How farming brought violence to Stone Age Cumbria

Two 6,000-year-old wooden clubs emerged miraculously preserved when a Victorian farmer drained a Lake District tarn. They revealed the previously hidden cruelty of Neolithic life.

It was such an astonishing sight that the local vicar felt as though he had walked into a far-fetched historical romance.

There, before the Reverend JW Kenworthy’s eyes on that day in November 1870 were the remains of what he rapidly concluded could only be an entire stone age village.

Prehistoric objects lay around as if the inhabitants had suddenly got up and abandoned the site in a hurry one day 6,000 years ago.

The clergyman was standing on the site of Ehenside Tarn, which was normally a five-acre sheet of water beside the River Ehen about five miles East of St Bees and a mile from the sea.

A farmer named John Quayle had dug a fifteen-foot-deep trench and drained the tarn. He was aiming to create more pasture for his cattle. But he called on Kenworthy, an enthusiastic antiquarian, after this strange encampment had appeared from under the water. Most surprisingly, there were ancient objects clearly made of wood.

The wooden items had been preserved by a complete accident. They were submerged in the oxygen-free waters of the tarn for six millennia. Without oxygen, the bacteria that normally consume wood could not live. The discovery of the everyday belongings of an entire New Stone Age (Neolithic) community dating back to between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago would make Ehenside world famous.

Following the line of the oval-shaped muddy bowl was a curving line of hearths. Each one was ringed by cobbles whitened by the heat of ancient fires. Originally, Kenworthy realised, each fire would have been inside a roundhouse, with a prehistoric family sat around it. Among the finds were rough greenstone axes. They had been brought down the valley from the mine at Pike o’Stickle. Alongside these were polishing stones used by the villagers to buff them up to a smooth, flesh-like shine.

The pattern of fatal cracks caused by a blow with a club on a prehistoric skull

Two finds attracted less notice then than they do today: a pair of very hefty clubs. One was covered in a carefully carved lattice pattern and the other was a bowling-pin shaped cudgel. As we will see, Neolithic Cumbrians did not keep these bludgeons for amusement.They were necessary and deadly serious weapons.

Their discovery at Ehenside Tarn suggests other Neolithic communities were similarly equipped with weapons - they just have not been found in past excavations because they were made of wood.

In recent years, archaeologists have started to accept that conflict was much more common and brutal in the stone age than previously acknowledged: the evidence increasingly shows that raiding, assault, infanticide, abduction and murder were regular features of Neolithic life. The prehistoric villagers used the clubs to smash the skulls of their enemies. They were not the only personal weapons available in the New Stone Age.

Neolithic raiders attacked rival clans with their bows. Specialised leaf-shaped flint arrows have been found in Cumbria at Drigg, Williamson’s Moss and at St Bees.

As professor Niall Sharples of Cardiff University wrote, you need long barbed arrows to bring down game. Leaf shaped tips can mean only one thing: they were designed to cause maximum bleeding in close combat between humans.

He wrote: “The leaf shape of the Neolithic arrowhead does not make any sense in regard to hunting and could only be designed for warfare and killing people.” The perception that the prehistory of Cumbria was relatively peaceful is changing.

But why did this happen? For ninety-five per cent of history, humans lived as hunter-gatherers harvesting food passively from the environment. But the switch to farming changed everything. Firstly, the downside of farming was that it brought constant worries that drought, disease or infestation might wipe out crops and herds. If your crops failed, that was it. You couldn’t go out and pluck enough replacement supplies from the hedgerows because you had a larger population to feed.

For this reason, farming introduced the concept of property. It was essential that the clan “owned” the land they farmed, their tools and their life-or-death stockpile of food. Thus, farmers had another fear to contend with - the threat that jealous, needy, less successful or simply hostile neighbours might launch raids to steal food, tools and carry off family members as slaves or for sexual exploitation. That is why the Neolithic period was so unequal and violent - and why the Ehenside Tarn villagers armed themselves with clubs.

How do we know this? Well, the truth about Neolithic violence has been slow in being recognised because archaeologists hate making assumptions without varifiable evidence. For years when they came across fractures in prehistoric bones they tended not to leap to the worst conclusion.

Breaks were usually given a benign interpretation. Broken ribs, for example, could be explained away as the consequence of an accident or a fall. But catastrophic fractures in ancient skulls cannot be so easily set aside anymore. Forensic archaeologists using advanced analytical techniques now believe the pattern of many cranial injuries could only have been caused by blows delivered by blunt instruments very close to if not actually at the time of death.

The picture that is emerging is not pretty. Many Neolithic attackers broke their victims’ legs, indicating that torture and deliberate mutilation were frequent tactics. Few examples of crushed female crania have been found, which suggests that women were generally not actively involved in the fighting.

But this may not be good news because it implies they faced the terrifying ordeal of being abducted. A 2006 study of hundreds of skulls led by Michael Wysocki at the University of Central Lancashire estimated that 7.4 per cent of Neolithic people died from a blow to the head. That is a big number when you compare it to NHS figures which say that 0.2 per cent of people die of head injuries today. All this indicates that human life in Cumbria had become a lot rougher since what seems to have been the relatively peaceful era of the hunter-gatherers.

Neolithic Cumbrians did not live in peace and harmony with their beautiful surroundings. In fact, their surroundings contained the threat of extreme violence. This is a radically different vision of stone age life from the one that prevailed in the Nineteenth Century.

Antiquarians such as the Reverend Kenworthy and the poet William Wordsworth believed in the idea of the noble savage. This assumed that there were “wild” humans who had not been corrupted by civilisation. They symbolised the innate goodness of humanity. Neolithic people were assumed to live in harmony with the natural world without the need for violence.

However, the evidence that the inhabitants of Ehenside Tarn shattered this illusion.

All of this suggests we should look at the Neolithic monuments that dominate Cumbria’s landscape in a new light. The region’s prehistoric agricultural settlements, the great Langdale axe industry and Cumbria’s fifty stone circles now appear to have been produced by a harsher, rougher and more aggressive society than people had believed. If this is the case, can we see any evidence of this hierarchical society in the fabric of the monuments left behind?

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