Archaeology

The small islands of Colonsay and Oronsay lie close together in the Inner Hebrides. On both of them shell middens have been found, great heaps largely consisting of shells left by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived there just after the end of the last ice age. The majority of the shells were limpets. Limpets pop up all over the Western and Northern isles, not just on Mesolithic sites, but on sites of all ages, such as the middens at the Iron Age site at Munkerhoose on Papa Westray.

The general opinion seems to be that limpets are tough and rubbery and best used for fishing bait, after being soaked in water for a long time. Humans mostly ate them in the historical past as famine food, so probably the same applied in the prehistoric past.  According to the archaeologist Professor Paul Mellars, limpets don’t taste very good but have greater nutritional value than winkles and whelks and are easier to get out of their shells. They are therefore an efficient energy source.

However, there are people who take a more enthusiastic view. I have just come across a recipe in a book of traditional Scottish cooking for limpet ‘stovies'. The limpets are removed from their shells and added to potatoes for slow cooking in a very little liquid in a sealed pot. It originates from the island of Colonsay. (“The Scots Kitchen, its traditions and recipes”, F. Marian McNeill, edited and introduced by Catherine Brown 2010, pages 142-3).

There is a footnote on page 142 of this cookbook quoting André Simon, a French-born wine merchant, gourmet and writer, to the effect that limpets can be as good as or better than oysters in many dishes. If you Google limpet recipes, you get a lot of them, especially from Spain and Portugal. They call them ‘lapas’. Grilled with garlic butter seems to be the most popular, although fried or boiled or added to rice also feature. A village on the island of Madeira even has a limpet festival in mid-July: the limpets are grilled with garlic butter and lemon. Most of these recipes cook them in their shells. It is admitted that they are a little chewy. They are accompanied by beer or white wine – a long way from famine food.

Some caution is required with all shellfish as they are liable to contamination by various things, so don’t just rush out with a hammer and start knocking them off the rocks. But perhaps we could persuade our local sources of winkles and oysters to get us a few limpets for a change?

I love smoked eel. My kind sister-in-law stuffs me with smoked eel from Germany every Christmas, to the point where I actually can’t eat any more. Well, it is rather rich and oily. I like it even better than kippers, although I love them too. I am fond of smoked salmon, and I won’t say no to a bit of smoked mackerel, or pickled and salted herring. Perhaps I should have been a Viking?

Preserved fish is really the reason why I visited Lübeck, Queen of the Hanseatic League, in 2018. I got involved with a local project which included trade with the Baltic. During medieval and early modern times, Orkney and Shetland traded stockfish and other salted and dried fish such as ling and tusk with towns in the Baltic area, including Bergen and Lübeck, and during the course of researching my contribution I got really interested in the Hanseatic League. Why on earth did nobody teach me about the Hanseatic League before? I can’t remember any mention of it in our school history lessons although for hundreds of years the Hanse was a major force in North West European trade. Beginning in the 12^th century and lasting for about 600 years, a confederation of merchants from areas speaking Low German built an extensive trade network which crossed political borders. They dominated the Baltic markets and their trading range extended as far as Southern Europe. The League had enormous power. They received protection and “privileges” from local rulers, and enforced their wishes and their monopolies by means of trade embargoes.  “Privileges” were deeds granted by a ruler allowing the Hanse a trading post, lower customs duties, free import/export of goods, freedom to trade with all locals & foreigners.  Their principal kontors or trading enclaves were at Bergen, Bruges, London and Novgorod, although there were many smaller ones.

From the mid-14C, representatives of the Hanseatic towns and cities held assemblies called “Hansetage” to take joint political & economic decisions. The first Hansetag was in 1356 and the last in 1669, the official beginning and end of the league. By the 17^th century the Hanse was winding down, eclipsed by the rise of new territorial states whose rulers wanted their law followed without special economic or political status for merchant towns.  The Thirty Years War (1618 – 48) and the rise of trade with the New World also contributed to the end of the League.

But getting back to fish, since there weren’t any freezers in medieval Europe, drying, salting and pickling were the only ways to preserve fish. Salt herring and stockfish were very important for the many fast days demanded by the church, at one point Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and all of Lent and Advent, and for long sea voyages. Stockfish is cod, which is not very oily and can therefore be salted and air-dried until it is as hard as a board and keeps for years. It is possible that being forced to eat salt cod for such a large percentage of the year might become a little tedious, especially as to reconstitute it, you have to soak it for hours and beat it with a mallet.  I think I might lose my Viking foodie tastes if I really had to eat it so much of the time.

Lübeck was founded in 1143 CE, and from 1230 to 1535 was one of the leading cities of the Hanse. The city was a major port in the lucrative salt trade dominated by the Hanse. All that salted fish meant that salt itself was a vital commodity, and it came mostly from the inland town of Lüneburg where it was mined from a geological formation known as a salt dome, and sent to Lübeck to be shipped on to Scandinavia for salting herrings. One of the sights of Lübeck is the “Salzspeicher”, a group of six salt warehouses built between 1579 and 1745, used for storing the all-important salt.   

