George Carter is the pioneer and founding figure in the archaeology of the East Devon Pebblebeds, carrying out extensive research in the area from the early 1920s into the late 1960s. He was most active during the twenties and thirties, before the outbreak of the Second World War, carrying out many excavations of pebbled mounds on Woodbury and Aylesbeare Commons and elsewhere. He did not have much time or patience for establishment archaeological ideas and positions and fell out with some of the leading archaeologists of his day who did not appreciate the value of his work. Sadly, he is now a forgotten figure in British archaeology. He was a man with ideas and interpretative approaches that in many respects were well ahead of their time. His work is central to the Pebblebeds project because nobody else had ever excavated a pebble cairn before, or since, or tried to interpret their meaning and significance. Spurned by the archaeological establishment, Carter may well have the last laugh from his grave! Eighty years later, much of what we know about the prehistory of the Pebblebed heathlands is due solely to his efforts. This chapter presents a brief review of Carter’s work and his interpretations of the material that he found as a background to the rest of the book.

Biography

George Carter (1886–1974) was born in Exmouth, East Devon, the son of John Carter, a house builder who built a large estate of back-to-back houses for working-class people on reclaimed land beside the Exe estuary during the period 1896–1934, an area known today as the ‘colony’. John Carter worked by building a house and then mortgaging it, using the money to build the next. The houses were then rented out. At the time of his death John Carter owned some 550 properties, most of them in the colony, but also some of a similar type in Budleigh Salterton. John Carter was a prominent local figure, a councillor and chairman of the former Exmouth Urban District Council for a number of years. John’s brother Harry ran a steamship company that imported coal into Exmouth and the Carter family owned various brickworks in the town.

George Carter was educated at West Buckland boarding school, 10 miles to the east of Barnstaple in north Devon, on the southwest fringes of Exmoor. Throughout his childhood, during the school holidays he developed an intimate knowledge of the East Devon Pebblebeds, which were within easy walking distance of his home. In 1904 he went to Oxford for three years and took a degree in modern constitutional history. Subsequently he spent a year at Oxford studying geography before applying to the Indian civil service (Figure 2.1). In 1909 he went to India and was posted to Bombay and spent two and a half years in the Ahmadnagar district near Poona. There he met his wife, Ivy Octavia Wakefield, daughter of a third-generation family of Anglo-Indian colonial administrators. From there he was transferred to the province of Hyderabad Sind (in present-day Pakistan), being appointed as Municipal Commissioner (Figure 2.2). He had an extraordinarily wide range of interests but was particularly interested in the archaeology, anthropology, history and folklore of Sind province. He carried out archaeological excavations, documented houses and other material forms, customary practices and cosmological beliefs, collected, recorded, interpreted and translated myths and stories, writing a string of published papers on these subjects (e.g. Carter 1916, 1919a, 1919b, 1922, 1923, 1924a, 1924b). He also left behind much unpublished material in the form of manuscripts, notes, photographs, sketch maps and diagrams.

Carter was eventually transferred back from Hyderabad to Bombay, where his second daughter, Priscilla, was born in 1920. He did not enjoy this new posting and took early retirement in 1926, returning to England to live in Budleigh Salterton, East Devon. He studied to be a barrister at Gray’s Inn in London and passed the examinations but never practised. Instead his day job became running the family letting company in Exmouth and gradually winding up the estate, which had incurred large debts, but his passion was investigating the prehistory and geology of the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands.

Carter’s extensive knowledge of the anthropology, folklore and customs of Sind province was to have a lasting influence throughout his life and was fundamental to all his subsequent archaeological research on the East Devon Pebblebeds. For example, in an article entitled ‘Pebbled Mounds’ published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay (1934b) he discusses the elaborate instructions contained in the Satapatha Brahmana, one of the sacred Hindu texts, for the method of building a burial mound. He introduces this article with the following comment: ‘Increasingly efforts are being made to elucidate pre-history, but attention is often paid rather to the recovery of material objects which can be studied at leisure (often as works of art), than to the more laborious unravelling of contemporary ritual’ (Carter 1934b: 1). Elsewhere he writes ‘the advance in the technique of fieldwork has outstripped the interpretation of evidence brought to light’ (Carter 1942: 2). These are veiled and not so veiled criticisms of the kind of archaeology prevalent in the 1930s, and since, in which the discipline becomes little more than a technical practice for recovering material remains from the earth rather than a field of study in which one attempts to understand and imaginatively interpret that material from a social perspective. Carter clearly had a keen interest in excavating the past and recovering things, but he was equally passionate about the necessity for providing an interpretative understanding of what he had found. He used direct ethnographic analogies, drawn from his experiences and research in India, combined with a deep knowledge of Greek and Roman Classical sources, in order to understand the material he was recovering from the Pebblebed heathlands in an innovative manner.

