaeologists that I’m writing about movement in the past, they occasionally reply: ‘Of course people moved around. We know that! It’s obvious.’

Well, sometimes the obvious needs stating, so that its significance can be seen afresh. And sometimes the obvious is all we have. We rely on it to create our best guess about how people lived in the deepest past. When somebody makes a discovery, we can set aside our guessing (if it’s been proved to be mistaken) or build on it (if it is validated). One way to make those guesses is to think about the ways we move ourselves, in the present and in recent history. We can ask ourselves if those movements are culturally specific or intrinsically human – and if they’re intrinsically human we can assume that our prehistoric ancestors moved that way too.

For too long, there has been a tendency to focus on the fixed and more tangible elements of the past, on ‘places’ rather than the movement to, from, and around them.

On the one hand, this is understandable because with ‘place’ there is something to see and excavate. We can be ‘in’ a settlement, and ‘go’ to a monument. Archaeologists like neatly bounded sites that we can draw around and, if the sites are nationally important, secure with legal protection as Scheduled Monuments. We like to impose boundaries, turning sites into containers of, and for, archaeology.2

But by studying only the site we unthinkingly impose stillness on the past – a form of disenchantment that can rob it of all wonder.

I can get so frustrated when I read articles and books about the movement of people or objects that mention only the place they came from or went to, and nothing about the meaningful movements in between.

It is the movements in between that are the important elements of life. ‘Life unfolds,’ says the anthropologist and thinker Tim Ingold, echoing the writer and journeyman Bruce Chatwin, ‘not in places, but along paths.’ We miss the action, the real life, if we don’t look at people’s movements.3

Of course, places are important. But we can afford to recognise that they are made by the restless patterns of people moving between them and through them: from one chamber to another, in and out of shops and houses, through tangles of alleys, plazas, streets, and roads. Places are designed for access and movement, and as we see in our own times they pulsate with life.4

Movement defies the notion of a neatly bounded site or monument. Of all sites, routeways are especially hard for heritage managers to protect, since they are long and linear, and run across land owned by multiple people. They are also seen as the opposite of monuments because they are often created by being worn down as opposed to built up; a negative feature, rather than a positive. Yet they are every bit as monumental. More so, in fact: they don’t represent the actions of a few builders over a defined period, but the feet of many over vast lengths of time, as we’ll see in a later chapter. Out of the 20,000 Scheduled Monuments in England, the only protected holloways – deeply incised paths, also known as sunken ways – that I can find are short sections that have been included, almost incidentally, as components of other monuments. Few, if any, are scheduled on their own, due to their intrinsic importance. They are not automatically afforded the protection the more obvious archaeological sites receive. And who knows how many holloways there actually are; I doubt anyone has ever attempted an audit of them the way they have other monuments. But that has to be a starting point for protection.

In the village I live in, the earthwork remains of a medieval motte and bailey castle is a Scheduled Monument, but the tangled and radiating holloways – earthworks every bit as impressive as the motte and of the same date, or earlier – are not. So, the landowners are free to scour them away, which they have done. Or, in the case of one I recently walked along, dug into it and lined the bottom with hardcore. At least it’s preserved now, you might say, but like writing down an oral story or pinning a butterfly, it’s no longer alive. That seems to me a very great shame. And that’s just one small, personal example. Extend that out across the British Isles, and across Europe and beyond, and you start to see the extent of the problem. That’s just one reason why we need to talk about movement in archaeology.

Moving is so natural, so everyday, that it’s easy to overlook, but we miss the real action when we do that. By following footsteps, we find the texture of paths and the places they connect. We hear settlements alive and full of busy people; the hubbub of business, the shouts of street vendors, the din from the inns. We see gossip spreading along lanes and alleys – these were the conduits where real life happened. Rhythms of all kinds pulsed through places and paths. Just think of the vibrant routeways that led to and from the Athenian Agora, medieval castles and royal palaces. Or the parks where nineteenth-century bourgeois Parisians would promenade along manicured avenues. Or the roads on which people routinely commute.

By shifting our focus to the way people moved, we infuse the past again with the dynamism and vital force it once contained, letting it live in the present. You can try this for yourself: next time you are in a museum, looking at motionless artefacts, take a second to imagine what they tell you about human mobility. It will change your perspective. This is the task I have set myself with this book: to think again about the stilled objects, monuments and paths around us, and to reanimate them.

