Matt

When we met a while ago I was just really curious about your work and some of the things you introduced me to in that brief conversation, and so I wanted to talk to you about some of those things in more depth – and now also about what you’ve discovered recently through your PhD and working on the EDAN [Emergence of Domesticated Animals in the Netherlands] project.

So, my interest over the past six months or so, in the prehistory of Northwestern Europe, British Isles and Doggerland, has kind of grown and expanded. Recently I’ve been talking with friends and extended family and people in the coastal farming community about their impressions of how farming in particular has changed over the past couple of generations, and what the main factors seem to be driving those changes. And that kind of tells me a lot about the way that people believe a natural landscape should like – you know like that fragile word ‘nature’, what is a natural state – I’m really fascinated by those shifting baselines of what we imagine a healthy natural landscape to look like, and feel like, and represent as an environmental default. I sort of feel like – I think I feel like about 90 percent of the time, our feelings about what that looks like – when we say that what we actually mean is what a healthy, functioning arable farming-friendly landscape looks like. Which is a very different thing, but we struggle to imagine anything different in reality. Tracing an archaeological period back towards the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition extends that context and it’s interesting to consider shifting baselines as recorded impressions beyond spoken or written histories. I know there are lots of similarities between where you and I are now geographically and this is key to understanding that transition period, and as agriculture is introduced, and quite quickly the concept perhaps of the nation state, how significant differences began to emerge. I read that there was a belief that the transition to agriculture in the Dutch wetlands seems to have taken longer than neighbouring areas or in the British Isles? And in Britain we have these curious things happening, like for example in the early Neolithic we seem to have really taken hold of cereal cultivation, but then maybe a thousand years later decided we don’t want to do that anymore, and so we stop for a while – all the while, we are still foraging and essentially raising livestock at the same time.

Merita

Well you know that we work with material culture but even that represents such a tiny, tiny portion, because of preservation or because of research bias… some things are lost in the landscape… the coast of the Netherlands is so extensively eroded and so we have a lot of early Neolithic sites which are missing. We don’t have the whole picture, and it’s really hard to say. But yes, there is a perception of a long transition in the Dutch wetlands but I don’t know if I would say so necessarily because we, archaeologists, tend to view transition as like a homogenous phenomenon you know? Like the moment they find cultivation, or let’s say domesticated animals in a hunter-gatherer environment they might say – okay, here the transition has started, but it feels like that whole group of people are viewed as one entity, which is surreal, to me at least. And we tend to also label people according to pottery so for example we call people Swifterbant because they are sharing similar pottery, but we forget that these people were also living in separate units, separate communities, they might not even have communicated or they might have had different religions and ideas.

So this long transition is basically based on the first appearance of pottery and then several hundred years later you see the appearance of domesticated animals, and then several hundred years later cereal cultivation. And then you have these people who are still hunting and gathering – they’re still foraging, but they’re playing you know with these concepts of farming. So they’re using both. But they’re banding this binary identity you know of like either you’re a farmer or you’re a forager. I’m not sure actually – we have to use categories of course, it’s one of the ways we perceive the past, but I would say that people in the Netherlands – in the Dutch wetlands – definitely reacted differently to the oncoming farmers and the changes in the landscape compared to the British Isles and Scandinavia. For example we usually compare these as case studies because you know how like DNA studies also show how in the UK and in Scandinavia you see a sudden change in DNA – like a complete change of demography – because of migration, mostly people coming in from Anatolia, from the South-East. And that’s really surprising because a lot of evidence shows that you would have a mixture of Mesolithic and Neolithic living together in one settlement. At the same time, you had Neolithic settlement beside a camp of hunter-gatherers, and there was a lot of continuity – you can see that they were co-existing – but at the same time when it comes to the DNA, large studies have shown that there was a complete wipe-out of hunter-gatherer’s DNA, so they were not mixing in Britain and Scandinavia. So that’s really interesting. It kind of shows they were almost, you could say, colonized… we don’t know understand what happened there. And there is not a lot of DNA from the Netherlands. We do have some in Germany, a few Swifterbant people, and they are mostly a mixture. At the moment, basically, because the Netherlands had a mixture of both subsistence strategies for let’s say about a thousand years, it’s difficult to say why they did this but I would say perhaps relationship with the environment was important to consider.

