I think my regular readers will have noted that one of my constant preoccupations is distribution of wealth over history and the affect it had, particularly on the deprived. We live in times when increasing numbers of families are brought into head on collision with the effects of the downturn in our economy so I thought I'd do a series of articles on what history and my own experience has taught me about this. Let's start way back in the mists of time before Barlick existed.
We have no specific evidence about the people who lived round here 7,000 years ago but we can make some informed guesses from what we know from archaeology about climate and inward migration from the east over the land bridge that connected us with Europe before the ice melt after glaciation raised sea levels. As far as we know, these people knew nothing about agriculture and survived by hunter-gathering, the nearest equivalent we have today is some of the Aborigine tribes in the tropics. Under that life style plenty and want were immediate as they lived literally hand-to-mouth. They were nomadic, following the game and the seasons and couldn't store any surplus beyond what they could carry. A good find, like a dead moose in Salterforth bottoms meant that they could gorge themselves until the meat was finished but they were soon back up against the need to get out and find something else. Bad luck or a bad season meant deprivation and eventual death. Only the fittest could survive and some hard decisions must have been made like whether to allow someone with bad teeth or an injury to eat and survive. The precedence for eating was the hunters first because they had to be fit enough to go out and scavenge, possibly the children second, then women of child bearing age and after that the people disadvantaged by injury or age. It was a cruel, bare existence and we have to work very hard to even begin to understand the extent of their suffering.
That's one of the problems, placing ourselves in their place and assessing what life was like. The surprising thing is that we have evidence from things like cave-painting to prove that they had something very close to leisure and one would assume, either spirituality or enjoyment. We know that they revered the dead and went to quite extraordinary lengths to bury them and mark the graves. They also had beliefs, what we would now call religion, the wonder is that these elements of their lives were so powerful that they survived the demands of keeping alive in a hostile world. They were very similar to us and I'd like to pursue this need for something more than bare survival down the years. I shall run out of space sooner under the new format of the paper but we can still try to get more understanding of our lovely little town.
Salterforth in about 1900. Used to be Moose country!