Carter’s archaeological work in East Devon

Carter published only some of his excavation reports but much information survives in the form of unpublished manuscripts, notes, photographs, sketches and plans, and part of the purpose of this section is to document and make publicly accessible some of this work. He left behind four unfinished book manuscripts: (i) ISCA: Notes on an Original Preliminary Interpretation of the History of Devon in the Late Bronze Age (written about 1934). There are two typewritten versions of the same manuscript with summaries of some of his excavations in East Devon from the 1930s. Some of this material is published in Carter (1936). Parts are typed, while other parts consist of handwritten notes. There is also a handwritten MS of the same text with additional illustrations; (ii) On the Track of Pythagoras: A Study of Certain Antiquities of the Bronze Age (about 1936); (iii) The Flank of Archaeology (about 1939/40) and On the Impossibility of Accepted Bronze Age Chronology (about 1941). The texts lack consecutive page numbering except in individual chapters/sections of some of them. These were essentially reworkings, with additions, of the same material derived from his East Devon fieldwork, plus observations made on prehistoric monuments elsewhere in Britain but mainly in southwest and central southern England. Essentially Carter was writing the same book over and over again with different emphases and arguments, with the substantive core of evidence remaining his archaeological fieldwork in East Devon. All these manuscripts gathered dust but Carter did not give up entirely. As late as 1972, only two years before his death at the age of 88 he was rewriting notes on his excavations of the Woodbury ε pebble cairn for Leslie Grinsell, who was compiling a catalogue of Bronze Age barrows in the area (Grinsell 1983). None of the manuscripts is completely finished and all contain numerous asides, handwritten notes and appendices. Photographs and illustrations are often removed, as they must have been taken out of one manuscript ready to go into the next. ISCA contains some of the material published by Carter about pebble cairns in the Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Exploration Society (Carter 1936) (see Chapters 3–7). The Flank of Archaeology contains details of his excavations of the pebble platforms on Aylesbeare Common published in the Devon Proceedings of 1938 (see Chapters 6 and 11). His important excavations at the burnt mound of Jacob’s Well (see Chapter 6) survive as a series of loose notes and photographs and were never published.

In ISCA Carter presents a list of mounds and other ‘objects of interest’ on Woodbury Common. The list comprises 56 places with one or more sites, mainly small pebble cairns/mounds, but also the Iron Age hillfort of Woodbury Castle and its cross dyke (see Chapter 9), prominent cairns such as the Beacon (Figure 1.10: 19), springs, landscaping mounds at Four Firs (see Chapter 11), pits and two large chert stones alien to the area, east of Hayes Wood, that he has recorded (Figure 2.3). Some are numbered, others are given letters, others multiple letters (QL, QN) and some letters and numbers (AA1, AA8). Unfortunately, there is no map and locations are vague, for example ‘two mounds east of Four Firs’, ‘three mounds, not on one line, north of the Exmouth Reservoir’, ‘a mound on Hayes wood’ (Figure 2.4).

In this manuscript Carter gives a preliminary account of his excavations of the pebble mounds/cairns, some of which were later published in the Devon Proceedings. His excavation work in the book covers the period 1930–2. In 1930 he cut trenches across six pebble mounds between 10 September and 22 November. In most, except Woodbury ε where he recovered Beaker sherds and a tanged and barbed arrowhead (see Chapter 3), he found no artefacts. Between 1 January and 13 June 1931 he examined a further seven mounds and from April to May 1932 another five, a prodigious rate of work. In addition he excavated two flint cairns on the Haldon Hills to the east of the Exe during this period. The excavation teams consisted of Carter, sometimes assisted by his gardener, family members and interested friends (Fig. 2.3; Fig. 2.5; Fig. 2.6).

Woodbury AA6 is recorded as being near the SE corner of a plantation about 274 m to the south of Four Firs. It was ‘semi-lunate’ in form, consisting of a shallow pit with a surrounding low bank 0.3 m high and with an overall diameter of 5 m. Partly within and outside this structure was an elongated N–S platform mainly composed of sand and paved with pebbles. A lump of manganese was found in a central pit (Carter 1936: 1–3). The pebble mound was erected over an area with multiple fires and pebble-filled pits. He observed geometric ‘pebble patterns’ at three levels in this structure and symbolic arrangements of blue stones (see below) (Figure 2.7).

In On the Track of Pythagoras he reports on other excavations. Woodbury P was just west of Hayes Wood, consisting of a mound covering a chamber cut into New Red Sandstone lined with pebbles in ‘the form of a cup with a rim of chert’ (Figure 2.8). The infill consisted of a lump of pyrolusite, a worked flint and a pellet of charcoal. Woodbury U on Dalditch common was a pebble mound with a bluestone. He states that it was dug into previously around 1900 by a Captain Ferrand, with finds consisting of a riveted dagger, a worked lump of chert, a perforated stone and some charcoal. This material is now in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter (see Pearce 1983, vol. II: 576, plate 15: 123 and 584, plate 23: 186).

