1Early sea traders of prehistory in the 2nd millennium BC
On 28 September 1992 a remarkable discovery was made in Dover, the port on the south coast of England next to the famous White Cliffs. Six metres below the present road surface, workers digging a shaft for a stormwater pump uncovered ancient timbers. The archaeologists who had been monitoring the work immediately called a halt to the digging and went down to investigate. The timbers lay beneath the medieval town wall and a Roman timber breakwater, built at the time when Dover was the base for the fleet that patrolled the English Channel. That meant that the timbers were likely to date to at least the Iron Age, more than two thousand years ago, before the Romans arrived. To their great excitement the archaeologists realised that they were looking at the remains of a boat, and that the nearest parallel for the construction techniques were boat fragments from the north of England dating to the Bronze Age. They knew that their find was of great importance for the study of British prehistory, but at the time they had little idea that it would prove to be the oldest seagoing vessel found anywhere in the world.
The archaeologists from Canterbury Archaeological Trust had only a narrow window of time before the works had to continue, part of a scheme to improve road access through Dover close to the seafront. The section of boat proved to be some 6 metres long and to be made up of four oak planks joined together – two bottom planks joined by a complex system of transverse timbers and wedges driven through cleats and rails, and another plank on either side attached by stitches or ‘withies’ of yew twigs sewn through holes along the edges. A second shaft dug alongside revealed a further 3.5 metres of the boat, including one end, allowing a projection to be made of the appearance of the other side of the boat that was buried under the road – where it remains to this day. Uncovering the one end had shown that a board forming part of the bow or stern had been deliberately removed when the boat had been abandoned, and stitches that had been cut along the tops of the side planks showed that a further plank on either side had also been dismantled and taken away. The timbers were marvellously preserved in the oxygen-free conditions of the mud – the bed of the river that had run through Dover in prehistoric times – but they were too soft for the boat to be raised intact, and the decision was made to cut it into sections. The whole operation took a little over three weeks from the day of discovery, a remarkably short time for such a demanding excavation, but under pressure from the developers at a place where cross-Channel traffic using the ferry port was being disrupted.
Exposure to air meant that the timbers might dry out and disintegrate and be damaged by bacteria, so an arrangement was made for them to be conserved by the Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth – Britain’s premier experts in ship timber conservation following the raising of the sixteenth-century wreck of the Mary Rose in 1982. The timbers were soaked for 16 months in polyethylene glycol, a liquid wax that strengthens the cellular structure of wood, and then freeze-dried to expel any remaining water. With conservation underway and a museum display in Dover already envisaged, study of the boat could begin in earnest. Most importantly, the timbers provided excellent samples for radiocarbon dating, measuring the remaining proportion of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in the wood. Using the latest calibrations, this technique indicated a 95 per cent probability that the boat was constructed in 1575–1520 BC, with the latest tree-ring date for one timber obtained by dendrochronology – finding a match for the tree-rings in a database extending back to that period – being 1589 BC. This showed that the timbers had been felled in the middle of the British Bronze Age – mid-way between the first appearance of bronze smelting in the British Isles about 2300 BC and the arrival of iron technology from Europe and the Mediterranean about 800 BC. The middle Bronze Age is less clearly visible for us in the landscape of Britain than the preceding and following periods, between the monuments of the Neolithic such as Stonehenge and the hillforts of the Iron Age such as Maiden Castle, but it was a time of great endeavour, with much effort being put into the clearance of land and the development of field systems as well as into technology, trading ventures and long-distance interaction for which the Dover Boat provides such vivid evidence.
By the time the boat was reassembled and installed in a state-of-the-art gallery in Dover Museum in 1999, great strides had been made in understanding its method of construction. A full-scale recreation of part of the hull using replica Bronze Age tools showed that it would have taken ten people about a month to complete the boat, using the timber from three oak trees at least 30 metres tall. Both the felling of trees and the hewing of timbers would have benefitted greatly from the use of bronze tools, which were much superior to copper or flint – the former being too soft to hold a sharp edge for long and the latter prone to breakage. The completed boat would have been some 18 metres long and 2.5 metres wide and weighed 8 tonnes. Study of the joinery showed that it was among the most complex examples of carpentry to survive from early prehistory anywhere in the world.
