The hippy version of history
Andrew Selkirk, founder of this magazine, likes to characterise the generation of archaeologists who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as ‘hippies’ because they have tended to downplay hierarchy, warfare, violence, invasion, and genocide, by contrast with the previous generation (who witnessed the brutality of war and are well aware of the cruelty that humans are capable of inflicting on one another). The ‘hippy generation’ prefers to tell archaeological narratives that paint our ancestors as egalitarian, caring for weaker members of society and welcoming migrants for the new skills and ideas they introduce to indigenous societies.
How else to interpret the human remains found in Neolithic long barrows and passage graves, where complete articulated skeletons are rare? One finds bones from a number of different individuals selected (according to the ‘hippy’ version of history) to represent all members of the community over several generations, young and old, able-bodied and disabled – the sign, in other words, of a non-hierarchical society. This contrasts with what followed in the Bronze Age, when single barrow burials became the norm, perhaps being the graves of dominant individuals in a society in which there were now social gradations.
Neolithic blended families
DNA analysis of the remains from the Hazleton North long cairn in Gloucestershire (see CA 87 and CA 384) now seems to point in the opposite direction. Bones and teeth from the 5,700-year-old tomb have been examined by an international research team of archaeologists from the universities of Newcastle, York, Exeter, and Central Lancashire, and geneticists at the universities of Vienna, the Basque Country, and Harvard. They concluded that 27 of the 35 people represented came from five continuous generations of a single family. The majority were descended from four women who all had children with the same man. The hippy tendency among those journalists who reported the story hailed this as ‘the world’s oldest family tree’, and evidence of that most modern of phenomena, the ‘blended family’. One of the report’s authors, Chris Fowler, was quoted as saying that ‘family ties mattered’ and that ‘you can see that with the inclusion of some very young children in the tomb as well’. There was also a suggestion that it was the women who were important because the Hazleton barrow has separate northern and southern chambers: the people in each were segregated according to the first-generation woman from whom they were descended. One conclusion of the report, published in Nature (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04241-4), was that ‘these first-generation women were socially significant in the memories of this community’.