In The Flank of Archaeology Carter reports on additional excavations to the east of the Pebblebed heathlands. On Easter Monday 1938 he examined a destroyed cairn at Moorlands, Broad Down, discovering the remains of a fire strewn with worked flints where people ‘for luck or some other religious purpose each cast on the mound a flint, the emblem of the spirit of fire, or the abode of fire’. At Otterton Brake he reports that he found ‘at the highest point of wasteland overlooking the sea a diamond shaped mound a foot high and 26ft long and broad’. This was a chert cairn. Underneath it he found nine irregularly cracked quartzite pebbles brought from the Pebblebeds to the west of the Otter a few miles away. In a central pit there was a piece of puddingstone and eight flints. This alien puddingstone he suggests was brought from up to 200 miles away in Wiltshire for a magical purpose. The cairn in his view was not used for burial but was a focus of magical rites.

Elsewhere in a note on a site that he refers to as the Quartz Deck field, Jubilee Park, Budleigh Salterton, he reports finding a pebble pavement covering a pebble-filled pit and a fire pit (Figure 2.9). Another site that he wrote about was the Longo Lines (SY 049 871 centred). The manuscript was published in the local newspaper, the Exmouth Journal (10 June 1933). This name was given by Carter to a series of earthworks crossing an SE sloping spur of the Pebblebed heathlands surrounded by boggy valleys to the west, east and south (due west of Kettle Plantation). The place name, like others such as Jacob’s Well, does not appear on any map and its origin is obscure, but it does not appear to be one given to the place by Carter himself. He states that ‘to those interested in place-names, I would mention that Longo Bottom, the lowlying bog, appears to preserve the Gaelic lon, a marsh or morass’. Carter planned these earthworks (Figure 2.10), suggesting they were of Neolithic date, a possible causewayed enclosure. He describes them as ‘two shallow trenches stretching across a spur of hilly moorland projecting into Longo Bottom and two deep broad trenches, which run across the spur’. However, there were no banks associated with them and no definite causeways. Carter was writing just after a new class of Neolithic monument, causewayed enclosures, was recognized in the 1920s, hence his suggestion of a Neolithic date. He also records the presence of a number of small pebble cairns on the same spur. In 2010 a wildfire burnt off the heathland vegetation from the entire area and the lines as planned by Carter were clearly recognizable. They are probably multiple sunken trackways crossing the spur. They clearly pre-date modern military use of the area after the Second World War and are most unusual, since multiple sunken ways do not occur anywhere else across the Pebblebed heathlands. Since Carter’s day this entire area has been subject to military trench digging that has effectively destroyed any other evidence of prehistoric activity on this spur. To the south of Longo Bottom, a short distance to the west of Kettle Plantation, Carter recorded the presence of a mound in a bog and two further mounds on the same spur as the Woodbury ε cairn that he had excavated (Figure 2.11). It has not been possible to locate any of these sites today.

Between 1951 and 1953 Carter undertook excavations at Little Silver, Combe Raleigh parish, East Devon, a Romano-British site. Returning to investigate the East Devon Pebblebeds in 1956 he undertook a series of exploratory excavations at Squabmoor, writing up the findings in a sketch pad with photographs: ‘A cemetery with classical affinities at Squabmoor’ (1956). He published some of the results in the Exmouth Journal (20 October 1956). The sites were on the most westerly part of East Budleigh Common and discovered after swaling. He describes the area as being ‘a cemetery spreading over the southwestern slopes of a hill crossed by two deserted Neolithic trackways … pebble cairns stood at the apices of a triangle. At the NE apex there were Arae Geminae (the phrase used by Vergil to denote the altars where the cult of the dead was performed consisting of twin altars (cairns) for ancestor worship. At the south apex, Altaria, altar for the gods above (this word denotes the raised altar on which oblations were offered to the celestial gods) and at the west apex, Ara fossata: pit for the subterrene gods’ (Exmouth Journal, 20 October 1956: 3). He termed this area the ‘Holy Triangle’ (Figure 2.12).

The twin altars ‘consisted of two closely packed adjacent pavements of stone at the exact ground level. They were aligned on a true east–west line. The western pavement was oval in form measuring 3ft 8in by 2 foot 10in. The eastern pavement was circular with a radius of 1ft 6in.’ Carter found no artefacts but traces of fire and burning under what were obviously two small pebble cairns that he excavated (Figure 2.13). He also recorded the presence of other pebble cairns in this southeastern part of the Pebblebed heathlands (Figure 2.10).

Carter’s last excavation took place in the summer of 1960. This was of the ‘Milestone 9 Cairn, Woodbury Common’. Situated at SY 0390 8620, this cairn (Figure 1.10: 21) is 12 m in diameter and 2.1 m high with a rounded top. It is partly cut by the Woodbury to Yettington road to the north of it. In the side of the road beside the mound there is an eighteenth-century milestone erected by the Rolle family, who diverted the road from its previous position to the south of the cairn. Prior to Carter’s work the cairn had already been dug into around 1870, when a N–S trench 1.5 m long was cut through its centre together with one of similar size W–E. Carter excavated a trench about 1.5 m square at the centre of the mound and discovered multiple pebble layers over a heavily burnt area resting on fine sand (Figure 2.14). He also reports finding a small ‘cairn’ in the base of the 1870 excavation trench, in all probability a pebble-filled pit. There were no finds and little charcoal. The structural sequence can be reinterpreted as follows: the cairn was built on a layer of inverted turfs. It covered a pebble-filled pit and a fire preceded the subsequent construction of the pebble layers.

