4. Hans and Jørn
Hans Peeters is an Associate Professor at University of Groningen. He is the Principal Investigator on ‘Resurfacing Doggerland’, which is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). He is a specialist in lithic technology, and focuses on the relationship between hunter-gatherer behaviour and landscape dynamics.
Jørn Zeller is an archaeozoologist with a broad interest in human-animal relationships, and a background in working on large-scale national research projects, investigating and advising on worked bone and antler artefacts.
The three of us met in Hans’ office with multiple cups of black coffee, a large block of black peat and a rucksack full of bone point tools at the University of Groningen’s Institute of Archaeology on Friday 31st March 2023.
Jørn - My part in the project is to look at the worked bone, and often bone with cut marks. This is a nice example… it is a horse bone – a tibia – with cut marks all across here, and horse is one of our key species. Because there is a discussion between palaeontologists and archaeologists about horses – palaeontologists they might say ‘okay – of the ice age – this is a deer’, and but in early Mesolithic sites in Germany, we find horse. So, I think that there are remains, populations of these local wild horses that survived millennia. What we are now doing is we’re trying to C14 these horse bones. And especially when they are worked in this way, these are traces of slaughtering – they removed the meat from the bone.
Matt - I can see that – the marks are repetitive across the surface.
Jørn
Yes – so we hope to shed more light on what really happened with these horses.
Hans
But from the bone itself and the degree of fossilisation, you can’t tell really if it’s let’s say 50,000 years old or 5000 years old, so you have to date it.
M
I guess there’s this thing in the popular imagination I think around deer and elk and bison… but the horse is maybe pushed to the side in this discussion, it doesn’t immediately spring to mind when you think about ice age landscapes. But why would they have just disappeared? They’re kind of integral to our modern understanding and image of wildlife, farming, one of the most familiar and widespread animals.
H
Yes and we know from a paleontological point of view, this research is very much focused on ecosystems and environments in which animals live, and when you’re talking about horses you are most often talking about grassland. You would see or imagine mammoth and rhino and animals like that, and reindeer – horses are also one of the animals you would find in that type of landscape. But there are various parts in the world where horse have adapted to completely different types of environment – more wetland-like environments, such as those you sometimes find in the Americas, or the south of France for instance. So these animals are not necessarily fixed to open dry grassland. So that’s one of the things that we also want to look at. But for the same price you know this comes up with a date, which, again puts it in a date that fits this ice age framework, where it has clearly been worked and then the question becomes by who – for example, okay, is this neanderthal or is it younger… and this makes a difference.
M
And you mentioned that human jawbone Hans, which appeared to have a higher percentage neanderthal DNA that anyone would have expected to find in this piece from that Mesolithic timeframe?
H
Well, that’s one of the most interesting questions we have in terms of human remains. The lower jaws, at least a number of them from the North Sea do have a Mesolithic date, and do have some characteristics which are neanderthal-like, to where specialists working on neanderthal material say “are you sure about the Mesolithic date?”. So it’s going to be very interesting to see what the DNA tells us about that, because you know everybody across the world except to some extent African people have significant amounts of neanderthal DNA, and that’s fine but I’m very interested to know which bits of neanderthal DNA are actually responsible for these features.
M
Do you think the connotations change when we talk about neanderthals? Just in common vocabulary and popular culture they have a certain charge, like a frown sometimes almost appears around that word and impressions immediately come to mind – like, ‘stone age man’, what makes something ‘primitive’ - I was talking with Luc about this a little bit yesterday… How does that impact a question like that about recency in the public imagination? This changes the story doesn’t it?
H
Absolutely – if you put that at, let’s say, a smaller population scale, because much of the genetic work that has been done has formed this broad, over-arching story of climatic change and relationships, but there are still really very studies actually which focus on smaller populations. This is also part of our project – you would compare let’s say Mesolithic Doggerland populations that we have from the North Sea to burial sites from southern Scandinavia, or France or Spain, you will probably not see the same features. So, what does that tell you about the dynamics and relationships between people within smaller populations, and a possible interconnectedness between various populations over larger areas? If there are very distinct features within smaller regions that also might tell you something about, let’s say, degrees of isolation… This actually brings up a lot of questions. That makes it exciting, because otherwise it would just be ticking boxes, you know or to say that these Doggerland people were part of a much larger group of Western European hunter-gatherers.