So I decided to visit Lübeck, and its wonderful Europaische Hansemuseum (European Hanseatic Museum).  Today the old quarter is still a very pretty town, built on an island in the river Trave near its outlet into the Baltic Sea. I went there in spring when the trees were green with young leaves, and flowering cherries overhung the main bridge.

Lübeck is famous for its Brick Gothic architecture, characteristic of the area around the Baltic Sea, which has little suitable stone for building, and in spite of extensive damage during World War II is a Unesco World Heritage Site.  The 13^th – 14^th century Marienkirche is a striking example of the Brick Gothic style. It has the highest brick vault in the world, twin spires and pointed arches over huge windows. The style was derived from France and the Marienkirche was the prototype for around seventy brick Gothic churches in the Baltic area.

The streets of Lübeck are lined with tall gabled brick houses up to seven stories high. The gabled houses which survive today are mostly 15^th and 16^th century and would have belonged to the elite but they were building brick homes as far back as the 13^th century here. Around 1200 CE Lübeck was mainly wooden houses, but by about 1300 CE, seven hundred to thirteen hundred houses had been built of brick, with gable ends facing the street & lots of storage space. Those merchants were mega-rich to afford all those bricks!

The island city was surrounded not only by the river but by a town wall with four massive gates, two of which survive, the15th century Holstentor, and Burgtor, also built of brick.  The Hansemuseum is located in part of a large Dominican monastery, founded in the 13^th century on the site of the original castle. I particularly liked the town hall (Rathaus) which started life as a brick Gothic building but with Renaissance additions. The round shields visible from the side of the Market Square designate the city’s status as a Free Imperial City. In the 13^th century the Holy Roman Emperor gave it the status of an imperial free city, which added to its importance.

Having enjoyed the standing buildings and indulged in an orgy of medieval brick and German stoneware jugs inside the museum, I turned my attention to food. The culinary delight for which Lübeck is most famous today is marzipan. It even has a marzipan museum. You can buy excellent marzipan in practically any form, including some rather nice marzipan coffee. But the food I enjoyed most was a fischbrot (fish roll) filled with salt herring which I ate sitting in an open-air café beside the river, washed down by a large glass of German beer. Lovely!

Health and safety at work is an emotive topic. As I filled out a risk assessment form for that most dangerous of museum activities, colouring-in for toddlers, I could understand why some people feel that Things Have Gone Too Far. Shortly afterwards we were doing an education session on the revolt by the Bryant and May’s match  girls, who, if you remember, were all dying in Victorian times of phosphorus poisoning contracted at work. I am personally happy to waste five minutes filling in a ridiculous form if that is the price of a society that values workers’ safety.

There is nothing like working on an archaeological site for making you appreciate the value of health and safety legislation. Having slashed my hands many times making replicas of flint knives, I have never felt any temptation to wear shorts or sandals on a site where the soil is full of flint. And I have personally fallen into a trench when someone left a slippery piece of plastic on the edge of it. I was lucky it was only three feet deep. One director I worked for in Greece suffered a fracture when a stone that had been carelessly left on the side of a deep trench fell onto her shoulder during a minor earth tremor. It could have been her head. Another colleague was buried up to his waist in sand during a trench collapse. He told me that you do not have to be completely buried to suffocate. If the earth is above the level of your diaphragm, you can breathe out but it becomes impossible to breathe in.

Earth-moving is a potentially hazardous exercise for anyone. I particularly remember one site I worked on in the early 1980s. We were working around a firm of developers, who had dug out a deep hole in the hillside to put in an underground car park. There was a large chunk of concrete the size of a wardrobe in the bottom of the hole and they needed to get it out. They slung a chain around the middle and attached the other end to the bucket of a JCB, and start to pull it up the steep side of the hole. It hadn’t got very far when the digger with its driver started to tilt and slide towards the edge.

After some frantic shouting, they stopped to think, with the slab of concrete hanging on its chain halfway up the side. By this time the archaeological team was lined up on the other side of the hole, watching the problem with professional interest. And then, before our astonished eyes, a man climbed down the slope, carrying a pneumatic drill, stood on the slab and began to cut it in half. Have you guessed? He was making the cut between the place where his feet were and the chain that was holding it up. And when he finished cutting, the bit he was standing on fell down into the bottom. Fortunately he managed to leap clear and cling onto the side of the hole, dropping the pneumatic drill, which by great good luck didn’t fall back onto him. The rest of the concrete was then light enough to be pulled out of the hole.

I have never before or since seen such a piece of mind-blowing stupidity.

Most of the things I dug up or picked up during my years as an archaeologist in the field were broken pieces of things, sherds from pots, smashed roof tiles, butchered bones. If they weren’t broken when they were thrown away, they were crushed by the shifting pressures of the earth and buildings under which they were buried, or smashed by some archaeologist pulling them out of the ground in the gathering dusk as the bulldozers moved in. But I remember one find that startled me so much when I found it that I actually yelled out loud, because for once it was complete and unbroken.