Carter’s interpretations

Carter linked a diffusion of Indo-European languages in Europe with the movement or diffusion of either peoples or customs across the continent, suggesting that the earliest Aryans in Britain were the Celts. Diffusionist models of social change and development dominated archaeological thought at this time, and in this respect Carter’s ideas were not unusual; Stonehenge for example had long been thought to have been constructed as a result of Mycenaean influences. Carter interpreted the East Devon material in terms of Indo-Aryan burial rites described at length in the Satapatha Brahmana and elsewhere. The pebbled platforms he discovered on Aylesbeare Common with their double-headed axe shapes (see Chapter 6) were likened by him to the vedi or sacrificial mound of the Indo-Aryans. The vedi formed a material link between the worship of Agni as god and the performance of sacrifice as a holy rite. The prescribed rite was for ceremonies involving the use of fire as a purifying force, and Carter says that he found evidence of prolonged burning under many of the pebbled mounds and platforms he excavated. In Vedic rites the fire bird was sacred and Carter interpreted the patterning of pebbles under one mound he excavated on Woodbury Common QL (Figure 2.15; 2.21) as the partial representation of a bird. Vedic mounds were constructed in layers just like the pebble cairns and in both cases pebbles themselves were sacred materials. In Vedic rites pebbles were used in the construction of the sacrificial fire as symbolic pegs on the edge of the ‘resting place of the fire to peg it down and keep it steady’. He maintained that the primary purpose of the pebbled mounds that he had investigated was not for burial but for the ceremonial worship of fire.

In On the Flank of Archaeology Carter writes as follows about the pebble pavements on Aylesbeare Common that he excavated:

Later, after discussing much Classical literature (e.g. Tacitus, Herodotus) he concludes that ‘the common measure of all the pebbled mounds of Woodbury Common … and of Aylesbeare Common is an Indo-Aryan culture. In the one case we have countless burial mounds, and many landmarks, in the other a few mounds devoted to an Agni (fire-water) cult. The earliest Aryans of whom we have any knowledge in Britain were the Celts, but of their first coming there is no certainty.’ Much of this account is in a published version that appears in the Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Exploration Society (Carter 1938: 95–6).

Carter not only pursued these direct Vedic ethnographic analogies to interpret the mounds and pavements that he had excavated, but he also made a strong claim that the builders of these mounds had a sophisticated knowledge of geometry which was used to lay out and site the positions of the mounds (i.e. pebble cairns) in relation to each other in the landscape: ‘I first observed the mathematical influence in archaeology in the field on the Ganeshkind hill-top just outside Poona in 1918’ (Carter 1942: 12) where he was surveying two stone circles.

In The Flank of Archaeology (written about 1939/40) he writes of ‘an accumulation of evidence which leads directly to a mental picture of the civilizing power of Greek thought among the northern and backward people of various races, though with a common stock of Indo-Aryan rites’. He describes his manuscript as being an ‘attempt to recover the natural religion of the Celts and to recognize the philosophy of the Druids’, and ‘to estimate the age of Stonehenge and of much which passes of the Early Bronze Age, as of the historic (and not prehistoric period)’. Thus Carter’s central claim was that the material remains that he had excavated were expressions of two intertwined syncretic cultural traditions, both of which had spread to Britain with the Celts: an Indo-Aryan culture, a matter of tribal and traditional religion, accompanied by the spread of the Celtic languages and fused with Greek/Phoenician influences bearing the teachings of Pythagoras. The pebble cairns that he excavated were understood as being ‘landmark sites’ and to Carter this indicated the interrelationship of mathematics and religion in a culture superimposed on an Aryanized people. Geometrical principles could explain both the distribution of sites across the landscape and their component parts. In the case of the East Devon material this found material expression in geometrical arrangements of pebbles and blue stones (see Figure 2.4; Figure 2.12; Figure 2.16). Carter accepted from the Classical sources that a Druid priesthood existed in Britain. For him they were philosophical educators within an ancient British Aryanized culture, bringing with them a primitive ‘pidgin-Greek’ knowledge whose primary expression was a form of primitive mathematical geometry.

Carter was convinced that everything that he had excavated should be dated to around 250 BC. For him the material evidence should not be regarded as prehistoric but rather the beginning of history that he associated with the Celts as described in Classical sources, of which he had considerable knowledge. However, this dating of the material conflicted directly with the chronology of ‘establishment archaeology’. He had excavated a pebble cairn (Woodbury ε) that contained Beaker sherds conventionally dated by archaeologists in the 1930s to about 1750 BC (see Chapter 3).