J
This is true. Here is an antler of a red deer… they used this to hold a shaft, or an axe. This was found a couple of years ago near Rotterdam, where also they have sand secretions from the North Sea.
M
Again you know you kind of look at these kinds of devices and just think wow – these are actually perfect! You know, they’re perfectly worked – it’s like the surface is almost polished. And physically holding these I’m learning makes a massive difference. It just brings you that much close I think to that relationship. And kind of having that knowledge too I suppose about where to make a cut, where to hollow, not starting at this point or that but right at this exact spot on the bone, working into the cross-section at a very precise point or depression…
J
Totally – and sometimes this can be in different places, depending on the type of tool you are making. Most antler we find is red deer… this is also a very nice one and this is elk antler. The funny thing is it was found about five years ago and there was a site where you could report your finds – I saw it, and tried to contact the person that found it, and they just didn’t respond, and I thought this was such a pity because it’s such a beautiful piece. And then, some months ago, someone mailed me, this guy, said “I have this beautiful piece of antler, I’d like to know more about it…” asked if I could take a look at it, and I thought… oh man, this is the same one! This one is going to be dated.
M
Well, it eventually found you! It’s travelled and it’s been travelling for thousands and thousands of years!
H
It has been sampled – it has been prepared, and there’s enough collagen in it for a date. Soon it will be going into the machine.
M
Aesthetically it’s beautiful.
H
That’s also one of the most enjoyable sides of our work is that it’s not just the object but the trajectory it has been on before and until it reaches the research community, and what happens next, you know? It’s the journey it makes from being a find to becoming a story. And every object has a different trajectory held within it. So you will know that if you talked to Annelou about biographies of objects, there is also this research biography, which is part of the story too, and this is actually very fun! It’s full of coincidence, and chance.
M
The chance of seeing something online and then it arriving from nowhere through the mail... I always look on these, on objects as being fragmentary memories. You never remember the same thing in quite the same way twice, and you are constantly reconstructing. Reconstructing our own stories, and you know this today for me will be folded in to that – you know being here and physically holding these things is honestly changing my preconceptions of the surrounding topic in ways I didn’t expect. It speaks to the continuous influence that these objects have across huge spaces of time.
J
What we find very often are these antler bases which are mostly production waste – you can see how it’s quite clearly been cut in, this is near the beam, on the first branch, and they are just cut in halfway and then broken off. And from what is left – this is mostly thrown away, sometimes used as a hammer – but then what they cut and break off they use for instance to make axes or barbed points, or awls, needles, things like that. This production waste is very common, but this is one of the nicest pieces. Often massive antlers.
M
It's another really effective piece of engineering isn’t it – the character of the bone itself and the engineering of the – natural engineering of the animal, but then the ingrained knowledge of just how far in to cut before breaking clean.
J
Moreover, this one is naturally shed, but often you find these with a fragment of the skull still attached.
H
It may have been found and collected from a forest for example.
J
Yes they normally shed in February or March, at the end of the winter, so if you know where to look you can just go into the woods and collect this stuff.
M
What do you imagine was the scale of this type of production? Again, in your mind it’s hard I think sometimes to get over that idea of people living in isolated pockets but then when you see hundreds and hundreds of bone tools being found in one spot alone, it does make you question how many of these were being manufactured at any one time? How many people were around?
H
Of course there are a lot, but at the same time you mustn’t forget that we are talking about millennia. And when we are talking about a find spot in say the context of the North Sea – these are actually quite big samples of landscape that are being dredged, and so it can actually come from a couple of different pockets of where you have more accumulation of stuff. If you would have the opportunity to, let’s say, excavate areas that are as big as those that are being dredged in the North Sea, or in various parts of the Netherlands, there’s a fair chance that you will find – I don’t know how much of this stuff lumped altogether – so there’s also this question of scale. This is the kind of stuff for the North Sea that we have an advantage in that it is well preserved. At least in the Netherlands we have very few Mesolithic sites that yield well-preserved bone, but if you compare this, in this instance to Star Carr – one particular spot where you have enormous accumulations of material that is deliberate – but there are many spots in the same area where barely any material has been found so it's very variable. I think this type of technology – a way of doing this – is very common and continuous over many, many generations.