The Netherlands and the Dutch wetlands are so dynamic – you have a lot of flooding happening… of course, if you have a field you are laying out crops and at some point those are going to be flooded so you’re going to want to move to a drier area, so the seasonality and connection to the landscape changing mobility, that we traditionally associate with Mesolithic, still remained for a long time. And there is such an abundance of wild animals at that point that are so useful, for example beaver – using beaver skin, fur for clothing, for trade, and fishing was obviously good with so much water everywhere, so I think that they really synchronized two different subsistence strategies. We don’t really know whether these people were hunter-gatherers who changed their relationship to the landscape, or added new skills, or they were really oncoming farmers, or mixed – we don’t know yet, but in the Netherlands at least there is a lot of evidence of people having a relationship to the landscape that is hard to see through archaeological assemblages but for example you can see chronologically that people visited the same sites repeatedly for thousands of years. And there were hiatus periods, but they would come back, and there was probably a reason why they would continue to leave then return continuously. So there is some indication of a very interesting relationship with the landscape. What I would say is that we can look at the ethnographic evidence, and of course we are living in modern times and we have this modern bias, but we can see that the hunter-gatherers really move across vast surfaces, and they know where to go, and they also actively adapt their environment. And because the landscape was so dynamic, with rising sea levels for example, and sometimes within a generation you would see a lot of land being lost, there was a lot of shifting and adaptation happening, moving away from coast and moving inwards and so on.

Matt

Obviously this patch of coastline is rapidly eroding as well, this patch of pretty recent bolder clay surrounded by chalk, like an in-filled bay, and for that it’s incredibly fertile and rich and full of wildlife and useful to that degree historically… Britain though, I do sort of feel… our sea defence strategies are not in any shape future-facing, but there is obviously a lot of political intent or lack of surrounding what is protected and what is left to fall and wider context – and rapid shift over time I think is familiar here. And so in terms of shifting baseline syndrome it seems quite logical to me that what I would have learned as a child from my parents and grandparents would have been something very different from what they learned when they were young about the built and non-built environments around them. And thinking about how children’s books actually might sometimes establish and reinforce those ideas of ecological defaults – the earliest memories you have of learning about a natural environment were in picture books or illustrations of pastoral, worked landscapes… we’re in a situation maybe now where the idea of a world without farming for some reason seems wildly unimaginable. But then again when such huge changes were being made over quite a long period of time that led us to this point by possibly homogenising ways of living into one or two particular types of hierarchy and economy, why is it so difficult to imagine meaningful adaptation now?

One question I wanted to ask and to learn more about was the ways in which you apply the word ‘baseline’ and what that means to your work? I read that you described working towards creating a ‘chronological backbone’ – a really evocative phrase in this context! What is Bayesian modelling, and what types of chronologies are you trying to establish?

Merita

Bayesian modelling is basically a statistical method of calculating probabilities. It’s a very complex method, so you need a lot of computational power, and it’s difficult even for me to understand sometimes! It kind of resembles quantum computing I think, but basically in a more practical sense I measure how old things are through radiocarbon dating, and then I create models of a site. And the point is, because of the interrelation of these dates you narrow the dates down, because usually when you date something it can be wide for several centuries because of uncertainty, and also because of shifting of the isotope of carbon in the atmosphere of the past. So we cannot really get a date, but we can get a range. And because these ranges are bigger than human lifetimes, especially this 300 years for example, what I’m trying to do is to narrow it down to generational precision, and help track human agency in the past… finding when something has actually happened to the closest date I can, and then also sequence of events to understand how processes were carried out.