For Carter such a date was unacceptably early. His privately published pamphlet Bronze Age Chronology: A Criticism (Carter 1942) is a brief summary of a few of the arguments put forward in his unpublished manuscript entitled On the Impossibility of Bronze Age Chronology. He personally sent the pamphlet to numerous public libraries and museums in an attempt to influence others. It is essentially a critical diatribe against establishment archaeology in general and Sir Cyril Fox in particular, directly criticizing some of his published excavations of Welsh barrows and the ascription of a conventional Bronze Age date to them.

In the introduction Carter points out that every example of a stone circle discussed by the Piggotts in relation to Dorset (Piggott and Piggott 1939) is in fact elliptical in form and that writing of ‘horseshoe’ arrangements of stones, as in discussions of the internal arrangements of the stones in Stonehenge by other archaeologists, is anachronistic since a true description of their form is in fact that of a truncated ellipse rather than a circle. In other words, the elliptical form of these stone monuments was an expression of Pythagorean geometrical principles.

He then goes on to conduct a detailed geometrical reanalysis of the site of Sheeplays 271 and other Welsh barrows published by Fox (Fox 1941), applying Pythagorean principles attempting to demonstrate that the positions of the interments, central pits and internal post circles were governed by them and conformed to other Indo-Aryan ritual practices such as the removal of turfs before constructing the mound, the orientation of the interments and the presence of a central ritual pit with no burial (Figure 2.17). His conclusions are that Fox had misdated his material on the basis of the pottery he had found by up to 1,000 years. Fox had also failed to understand the mathematical basis underlying the positions of the central pit, internal post hole palisade and interments in the barrows that he had excavated. He ends by stating ‘we should have the reconstructed records of our own people, our own ancestors, and not merely the eclectic reactions of connoisseurs of urns of hypothetical races [a thinly disguised reference to Fox] which are meaningless to others’ (Carter 1942: 14). Furthermore, the real lack of scholarship manifested by Fox and his contemporaries was ‘to attempt to interpret religious ideas absolutely, instead of first exhausting known and specific religious systems’ (Carter 1942: 2). In other words, rather than attempting to understand their data in terms of direct analogies with known religions such as the Indo-Aryan beliefs documented in the Satapatha Brahmana or knowledge of Celtic religious beliefs documented in Classical Greek and Roman sources, conventional archaeologists considered ritual as essentially an abstract category denoting evidence they could not explain in any other way. They thus did not understand anything at all because such a category remained empty of content. Fox’s work exemplifies ‘an ability to date a ritual mound while admitting ignorance at the same time of any meaning in the ritual he had uncovered’ (Carter 1942: 13).

In Carter’s four unpublished manuscripts he successfully demonstrates that many stone circles are in fact ellipses rather than true circles. To Carter this was proof that their planning was inspired by Pythagorean principles. He writes in On the Impossibility of Bronze Age Chronology that ‘The expressions of mathematic lore, and of the ellipse in particular, are all of one category, all in so far as they are formulary, refer to the equilateral triangle or to a technique derived from the groupings of units of length. The facts are essentially objective and typical of the early and elementary stages of Pythagoreanism.’ Elsewhere he states that the ‘whole system of Bronze Age chronology is in error since it is a millennium in advance of Greek thought. … There is in Britain, in common with the Mediterranean regions, a mathematical culture which was derived from Greek sources, wholly dateable after B.C. 600, and doubtless of several periods. Most of what passes as of the Bronze Age was of the Iron Age, and in general terms, is placed about one thousand years too early.’ Although the Bronze Age occurs in the titles or subtitles of all his manuscripts, it remains a moot point as to whether for him such a period existed, for the period as he understood it would belong in conventional archaeological terms solely to the Iron Age. He had no solution to an apparently missing Bronze Age period and in this respect he was, of course, desperately wrong and peculiarly stubborn in denying all evidence to the contrary.

Going far beyond the East Devon material that he had excavated and studied, Carter generalized his position to suggest that there were two types of British burials: (a) extensive gravefields of small mounds such as those that he had excavated on the East Devon Pebblebeds exactly conformable with the details of Indo-Aryan religion that were not for burial and (b) great mounds for a princely class such as the huge barrows around Stonehenge. In both there was a scrupulous observance of Aryan customs: the removal of turfs in preparing the site, the digging of holes beneath ground level, the use of worked flints of various ages as fetish stones, manifestations symbolizing for him a cult of Agni. In Britain all the evidence suggested a fusion of Aryan ritual and a mathematical, Greek-inspired culture. The practice of mathematics employed was based on the numerical system of Pythagoras, not on the rational system of Euclid. The distinctive characteristics of this were knowledge of the quindecagon as the formula on which astronomy was based, and of the ellipse as the foundation plan of many holy places, both inventions of the Greeks.

