Trace elements
By charting the evolution of Islay, archaeologist Steven Mithen presents a thrilling microcosm of all human history, writes
Based at the University of Reading, Professor Steven Mithen is a worldrenowned archaeologist, with a special interest in the evolution of the human mind and of human culture – as revealed through the material record unearthed from bogs, dunes, deserts, forests and grasslands across the planet – that has made his books influential far beyond academic circles.
His 2005 study The Singing Neanderthals became a New York Times bestseller, and his previous books After The Ice: A Global Human
History, and A Prehistory Of The Mind: A Search For The Origins Of Art, Science And Religion, also helped shift preconceptions about early human history, as we come to learn more about our own evolution and origins.
It’s therefore thrilling to see Mithen now turn the full searchlight of his attention and experience onto one small Scottish island, and its people, the Ilich. The island is Islay, the southernmost of all the Hebrides; and although it is not large – just 25 miles from north to south, and 15 miles across – it is nonetheless the
eighth largest of all the British and Irish isles, after Great Britain, Ireland, Lewis & Harris, Skye, Mull, Anglesey, and Shetland.
Mithen has been fascinated by Islay for 30 years, seeing the island as a vital crossroads of early human life on these islands, set across the main sea route from Ireland to Scotland, and from the west coast of France and Spain north towards Orkney, and then east to Norway.
And now, in this comprehensive study, he takes us on a series of journeys across the island – almost always by bicycle and on foot – each of which reveals the story of a new period in its human history, from earliest Mesolithic times, through the Bronze Age, the Vikings, and the mediaeval Lordship of the Isles, to the economic and industrial developments of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the remaining traces of the Second World War.
It can’t be denied that Mithen’s passionate archaeological detective work gains an extra intensity in describing those early periods, before about 800 AD, when there are no written records, and material objects represent our only evidence of the people and their lives. The first humans – simple hunter-gatherers – are thought to have arrived on Islay around 10,000BC; and Mithen is at his eloquent best in describing his long, slogging bicycle journeys through bramble, scrub and peatbog, to trace the modest remnants of the places where they worked and gathered, or where their Neolithic successors began to build burial mounds known as chambered cairns.
His detailed descriptions are interspersed with moments when, in a kind of dream state, he imagines whole scenes involving the people of the past. His writing is detailed, but also fluent; and huge themes pulse beneath its surface, to do with the stable self-sufficiency of early