It was clear that the boat had been a stout and durable vessel, suited to river and coastal transport, and that it had been used – there was evidence of repairs. But it was not until a half-scale replica was made that its seaworthiness was demonstrated. On its maiden voyage in Dover Harbour on 7 September 2013, the boat rode the waves and swell with ease and the team of eight paddlers were able to make good headway. As originally built, the full-scale boat would have required sixteen to twenty paddlers and been able to carry three or four passengers with up to three tons of cargo. Another full-scale replica of a Bronze Age boat launched in Falmouth Harbour in the same year led to similar conclusions. With knowledge of tides, currents and winds it would have been possible to cross the Channel and undertake long coastal voyages, conceivably as far as the Baltic Sea and the Bay of Biscay. The flat bottom of the hull – a feature of ships of north-west Europe in the Roman period as well – would have allowed the boat to rest upright on a tidal foreshore. This experiment suggesting the proficiency of Bronze Age seafaring opened up a whole new perspective on trade and communication, showing that the Channel was less a barrier and more a conduit through which people, goods and ideas could easily travel.
The technique for attaching the planks to the floor timbers – boring holes along the edges and lashing them together with plant fibre, made watertight with moss – is paralleled elsewhere in the world, including modern-day sewn boats in Oman, Sri Lanka and southern India. In Britain the oldest example is one of several boat fragments from Ferriby on the Humber Estuary dated by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon to about 2030 BC, showing that the technique had existed in Britain since the early Bronze Age and that it was not just restricted to the south-west. The oldest examples in the world are the funerary barges or ‘solar barques’ of Egypt in the third millennium BC, including the spectacular Khufu ship buried at the foot of the Great Pyramid at Giza about 2500 BC – its timbers sewn with rope made from esparto grass – and a boat from Abydos dating to the very beginning of the Dynastic period, about 3000 BC, making it the oldest planked vessel known. These were ceremonial vessels only ever used on the Nile, but the technique was probably used for Egyptian seagoing vessels on the Mediterranean and Red Sea as well. Nevertheless, rather than seeing Egypt as the source of this technique, we are probably looking at parallel innovation in different areas. Sewn-plank joinery probably had its origins in an earlier tradition of boats made with animal hides stretched over a framework of flexible branches lashed together, with the stitching of hides showing how timbers might also be joined. Much in world history can be explained by the spread of ideas from one source, but many innovations such as this are likely to have taken place independently, as people tackled the same problems, applied the same ingenuity and came up with the same solutions in places widely separated both geographically and culturally. The networked global trade that spread innovations in more recent times was still a long way off, dependent on larger seagoing ships and better navigational knowledge as the worldview of populations gradually expanded beyond their home waters.
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The layers of artefacts and debris above the Dover Boat reflect the huge expanse of time that had passed since the boat was buried – more than 1,500 years before the next oldest boat finds in Britain, 2,000 years before the Anglo-Saxon ship burials at Sutton Hoo and 2,300 years before the age of the Vikings. Early humans had first arrived in Britain almost a million years previously, crossing a land-bridge that became submerged by 6000 BC as the glaciers melted and the sea level rose. Seafaring was thus a necessity for the waves of migration that followed, including the people who brought farming with them about 4000 BC – some 5,000 years after the inception of agriculture in the ‘fertile crescent’ of the Near East – and others who arrived about 2300 BC with knowledge of how to smelt copper and tin to make bronze. These people, called the ‘Beaker Folk’ because of their distinctive pots shaped like everted bells, may have been driven from their homeland in Europe by war – a function of the improved weapons that came with bronze technology, which also provided the tools needed to make better boats than the dugouts and skin vessels of earlier periods. These migrants are likely to have displaced the remnant Neolithic population of southern Britain and to have been the ancestors of the people who built the Dover Boat.