There were clear indications in the Classical texts of an oceanic route to Britain bringing these Greek-inspired ideas. He discusses at length Classical writers – Homer, Herodotus, Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny, Plutarch, Tacitus, Caesar and others – to demonstrate sea connections between the Mediterranean and Britain. He states in the conclusion to the manuscript of On the Impossibility of Accepted Bronze Age Chronology that ‘within Britain a new order of priesthood grew up. The Druids were a professed brotherhood, but when we first meet them in history, they had become the priests of the tribes and the teachers of an advanced system of education.’ Furthermore:

The construction and arrangement of prehistoric monuments were built through the inspiration of a priestly class of Druids in Celtic society ‘with the mathematical lore reported by Caesar as Druidum disciplina, the science of the Druids’.

In the manuscript of On the Track of Pythagoras these ideas are applied to discuss the distribution of the Broad Down barrows of East Devon (Figure 2.18), the stones of Lagavulin, Islay and other stone circles, the Bronze Age barrows of Buttermere, Wiltshire, barrows to the east and northwest of Stonehenge, the stones of Stonehenge itself in phases I and II (Figure 2.19) and two polygonal or so-called ‘kite shaped enclosures’. These are the Druid’s Head South Kite enclosure with its two internal barrows three miles SW of Stonehenge, Wiltshire and the Soldier’s Ring, Blackheath Down, Cranborne Chase on the Dorset/Hampshire border (Figure 2.20). The latter two monuments must have particularly interested Carter because of their obvious angular geometrical shapes (today they are presumed to be of late Romano-British date). The text is interspersed with lengthy discussions of geometry: the nature of a triangle, that of a square, of an ellipse and a hexagon. These do not really illuminate anything.

Carter argues that there is an underlying geometrical relationship within and between both the distribution of the barrows and the stones that he analyses. The barrows are understood as being essentially landmarks and geometrical foci. An Aryanized prehistoric people usedpreviously constructed barrows or cairns as landmarks to establish the correct positions for new ones using a system of mathematical thought based on, or influenced by, Greek teaching. Underlying their locations were geometrical methods and mutual interrelationships. Many earthworks are ‘set squares or bases for the study of geometrical problems’. As such, barrows should be understood primarily as being landmarks rather than burial mounds. Discussions in The Flank of Archaeology involve applying geometrical principles to a study of other sites such as Ogbury hillfort, Durrington Walls and Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. These Pythagorean studies are applied to the data, made to work in some way, but he could not demonstrate that they actually explained anything and we are ultimately left with a series of tautologies.

Blue stones

Carter not only researched the archaeology, local history and folklore of the Pebblebeds, and more widely, that of Devon, but he was also very knowledgeable about the local geology. He was the first to find rare radioactive nodules that occur in the red sandstones underlying the Budleigh Salterton Pebblebeds, which he found on the beach as water-worn specimens (Carter 1931; Perutz 1939). During his archaeological excavations of pebble mounds or cairns, Carter recognized a particular type of stone that was different from all the others: he termed these blue stones. The use of this term by him is particularly interesting as only a few years prior to Carter starting his excavations the geologist Herbert Thomas had published his findings that the bluestones of Stonehenge were derived from the Preseli mountains of Pembrokeshire, south Wales (Thomas 1923). Carter, then, had his own blue stones but in comparison with those at Stonehenge they were tiny. Carter plotted the distribution of these blue stones in his excavations and claimed that their positioning in the cairns, like the positioning of the cairns themselves in the landscape, could be understood in terms of Pythagorean geometrical principles.

He writes in ISCA: ‘In the blue stone we have the symbolic representation of the early religion of the Aryans, the mark of the great god of the heavens, father of all nature, of the gods, of the Aryans. By it the Druids linked their Pythagorean, their pidgin-Greek philosophy with the tribal religion of the people at large’ and ‘Blue was the colour associated with Indra from the earliest Vedic times and Indra was the great father god of the Aryans. In Indo-Aryan thought Agni, the fire god, was thought of as a bird.’ Carter used these ideas to interpret the pebble cairn Mound QL that he excavated on Woodbury Common. This was 90 m to the northeast of his AA6, discussed above. On the surface he claims to have found the diagrammatic outline of a bird (head and legs), together with other geometric arrangements of pebbles. Underneath it were pebble ‘cairns’, that is, pebble-filled pits and blue stones (Figure 2.21). The cairn was built over an area that had been burnt (Carter 1936: 3–4). Carter again argues that the cairn was not for burial, but a landmark (i.e. an orientation point in a trigonometrically inspired system of cairns), a site where Agni was worshipped, erected by people of Aryan affinities to whom had travelled ‘a slender knowledge of Greek civilization’. The blue stones that Carter recorded at this and other sites that he excavated, notably Woodbury ε (the letter e standing for epsilon), were primarily significant to him because of their blue colour, sacred in Indo-Aryan mythologies, but they have other interesting characteristics (see Chapter 5).

