Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain

Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain Francis Pryor A lively and authoritative investigation into the lives of our ancestors, based on the revolution in the field of Bronze Age archaeology which has been taking place in Norfolk and the Fenlands over the last twenty years, and in which the author has played a central role.One of the most haunting and enigmatic archaeological discoveries of recent times was the uncovering in 1998 at low tide of the so-called Seahenge off the north coast of Norfolk. This circle of wooden planks set vertically in the sand, with a large inverted tree-trunk in the middle, likened to a ghostly ‘hand reaching up from the underworld’, has now been dated back to around 2020 BC. The timbers are currently (and controversially) in the author’s safekeeping at Flag Fen.Francis Pryor and his wife (an expert in ancient wood-working and analysis) have been at the centre of Bronze Age fieldwork for nearly 30 years, piecing together the way of life of Bronze Age people, their settlement of the landscape, their religion and rituals. The famous wetland sites of the East Anglian Fens have preserved ten times the information of their dryland counterparts like Stonehenge and Avebury, in the form of pollen, leaves, wood, hair, skin and fibre found ‘pickled’ in mud and peat.Seahenge demonstrates how much Western civilisation owes to the prehistoric societies that existed in Europe in the last four millennia BC. SEAHENGE New Discoveries in Prehistoric Britain FRANCIS PRYOR Copyright (#ud2d6f5d6-55e8-5a71-8473-fc9065e89a8d) HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/) Copyright © Francis Pryor 2001 Francis Pryor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Maps and diagrams by Leslie Robinson and Rex Nicholls All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007101924 Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007380824 Version: 2016-09-15 To the memory of my father-in-law, DAVID SMITH Contents Cover (#u4d78b7aa-1064-5ac1-8805-027dd5ec21bb) Title Page (#u82be0bc8-10f7-5cc9-95cb-def4809a168c) Copyright PLATES (#u47a428ea-3ad4-5469-bcac-a1cb5f836900) MAPS AND DIAGRAMS (#u3156d25b-8ab7-5ce5-9b73-17634e3c4c7c) DATES AND PERIODS (#u75565f70-1e3d-5ee6-834c-b7ee76d07e20) PREFACE: The Quest (#u9fa57314-475a-5347-94f2-04ac74c588a9) PROLOGUE: John Lorimer’s Discovery (#u4c825fdc-da1f-5e10-b06b-6494ccf5ca60) CHAPTER ONE: Setting the Scene (#ue2c93695-a2e7-52a0-bc91-899a41ddee54) CHAPTER TWO: The Hunt is On (#udbd47cd3-3cf0-522f-8c6f-ce88184b7c05) CHAPTER THREE: A Trans-Atlantic Commuter (#ufcde3f16-210d-50c0-be92-3235f1364d98) CHAPTER FOUR: Direction and Disorientation (#u4fe61ba5-5eb4-5abd-a610-b2e9ecbd9446) CHAPTER FIVE: Gardens of Creation (#u4d1f69e3-03c2-5e6e-b48a-6897f1003111) PLATES SECTION 1 (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER SIX: Ritual Landscapes (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER SEVEN: Etton and the Origins of Ancestral Authority (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER EIGHT: Rites of Passage in a Private World (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER NINE: The Living Dead: Ancestral Spirits in the Landscape (#litres_trial_promo) PLATES SECTION 2 (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER TEN: The Wetland Revolution (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Daily Round (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER TWELVE: Between the Tides (#litres_trial_promo) PLATES SECTION 3 (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The World Turned Upside Down (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Passage of Arms (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Retrospect and Prospect (#litres_trial_promo) FURTHER READING (#litres_trial_promo) INDEX (#litres_trial_promo) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PLATES (#ulink_42129878-4ce3-5221-965f-bc4ee30f0e6a) (Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are from the author’s collection) PLATES SECTION 1 (#litres_trial_promo) The prehistoric landscape at Fengate, Peterborough. The Bronze Age fields were used by livestock farmers between 2500 and 1000 BC. Unexcavated Bronze Age droveway ditches at Fengate, showing on the stripped gravel surface as dark marks. The bank that ran alongside a Bronze Age ditch at Fengate was preserved beneath upcast from a modern drainage dyke. A minor Bronze Age double-ditched droveway being excavated at Fengate. Body of a young man buried at Fengate sometime between 3500 and 3000 BC. Gold objects from Barrow G.8 at Wilsford, Wiltshire (2000–1800 BC). (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society) Gold grave-goods from a barrow at Little Cressingham, Norfolk (2000–1800 BC). (Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service) Sheet-gold cape found at Mold, Flintshire, Wales in 1833. It covered a body which lay under a cairn in a gravel pit (2000–1800 BC). (British Museum) The Carnac alignments, erected near the coast in Brittany during the Late Neolithic period, around 3500 to 2500 BC (The Ancient Art & Architecture Collection) The aerial photograph which first revealed the faint cropmarks of the Etton causewayed enclosure (3800 BC). (Photo: S.J. Upex) Corn-grinding stone, or quern, buried on-edge in the Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Etton (3800 BC). Aerial photograph taken by J.K. St Joseph in July 1951, showing cropmarks south of Maxey church, Cambridgeshire. (© Crown Copyright 1951/MOD. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) The immediate effects of de-watering on waterlogged Neolithic wood (3800 BC) at Etton. The base of a Bronze Age notched log ladder (1000 BC) found at the bottom of a large quarry pit at Fengate. The notched log ladder from the Fengate quarry pit. A notched log ladder in the courtyard of a disused Tibetan Buddhist temple in the Himalayas north of Kathmandu, Nepal. (Photo: Felix Pryor) Reconstruction of the first Bronze Age roundhouse (c.1500 BC) to be found at Fengate. Skeleton of a young woman found at Fengate and radiocarbon dated to 3030–2500 BC. Bronze Age weapons (1300–900 BC) from Flag Fen. Bronze Age wheel found at Flag Fen, dating to about 1300 BC. Middle Bronze Age stone roadway (1200–1300 BC) at Yarnton, Oxfordshire. Clothes of a young Middle Bronze Age woman (1400–1200 BC) found in a barrow at Egtved Farm in southern Jutland, Denmark. (Danish National Museum) PLATES SECTION 2 (#litres_trial_promo) John Lorimer holds the bronze axe that started the Seahenge saga. A view along the Holme-next-the-Sea peat beds at low tide, autumn 1998, showing the timber circle. The team from the Norfolk Archaeological Unit start working on the ground-plan of the Seahenge timbers. A close-up of the post circle, showing the eroded and damaged state of the timbers. The initial exploratory trench within the circle of timbers, autumn 1988. Part of the inverted oak tree exposed by the excavation. A post being prepared for removal. The team’s soil scientist, Dr Fran Green, records the precise position of sample tins placed in the section on either side of a post. A group of Druids occupy the central tree in an attempt to prevent its removal. PLATES SECTION 3 (#litres_trial_promo) Sheets of foam being attached to the central tree to cushion the straps which would be used to lift it. The lifting of the central oak tree. The tree trunk was carefully checked when clear of the ground, in case any votive offering or other unexpected find might still be adhering to it. Members of the Norfolk Archaeological Unit preparing to lift the final two timbers of the Seahenge circle. The central tree in a shallow water bath at Flag Fen. The flat underside of the central oak tree was found to be covered with axe-marks, believed to be the earliest left by a metal tool yet found in Britain. One of the towing loops, still with honeysuckle rope in place, is also visible. (Photo: F. Pryor. Courtesy of English Heritage) One of the Seahenge timbers being carried to the washing tanks at Flag Fen. Wide axe-marks, similar to those on the central oak tree, were also found on the lower, chopped ends of the oak posts of the timber circle. (Photo: F. Pryor. Courtesy of English Heritage) The freshly de-barked oak-tree stump with one of the two towing loops and a length of twisted honeysuckle rope ready for the reconstruction of a full-size replica of Seahenge by Channel 4’s Time Team. The Time Team reconstruction reaches a critical stage, with the oak tree poised above the hole dug to receive it. The roots of the central oak are levered upwards, and the two-ton tree drops into position. The tree is manhandled upright. Aerial view taken during the final stages of the reconstruction. The interior during the reconstruction. Excavators working on the Bronze Age religious site at Flag Fen. An archaeologist reveals part of a wooden axle which had been jammed between two large posts at Flag Fen. The oak axle from Flag Fen (1200–1300 BC), the oldest known axle found in Britain. Objects thrown into the waters around the Flag Fen posts as offerings to the gods and ancestors. A later Iron Age village at Cat’s Water, Fengate, dating to the final three centuries BC. MAPS AND DIAGRAMS (#ulink_0a257b3a-3193-558d-b76c-d36cb4f6d7ad) The Fens (#litres_trial_promo) The Fengate Bronze Age fields (#litres_trial_promo) Excavated ground plan of a Bronze Age roundhouse at Fengate (#litres_trial_promo) Ground plan of the Fengate Neolithic ‘house’, or mortuary structure (#litres_trial_promo) Ground plan of Fengate Site 11, showing the position of archaeological trenches (#litres_trial_promo) Ground plan of the Neolithic mortuary structure at Fengate discovered in 1997 by the Cambridge University