I was working on the site of a Roman villa just outside my home town. This was in the late 1970s. It was a research dig, so we had all the time in the world (within reason). The trench and the diggers’ campsite were in a piece of perfect English countryside, in the tree-lined avenue of the local stately home, with fields of ripe corn and contented cows on either side. It was high summer, so the days were sunny and warm, with a breeze that sent ripples across the cornfields and rustled in the leaves of the towering horse chestnuts. The lane leading to the house was fringed with frothy white flowers of cow parsley, and birds sang in the hedgerows. In the evenings, after the usual water-fight by the horse-trough, where the more boisterous members of the team threw saucepans of water over each other, some of the staff played chamber music on their recorders in the tool shed. The others went to the pub. So English!

I was poking the point of my trowel into the earth, which I should not have been doing – I was supposed to be scraping carefully with the side – and suddenly the earth just fell away to reveal a little Roman brooch. It was a cheap bronze trinket without any decoration, of a kind made in large numbers for ordinary people to fasten their clothing with in the days before buttons. The metal was bright green from the corrosion products of the copper, but when it was worn it must have been either a reddish-bronze colour or perhaps a brassy gold-yellow. And it was complete. That one was a special thrill.

One of the side effects of the covid-19 epidemic has been panic buying, with supermarket shelves being emptied of pasta, baked beans, and toilet paper. It caused me a certain amount of amusement that people should consider toilet paper to be as essential for human survival as food.

My son spent two years working in Singapore and travelling all over South-East Asia, so he has first-hand experience of the fact that over large areas of the planet, people don’t use toilet paper and never have. They use water. In the up-market office where he worked as a computational chemist, the toilets were provided with both toilet paper and a “Malay hose” for those who preferred the traditional method. I will spare you the exact details, but I Googled them and it does sound as if it takes practice to spray your backside clean without soaking your clothes. However, the result is generally acknowledged to be a cleaner rear end than using paper alone. Some of these conveniences are extremely sophisticated. A modern Japanese toilet has a sort of bidet arrangement which is electronically controlled, and if you can’t read Japanese and you press the wrong button, you can end up flooding the cubicle. I like the sound of the warm air dryer though. I found a charming Youtube video on how to do it properly.

What people used to wipe their behinds in the days before loo rolls is an interesting topic for speculation and archaeological research. Historical records come up with some appalling ideas: potsherds; washable flat sticks (“shit sticks”), stones, shells and corn cobs. Most uncomfortable. The Romans are supposed to have used a sponge on the end of a stick to clean themselves, although literary references to this are few and ambiguous. It is suggested that the sponge was used by everyone who visited the loo and washed in between in salt water or vinegar. Yuk!

Leaves, moss, raw wool and old rags are a more attractive idea. I worked for many years in a town near London with an interesting history.  During the medieval period the local monastery had a number of toilets, recorded in the abbey chronicles. The monastery buildings were mostly demolished during the Reformation, but in the 1920s a flint-lined cesspit below the toilet attached to the abbot’s lodging was excavated. It contained fragments of coarse cloth which were likely to have been used as toilet paper.

The possibilities are endless. The 16^th century satirical novel “Gargantua”, by Francois Rabelais has a chapter which explores the subject of anal cleansing in earthy fashion. In chapter XIII the young giant Gargantua tells his father about his experiments with various materials in his search for the perfect wipe.  These included such things as a young lady’s velvet mask (lovely and soft); a page’s cap (also good); leaves of various plants (mostly good); and a selection of live birds and animals including a cat, which didn’t work so well because it scratched him in a most delicate place. He finally decided that the best “torche-cul” or bum-wipe was a nice fluffy young goose with the head held between your legs.

Gargantua didn’t consider paper very efficient. It is widely recognised today that he was right, and that using toilet paper alone is not actually very hygienic. You will find a neat article on the subject, one of many, at this link to a bbc website.

Both paper and water have their disadvantages. What do you do in a country where water is hard to come by?  See Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth’s book “How to Shit Around the World. The art of Staying Clean and Healthy While Traveling” (2006 Traveler’s Tales, Books, Palo Alto) for suggestions.  The disadvantage of using paper is that it has to be disposed of afterwards. There is a famous story about Queen Victoria, who was visiting Cambridge and noticed bits of paper floating down the River Cam. She naively asked what they were, and instead of telling her the unsavoury truth, that they were toilet paper which in the days before sewage treatment ended up in many a river, she was told that they were notices forbidding bathing in the river. Even modern toilet paper needs a strong efficient flush to move it along, or your toilet will block up. When I was a young woman in Greece, many toilets had a small bin beside them for you to deposit your used loo paper, as the flush mechanism couldn’t cope with it. What a fun job emptying them must have been!