In a footnote to his paper ‘Pebbled Mounds’ (Carter 1934b) he states that ‘these pebbles [those of the Budleigh Salterton pebble beds] are mainly a pale quartzite but occasional pebbles (1: 1000) are of dark or coloured igneous rock’ (Carter 1934b: 4). Elsewhere he states that ‘blue stones of various shades of colour and petrological nature (though of igneous origin) occur locally … in the Bunter Pebble Beds” (1936: 2). InISCA Carter states: ‘The regular use of the darker stones of the Budleigh Salterton Pebble Beds (other than black stones), which show colours ranging through many shades of blue from purple to grey, seems to indicate an insistent idea of the importance of this colour.’

The reception of Carter’s work

During his lifetime Carter only published in any detail on some of the sites that he excavated on the Pebblebeds. Early on during his work in the early 1930s he had been an active member of the Devon Archaeological Society, publishing work in its Proceedings in 1936 and 1938. He had acted as secretary to the excavation fund for the Hembury hillfort excavations directed by Dorothy Liddell and also took part in the excavation of the Neolithic settlement of Haldon Belvedere. It is probable that he learned modern archaeological techniques of excavation on these projects. He had extensive correspondence with Sir Cyril Fox, Director of the National Museum of Wales, and one of the leading British prehistorians of his generation, sending him some of his own research findings and interpretations of the pebble mounds. Fox even came to visit one of Carter’s own excavations on the East Devon Pebblebeds and obliged him by sending him a large scale plan of one of his Welsh excavations, to which Carter took his protractor. In a letter dated 28 November 1932, Fox writes to Carter about one of his manuscripts, probably a version of ISCA: ‘I do not wish for a moment to take up a superior attitude …. Now the fact is that official archaeology which you are up against works on common-sense lines and eschews visionary significances and far-fetched symbolisms …. It seems to me certain that it will never be accepted by reputable publications in this country’ (letter in Carter archive). However, despite this warning Carter did manage to get at least some of his work published in the Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Exploration Society, but after around 1935 he seems to have given up trying to find an academic reception for his work or a ‘reputable publisher’. Instead he published a few of his excavations and ideas in the local newspaper, the Exmouth Journal, but made no concessions whatsoever to the type of audience that he was addressing in terms of his writing style and the Classical sources that he used in them (see the discussion of his Squabmoor excavations, above).

In 1949 the summer conference (actually held in September) of The Prehistoric Society was held in Exeter. The year before, Sir Cyril Fox had taken early retirement and had moved to Exeter with his wife, Aileen, who had just been appointed to a Special Lectureship in archaeology at the university. Carter’s unplanned appearance and unorthodox positions led to Lady Aileen Fox and O.G.S. Crawford, two very prominent archaeologists of their day, leaving the hall almost immediately, together with half the audience within five minutes. Aileen Fox must have known Carter well, as she had also participated in the Hembury excavations directed by Dorothy Liddell. In her biography she writes:

Clearly Carter’s appearance was most embarrassing to her, but as Grinsell later pointed out, one of Carter’s ‘main points: that archaeologists are inexact in their terminology, often describing stone ellipses as stone circles is now upheld’ (Grinsell 1985). It is interesting to note here Grinsell’s use of the word ‘inexact’. Grinsell was Keeper of Bristol City Museum between 1952 and 1972 and was a key figure in the documentation and study of Bronze Age barrows in southwest and southern England, visiting virtually every known site. Despite Grinsell’s own obvious personal sympathy for Carter he did not use any of the notes Carter compiled for him on his East Devon ‘pebbled mounds’ in his ‘professional’ publication of the barrows of South and East Devon. They were excluded from the catalogue, apart from Woodbury ε, which could not be dismissed as it contained Beaker sherds. He notes that Carter’s interpretations were ‘out of step with normal archaeological thought. It has accordingly been considered expedient to omit from this paper his pebbled mounds’ (Grinsell 1983: 6). In doing so Grinsell missed a great deal, as this book demonstrates. By taking Carter seriously even in the matter of the ‘objective documentation’ of the distribution of barrows and cairns in the landscape, his primary concern, Grinsell must have felt that his own work might suffer the same fate of ridicule and exclusion should he use information from Carter (some of which is to be found in the National Monuments records and those of the Historic Environment records of Devon County Council). In hindsight Grinsell’s objectivity in the manner in which he chose which monuments to record in his catalogue is a manifestation of his own subjective and personal concerns about Carter. Any information gained from him was clearly deemed as potentially toxic.

