Tales from ‘the Bone Room’

I would like to dedicate these pages to my PhD supervisor, Eric Higgs. After studying at the London School of Economics, he bought a hill farm in Shropshire at the outset of the Second World War, and spent the following decade rearing sheep and cattle, with the objective, he once told me, of breeding miniature versions of the former. By 1953, he had had enough of farming and went to Cambridge to ask Professor Grahame Clark if he could enrol for a Diploma in Archaeology. Clark suggested that he should apply to the Institute of Archaeology in London University, but Higgs was adamant. He informed Clark that ‘I want to study at the best university’. Grahame could hardly disagree on that score. After his studies, a junior post became vacant and Eric was appointed an Assistant Director of Research. His great interest was economic prehistory, for which his time as a farmer primed him perfectly, and in 1959 I first encountered him, in his lab, known as ‘the Bone Room’. It was a small den, with animal bones hanging on the walls, dominated by a massive aurochs skull. Eric had piercing blue eyes, and a disarming way of giving one the impression that you were important, and here was your chance to join a movement to change the course of prehistory. He said to me that he could tell more about a prehistoric society from a single animal bone, than from a suitcase of handaxes.

I was fascinated by his confidential asides that it was us against them, and spent many hours learning how to tell a sheep bone from a deer, or a horse bone from that of a cow. In the summer of 1962, I went straight from my graduation ceremony to jump into the back of his Land Rover for the week’s drive to Greece and a fabulous summer hunting down the Neanderthals in the Balkans, as described in CWA 90. The day we returned to Cambridge, I became his first doctoral student. I asked him for his advice for a topic, and he replied with two words: ‘Try Norway’. But I went to Switzerland, and spent months in the Zurich Zoological Museum, identifying and analysing thousands of animal bones from the Swiss Lake Villages. One of the first tasks, confronted with boxes of bone fragments, was to sort out those that were sufficiently complete to make it possible to say what animal they came from. Fragments where this was impossible, like rib bones, were set aside as being of little use. Then I did the same thing in Denmark before returning to base to write up my findings into a dissertation. All this time, Eric continued his fieldwork in Greece, and then moved to the Near East with substantial funding from the Royal Society. It was Eric who urged me to write and ask for a lectureship at the University of Otago, and so I took what I had learned from him to New Zealand, and set up a cloned ‘bone room’ there, before doing the same when my interests took me to Southeast Asia. On one of my return visits to Cambridge, I naturally called on Eric, and he showed me his latest device, a flotation machine to extract botanic remains from archaeological sites, which has transformed our understanding of prehistoric exploitation of plants. I was the first person to use this technique in Southeast Asia. On a later visit in 1976, I found that Eric’s health had deteriorated rapidly, and I sat beside his bed reminiscing about those golden days roaming Greece, just a few weeks before he died.

Sorting species

The virtually universal recognition among archaeologists today that faunal and floral remains are important owes much to his pioneer thinking, but I am sure that Eric would be amazed by recent developments. Prominent among these, was a remarkable discovery made as part of investigations into the Siberian cave site of Denisova. As it happens, this involved my son Tom and his wife Katerina. Located in a tributary of the Ob River, Denisova has a long Palaeolithic sequence that involved the eastern limit of occupation by Neanderthals, the arrival of Anatomically Modern Humans, and the discovery by DNA analyses of a new species of human known as Denisovan. A problem with this cave is that it was also occupied from time to time by hyaenas, and they crunched up bones, leaving thousands of fragments and very few that can be assigned a species. However, bone fragments need no longer be set aside, for we now have ZooMS, or  ‘Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry’, a method developed at the University of York by Matthew Collins and Mike Buckley that can identify the species of these vital fragments. Tom and Katerina returned bags of fragments from Denisova to their lab in Oxford, and set graduate student Samantha Brown to seek any that might be human. And on the 1,300th bone – eureka! – they found one: a tiny fragment just 24.7mm long that was at once despatched to Nobel Laureate Svante Pääbo’s lab in Leipzig for DNA analysis.