Beer Quarry Caves By Kevin Cahill

A distant prospect of their past and future in the light of the British Museum’s Stonehenge - Stone Age Britain exhibition. Feb 17 to July 17 2022

What, you might ask, has Beer Quarry Caves got to do with nuclear fusion and the light that twinkles down at us from the stars above? Well, the starlight that twinkled upon our ancestors here in Devon between six thousand and ten thousand years ago, is much the same starlight that twinkles down on us now. Oh, and my nephew works at JET, the experiment aimed at making the energy that fuels the sun and the stars, available to us here on earth. If you’re young or youngish my nephews’ activities won’t surprise you much. Me? When Sputnik, the first satellite to spin around the earth first flew in October 1957, I was just under 13. I climbed out onto the rounded tin tarred roof of our great barn, and lay there on my back for hours, watching this man made artificial star, hurtle, glittering, through space.

I didn’t come down from the barn roof wanting to be an astronaut. I came down wanting to know what infinite space was. What was this world we lived in all about, and most especially the big bit, the star filled heavens. Just as our ancestors here and at Stonehenge did millennia ago.

Now, out here at Beer Quarry Caves I am doing what I’d like you, our visitors, to do. If you can recall what Merlin tells Arthur to do in the marvellous book the Sword in the Stone, you’ll recall that the wizard tells the future King to “Think, boy, think”. As our homo sapiens ancestors, successors to the Neanderthals who lived at Broome near Axminster, worked to turn flint into tools and implements, they wondered what the world they were living in was all about. We can learn something of this from the graves they made, many of them up the way at Farway. But no leap of the imagination could have told them that their remote descendants would one day move from flint to fusion, to the fire that lights the stars themselves—and have it here on earth. And just ‘think’, this progress, from flint to fusion, only took ten thousand years or so. Not even a blink of time’s eye out there in the heavens.

So, what are our caves really about? Are they about the dreadful tale of man’s inhumanity to man etched on their walls? For 57 generations of about 35 years each, men and women, and kids too, from this area crept into the darkness with tallow candles and small picks and hacked limestone blocks out of the rock deposits, for a pittance that was never more than the equivalent of a few pence a day. Life for a quarrier in the caves seldom lasted even 30 years. The big question then, is, was that a life at all? There are two answers. The first is that families occurred. Humans some how endured this situation, married or whatever, and had children. Otherwise, no quarriers at Beer. The second answer is that of course it wasn’t a life, nor an approximation to one. Not at any rate if each human then was what we have now become, a living, thinking sentient being. So the question that the caves pose is why or what enabled the local people to endure and survive a life that was almost meaningless and pitted with pain? How did we get from there to here?

Our contribution to the answers this year takes in the most marvellous exhibition ever mounted by the British Museum. At its heart is Stonehenge, but its basically an exhibition about the Stone age in Britain. We’ve linked with the Museum and taken out our first ever national advertisement, with the BM magazine. And all our guides are going to London while the exhibition is on.

Our answers for you this year will therefore be informed in a way they never have been before. Our guides will know, in a whole new way, how our earliest ancestors tried to make sense of the world around them here in east Devon. From what we now know about Stonehenge, most of it recent, our ancestors asked just the same basic questions we still do.

What are we? Why are we here? What do our lives mean? Where did we come from? We now know that Stonehenge was less a settlement than an embryonic city, a stone age city, and not the first either. City like structures in the Stone Age period are now being discovered all over the world, especially in Turkey at Gobekli tepe. What Stonehenge is now disclosing is a complex Stone age society that paid great attention to the unknown, that buried its dead with considerable ceremony and cared and knew, instinctively, that the heavens and the stars mattered. It is still likely that the core standing stone formation at Stonehenge was a celestial observatory of some kind.

Down here at Beer Quarry Caves we have no great standing stone formation that might catch the eye. But what we have got is the major necropolis at Farway, reaching to within 100 meters of the cave entrance. This reverence for the dead and their decent burial is our link to Stonehenge and the religious beliefs of the people who lived at the time of Stonehenge. Our great challenge now is to formally link Beer caves to the society of its time, for which we have no written records, only flint artefacts. Please visit us—and the British Museum and Stonehenge if you can, as we make our local journey into the remote past of Beer quarry caves and the people of East Devon

The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Allan Lane. Penguin Books. London 2021. 692 pages.