It is curious how often Carter seemed to have been right, at least in some of his interpretative positions, when he was deemed to be so wrong by his contemporaries. In 1969 Carter wrote a letter to the BBC, who were then sponsoring an archaeological excavation to drive a tunnel into Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, the largest artificial mound in Europe. He writes: ‘I investigated the meaning and purpose of the hill thirty years ago and am prepared to offer you a talk for broadcasting, now, for demonstrating why the work will be a failure.’ He was not invited to talk and the excavation did indeed prove to be a failure, in that no artefacts were found. Carter’s 30-year-old interpretation first put forward in on The Flank of Archaeology was that the hill was a viewing platform, or observatory: ‘It is only when one climbs to the summit that one realizes what a noble platform it is, overtopping (but only just so) all the neighbouring low-rolling downs. From its summit a clear view is obtained in all directions and its ample platform must have rendered it a grand view-point.’ Carter goes on to write that: ‘Silbury Hill was raised until its height exceeded that of Waden Hill to the NE and then the builders stopped work’. Its construction and use had to be understood in relation to the surrounding landscape. These ideas are very much current and living in contemporary archaeological research (e.g. Barrett’s discussion of Silbury Hill as a viewing platform (Barrett 1994: 31)).

For Carter the conventional archaeology of his day was far too materialistic and desperately limited in its aspirations to interpret the past. Archaeologists always failed to go beyond the things that they excavated or surveyed to discover what was really important: the underlying immaterial religious and social principles that they objectified.

Naturally Carter’s work cannot be uncritically accepted today. His use of direct ethnographic analogies between Vedic rites in India and the material he was finding in East Devon may appear somewhat dubious in the direct manner in which it was undertaken, but there has been a recent and renewed interest in Indo-European influences in the emergence and development of the European Early Bronze Age by a number of Scandinavian prehistorians, in particular, works by Kristiansen and Larsson (2005) and Kaliff (2007). Furthermore, some of Carter’s general ideas – that pebbles were things of spiritual power, that colour symbolism was important, that rituals at the mounds involved fire and notions of purification, that the blue stones were important, that pebbles might be carefully chosen and selected and patterned in various ways, that many cairns may never have been intended for burial – are extremely important insights informing this book. Like Carter we need to imaginatively engage with the past to produce an interpretative account, relevant to the present and not produce a dry-as-dust inventory of factual information. Ultimately Carter could not prove his case and we will not do so either. Anyone who thinks they can should not be engaged in archaeology, since it is always an interpretative exercise, fragile, provisional and open to change.

Carter’s work did not occur in a vacuum. It is obviously a product of his own personal experiences and his times, as indeed is this book. We need to situate the reactions to the work of Carter in relation to the dominant ethos of both archaeology and anthropology in the period 1920–40. Here we need to remember that field anthropology was limited and very much in its infancy and that archaeology was trying to establish its credentials as a form of academic research to be taken seriously, which meant in practice eschewing anything that might be deemed to be ‘speculative’ or going beyond the ‘facts’. The major concern of archaeologists was, lacking radiocarbon dating, to establish a reliable chronology for the past based primarily on the typological analysis of artefacts. Carter directly attacked this holy grail and suffered the inevitable consequences in his determination to prove his case that the sites he had excavated were of Iron Age date. He never changed this view throughout his lifetime. But he shared the main explanatory basis put forward by prehistorians to understand cultural change: the movement of people and the diffusion of ideas across Europe to Britain from the East and from the Mediterranean civilizations.

Grimp, as Carter was affectionately known in his family (Figure 2.22), undoubtedly had a somewhat prickly personality at times, but he was absolutely driven and dedicated to his personal research. He was a man who was extremely well read, with an extraordinary depth and breadth of interests, and who was working outside and was excluded from an academic institutional framework. He was a dogged and determined man who seems to have had an absolute belief in the veracity of his own ideas that changed little throughout his lifetime. As far as his archaeological research is concerned, he simply applied the same kind of geometrical analyses to more and more sites from East Devon to Cornwall, from Exmoor to Wiltshire and Dorset to Yorkshire and Scotland, often using large-scale plans from 6-inch Ordnance Survey maps. It is obvious that at least in the 1930s he kept up with current archaeological research and ideas that influenced him, such as the discovery of Neolithic causewayed enclosures and the origins of the bluestones of Stonehenge. The title of one of his manuscripts, The Flank of Archaeology, perhaps says it all: there were the dominant, institutionally accredited prehistorians and there was Carter, representing the flank, an alternative vision of the past decried by those in the academy and consequently not to be taken seriously. He desperately wanted to make sense of the East Devon landscape in which he was born and grew up. In his retirement in Devon, just as in India before, he had a huge variety of other research interests, from local geology to folklore studies to history to archaeology to numismatics, reflected in some of his other publications (Carter 1927, 1928, 1932a, 1932b, 1933). His daughter, Priscilla Hull, remarks of him ‘He never stopped reading, writing, studying …. He could be confrontational but that rather ran in the family …. But my father was quite willing to be reasonable so long as you agreed with him!’, she chuckles (interview, 31 March 2008).

Material from Carter’s collections (archaeological and geological) partly formed the basis of the collections of Fairlynch Museum in Budleigh Salterton, founded by a group of women including Priscilla Hull. Carter wrote a pamphlet for the museum on the local archaeology and history of the area. Carter’s papers on the history, archaeology and folklore of Pakistan are in Cambridge University Library. His unpublished papers and photographs and records on the archaeology, history and folklore of Devon are in the Devon Record Office, Exeter.