J
This certain type of axe is typical of the Mesolithic and Neolithic and after the Neolithic they disappear, and we don’t find them anymore. And they’re made mostly from metapodia of aurochs. This is a tibia of an male aurochs. And we see also cattle bones, so cattle must have been useful. There is always a shaft hole through here, and this is the working end. We have very nice data from Denmark about the measurements of female aurochs and male aurochs and domestic cattle, so this is a very nice reference for us to use. The breadth of the distal end here is big enough to indicate a male aurochs. You find them quite regularly in the North Sea and also on land. And why do they disappear? I don’t know. They still have domestic cattle so they could still make these kinds of tools, but they don’t.
H
Sometimes things change quite rapidly, certain aspects of doing all of a sudden – ‘bang’ – are gone.
J
Like barbed points – we don’t find them after the Mesolithic. But for fishing, fishing continues to be important, from the neolithic and into the Bronze Age, perhaps they found new techniques. Fish weirs, or fish traps…
H
On land, here, in the Mesolithic one of the features which is very common are what we call hearth-pits and the only thing we find back in them are lots of charcoal and we’re still not quite sure what they were used for, but it’s a typical Mesolithic feature. At the end of the Mesolithic – bang – let’s say 5000 BC, they disappear from the archaeological record. They don’t do it anymore. We haven’t got a clue why!
M
It's interesting that, looking at this object and having spent thousands and thousands of years perfecting that kind of technology, for it to disappear really quickly across multiple locations and communities …
J
And this is all from one collection, one of the biggest collections I think in the Netherlands of worked bone and antler – amazing stuff.
H
Again, mainly stuff that came up in fishing nets and this is very different from the things we find on the beaches. From the very beginning with the fishermen it would have been the case that they would have recognised a large object and thought that “this is a curious thing” so we will keep it and the rest when overboard.
M
Like Clement Reid describes in the early 1900s, you know, “it was said…” that when Dogger Bank was first encountered it was reported to be absolutely covered in mammal bones, but that was just seen as piles of hazardous material for a fishing fleet so they would clear it, throw it all back in the sea without a second thought.
J
Absolutely! Here is another nice adze, or axe with a shaft hole – this is the bone of either a big deer, maybe an elk, or an aurochs. We could find this out with a technique based on mass spectrometry.
H
Very small samples can be successfully analysed using mass spectrometry basically. All species have different frequencies based on proteins. So we can differentiate between animals if what is being analysed is well enough preserved.
M
It’s wild isn’t it, that power of interpretation of animal bone by individual protein frequencies?
H
Yes and technologies are advancing at such a speed it’s incredible. Certainly in this type of analysis one of the things they are foreseeing is in what we know about human evolution, which you can do genetics on and stuff like that, but that only allows you to go back to some point in time, and we more or less have to project or calculate how far back these developments first begun, splitting and things like that but now they are working on developing methods based on protein analysis from fossil human bones where they think that within a couple of years they can simply distinguish between the various types of humans without DNA analysis.
M
Is that all positive?! You know when we talk about technology, people you know might think ‘technology’ is something recent… is this acceleration an exciting thing for an archaeologist or a palaeontologist?
H
Yes – but also at the same time you could say, okay, the more we know the less questions remain, which is not true! Because you can always ask different questions.
J
Every solution raises new questions.
H
There is no finality in it.
J
No. The nice thing is that I worked on bones from neolithic sites 30, 40 years ago, and now people at the institute have been looking at the same material with new techniques – isotope analysis for example – and finding new things that I couldn’t have dreamed of. Suddenly we can answer questions we never thought we could have. And new questions come up.
M
But also then you have the experimental work that is being done in projects such as Annelou is being involved, and actually they are hand-making replicas of these objects, photographing these, simulating the original ways in which they might have been used to recreate conditions, and that situation, and then photographing again for comparison – there’s nothing simple or straightforward necessarily about that but there’s a very grounded approach to that which is back in human hands, almost the total opposite to technological analysis.
H
These are very different processes but most importantly they are complimentary to each other. One doesn’t replace the other. You can answer different types of questions between those methods.
M
It’s like two different languages, and I think that makes this project so exciting.
J
Yes. Here is a very special object – you can see this is from a deer that was hunted because this is part of the skull, and this is the point where it comes loose from these skull when an antler is shed so this has been killed. It’s a male red deer, and well this is quite a strange thing… it could be as in some types of burials abroad, it could have been used in some sort of ritual… I think it’s the only thing I’ve seen quite like it. I have to say that sometimes, archaeologists, they don’t know what it is and called it ‘ritual’, but this is a very special thing and I don’t know what it has been used for. Perhaps analysis could shed some light on this.