THIS book is being reviewed here in connection with the link between Beer Quarry Caves and the British Museum Stonehenge- Stone Age exhibition, at the Museum from February to July 2022. In their introductory ‘Farewell to humanities childhood’, the joint authors of this extraordinary book state something very obvious. They note that ‘Most of human history is irreparably lost to us’ and continue, ‘Our species, Homo Sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years and for most of that time we have no idea what was happening.’ Here at Beer Quarry Caves, we are addressing a shorter time span, perhaps 6,000 to 10,000 years, for the existence of Homo Sapiens locally. The point the authors make, and we make with them, however, is that the debate about who we are and what we are is mistakenly framed as a debate about whether we are good or evil. The authors say that this is about as sensible as asking whether a tree or a fish is good or evil. Until we have a far clearer idea of where we came from, and why we are here at all, what the authors call the ‘theological debate’, is premature. Which is where our caves and the British Museum come into it. Both sites show us the best physical and factual evidence, such as it is, for what humanity has been up to recently, ie in the last 20,000 or 30,000 years, or in our

case 6,000 To 10,000 years. What the authors dig into is how we interpret this evidence.

Are we, they ask, the residue of gangs of hunter gatherers, who, according to Jean Jacques Rousseau lived in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands? These bands were egalitarian because they were so small. And nothing changed until the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ and the rise of cities, states, literature and writing. Here the authors mischievously note, ‘and the rise of annoying bureaucrats, demanding that we spend much of our time filling in forms’. Clearly, here in just Britain, Stonehenge drops a great big brick on that theory. It was, we can now see, a huge settlement, stretched all over the local landscape with tentacles reaching to Carn Brae in Cornwall and the Orkney’s in Scotland. After critiquing the faulty simplifications in Rousseau’s theory of the noble savage, the authors then give our very own Thomas Hobbes a good going over. Hobbes wrote Leviathan, published in 1651 and still going strong as the go to guide for the average gangster.

Hobbes held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been, in Hobbes famous phrase, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—basically a state of war with everybody fighting against everybody else’. Insofar as there has been any progress from this benighted state of affairs a Hobbsian would argue, it has been largely due to exactly those repressive mechanisms that Rousseau was complaining about, governments, courts, bureaucracies, police.

Hobbes didn’t live to see the megalopolises we have today, cities like London, Beijing, Paris and so on. These vast conurbations only function at all because of something that is neither oppression nor violence. Its called consent. At its simplest, if we don’t all consent to drive on the left hand side of the road, we don’t drive at all; chaos ensues. The two authors then say that they don’t like the choice between Rousseau and Hobbes. They categorise their objections as follows. 1 - Their views simply aren’t true. 2 - They have dire political implications and 3 they make the past needlessly dull. To us at Beer there is nothing dull about the past. We see it as the record of how we got here and we recognise the issue of why the past matters. We come from the past and we cannot know the future. The present is all that we have and it is manufactured from the raw materials of the past. If we want to stop repeating the mistakes of the past, mistakes all too visible on our walls, we have to know what the past was. The authors go on to prove their point about the mistake of making simplistic models of the past. They show that many so called primitive societies were anything but primitive or savage. They were simply different and when they encountered western missionaries and imperial adventurers they thought the missionaries and imperialist barbarians crude. But the authors, one of whom, David Graeber died just before publication of the book, after 10 years work, show how so called primitive societies had complex and civilised systems of governance. Indeed that is the model of the past we have lost which has the greatest potential value in our over beurocraticised world. Much of so called ‘savage society’ had evolved sophisticated systems of arbitration that limited violence and settled disputes rationally. The issue of the war occurring in the Ukraine now is one that would have been better arbitrated by almost any of these ancient societies. But the cultivation of the Hobbsian model, with the male chauvinist ‘big man’ theory folded into it, encourages the likes of Vladimir Putin to access the doctrine of infallibility, that does not even work for the Pope. Here at Beer Quarry caves our deficit of knowledge about just our local past is huge. We don’t think it will be anything like dull exploring it. Please come and join us.

Kevin Cahill, Fellow Emeritus of the Royal Historical Society. Historian in Residence at Beer Quarry Caves