The Bronze Age in Britain is most clearly evidenced in the numerous round barrows that dot the southern uplands, but it is in the expansion and consolidation of agriculture that the greatest impact took place. Rather than directing their energies towards monumental constructions and earthworks as in the Neolithic period, people cleared the land and set up the first extensive field systems. Bronze technology was a key factor, with stronger and sharper axes allowing trees to be felled more quickly and adzes and other tools allowing carpentry to flourish. From that viewpoint the Dover Boat provides a key insight into the sophistication and ingenuity of woodworking as a whole. Another defining feature of the Bronze Age was the expansion of overseas trade and interaction, as people whose ancestors had been migrants returned across the Channel for trade, marriage and other events, strengthening social ties and providing a conduit for the spread of culture and ideas.
The date of the Dover Boat provides a watershed moment for looking at history worldwide. In the Aegean Sea, the volcanic island of Thera had just erupted – one of the largest volcanic events in human history – destroying Bronze Age settlements on the island and causing a tsunami that devastated the Minoan civilisation of Crete. That event may have been the basis for the story of the drowned civilisation of Atlantis recounted by the Greek philosopher Plato a millennium later. In Egypt, the eighteenth-dynasty pharaoh Thutmose I, the first pharaoh to be buried in the Valley of the Kings, had extended his control from the fourth cataract of the Nile to Carchemish on the river Euphrates, creating the greatest empire that Egypt had ever known. More than 7,000 kilometres to the east, the Shang Dynasty of China was becoming established in the valley of the Yellow River and scribes for the first time were writing with Chinese characters. On the other side of the world, the Olmecs, the first great civilisation of Mesoamerica, were beginning to flourish in the tropical lowlands of Mexico and carve the colossal stone head for which they are famous. This was the wider world at the time of the Dover Boat, but one in which the early civilisations provide only part of the picture – many people, from the Arctic and North America to Africa and Polynesia, still lived mainly as hunter-gatherers, though with the seas and inland waterways providing an ever-increasing part of their day-to-day life, and boats being central to their survival and culture.
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Dover in 1550 BC was very different in appearance from today. The steep slopes of the valley leading down to the sea were probably already denuded of trees, used for firewood and building. The river was a braided stream of many different channels, separated by marshy islets and tidal in its lower course. The prehistoric settlement lies buried under the modern town and is largely unknown, though the excavation around the boat and comparative data from other settlements of the period provide clues. Close to the boat there may have been a small cluster of roundhouses on a spur of land leading down from the slope to the river. They would have been made of wattle and daub, the wooden laths of the walls sealed with mud and dung and with a single central fireplace. As well as being places for family and communal living they would have served as locations for craft activity including textile and basket making and for food preparation. On the slopes above there would have been enclosed plots for vegetables as well as fields for wheat and barley and other crops, and open pasturage for cows, sheep, goats, pigs and horses, with dogs also being domesticated by this period. Deer and wild boar were hunted in the woods with spears and bows and arrows, the river would have provided freshwater fish and waterfowl, and the sea was extensively exploited for fish, crustacea, seaweed and salt, with fish being caught by line and nets just as today.
The intensification of agriculture and higher crop yields meant that more time was freed up for other economic activity – as shown by the construction and use of the Dover Boat – and for ‘life of the mind’, something that is difficult to reconstruct in a society that left no written records but is evidenced in burial practice as well as technological innovation, particularly in metallurgy. If scrap bronze and copper and tin ingots were coming into Dover it seems likely that metalworking took place close to the settlement by the side of the river. At this period the forging and tempering of iron was still hundreds of years away in Britain, and metalworking was either the cold hammering of soft metals such as copper and gold or the smelting of copper and tin to make bronze. The discovery that adding a small amount of tin to molten copper made a much stronger metal was a massive technological breakthrough – the greatest until ironworking arrived in Britain about the eighth century BC. Unlike iron ore, which could be found in many areas, copper and especially tin were scarce, and much smelting would have been of recycled metal, including broken and worn-out tools as well as items whose shape and decoration had fallen out of favour. The bronzesmiths were agents not just of utilitarian production but also of cultural expression, with the decoration on tools and weapons probably reflecting artwork in materials that have not survived, such as textiles and wood.