archaeological team (#litres_trial_promo) The main features of the Avebury ritual landscape (#litres_trial_promo) Ground plan of the causewayed ditches at Windmill Hill, Avebury (#litres_trial_promo) The main features of the Stonehenge ritual landscape (#litres_trial_promo) Simplified plan of Stonehenge, Phases 1–3 (#litres_trial_promo) The ritual landscape around Carnac, Brittany (#litres_trial_promo) Cropmarks revealed by air photography near the village of Maxey, Cambridgeshire (#litres_trial_promo) Ground plan of the causewayed enclosure at Etton, near Maxey (#litres_trial_promo) Ground plan of the small henge, with two nested ‘mini-henges’, at Fengate (#litres_trial_promo) Bronze Age fields revealed by air photography at West Deeping, near Maxey (#litres_trial_promo) A group of ‘mini-henges’ excavated by Gavin Simpson at Maxey, 1965–66 (#litres_trial_promo) Decorated shaman’s baton from the Maxey ‘mini-henges’ (#litres_trial_promo) A complex Later Neolithic henge (Etton Landscape Site 2), showing a succession of ditches, pits and post-holes, from the Etton/Maxey ritual landscape (#litres_trial_promo) The Maxey Great Henge complex (#litres_trial_promo) The oval barrow in the entranceway to the Great Henge at Maxey (#litres_trial_promo) Schematic cross-section through features of the Maxey Great Henge, showing phases of construction and destruction (#litres_trial_promo) Later Bronze Age wheel-ruts at Welland Bank Quarry, south Lincolnshire (#litres_trial_promo) Holme-next-the-Sea and the surrounding area (#litres_trial_promo) Plan of Holme timber circle (Source: Norfolk Archaeological Unit) (#litres_trial_promo) The forked double posts (numbers 35 and 37) that formed the narrow entrance to Seahenge (#litres_trial_promo) The enigmatic Street House ‘Wossit’, Yorkshire (#litres_trial_promo) Ground plan of a barrow at Whittlesey, near Peterborough (courtesy of Cambridge University Archaeological Unit) (#litres_trial_promo) Fengate and Flag Fen basin, showing the course of the Bronze Age post alignment and timber platform (#litres_trial_promo) DATES AND PERIODS (#ulink_f925aef1-85d9-5cf2-8b27-961decdd6c17) PREFACE The Quest (#ulink_f6ce7118-288e-55be-801d-2df95340a92c) I DECIDED to write a book on prehistoric religion about two years before the discovery in spring 1998 of the site which has since become widely known as ‘Seahenge’. My original aim was to demystify the subject, to blow away the fog of romance which so often appears when it is raised. I wanted to show how ancient shrines such as Avebury and Stonehenge were made and used by people who were like ourselves. Although they constructed places of worship that seem remote, alien and strange to us, they themselves were none of those things. I was fascinated by the outward form – the appearance – of their religion. Why, for example, did circles play such an important role? Why were offerings placed in the ground? And why were many sites placed within the fields and lanes of the working countryside, while others were hidden away in inaccessible and remote places? We can only attempt to answer these questions if we try to understand the social context of these ancient beliefs; and to do that, we must examine the evidence provided by archaeology. I also wanted to write about the way in which modern archaeologists can study discarded prehistoric rubbish, long-lost objects and the fragmentary remains of ancient places to recreate the way people thought and behaved. Like fictional detectives, we make deductions from the slightest of clues; but today, increasingly, we go further than that: we try to understand the motives that drove people in the past to construct great monuments like Stonehenge, or small shrines like Seahenge. Almost daily, new scientific techniques are removing the ties that once restricted our imaginations. But these new freedoms carry with them new responsibilities. It’s becoming easier to sound authoritative, simply by quoting evidence uncovered by science. To reveal a precise date through some new wonder-technique is one thing, but it is quite another to understand why something happened in the past. In this book I want to make a start at answering some of those why questions. The practice of religion has always happened in the here and now, and I wanted my book to be set in a real prehistoric world, in which children were born and educated, families farmed the land, and law and order prevailed – a world which has been rapidly revealed by excavation in the 1970s and subsequent decades. I decided to use the discoveries made on my own particular excavations to colour the picture I wanted to paint. My research into British prehistory has been a long quest. It began in 1971 when I directed an eight-year excavation at Fengate, near Peterborough. Fengate is one of the best-known sites in British prehistory. It was continuously occupied for four thousand years, from