A History of Ancient Britain Read Online Free PDF

red colour, as were the human bones. Buckland was instantly sure whoever had dug the grave and placed
the body inside it had then liberally backfilled it with a great deal of red ochre: ‘They were all of them stained superficially with a dark brick-red colour, and enveloped by a coating . . .
composed of red micaceous oxyde of iron which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch around the surface of the bones. The body must have been
entirely surrounded or covered over at the time of its interment with this red substance.’
    Likely because he associated jewellery with the female of his species, Buckland assumed he had unearthed the body of a woman. And given that he had spotted the ramparts of a Roman camp on the
cliff top directly above and behind the cave’s location, he quickly decided she had made a home for herself where she was in easy reach of the soldiers – a camp-follower, as it were.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of her reputation was provided by the red ochre heaped upon her remains – a scarlet woman indeed. ‘The circumstance of the remains of a British camp
existing on the hill immediately above this cave, seems to throw much light on the character and date of the woman under consideration; and whatever may have been her occupation, the vicinity of
the camp would afford a motive for residence, as well as a means of subsistence, in what is now so exposed and uninviting a solitude.’
    The good Reverend was sure, in other words, that he had found the skeleton of a prostitute – whose immorality had condemned her to be buried far from civilised
society in the very cave where she had conducted her business. From that moment, the remains from Goat’s Hole Cave were labelled the ‘Red Lady of Paviland’.
    All of this Buckland wrote up for his forthcoming Relics of The Flood and, along with everything else he had seen on his travels, his Red Lady convinced him of the truth of a world shaped
by catastrophes. Whatever and whoever she might once have been she was ‘clearly not coeval with the antediluvian bones of the extinct species’. In other words, in his mind she belonged
to a world much more recent than the pre-Flood animals whose bones littered the cave.
    Denied any other means of dating his discovery, he allowed his religious convictions, coupled with his knowledge of history, to provide an explanation that made sense to him: ‘that the
date of these human bones is coeval with that of the military occupation of the adjacent summits, and anterior to, or coeval with the Roman invasion of this country’.
    But in 1823 Buckland was wrong – in his view of the Red Lady as in so much else. Rather than a Biblical flood, the Reverend’s world was under threat from the tide of scientific
thought rising from, among other sources, Hutton’s Theory of the Earth. He fought the good fight for another decade and a half until finally the weight of evidence made him change his
mind. It is greatly to his credit – and ultimately evidence of his love of unbiased observation – that he finally went with the flow.
    Buckland had become aware of the work of Louis Agassiz, particularly that on fossil fish, and in 1834 he invited the young Swiss scientist to come and study the British collections. Then, in
1838, he visited Switzerland and saw for himself the evidence of glaciation in the Alpine valleys. By the time he accompanied Agassiz on his momentous tour of the Scottish Highlands, Buckland was
already persuaded by the idea that a hitherto unexpected Ice Age had shaped much of Britain and Europe in ancient times.
    But while he accepted some alterations to his world-view, he remained committed to a divine creation of Man – and a relatively recent one at that. He was, after all, a product of his times
and that he nonetheless investigated his surroundings as diligently as he did is more deserving of praise – for all that his endeavours left us