Motorways of Prehistory? Boats, Rivers and Moving in Mesolithic Ireland

4.1 Transitions: Mariners, Pioneers, and the River Less Travelled

The first pattern that can be observed is a strong focus on pioneering journeys polarised either at the beginning of the Early or at the end of the Late Mesolithic. The semantic field presents navigation as a key element of colonisation – e.g. “colonisation by boat” (Little et al., 2017, p. 224) and “first settlers” (Woodman, 2015) in Ireland; “boats and pioneer settlement” in Scotland (Bonsall, Pickard, & Groom, 2013) – and rivers as the obvious routeways into an unfamiliar landscape.

This assumption is not discussed critically despite the absence of information and data about “ethnographically known hunter-gatherers moving into terra incognita” (Kelly, 2003, p. 44). It is problematic at two levels: first, the implicit construction of a single colonising event is debatable, as “Scouts probably were basic components of the process of human expansion, and their function was to acquire geographic and subsistence information” (Borrero, 2015, p. 46). Second, the fact that “‘wild’ boar was probably imported to the island by Mesolithic colonists, and appears to have been managed by those communities” (Warren, 2015, p. 2) indicates that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had indeed a very early knowledge of the resources available on the island. This knowledge was likely built progressively through multiple, if not routine, journeys.

Except about the colonisation process, little is offered on riverine navigation as part of the existence of the hunter-gatherer communities, their way of life suspended in a universal and timeless background (e.g. O’Sullivan & Royal Irish Academy & Discovery Programme, 1998, p. 53 et sqq.) dramatically disrupted by Neolithic settlers. In contrast, seafaring is a ubiquitous motif in the archaeological discourse on Mesolithic inland navigation. Against Warren and Westley’s cautious reminder that, “once Mesolithic populations were established, … they certainly did ‘explore the interior of the country’” (Warren & Westley, 2020, p. 74), two-thirds of the relevant articles are dedicated explicitly (e.g. Cooney, 2004; Warren, 2000), exclusively (e.g. Cummings, 2017, p. 26; Noble, 2010, p. 127 et sqq.) or principally (e.g. Cobb & Gray Jones, 2018, pp. 375, 378; Finlayson, 1998, pp. 29, 47) to maritime navigation, with an emphasis on Late Mesolithic coastal settlement, activities and the importance of the sea for hunter-gatherers in Ireland and Scotland.

This trend is influenced by the archaeological and academic material available on the late Mesolithic of coastal Scandinavia (e.g. Rönnby, 2007). Despite Conneller and Warren’s argument that “what we have in Britain [and Ireland] is not a poorly preserved record of material that was once identical to Scandinavia (…)” but “evidence of an entirely different suite of practices” (Conneller & Warren 2006, p. 10), the risk is real for Scandinavian archaeology to be considered as a proxy for navigation in the Mesolithic of Ireland and Scotland (e.g. Bang-Andersen, 2003; Engen & Spikins, 2007, p. 26 et sqq.). A clear example can be found in the claim that “the best available parallel for the use of logboats in Mesolithic Scotland is provided by the underwater excavation of part of a settlement of the Ertebølle structure” (Mowat, 1996, p. 128).

4.2 Boats? What Boats?

Our analysis confirmed the suggestion that “The development and the use of log and skin boats to traverse coastal and inland waterways during the Holocene particularly for Mesolithic and Neolithic periods is a key theme across the British Isles” (Bicket & Tizzard, 2015, p. 658). In the absence of direct evidence for Mesolithic boats, the gap is filled with known contemporary examples in a different place (e.g. Conneller, Milner, Taylor, & Taylor, 2012, p. 1005 et sqq.) or by drawing on indigenous material present at a later date. More specifically, the Irish currach (e.g. Rowley-Conwy, 2011, p. 439), and mostly the Arctic Umiak, have been mobilised as material-ethnographic proxies for Mesolithic hide boats as early as the middle of the twentieth century (Clark, 1947, p. 86), and more recently under the influence of Scandinavian archaeology (e.g. Mithen et al., 2015, p. 412; Schmitt, 2013). These inferences are not presented as such, and their epistemological validity is not discussed. More generally, a systematic and explicit methodology is absent in “the existing scholarship on Arctic watercraft,” which

is primarily focused on boats’ constructional details and performance characteristics. In those rare occasions when an attempt is made to provide a larger context or theoretical framework, the emphasis, as a rule, is on diffusion of technological trends and environmental adaptation (Anichtchenko, 2016, p. 64).