The story that can be told from the Dover Boat straddles two of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in archaeology since the nineteenth century. The first is radiocarbon dating, which as we have seen gives a date for the boat of about 1550 BC. The second is DNA analysis, which can indicate whether or not changes in material culture – including pottery styles, the decoration and shapes of metalwork, and burial practices – were associated with the arrival of new peoples, by analysing samples of human bone dated before, during and after these changes. In 2021 a ground-breaking study of Bronze Age DNA was published by scientists from the University of York, Harvard Medical School, the University of Vienna and the Natural History Museum in London. The analysis of bone from nearly 800 inhumation and cremation burials revealed evidence for two large-scale migrations, the first in the late third millennium BC and the second about 1300–800 BC. In both cases the migrations are likely to have come from the area of northern France. The point of arrival for the first migration was the south-eastern coast of Kent, probably including Dover itself, with isotope evidence from some individuals from a site on the Isle of Thanet showing that they had spent their childhoods in continental Europe. While the early migration, associated with the ‘Beaker Folk’, may have been precipitated by crisis – war, population pressure and food shortage are all possibilities – the later migration may have been spread over several centuries and been more a function of trade and intermarriage. These later migrations may have brought with them the Celtic language spoken by Britons during the Roman period and been responsible for perhaps half of the genetic ancestry of people living in Britain at that time.
The implications of this for our picture of the Dover Boat are profound. The sophisticated joinery already evident in the earliest Ferriby boat, dating to soon after the arrival of the ‘Beaker Folk’, suggests that this technique of boat-building was brought with the migrants rather than being an invention of the British Bronze Age. Robust, flat-bottomed boats suited to tidal foreshores may originally have been designed for river transport, perhaps in the area of central Europe from which the migrants had fled. By the time of the Dover Boat several centuries later, vessels built in the same way were used to take people back across the Channel, not for migration but as part of a network of exchange, communication and social ties, meaning that people on either side of the Channel probably had more in common with each other than with communities inland. Having been a means of escape, and then perhaps a barrier, the sea became a unifier and a conduit for the spread of agriculture and trade in metal, with boats drawing people together across wide expanses of sea and inland waterway – a theme of maritime transport through much of the history covered in this book.
Remarkably for such a utilitarian artefact, the Dover Boat may also allow us a rare glimpse into the belief systems of the Bronze Age. Despite impressive monuments such as Stonehenge, we know little for certain about the nature of religion in British prehistory. We do not know when the concept of gods originated, how gods might have been worshipped or whether belief in a spirit world was dominant. One problem is that there were no stone-built temples or other places of worship that can be identified archaeologically; Stonehenge and the other great monuments of the Neolithic were probably still sacred places and served a ritual purpose but remain enigmatic. It is not until the arrival of the Romans that we know anything in detail of the gods and beliefs of the ancient Britons, with classical authors describing how worship happened in sacred groves, Julius Caesar’s famous account of the Druids and the syncretism of local and Roman gods – for example, the water-god Sulis and the Roman god Minerva in Aquae Sulis, the sacred springs of Bath. Some aspects of prehistoric religion may have survived into early Christian practice in Britain, including veneration of the yew tree. The Druids are particularly interesting because they may have been shamans, and thus part of a belief system that originated with the early hunter-gatherers. Nevertheless, the successive waves of migration into Britain during prehistory means that there can be no certainty that the gods and beliefs observed by the Romans were similar to those two and a half thousand years earlier when Stonehenge was first built, or a thousand years after that at the time of the Dover Boat.