I want to dig up the extraordinary stories of people on the move, not only because I like to share those stories but because new developments in archaeology are changing fundamental ideas about how our forebears lived. Archaeologists, osteologists, isotope specialists and geneticists are throwing into the air many settled ideas, such as: Were hunter-gatherers really more mobile than farmers? Have women travellers always been more constrained than men? Were the big innovations of farming and metalworking introduced by immigrants? And did prehistoric societies have their own charismatic adventurer-leaders – their own Shackletons and Edmund Hillarys?

*

The process of walking rarely follows a straight line with a beginning, middle and end. It is spidery and complex, with frequent diversions around things, forking and then reconnecting paths, and inevitably some retracing of steps. Only by looking back do you see that you have been pathmaking. This book takes a similarly loose approach. We will travel millions of years through the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, and across the periods of written history, encountering cultures and people such as the Beakers, the Vikings and the French Impressionists. We’ll tramp through mud, take bicycles, horses and boats. Most of the time, we’ll stay in and around the UK – under burial mounds, circling henges, trespassing on private land, getting wet feet on beaches, tramping through the woodlands of Oxfordshire and digging beneath the streets of the City of London. But occasionally we will find ourselves further afield: in Africa, Denmark, the Alps, the Russian Steppes, Turkey.

Using the very latest science and technology, we’ll analyse chemical isotopes in the teeth and bones of the long-dead, count tree-rings, and map the ancient DNA of entire populations.

Walking alongside us will be a remarkable crowd of archaeologists, anthropologists, writers, sociologists, and even the odd movie star. With their help, I hope to share with you my own excitement as we find answers to things that were, until very recently, mysteries.

As you read, you may expect to follow a particular line, only to realise that we have taken a detour. I hope you will enjoy this approach and will take from it what most pleases you – just as I imagine those wanderers on the Severn Estuary, 7,000 years ago, might have stopped on their way to pick up anything that caught their eye.

In other words, welcome to the new ‘mobile archaeology’: the archaeology of movement, shining its wobbly torchlight against our previously murky understanding.

Humans have always been on the move; it defines our nature, from the moment we are born – in fact, even before that. So we will begin our journey with the human body. We will look at how walking is sensual and experiential, before moving on to how we turn it into something fashion-conscious and culturally specific: a performance.

We will see that mobility has different meanings according to the individual, the time, and the culture: it can be freedom, opportunity, progress, or constraint and rebellion. It has been historicised, romanticised, but also feared and controlled.

Our journey will take in footprint trails left a million years ago along the north Norfolk coast in the UK, and early hunter-gatherer footprints from a cave in France. We will see how these trails become tracks, paths, and eventually roads; from prehistoric wooden trackways to ridgeways, holloways, droveways, green ways, corpse roads, and Roman roads. Each of these physical features has a story to tell us. These are the historical counterparts of the modern roads on which people drive daily.

We’ll see that the way people walk, and the pathmaking they leave behind, depends on why they’re moving: a hunter’s progress is different from a shepherd’s, which is different again from a cattle herder’s. Each one – walking alone, in company, with dogs or with livestock – perceives the landscape around them slightly differently.

By looking through a wayfarer’s eyes we’ll discover how people on the move engaged with our three-dimensional, lumpy, bumpy, weather-beaten world, and we’ll see that the landscape has been folded and moulded to our travelling needs.

Having started with individuals’ footsteps, we’ll progress steadily through longer trips, and the final chapters will take us on the giant human journeys that people have made across continents and oceans. We will assess the pathways of migration, in wave after wave, through every part of the globe, and ask what it tells us about the transmission of individuals, populations, and entirely new ways of life.

The past is made up of travelling, wandering, tracking, herding, riding, sailing and migration. Archaeology is increasingly coming to recognise this restlessness. I hope that by bringing this into view, the past – and with it my brother – will never be still.

* Before the Common Era. I will use BCE and CE – Common Era – throughout, instead of the rather old-fashioned BC/AD.

2. MOVING MATTERS

In which we see that movement forms the foundation of our thoughts, our skeleton, and life itself

Without movement, life is not possible. To be alive is to move. It is primal.

‘Seeing comes before words,’ says John Berger in his classic book Ways of Seeing. ‘The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.’ But movement comes even before seeing: a child moves before it looks, while still in the womb.

We discover ourselves through movement, and we make sense of the world, and all the things in it, by moving, by reaching, grabbing and grasping. It forms our basic perceptual system and structures our knowledge. As we journey through life, we continue to make sense of the world, to know it, by exploring it through movement.1

It happens spontaneously; we don’t have to think about it because movement is thought.