As an example, Bang-Andersen’s processual argument rests exclusively on general considerations on environmental constraints, technological-functional interpretations of lithic material, and most importantly, on a “common-sense” assessment of boat performance: “Even today one must ask oneself, what would I chose if I want to paddle along the outer coast of Norway – a log boat or an umiak?” (Bang-Andersen, 2013, p. 83). This casual reliance on illustrative analogies is underpinned by an adaptive, utilitarian logic: facing comparable environmental conditions as eleventh century Thule Inuit populations, the Mesolithic colonisers of Scandinavia must have developed a solution similar to the Umiak. The skin boat is also praised as technologically more complex and superior to the humble, unrefined logboat, reflecting the processual inclination towards evolutionary interpretations.

These orientations and limitations are part of a wider archaeology of boats and navigation with its distinct network of academics and experts: as a practice and an academic discipline, maritime/underwater archaeology appears to be still partly trapped in its own masculist construct as an “action-man archaeology” of engineering feats, dangerous journeys and colonisation (Ransley, 2005, p. 625). From her own experience within the discipline, Ransley deplores that

our dominant discourse is about the physical not the social. These are the legitimate fields of interpretation. Again, the appropriating male gaze: objectifying, measuring and surveying. All of which results in an essentially reductive approach to past maritime cultures” that excludes “the small scale, the social and the unexplored. (Ibid., p. 626)

This implicit use of comparative reasonings – between types of boats, between environmental contexts – frames the subject into a contest for the most technologically advanced, the fastest, the most prestigious (Tolan-Smith, 2009, p. 155), the most seaworthy – in short: of the best boat. It is also a discourse on the exceptional, that constructs a leapfrog adaptation made of transitions and unchartered territories, of unprecedented events and rare achievements, of muscular entrepreneurship and innovative engineering. By contrast, few authors envisage navigation as a routine activity embedded in the Mesolithic way of life on the coasts (Adams, 2001, p. 303), and even less so inland (Warren, Little, Stanley, McDermott, & O’Keeffe, 2009, p. 30): habitual, effortless, secure – it is too plain sailing to be of interest.

This superlative archaeology also performs a typological restriction: in the Mesolithic of Ireland, navigation was either by logboat, universally considered as the boat of (second) choice most likely used on lakes and rivers, or by the more sea-worthy hide boat. By contrast, the potential for Mesolithic boats to have been constructed of reeds – well adapted to lakes and slow-flowing rivers and to local resources and technologies, and equally supported by indirect archaeological evidence and ethnographic examples in Ireland (Mac Cárthaigh, 2008, p. 598 et sqq.) and elsewhere – is absent from the academic material.

4.3 Not Seeing the Wood for the Logs: Scale, Physicality, and Agency

Inland waterways are assumed to be the obvious ways to move around in the Mesolithic. Some authors merely allege the existence of inland navigation (e.g. Bicket & Tizzard, 2015, p. 645), while others consider it important (e.g. Finlayson, 1998, p. 47), with Fredengren comparing rivers to “lifelines running through the landscapes” (Fredengren, 2002, p. 138). It is also presented as easier than moving through woodland, with the Mesolithic landscapes of North-Western Europe being described as entirely covered with “dense” (e.g. Spikins, 1996, p. 88) forests forming a barely penetrable, “heavily wooded” (O’Sullivan & Royal Irish Academy & Discovery Programme, 1998, p. 45) landscape.