When it comes to the sites in my case studies, for example the Swifterbant sites S3 and S4, these are the first cereal fields that we have where we also found animal husbandry, so we did DNA on cattle and pig and found that they were mixed with near-eastern animals. One of my colleagues also did a stable isotope analysis, trying to see what these animals ate, and where they moved, and we found that they were highly managed. So they were fed something completely different from the wild animals we analysed. And also they were moved over great distances, maybe over 100 kilometres, and they were moved to the coast – so they were moved seasonally. This was a site that had a 300 year wide range, and everyone sort of thought lasted maybe for this amount of time, but through Bayesian modelling I realised that it’s only really 20 years – really short term. What is interesting is that we have many of these sites. We have a settlement system in Flevoland, in Central Netherlands, where they found a lot of very similar sites, and now archaeologists are digging more and more because construction companies are installing more windmills, are they are finding a lot of very similar sites from the same time range. So suddenly within one generation people started doing agriculture in a certain way across a system of several connected settlements. So my contribution here was to sort of say okay – we can narrow this down and we can see that these people started doing this within a single generation – it wasn’t something long and homogenous and slow… and I mean, why not?! Why not suddenly change your relationship to the landscape.

I also did analysis of the appearance of the first domesticated animals – that means that we found in hunter-gatherer camps sheep bones, which are not native to the Netherlands, and we also analysed the cattle and pigs to understand whether they were domesticated, and they weren’t, so what we concluded was that these are just maybe trade – like gifts, or maybe hunter-gatherers were simply just curious at that point! They wanted to keep sheep and goats for example. And the dates that we used to assume were actually much younger, so these changes in the Netherlands were actually much more clustered together. They were not happening over a thousand years, but they were more clustered within say 200 years, which is still a lot but this is somewhat more precise. Actually in the UK you have a lot of research done on chronologies like this – the UK is leading in these research methods. The University of Oxford developed an online program and the methods to calculate this stuff precisely – there has been a massive amount of work done in the UK. And so that’s really the point of what I’m trying to do, and also to sort of break this narrative that we archaeologists tend to go to which is simply perceiving things in the past happening at some sort of comfortable place, or very slow or homogenous.

Matt

I was listening to an interview with David Wengrow and some of the realisations he and David Graeber came to along the journey of writing ‘The Dawn of Everything’, and this reimagining and often a condensing of those wide, broad frameworks – the way that we conceptualise the deep past as being almost 300,000 years of our species sort of wandering about in a haze, not very curious and then all of a sudden we have curiosity, tools and technology, agriculture, domestication, astronomy, revolution after revolution – but biologically how much have we changed in 300,000 years?! So I think probably education, generationally has instilled this idea – this image in us, that we are now at some sort of fixed pinnacle of sophistication, even intelligence… obviously when you take a step back from that it seems absurd.

Merita

I think it’s kind of like expected too because we rely so heavily on material evidence, and we have way more material evidence from later periods, so we don’t have records of what languages people might have spoke for example – I mean we have cave art obviously but who knows what people really did. I’m pretty sure they would have had songs or dance, performance, forms of worship, perhaps used landscapes as ritual spaces, but we only see the things that are still surviving. You’re right, it’s a persistent illusion of viewing life in the deep past as something that is very simple.

Matt

There is a term I came across, an abbreviation in some of the papers I’d read coming out of the project – LBK - and as relates to pottery I wondered if you could tell me a little bit more about that and what the interface there was with the onset of agriculture?

Merita

So LBK stands Linienbandkeramik – a German term, and this refers to the linear marks and bands on the ceramics basically – associated with the culture that was the first proper farming culture in Central Europe, and they spread rapidly – we don’t know yet but we think from perhaps an area of the south-east or Ukraine, spread throughout Europe, at the start of the Neolithic. And they reached up to about 200km from the Dutch wetlands, and then they stopped because the land was not fertile. After them, there were a lot of smaller pottery cultures that emerged, and those were all interacting with hunter-gatherers of the Netherlands, and of Scandinavia, or the Funnel Beaker later in Britain. So the LBK are considered the principle agents of Neolithisation.