A crucial period for the development of religion may have been the interface between the hunter-gatherer world of the Palaeolithic – the old Stone Age – and the settled agriculture of the Neolithic, between a belief system that may have been based on the idea of a parallel spirit world and one based on gods. Our evidence for the former comes from the extraordinary cave art of the upper Palaeolithic, showing animals sought by hunters and perhaps involving the agency of shamans. The idea that gods were a creation of the first settled communities – perhaps associated with the consolidation of power by the earliest priest-kings – may be seen in the site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Anatolia, a complex of circular enclosures dating to the ninth millennium BC with stone pillars that may be the earliest representations of gods. In Britain, the transition to agriculture was not followed by the rapid rise of urban civilisation as happened in the Near East, where the worship of gods became widespread. Instead, people continued to live much as they had in the millennia since the retreat of the glaciers, with belief systems that may have altered little from the final period of the Palaeolithic.
Some of the best evidence that we have for religion in Britain comes from changes in burial practice. The collective burials seen in the long barrows of the Neolithic gave way to a proliferation of smaller round barrows in the Bronze Age, places for individual or family use. These changes may reflect the arrival of new populations and also a shift from large-scale communal activities such as the construction of henges to a more individualistic society in which leaders of small communities would be the focus of economic success and power. The burial of bronze axes and weapons with those individuals shows not only the prestige value of such items – the scarcity of tin meant that bronze always had high value – but also a belief system in which favoured items bound up with the lives of those individuals went to the afterlife with them. The discovery of hordes or isolated items of bronze, sometimes broken or disabled in a way that suggests it was deliberate, may be further evidence of this practice. Whereas in the Palaeolithic the main portal to the spirit world may have been caves, by the Bronze Age it included the rivers and pools and marshland where these artefacts are often found. It may be that the reflection on the surface of the water elicited a sense of looking into the world beyond, to a place where ancestors resided, and shamans may have had special access. The idea of sacred pools or wells to which offerings were made is well-documented in Norse literature and survived in Britain into recent times.
The possibility that the Dover Boat may have been deliberately ‘broken’ and buried in the riverbed is suggested by the removal of the end-board and the upper planks, with the yew withies having been cut along both sides, and by the deliberate severing of one of the cleats holding the two lower timbers together. In all other respects the boat appears still to have been seaworthy and does not seem to have been abandoned while repairs were being carried out. A fascinating possibility is that it may have been disabled and buried as part of a funerary ritual for the boatbuilder and captain. Such a person would have had high status in the community, with the boat being their most prized item and the key to their prosperity beyond farming and fishing, and the boat may have accompanied him or her to the spirit-world with the timbers removed from the hull perhaps forming part of their cremation pyre. If so, the Dover Boat may be the earliest known in the tradition of boat burials that we see spectacularly evidenced in the sixth century AD royal ship burials at Sutton Hoo on the eastern coast of England and in the longship burials of Norse Scandinavia over the following centuries – discoveries that underline the significance of ships as conveyances for people and their belongings not just in this world but also the next.
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Amazingly, the boat is not the only evidence for Bronze Age seafaring to have been found at Dover. On 14 August 1974, two members of the local sub-aqua club went diving in Langdon Bay, immediately off the eastern breakwater of the ferry terminal below the White Cliffs and about 2 kilometres from the site where the Dover Boat was to be found. They were exploring an area in 5 to 12 metres depth of flat chalk with eroded cracks and fissures where they had previously found artefacts including ammunition from the Second World War. Langdon Bay is a challenging place to dive – the seabed is covered with chalky silt that can reduce the visibility to a milky-white haze, and there are strong currents. To their great excitement they found a bronze axe in a gully, and by the end of the dive had found four more. The curator of the Dover Museum confirmed that they were prehistoric and encouraged the divers to continue the search. By the end of the season they had found 86 artefacts, many of them of middle Bronze Age type.
That collection, as well as further finds made in the following year, were acquired in 1977 by the British Museum, whose initial study confirmed the importance of the assemblage and the near certainty that they represented a wreck. Keith Muckelroy, a research student at the University of Cambridge at the time, secured designation for the site under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 and carried out an excavation in 1978–80 that produced a further 94 artefacts. By the time of the last reported find from the site in 1990, a total of 361 had been recovered – making it the largest assemblage of bronze artefacts of the period excavated in Britain as well as the oldest shipwreck cargo known in north-west Europe. It includes 95 axes, 187 knives and longer blades and some 80 smaller ornaments and tools of uncertain use, many of them worn or broken at the time of their loss and therefore likely to have been carried as scrap cargo for their metal value alone.