H
Is it broken off or has it been cut off?
J
I think it’s broken – yes the main beam has been broken off.
H
Well then it’s possible this thing was actually much bigger and in that case, if you would interpret it in a very straightforward functional way you could also say that it gives extra weight perhaps – but we have to find the other part! Let’s say if this would have been an adze like many of these objects then you know, you would have a working edge but what has been left provides a lot of weight. And when you have a heavy tool you need a heavier, stronger shaft.
J
It's a beautiful mystery object.
M
I imagine these as being like toolkits – this one is much smaller. It’s a different way of using your environment isn’t it.
H
Yeah but you know there are quite some interesting ethnographic stuff on the use of tools, and there’s one film on the production of basalt adzes from Papua New Guinea, and you can see that the people there use various adzes for different purposes, you know big ones for cutting down trees, but smaller ones almost like Swiss pocket knives, but they use it for all sorts of things in daily life, and it’s an extension of their body. They carry it around all of the time, over their shoulder, and they work with it, and then it goes back over the shoulder. Don’t be stuck in one single idea of function around a tool, any tool can have multiple uses.
J
Exactly – by it’s shape it can be an axe, but could also be used as a chisel for instance.
M
I was talking to Isaak at Naturalis about degrees of mental separation from the environment, and this feeling that wherever we are we’re always at least some comfortable distance away from the animal kingdom, one step removed whether we’re at a zoo or on the roads, or in a park. But I imagine that’s a pretty modern convenience. And for long how can that be sustained if this area of the world is going to be mostly underwater in 700 years time… you know people will move but what new habitats might they encounter and face, and clear, and how does that line between you and your environment shift?
J
Exactly, it’s a total disconnection.
M
I’m really curious about the distance we’ve travelled, and how far in any one direction, how far forward do we travel technologically, and how disconnected will we become before we snap back to this knowledge, or do we continue on this trajectory because of the population of the planet – which will change depending on how disastrous the next few hundred years look, could be much reduced – these modes of living we are looking at span such vast amounts of time seemingly with great success, but now we just take for granted an idea that we’re so far removed from that, and that is somehow a good thing for all of us.
J
This was a very sustainable way of living, and vast amounts of knowledge have been lost. People could very easily, very well, read the landscape. You knew where to go literally for whatever purpose. And we don’t know half of that any more I think.
H
We’ve made ourselves quite vulnerable. Every innovation comes with new opportunities, it opens up a door into another part of the world, but also a lot of new risks and these might not have been foreseen. In advance it’s hard to predict how things will move forward.
M
How do you think things will move forward?
H
Well we simply don’t know! And this all remains very risky. And at some point, it’s quite evident in the way we are behaving ourselves these days… well there are certain limits which are in view.
M
Maybe there are lesson to be learned?
J
Yes but people are very stubborn sometimes. It’s like they don’t want to learn.
M
Are there any particular stories that have come out of this for you both – that obviously I know for you guys this is one project but this is part of a lifetime’s interconnected work – but stories you think could teach us a bit to carry into the future?
H
I’m always a bit hesitant in speaking about teaching or learning from the past, because the context that we are studying – what we have on the table – was very different from our context. And you know, this loss of connectedness and not being able to – well let’s say if we were all to be dropped in a different environment you would simply have to survive, and I think that most of us would have to say “goodbye – see you in another world.”
So personally, I don’t like to speak in terms of lessons that can be learned. It’s much more an adding to this awareness that technologies and innovations open up as I said new worlds – create new worlds, in a sense, and you simply don’t know where you’re going. And so there is always risk that you have to count into your new ways of doing and being. That sort of, let’s say, risk management – this is something that we have lost. I think that many people don’t want to acknowledge this. People feel it as a threat.
the ‘bone attic’ at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, 31.3.23
J
The easiest thing to do is not to believe it. It’s not there. Just like a child closing it’s eyes. But we can demonstrate in this project, I hope, is how people – civilisation, populations and lots of humans and animals have reacted to a changing environment. And I don’t think we can learn from it, because it’s a totally different society, but we can show the effects of these changes on people and animals.
