A lens on the past

We have an unfortunate tendency to idealize the past.

Well, unfortunate is probably the wrong word.  I don't guess it does any real harm, and in fiction it can be quite entertaining.  Unrealistic is probably a better choice.  Except for the (very) select privileged few, our ancestors' lives were -- to quote Thomas Hobbes -- "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

This idealization creates a picture in our minds that is almost certainly false.  Consider, for example, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, which focuses on the meeting between some civilized, beautiful Cro-Magnon folks and some violent, nasty Neanderthals.  Reminiscent of Tolkien's Orcs and Elves, the Neanderthals all have names like Thok and Ugg and Glop, and the Cro-Magnons mellifluous names like Sondamar and Alidor.  (Before you start yelling at me, yes, I made those up because I don't own the book any more and I don't feel like looking it up.  But my point stands.)

But it's not just the prehistorics.  Contrast two different tales of medieval monastic life -- Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Don't get me wrong, I love Brother Cadfael; his logic, compassion, and love for botany are all endearing, and Peters was a great mystery writer.  But the reality of life in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was undoubtedly closer to Eco's harsh, unwashed, rough-shod reality, with its starving peasants and superstitions and religious fanaticism, than it was to Peters's genteel knights and tradesmen and monks.

Like I said, I don't really object to fictional portrayals, even with their inevitable inaccuracies.  I've written a few stories set in the past myself -- the English Midlands in the nineteenth century (Adam's Fall), pre-Civil-War Louisiana (The Communion of Shadows), eleventh century Iceland (Kári the Lucky), and Britain during the fourteenth century Black Death (We All Fall Down).  I hope I've skirted the line between realism and romanticism deftly enough to make it believable without being too dark and depressing.

But the fact remains that our ancestors didn't have it easy.  That we're here is a tribute to their tenacity, strength, and determination.  Whenever I consider archaeological finds, I'm always struck by how cushy a lot of us have it now, with our indoor plumbing and heat in the winter and electric appliances and modern medicine, all of which our forebears somehow survived -- at least for a while -- without.

The reason this comes up is a study out of the University of Oxford that was published last week in the journal Antiquity, describing a rather horrific archaeological discovery in Merrie Old England.  The remains of at least 37 people were found near Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, dating to the Early Bronze Age (preliminary dating puts them at around 2000 B.C.E.) that show signs not only of violent death -- but the bodies were butchered and eaten afterwards, and the remains thrown down a fifteen-meter-deep shaft.

"We actually find more evidence for injuries to skeletons dating to the Neolithic period in Britain than the Early Bronze Age, so Charterhouse Warren stands out as something very unusual," said Rick Schulting, who was the study's lead author.  "It paints a considerably darker picture of the period than many would have expected."

[Image credit: Schulting et al., Antiquity]

And it doesn't appear to be a case of desperation, where starving people resorted to cannibalism because they had no other options.  The same site yielded up plentiful cattle bones, so it's apparent the Bronze Age residents of Charterhouse Warren weren't hurting for chow.

Any explanation of this behavior is, of course, pure speculation, but one thought is that the victors ate their defeated enemies as a way either of dehumanizing them, or perhaps from some sort of belief that doing so would allow any courage or spirit the enemies had to pass into them.

"Charterhouse Warren is one of those rare archaeological sites that challenges the way we think about the past," Schulting said.  "It is a stark reminder that people in prehistory could match more recent atrocities and shines a light on a dark side of human behavior.  That it is unlikely to have been a one-off event makes it even more important that its story is told."

It certainly puts a clearer and harsher light on what life in the past was actually like.  "If people think of the past as something peaceful and idealized," said archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, of Kalmar University, who was not involved in the current study, "that needs to be revised."

In any case, it's probably for the best that we do see our history through softer lenses.  The rigors that 95% of humanity endured back then, that (fortunately) far fewer have to endure now, were seriously depressing stuff.  And I suppose it's encouraging, really; for all the horrific stories in the news, we have come a long way as a species.  Not that we don't still have a long way to go.  But when asked when I would choose to live if I had a time machine that could take me into the past, my answer is always "right here and right now."

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