Whereas the Dover Boat was dated from its stratigraphic location beneath Roman remains, by radiocarbon analysis of the wood and by dendrochronology, the dating of the Langdon Bay assemblage was dependent on artefact typology – another of the building blocks of archaeology, in this case resting on the idea that the forms of tools become more efficient through time. The axes that make up the largest component of the assemblage are one of the characteristic artefacts of the British Bronze Age, evolving from the flat axes of the early period through the flanged axes of the middle second millennium BC to the socketed axes of the late Bronze Age. The Langdon Bay assemblage includes so-called ‘palstaves’, which were cast with flanges to keep the wooden haft in place and a side-loop for twine or rawhide to bind the head to the handle. As well as showing the common evolution of these forms over much of north-west Europe, itself a function of seafaring in spreading tools and technology over a wide area, typological research reveals small regional variations in shape and decoration that may represent cultural differences. In the case of the Langdon Bay assemblage, these show affinities with tools and weapons made in Continental Europe and suggest that the cargo may have originated in northern France.
With many of the items being worn or damaged it seems likely that this was a cargo destined for re-smelting, perhaps by a smith in Dover itself. Bronze smelting was an easier process than blacksmithing, with the temperature required to melt copper and tin – about 900 degrees Celsius – being reached using a simple bellows and charcoal fire. Tools were made by pouring molten metal into moulds of clay, stone or bronze, with the castings then being quenched in water and hammered, polished and sharpened. Gold that was cold-hammered into ornaments and jewellery provided a form of portable wealth just as today, but it is in bronze that we see the greatest accumulated wealth of communities and their leaders – providing not only for utilitarian needs, but also prestige items for wealth display and ceremonial use, perhaps including the type of reciprocal exchange between chieftains that anthropologists first observed among the island communities of Melanesia and Polynesia in the Pacific.
The date of the Langdon Bay assemblage, about 1200 BC, puts it some 350 years later than the Dover Boat, but it forms part of the same picture of cross-Channel trade in the Bronze Age and it is appropriate that the bronzes are displayed together with the boat in the museum in Dover; the axes also show the type of tools that were used to fell the timber and build the boat. An exciting addition to this picture came with the discovery of a second Bronze Age site off southern Britain in 1977. At Moor Sand, off Salcombe in Devon – some 370 kilometres west of Dover – divers found two beautiful bronze swords, of a type identified as originating in northern France or southern Germany and also dating to about 1200 BC. These are among the oldest swords discovered in Britain and represent the earliest cross-Channel transport of these weapons, which were then copied and produced locally. Swords first appear in the seventeenth century BC in the Black Sea and Aegean region but do not become widespread in north-western Europe for another five hundred years. The reasons for this are open to speculation; by the time of the Dover Boat, it seems likely that seafarers from Britain would have come into contact with metal traders from the Mediterranean who may have had swords with them. One possibility is that they saw little use for swords, which were solely intended as weapons; spears could serve that purpose if necessary, while being mainly for hunting. It could be that warfare was not yet endemic in Britain and that the importation of weapons of war was resisted, opening up the fascinating idea that pacifism and ‘non-proliferation’ may have been as much an aspiration in prehistory as it is today.
The Moor Sand site was also investigated by Keith Muckelroy as part of the doctoral research that he was completing at the time of his death in a diving accident in 1980. Only a small number of artefacts had been found by the end of his last season at the site, but later discoveries showed that he had been right to think that they were part of a larger assemblage located further offshore – in 2004 and 2009 further concentrations of artefacts were found, bringing the total number up to 390. These included tools and blades similar to those from Langdon Bay, but also parts of stranded gold bracelets and a neck torque in gold, and, most importantly, a cache of copper and tin ingots – some 255 whole and part ingots of copper and 31 of tin, altogether weighing about 100 kilograms. These were small ingots, unlike the heavy ‘oxhide’ ingots of the east Mediterranean Bronze Age that we will encounter in the next chapter, but they provide an excellent complement to the Langdon Bay assemblage by showing that seaborne trade took place not only in scrap and finished items but also in raw metal transported as ingots.
