Book review: Land of the Ilich: Journeys into Islay's Past, by Steven Mithen

Based at the University of Reading, Professor Steven Mithen is a world-renowned archaeologist, with a special interest in the evolution of the human mind and of human culture – as revealed through the material record unearthed from bogs, dunes, deserts, forests and grasslands across the planet – that has made his books influential far beyond academic circles. His 2005 study The Singing Neanderthals became a New York Times bestseller, and his previous books After The Ice: A Global Human History, and A Prehistory Of The Mind: A Search For The Origins Of Art, Science And Religion, also helped shift preconceptions about early human history, as we come to learn more about our own evolution and origins.

It’s therefore thrilling to see Mithen now turn the full searchlight of his attention and experience onto one small Scottish island, and its people, the Ilich. The island is Islay, the southernmost of all the Hebrides; and although it is not large – just 25 miles from north to south, and 15 miles across – it is nonetheless the eighth largest of all the British and Irish isles, after Great Britain, Ireland, Lewis & Harris, Skye, Mull, Anglesey, and Shetland.

Mithen has been fascinated by Islay for 30 years, seeing the island as a vital crossroads of early human life on these islands, set across the main sea route from Ireland to Scotland, and from the west coast of France and Spain north towards Orkney, and then east to Norway. And now, in this comprehensive study, he takes us on a series of journeys across the island – almost always by bicycle and on foot – each of which reveals the story of a new period in its human history, from earliest Mesolithic times, through the Bronze Age, the Vikings, and the mediaeval Lordship of the Isles, to the economic and industrial developments of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the remaining traces of the Second World War.

It can’t be denied that Mithen’s passionate archaeological detective work gains an extra intensity in describing those early periods, before about 800 AD, when there are no written records, and material objects represent our only evidence of the people and their lives. The first humans – simple hunter-gatherers – are thought to have arrived on Islay around 10,000 BC; and Mithen is at his eloquent best in describing his long, slogging bicycle journeys through bramble, scrub and peatbog, to trace the modest remnants of the places where they worked and gathered, or where their Neolithic successors began to build burial mounds known as chambered cairns.

His detailed descriptions are interspersed with moments when, in a kind of dream state, he imagines whole scenes involving the people of the past. His writing is detailed, but also fluent; and huge themes pulse beneath its surface, to do with the stable self-sufficiency of early human communities that struck a reasonable bargain with the rich natural resources of the island, the powerful impact of climate changes much smaller than the one we are now inflicting on ourselves, and ever-shifting patterns of power and population, in a world that never stands still.

What Mithen has produced, in other words, is not only a mighty guide to the archaeological landscape of Islay, but a thrilling microcosm of human history, captured through the story of one small island. And if love for Islay’s land and people vibrates through every page of this remarkable book, then behind it there also lies something deeper; a profound concern for humanity as a whole, and a kind of prayer that despite the depth of our current crisis, the story of human survival and development told here will somehow continue, on Islay, and across the world.

Land of the Ilich: Journeys into Islay's Past, by Steven Mithen, Birlinn, 624pp, £40

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