By contrast, waterways are presented as the easy way, with a river/road equivalence implicitly embedded in concepts such as “systems” or “networks” (e.g. Haughey’s prehistoric “network of wetland highways,” 2013). Such concepts impose a cartographic perspective “from above” where rivers are presented as interconnected, multidirectional webs enabling and directing Mesolithic mobility, or even dictating socio-political structures such as “clan territories” (Spikins, 1996). Physical bodies of water are reduced to their symbolic representations – from flowing rivers to lines on the map – and rarely problematised as physical and cultural agents, with rivers being “the ‘dark matter’ of the archaeological landscapes” (Edgeworth, 2011, p. 26).

And yet it is possible to spot a discrete awareness that navigating rivers might not have been that easy after all. Firstly, rivers in their diversity share one characteristic: “On inland rivers with no tidal effects, the current is a unidirectional hydraulic current downstream, and can be used for travel in one direction only” (Millar, 2002, p. 33). Paddling upriver is a technical, slow, and arduous exercise in the most favourable situations, and often impossible the rest of the time. Secondly, the topography of rivers – their depth, width, length, sinuosity, nature of their banks and bottom – is incredibly varied. As a consequence, “differences in altitude, numerous rapids and waterfalls and relatively-long overland stretches divide the topography of the watercourse into several zones that were navigable by boat (…)”, these zones being “defined by the topography and the stretches of water where boats could be used” (Nymoen, 2008, p. 10). Third, as discussed in the introduction, rivers of Ireland today have little to do with their Mesolithic counterparts in their behaviour, and “the impression of an intact environment is mistaken” (Odgaard, 2007, p. 25); more specifically, cumulative interventions on the landscape have dramatically reduced their chronological and spatial dynamism.

Awareness of this reality remains theoretical and is not reflected in the academic discourse. Experimental archaeology has generated many reports detailing the construction process of logboat replicas. While subjected to a profusion of desk-based performance calculations, they were then at best cursorily tested in real life (e.g. Gregory, 1997) – the most thorough trial that could be found was that of an “experimental logboat” having averaged a speed of 4.5 km/h over “15 min”, led by “an extremely fit paddler” on “a calm lake, with no current” (Fry & Department of the Environment for Northern Ireland, Environment and Heritage Service, 2000, p. 22). This focus on the object ignores what it does to its user and to the river, but also what they do to it. Constructing Mesolithic navigation calls for an integration of multiple agencies: that of the object, of its human user, and of the physical world. At this point, it is also relevant to underline that the pioneering narrative appears to dilute the agency of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers through time, from brave explorers of the ninth millennium to passive observers of the Neolithic “colonisation” (Rowley-Conwy, 2011, p. 439).

Despite some serious reservations “against the use of logboats on small tributaries of lakes and larger rivers” (Mainberger, 2017, p. 9), the dynamic nature of rivers fails to influence the discourse on Mesolithic navigation. Within the academic boundaries of the Irish Mesolithic of Ireland, only Woodman mentions in passing that “the presence of water as a means of communication (…)” is a “variable factor depending on direction of travel, rate of flow in the river (…)” (Woodman, 1978, p. 170).

Problematising this desk-based construction of static rivers can bring us closer to Kador’s promise of “a truly mobile perspective of people’s journeys” (Kador, 2007, p. 38), and can provide some unexpected support to the contention that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were actively modifying their environment and inhabiting the woodlands (Warren, 2003). The physicality of rivers forces us to acknowledge that not all rivers were navigable, not all the time, not in all directions (across/down/up), and not uninterruptedly. Therefore, we must also conclude that land passage was a significant component of Mesolithic mobility, not only as the alternative to inland navigation – e.g. river absent, (temporarily) unsuitable for navigation or flowing in the wrong direction but also as its necessary condition. Be it to tow a heavy logboat upriver or to carry a lightweight hide boat between two navigable stretches by portage (e.g. Odgaard, 2007, p. 24 et sqq), river navigation as an alleged routine way of travelling could not have existed without routine land passages, which suppose in turn an ability to create and maintain paths; paradoxically, by taking the trope of the impenetrable forests seriously through the angle of riverine mobility, we must conclude that forests were in fact not impenetrable at all.