H
It’s very much about flexibility I think, and the more you stick to what you always have done and think that’s the way to go, the bigger the chance will be that at the very same time, things are changing around you, and there’s a chance that you will find yourself in trouble. That’s part of life – if you’re more flexible in life then you build a broader range of opportunities and possibilities into your society. You will be able to cope more easily with changes that are beyond your control.
M
It's not the case now necessarily that we will wake up one morning and from nowhere and for reasons we don’t at all understand, half of our village is flooded – we have such predictive capabilities and technologies now that we’re afforded those opportunities to mitigate risk, but then if you say well everything is destined to collapse – it’s a crisis, it’s inevitable, then what can I do?
H
And there are various kinds of risk. If you look at the discussions around sea level rise, much of it is focused on material risk. Places where people live. But societal risk is much a problem – if we didn’t have our coastal protection here in the Netherlands, half of the Netherlands would already be underwater. Where can people go? The eastern part of the Netherlands, let’s say, is a relatively empty part of the country – all of those people in the western part of the Netherlands would have to move over. We have a border between there and Germany so, what is going to happen?
M
It's one thing to say that we will have to prepare to move from the building in which we live to another, but if tens of thousands of people are doing that at the same time then moving isn’t just materially picking up your photo albums and moving them 300 miles – you might find a shelf to put your objects on somewhere but around that case or shelter or whatever you find, there might not be a street, you might in the middle of a marsh.
You know like, the Holderness coast is still eroding now at a rate of about 6 feet a year, and it’s the news all the time and it has been for 150 years now. The University is scanning for lost towns up and down the coastline which are in memory, towns that have fallen into the sea since the Norman Conquest. You know politically the priorities in terms of risk management are weighted towards protecting the gas terminal over housing, but it’s all going and it’s going quickly.
H
I guess, to what extent do you look at things as being ‘how it always has been’ or was… I find it a bit curious when you think about the coral islands in the Pacific for example, small volcanic islands, and quite a number of them are actually pretty recent, but people living there now with sea level rise, they feel threatened and they will say and feel that, well, ‘we have always lived here’, but that’s maybe only just a couple of generations.
J
Another thing is that people tend to forget how thing were before they existed. I’m reading a book right now about shifting baseline syndrome. So people tend to forget how things where when they were young – ‘it’s always been this way’ – well this generation has forgotten already so things get lost.
H
That’s part of the, let’s say, inflexibility we have or not being able to cope with a different reality.
J
And in this book they are studying the importance of big mammals and big birds, and within generations people might have forgotten them. There is one type of bird in Indonesia – it’s still there but it disappeared from many places where it was quite common, two generations ago, so if you talk to young people now and name the bird they do not recognise it. For their grandfather or great-grandfather, collecting the eggs of that bird was very important. But it has vanished from memory.
M
We have quite ancient, time-travelling brains, but memory is something different.
J
I also think of the difference between knowing things from your parents or grandparents because they told you stories, and then seeing these things with your own eyes. If you see things with your own eyes it immediately is vivid and living. Those stories might be too far away.
M
And that element of the world is rapidly accelerating in terms of different types of knowledge – that maybe becomes harder and harder to impart.
H
Yes the pace of change is completely different. It’s now 2023… 100 years ago the house where I live now was built. And 1923 was a completely different world.
M
We can kind of make worlds within worlds can’t we. There is maybe a lot of distraction within modern devices and having an online identity, and shaping bubbles around ourselves, but that’s an interesting response I think.
J
I agree I mean sometimes that is very necessary if only to protect yourself. And that might mean going for a walk, working in the garden – using your hands. That always works for me. Escape.
M
Is that where it started for you guys, an escape? More and more I realise that I’m the most interested now as the things I was interested in as a child, as I’ve ever been.
H
When I was 7 or 8 years old, archaeology was already something I absolutely wanted to do.
J
Yes – I was looking for fossils, and then I became fascinated with birds when I was 10. Before that we lived in a house with a big garden and lots of birds, and my mother was interested in plants and so I knew a little, but it started seriously when I was 10 years old. I met a man who was the very few people then making films and photographs of birds there, and we became friends.
M
These things carry us forwards.
J
I need to head home now I think. There is a little girl that lives on the other side of the street from us, she is 5 today, and I have to visit her. I promised I would be there for her birthday.
