Fairweather Eden: Life in Britain Half a Million Years Ago as Revealed by the Excavations at Boxgrove.

McNabb, John

When I went to the Institute of Archaeology in 1981 British Middle Pleistocene studies were still in their age of innocence. The Clactonian was the earliest securely provenanced stone-tool culture in Britain. It occurred in the Hoxnian interglacial and was about 250,000 years old; dating was typological or relative to pollen-based terrestrial sequences; two interglacials separated three full-on glaciations, and well made ovates were a stage in a developmental trajectory. When I left in 1992 all this had been swept aside and more than 200,000 years had been added to our past. The 1980s were nothing short of a revolution, and Boxgrove was an intimate part of this. Throughout this decade Boxgrove was one of the most talked-about sites in British archaeology, and this despite only one or two publications. If all that talk served to make Boxgrove a self-generating legend, then the site itself was its own best PR exercise. It never failed to impress.

Mike Pitts and Mark Roberts have written an account of the Boxgrove excavation, from its inception in the early 1980s through its numerous transmutations to the final phase of its life - the Boxgrove hominid project in 1995 and 1996. Pitts' prose is easy to read and competently reduces complex issues to manageable proportions. The book is well written, well laid out and excellently illustrated. If much of its detail is rather sketchy this is because it has been written for the burgeoning popular science market. It does not substitute for an academic monograph, but then hopefully it will not have to do so (trout season notwithstanding). Since it is not targeted at a specialist market we should look at what it is this book is trying to achieve, and whether or not it succeeds.

Firstly it tries to convey what Boxgrove as a site was about and to place it in its broader archaeological context. At this level the book works very well. Soundbites of archaeological history are inter-cut with slices of the site's history. I felt this approach did work, though many colleagues seem to disagree. Secondly, the book tries to convey what goes into the making of a site, and the range of people and specialisms that blend (or often not!) to create interpretation. Here again the book scores a hit; I was left with the impression that all concerned with the project got the chance to chip in with their ten flakes' worth, even if the Young Turk thing was a bit overdone. But here my first reservations surface. I did not get the impression that dissenting voices were given an equal airing. The treatment of the amino-acid dating of the site, and of the dating of the Atapuerca TD 6, was a little too dismissive for my taste. Interpretation, like science itself, is not a cut-and-dried affair, and we should be careful how we present it.

The third aim of the book is to promote a particular view of Lower Palaeolithic lifestyles, and through this to imply that the roots of humanity are deeper than Homo sapiens sapiens. This is 'Homo the mighty hunter'. Large mammal carcasses, in particular horse and rhino, were covered in cut marks; what animal gnawing marks were present always overlay those of the stone tools. This implies that the Boxgrove hominids had first access to the carcasses. The extent of the butchery marks, and the number of individual tool-making episodes associated with the butchered horse carcass, implied cooperative butchery and effective resource defence. A supposed spear wound (the book left me unconvinced by this) on a horse scapula is taken to indicate pro-active hunting; spear wounds imply spears, from which are inferred forward planning and cooperative action. Thus many of the traits firmly associated with Upper Palaeolithic peoples, but which are hotly debated where Neanderthals are concerned, are argued by the authors to be present much earlier in the archaeological record. This reconstruction of the world of Homo nimrudensis is presented as an alternative to the ideas of Clive Gamble or the more extreme world of Homo isolationist that Binford would have us believe in.

How good is the evidence for this reconstruction? The book fairly points out that Boxgrove gives us very little direct social information; there are no hearths, or structures, and many of the normal stone tools associated with Palaeolithic activities (away from butchery locations) such as core working, flakes and flaked flakes, and in particular scrapers are absent from the site. (Presumably these were away from the cliff line and are now lost through quarrying or erosion.) What social information there is must be inferred through assumptions about group hunting and the like. Here the book does tend to offer its reconstructions as revealed truths rather than stopping points in an ongoing dialectic. Many people, myself included, will not have a problem with hunting or social co-operation at half a million years ago or even earlier, but does Boxgrove unequivocally demonstrate the depth of forward planning and co-operative behaviour that the authors are in no doubt of? I don't think so. Pitts & Roberts imply that hunting and meat-eating are the mainstay of the subsistence strategy as well as the driving force behind co-operative behaviour. I remain to be convinced by this. We should remember that chimps are known to be intensely social, transport and use tools, and engage in pack hunting. They also build sleeping nests and share meat after a kill. But the degree of planning and forethought in these activities is relatively limited. One of the chapter headings is a quote from Wil Roebroeks: 'We are making new creation myths' ... Paradise regained?

All too often the book fell into the superlative trap. Boxgrove is a fabulous site, few doubt that, but it is not the only site of its kind, nor is its archaeological contribution so unique that it eclipses all others. For example it does not have the 'best database for early hominid activities from anywhere in the world' (p. 291), or '... Boxgrove hominids ... were among the best handaxe makers ever seen ...' (p. 312). I was particularly incensed by the penultimate paragraph on p. 307 which pictures a lost Pleistocene world of innocence we would do well to emulate. This kind of arrant idealistic nonsense belongs with other fairy stories like the Garden of Eden, Man the Mighty Hunter, or, for the fishing fraternity, 'the one that got away'. Palaeontologically, however, the site certainly does deserve all the praise it has received.

At the end of the day what I remember most about Boxgrove was the sheer professionalism of the people that worked there, and who came back there year after year. It seemed that the site itself required you to do nothing but your best; this was the case for everyone, from Roberts, Lees, Bell, Austin, Mann, Wenban Smith and Parfitt's flawless management of the archaeology, right down to the enthusiasm and high standards that the site evoked in the diggers. On this note there was a pleasing inclusion of the diggers as well, an underrated specialism as important as any interpretative science. I was also pleased to see Mike Bishop get more than a mention as he was one of the 1970s prophets of the 1980s revolution.

Boxgrove was a great site and it held a pivotal role in laying the background for the acceptance of change and many of the precepts that now underpin Lower Palaeolithic archaeology in the last decade of the 20th century. In setting a dynamic site in the context of a dynamic subject I think this book scores a big hit. If it suffers from occasional factual inaccuracies, or its subjects suffer from memory lapses, it still conveys the spirit of a great site. I have reservations about its message, but that is only my opinion. The bottom line is that this a good and enjoyable read. How many of us now in our late 30s (groan) can remember sunny afternoons after A-levels reading Johanson & Edy's Lucy and daydreaming? If this turns out to be another such recruitment exercise then it gets my support.