Ancestor

From time to time on this, my first visit to Orkney, I am in touch with my Irish relatives, who are coming to Cambridge for my mother’s funeral. A funeral is like a scuttling of a life, in that it is a formal and ordained act. Death is random, painful, oneiric; the funeral is ritualised and solemn. A sort of correction. 

My relatives are taking a circuitous trip, arriving by ferry in Anglesey, visiting relatives in the Midlands and in the east of England. I ping text and email back and forth between them, and my brother, and my wife. The tribe is gradually assembling, to honour the ancestors. Or anyway, one ancestor. My mother. 

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The poet and writer Kathleen Jamie, who has spent a good deal of time archaeologising in Orkney and knows her way around the bones of its settlements, declares herself suspicious of what she calls ‘baggy’ words: words like ritual or ceremonial, or perhaps ancestor, or tribe or, I suppose, settlement.

Poets prefer the concrete. Give a poet a polished axe, a nodule of flint, an antler mattock, and she can work something out. These are objects that speak, or anyway clack if knocked together. Why should an archaeologist, an anthropologist, be any less specific, local, pointed, than a poet? There is never virtue in woolliness. 

What, after all, is an ancestor? In 2002, the archaeologist James Whitley published an essay entitled Too Many Ancestors, in which he questioned the readiness to reach for ancestor-type explanations whenever bones were found.

“A spectre is haunting British archaeology” he wrote; “—the omnipresent ancestor.” Whitley observed that the ancestors lend themselves especially well as explanations in Neolithic contexts, because the Neolithic is an agricultural phenomenon, and the deferrals inherent to agriculture, where one generation is beholden to those who went before for establishing and maintaining patterns of cultivation, alongside the associated control of land, grant the ancestors a particular heft. The ancestors, the tale goes, legitimise what we do on the land in the here-and-now. 

But if all that is true, Whitley says, then why is ancestor-worship not more prominent in the Bronze or Iron Age than in the Neolithic? These are patterns, after all, which we could expect to deepen with time. And what, anyway, is an ancestor? It depends who you ask, or when you ask. In some places and times, ancestors are a collectivised dead. At others, an ancestor is a named individual from whom some of those currently alive may claim descent. The fact of descent is key, also because it excludes some of the recent dead. In some societies, for example, descent is traced through the male line alone. Females, in such societies, cannot be ancestors. “It follows” concludes Whitley, “that not all the dead are ancestors, and not every fragment of human bone found in a barrow, cursus, causewayed enclosure or henge can be construed as evidence that these monuments were ‘ancestral’.”

Ethnography further suggests that ancestral status is an achieved status, not one simply conferred by death. Certain individuals in a society would be selected and honoured. “Ancestors are the elect of the dead.” And, again, the places where ancestors are worshipped or remembered are not necessarily the places where they are buried. Ancestral shrines are often located in houses, for example. In Orkney there are tombs—most notably, Maeshowe—where no human bones were found, and there are houses where humans are buried beneath the floor. The picture is fractured, peculiar, complex.

Ancestor is, in other words, an especially baggy word.

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The argument is sometimes made, notwithstanding or perhaps because of this vagueness, that the ancestral dead root us in place. That as a species we stopped moving because we wished to remain with our dead. We grew more and more reluctant simply to leave them, and move on. As Robert Pogue Harrison phrases it, "human beings housed their dead before they housed themselves”.

Whatever the poetic truth of this, both logic and the evidence suggest otherwise. In a hunter-gatherer society, when someone dies, you leave them behind. A death is often a reason to move, not to stay. Bones disappear into the land, and are gone.

The gravitation to cemeteries, to designated burial places, was slow and uncertain.

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The excavations at the quasi-settled site of Ohalo II by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, found one burial, a man aged between thirty-five and forty. He was laid in a shallow grave, perhaps shallow enough for certain of his features to remain visible after burial, to the west of the little camp, his head propped up on three small stones and his face turned to the east—toward the camp, the lake and the sun. Between his legs a hammerstone was placed, and just behind his head was a piece of animal bone, about three centimetres long, which had been incised with roughly fourteen parallel lines, and some transverse lines linking the parallels here and there. 

The dead man is buried on the margin of the settlement. Creeping in, or creeping out, we are unable to say. It looks as if they were uncertain what to do with him. Is he keeping an eye on them, or are they keeping an eye on him? In the end the site was rapidly inundated, and the dead man was left an underwater sentinel of a deserted town. 

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By the Neolithic, bones were routinely treated as relics to be circulated. To die was not to settle. Not immediately at any rate. Local practice varied, and practice varied also through time, but in general after death, bodies were defleshed and disarticulated, the bones accumulated in promiscuous piles or passed around the settlement. Your femur could be brought out years later, handled, used by shamans, confided to relatives, reburied in communal pits or beneath one of the green mounds. 

