The identification and quantification of pollen grains in peat profiles has long been employed to interpret changes in prevailing vegetation types.  However, during the 1970s the identification of fragments of invertebrate exoskeletons in peat and other Pleistocene deposits made possible the critical interpretation of past climates, habitat types and ecological relationships. Pioneer proponents of this highly skilled and revealing methodology were Russell Coope (Birmingham University), Paul Buckland and Harry Kenwood (York Archaeological Trust), Peter Skidmore (Doncaster Museum) and Maureen Girling (DoE Ancient Monuments Laboratory, London).

During the early 1970s Paul Buckland, then at Doncaster Museum, working with Maureen Girling on peat samples from one of the Somerset Levels Neolithic trackways, passed me a sample containing arachnid (spider) fragments.

Technical equipment available at Doncaster museum was rather rudimentary, so I set to work with a low powered binocular microscope illuminated by an office anglepoise lamp with a 100w light bulb, a petri dish filled with 75% ethyl alcohol and two entomological pins with which to manipulate the invertebrate fragment(s).

The peat sample eventually gave up its chitin fragment which turned out to be the cephalothorax of a Wolf spider of the family Lycosidae. These are diurnal hunting spiders which ambush insects that land on the peat surface to roost, feed, oviposit, display or bask in the sun. A primary taxonomic characteristic of the Lycosidae is that their eight simple eyes are arranged on the cephalothorax in three rows, these being 2 anterior (vertically-facing) eyes, 2 larger central forward-facing eyes (presumably affording binocular vision), below which is a row of 4 smaller forward-facing eyes.

Not only does their optical capacity enable the spiders to stalk and ambush perching insects, it gives them the ability to detect and avoid danger and to watch and presumably interpret visual signals of the sophisticated semaphore-like gesturing of the pedipalps, performed by the adult males.

In teasing the fragment from its sediment matrix, and in attempting to manoeuvre it into position for identification, the alcohol had become sufficiently heated by the 100w lightbulb that a strong convection current floated the cartwheeling cephalothorax across my field of vision. In so doing, for a moment, I found myself effectively inside the spider’s head looking out through the transparent corneas of the large central eyes.  So alarmingly clear was the view, I felt I was seeing the world as the spider had seen it. My thoughts, initially of fascination soon switched to grisly apprehension, for whatever the spider had seen through those binocular lenses would have been judged and interpreted by the mental disposition of a highly evolved obligate predator.

CAH. (2024)

P.S. For further information on the optical qualities/visual abilities of a Lycosid spider see J. Clemente et al (2010) The Journal of Arachnology 38:398–406.