As well as being a point of landfall for boats coming from Brittany and northern Spain, the coast at Salcombe would have been traversed by vessels bringing metal from Wales and Cornwall. During the middle Bronze Age one of the main sources of copper in north-west Europe was the promontory of the Great Orme in north Wales, where ongoing exploration has revealed more than 8 kilometres of tunnels dating from prehistory – probably the largest mining enterprise anywhere in the world until the last millennium. It seems likely that copper ingots from the Great Orme would have been transported by sea along the coast of Wales, across the Severn Estuary and around south-west England, a voyage that would have required intimate knowledge of tides, currents and winds, and an ability to forecast conditions and seek shelter by drawing up vessels on sheltered foreshores along the way as necessary.
Cornwall may have been the source of much of the tin used in the European Bronze Age, not just in north-west Europe but also in the Mediterranean. The tin trade was described by the fourth-century BC Greek explorer Pytheas, whose account of his travels – the earliest known written description of Britain – survives in books by the later Greek writers Diodorus Siculus and Strabo. A fascinating link between prehistory and the present-day is provided by place names recorded by Pytheas, including Kantium, present-day Kent, and Prettanikē, the word for Britain that survives today in the headland of Predannack on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall. Unlike the Great Orme, where the prehistoric workings remain intact, Bronze Age tin workings in Cornwall are difficult to discern archaeologically because much of it involved the ‘streaming’ of ore from open watercourses or extraction from shallow workings that have been subsumed by later shafts and levels. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that extraction was on a large scale and that boats frequently took ingots along the coast to the east and across the Channel. They too would have faced perils along the way, including the treacherous rocks off the Lizard Peninsula, but the Dover Boat shows that vessels would have been capable of making the journey to Kent and beyond.
The Langdon Bay and Moor Sand sites were the first wreck cargoes of prehistoric date to be identified outside the Mediterranean. They helped to show that north-west Europe in the Bronze Age was not the backwater that some archaeologists of the Mediterranean had thought, and was instead part of a wide-ranging network of maritime contact and exchange in which local seafarers were able to travel long distances. Ancient accounts of trade with the Cassiterides, the ‘Tin Isles’, no longer needed to imply Phoenician or Greek ships off the coast of Cornwall – much of the trade could have been in local hands, carried out by seafarers capable of transporting ingots and metalwork to points of exchange with middlemen or Mediterranean merchants along the coast of present-day France and even as far away as northern Spain.
This viewpoint has also opened up new ways of thinking about the nature of early trade, which traditionally has been seen in terms of commercial exchange involving different ‘nationalities’ as revealed in the origins of artefacts. The idea of nationality in European prehistory draws heavily on the classical written sources and our own experience, and may be anachronistic. Instead of standing in front of a map and pointing to the different sources of a cargo as indication of international trade and perhaps the movement of the ship between those places, we might instead focus on the idea of a common maritime culture that bound together those regions – so that instead of debating whether trade in the Bronze Age was in the hands of ‘British’ or ‘Continental’ seafarers we might see them as part of a unified culture encompassing both sides of the Channel. The social network that provided the basis for trade also brings into play other factors behind the transport of goods, including gift-exchange, dowry and political alliance. As we shall see in examining the earliest shipwrecks of the Mediterranean, these approaches have begun to inform the way that we look at the earliest civilisations there as well, drawing scholars away from traditional models and towards new interpretations that have a more global perspective – changing the lens from a view dominated by kingdoms and states to one of greater fluidity and integration, in which coastal communities looked out to sea, rather than inland, for their common culture.
Copyright © 2024 by David Gibbins