Some cultures plastered the skulls of the deceased and placed cowrie shells where the eyes once were; others sat down to a feast of the recently dead. In Orkney and elsewhere, human remains were often leavened with animal bones, totemic ancestors, perhaps, of the tribe—twenty-four dogs at Cuween, numerous sea-eagles at Isbister, red deer at the Knape of Yowe on Rousay, and here and there auroch and bear and beaver—all stacked and piled in tombs.

Everywhere, bones marked thresholds, significant or structural points. Your skull could be lodged at the base of a post in your descendants’ houses, or under the hearth, or a corner of the wall, your spirit—your skull—responsible for holding the structure up. You were not allowed to rest. Your work was not done.

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At the corner of the most singular structure at Skara Brae, known as Structure 7, two human female bodies were found buried beneath a corner of a wall. Structure 7 is the only detached structure, the only one not built on the remains of earlier structures, and possibly therefore the oldest structure. 

Structure 7, perhaps not incidentally, is also the structure at Skara Brae with the greatest number of decorative scratch marks, most of them near the burial site on the right-hand side. Twenty-seven decorated stones in total, twenty-four of them still in situ. Anxious scratchings over the bones of the dead.

For whatever reason, the door to Structure 7 could only be bolted from the outside. 

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In March 1919, during restoration work at St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, a box of Norwegian pinewood was found encased within the stonework of one of the pillars. Inside were the remains of a man whose head had been staved in, probably with an axe.

It seems likely that these are the remains, or were intended to stand as the remains, of the titular saint, Magnus Erlendsson.

The Orkneyinga Saga relates that Magnus was buried on the spot in Egilsay where he was executed. In this unprepossessing, rock-strewn area, lush grass and miraculous vegetation soon sprung up, and Magnus’s mother petitioned Earl Haakon to have the body moved to a church. Earl Haakon was repentant. The body was exhumed, and the bones reburied, first at Birsay on the Mainland (the site of the first Orkney cathedral) and then in the new cathedral at Kirkwall, erected after the sceptical Bishop William the Old, who had forbidden heretical tales of miracles associated with Magnus’s burial place, was struck blind, and duly converted to the cause.

It seems Magnus’s skull was holding up the cathedral all along.

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The progress of my mother’s soul, as she lay in a coma days from death, was watched over by a monstrous crow with a crippled claw. Each ground-floor room in the hospice where she was lying had a bird table outside it. This particular crow staggered about outside like one of Bruegel’s beggars, foraging for whatever the songbirds had cast aside.

Maureen had lived her life in a state of constant agitation. She was always talking of being off somewhere, packing a bag and going. She viewed settlement, resignation, with a species of horror. When, following my father’s retirement, they had moved to a village near Norwich and had followed the removal van up through Thetford Forest in the pouring rain, she said she had had a conviction that she would never pass back that way, that she was going beyond the forest to die. 

It turned out that my father would die in the new house, but not my mother. She crossed back over the threshold of Thetford Forest, to live in Ely, to the north of Cambridge. 

And when, the dementia taking hold, she moved into a room in a care home in Cambridge, she never stopped preparing to leave. I would arrive to find that she had packed random belongings in a carrier bag, oddities salvaged from the seabed of her life, the stuff that had for whatever reason survived the clear-outs which had preceded every move she had made. Oh good, she’d say, you’re here. I can go.

She couldn’t go. There was nowhere to go. She had taken her last journey. Last but one. We made her as comfortable as we could. I would unpack her bits and pieces, bring her a cup of tea, sit with her for a while in the unbounded restless present tense of her life.

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We not longer expect the death of a loved one to colour or confirm our picture of the cosmos; the death of those near to us does not reinforce meaning, it threatens it. All we are left with is an emotional connection with certain individuals, not a ritual of the collective. How you commemorate your dead, therefore, is really up to you. Scratch ochred marks on your walls, decorate a pendant, play an eagle-bone flute, dance a spectral dance, if you like. Whatever meaning you create does not have to last, or bear repetition. 

When did we finally lay my mother to rest? For one reason or another, her grey ashes, in a white plastic bag tied with a tough black plastic clip inside a blue cardboard box with her name and date of birth and death and the date of her cremation on it, sat for some months on a shelf in the room where I worked. Then, after breakfast on a damp morning in the middle of October, we planted a rose—a shrub rose called Fighting Temeraire—in the garden and scattered her ashes around it, along with some soil taken from her home town of Ballymullen and a rock retrieved by her nephew, Robert, from the mountains above Tralee. And then, to balance out the alkalinity of the ashes (which roses do not like) we started to scatter our acid tea leaves around it, raising a warm little midden over the spot. My mother liked a cup of tea in her hand, as she would say. And on her ashes? I don’t suppose she would have any objection.