Matt

We’re at this interesting point in time. Where does agriculture go from here? We have this cacophonous global population and pace of life, vying for ever depleting resources, maybe, hopefully in late-stage fossil fuel consumption, but possibly with scale being the binding factor behind our hard-edged shared imagination about how we might change our relationships within ecosystems rather than striving to maintain some illusory barrier between ourselves and the natural world.

Not unrelated, something small but I read about how the Netherlands are about to spend a lot of money reducing the amount of livestock in the country?

Merita

Yes, it’s become a massive environmental issue because of the methane and emissions created – we simply have too much livestock and it’s destroying the atmosphere. So they have introduced this program and there is a huge amount of backlash, because a lot of people obviously generate massive profit from livestock farming. So the country is very much divided.

I mean it’s so tricky but basically, we are living in a world almost solely focused on profit, right? So I’m a little bit sceptical. There will be a lot of greenwashing to come – nice for PR. Until something very bad happens I think we will continue modifying the environment to our own benefit. Maybe that’s pessimistic but this is how it seems to me – especially because the people that are most focused on profit are the wealthiest and the most powerful – that small handful of major companies. There is so much more division that unity in general. But we can raise awareness, we can have thought experiments… I’m just not sure how much more we can do for now.

Matt

When did you first become interested in that time period – was there a previous project that fed into your PhD specifically?

Merita

Actually, it might be disappointing for you to here this but no not really! I used to be interested much more in early Christianity and really not as much into prehistory, but when I was studying abroad I began working on these scientific methods of analysis, and I started applying them to the Neolithic in Portugal – I was studying pigments and bones with microscopes and lasers, just to trace also where these pigments came from. And then I started realising this was really interesting in terms of prehistory, before we had any written sources, so also this is when I became interested in breaking the illusion of the past being completely inert. So that’s the reason really why I joined this project – I’m interested obviously in how people lived in the past and more specifically the human agency of the past rather than a specific period. Getting closer to that.

Matt

So, early Christianity - we’re maybe moving away from farming a little bit! – what is that interests you around that subject?

Merita

I think I’m mostly interested in people’s belief systems and religions in terms of how they spread. It’s such an incredibly powerful religion, to have shaped our shared history for the past 2000 years, but in the beginning, it was such a marginalised religion or community, and I used to really enjoy digging on sites where we would find tiny Christian churches that were built on older temples, so I was also interested in how those religions change. How they synchronise into something new – as you know Christianity adopted so many elements of older religions. And I was always fascinated with people’s ideas around purpose. I’m the weird person who goes to churches or synagogues and stares at people while they’re praying!

Matt

Something that I was actually pondering – I mean the reasons why are obvious, but how for example a huge amount of the natural landscapes described in the bible are all pastoral landscapes dominated by the familiar handful of domesticated animals, and it’s very much a product of the time in which it was written, but that again is something that takes me back to thinking about literature – children’s books, setting defaults or baseline learning… That immediately sets up you with this default picture and belief that, okay – we have always had these four or five native species and those include chicken and sheep!

Merita

We tend to forget how the food we eat is imported – I mean basic stuff, that we haven’t had these things for very long, like potatoes, or coffee or tomatoes, you know?!

Matt

This makes me think about Brexit as well and how we seem to have this preference, I suppose typified by Brexit in so many ways, for enclosure essentially – for hard borders and boundaries – how concerned might we have been 6000 years ago with even the idea of a nation state? Or fixed identity and belonging. These things can be really dangerous but we seem so infatuated with the idea of a nation state and it’s unquestioningly embedded across the majority of cultures. And a nation state and a natural state – often those can be just as much wrapped up in identity politics – I’m going off in so many directions here.

Merita

Yes we’re so attached to this, and I really don’t know where it comes from. I’m not sure if people in the past thought about identity in the same ways, perhaps as being important in belonging to a certain group but on a much smaller scale, but the concept of national identity I’d say is fairly unnatural actually I feel – largely enforced identity I think for reasons of shared economics or political belief. But we’re kind of raised like that right? And it’s difficult to escape that. We’re incredibly conditioned to many of these things.