Page 69 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

ana reaay ror me wneat ana oariey to be sown among the tree
stumps. By the cleared fields stand square two-roomed houses
of timber or of wattle and daub. But by fjords and seacoasts lie

other settlements of a very different type.
Though the cultivators have been living in the forests for a
thousand years and more, they know that their ancestors came

from the south and occupied a land that was not their own. The
people who dwell in the shell-heap villages, they know, are the
real “natives,” who were here when their forefathers came.

These people are clearly different, fairer of hair and larger of
bone, and they speak a different language.

Only a stone’s throw from the beach stretches the long low
mound on which the fishing village lies. It is grass-grown except
around the circular wattle huts, where the scuffing of dogs and

children has brought to light the grey-white oyster shells of which
the whole mound is composed. This is the debris of thousands of

years of occupation, the remains of the daily meals of a hundred
and twenty generations. And to the lee of the huddle of huts
the current rubbish heap, spilling down the side of the mound,

is still mainly composed of oyster shells, with among them the
bones, broken for the marrow and well-gnawed by the dogs, of
many a red deer and aurochs. Pigs root along the edges of the

mound, turning the drifts of dead leaves in the hope of finding a
forgotten acorn, and the dogs lie out in the winter sunshine,

curled up with their bushy tails over their noses.
The men are coming in from the marshes now. They saw
in the millennium crouched in dugouts in the reeds, waiting

to catch the wild fowl on the lake at dawn. And over their shoul­
ders they bear a bundle of ducks and coots brought down by
their flint-tipped arrows. They bring enough meat for the day,

and the women reflect thankfully that today at least it will not be
necessary for them to wade through the icy water out to the

mussel banks. While they begin to pluck the birds, the men warm
their frozen hands at the hearths and refresh themselves with
beakers of beer from the barrel which, together with the beakers,

they had bought the previous week from the farmers at the price
of a fat roebuck.

Continually there is trade between the farmers and the shell­