Footmarks (eBook)

1. THE STILLNESS OF 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....