Neolithic to Roman times, and possesses an extraordinarily diverse succession of settlements, field systems, barrows and burials. After Fengate I turned my attention to two major religious centres: the Bronze Age henges and other shrines at Maxey in Cambridgeshire and the partially waterlogged Neolithic ritual enclosure at nearby Etton. Etton was one of the earliest sites of its type yet found in Britain, and is certainly the best preserved. Then, in 1982, I discovered the waterlogged timbers of what is probably the largest Bronze Age religious site in Europe, at Flag Fen, on the outskirts of Peterborough. I have been working there ever since. These are major excavations and they have produced a wealth of material, not to mention eight volumes of scholarly research. It is, however, hard to extract the essential narrative thread from this sea of published detail. Moreover, the story emerged only slowly as the research progressed – and this was necessarily at a measured, academic pace. My intention in this book is to tell that tale in a way which reflects, I hope, some of the excitement of the quest itself. I had scarcely begun putting pen to paper when I learned about the timber circle which had been discovered on the beach at Holme-next-the-Sea on the Norfolk coast, just over half an hour’s drive from where I live. It was an extraordinary coincidence, and one I couldn’t possibly ignore. The discovery created enormous public interest, excitement and indeed controversy. It was certainly remarkable, but to those of us who have been working in the area, it was not unexpected. Large parts of the coastline of eastern England are constantly being eroded by the waves, and significant prehistoric finds are regularly exposed there. Although Seahenge’s near-perfect state of preservation made it unique, as a small wooden shrine it was not out of the ordinary. Indeed, I myself have seen and dug several like it. This was one of the things that made it supremely important, as it meant that it could be placed within a known sequence of development. We knew approximately where it fitted both chronologically and in the lives of Early Bronze Age communities. We also knew what it may have signified to them. Or rather, we thought we did. But when we started to excavate and study the timbers, we were wholly unprepared for what we actually encountered. SEAHENGE COMES HOME The Seahenge excavations happened in 1999 and I wrote this book during the following year. While I was writing my wife Maisie Taylor would leave home every morning after breakfast, allowing me to do the washing-up, and would then drive the twenty-two miles to Flag Fen, where she would work away at the Seahenge timbers which were stored in tanks there. By this time, thank Heavens, the protestors and tabloid press had lost interest. After a few months, English heritage decided to have the timbers conserved by freeze-drying and when Maisie had finished with them they were taken to Wales where they were treated at the Mary Rose Trust’s laboratories. This process was completed early in 2007 and the timbers were then sent to King’s Lynn Museum, where money had been found for a permanent display in the main gallery. That display opened in February 2008 and it really is quite exceptionally good. Maisie and other archaeologists have been working with the design team closely and huge efforts have been made to get every possible detail correct. The new display gives a wonderful impression of what the site would have looked like in the Early Bronze Age, not on the beach, but in a damp and rather mysterious back-swamp behind the coastal dunes. Scientific research has also been pressing ahead and, with admirable promptness, the full academic report appeared in 2003. (#ulink_9c377b50-dd8c-5d93-be40-63e3068b19e1) This report confirmed that the site was indeed constructed in the spring or early summer of the year 2049 BC. It also showed that Seahenge was far more complex than a simple timber circle. The central inverted tree was inserted first. Shortly afterwards a forked timber was placed to the south-west (towards the mid-winter setting sun). The forks formed a narrow gap or entrance into the planned circle. Next a screen of ten large timbers, all cut from the central tree, was placed directly opposite the fork, to the north-east. The ‘circle’ was then laid out in a series of ten straight or slightly curved panels. Within this arrangement were additional subtleties. Most of the posts had been driven into the ground with their bark facing away from the circle, like the trunk of a vast tree. But a few had been deliberately set the other way around. We don’t know why this was, but it seems to have been something that happened as part of the initial laying-out. One of the biggest surprises came when Maisie studied the axe-marks on the timbers. She measured every single one and discovered that over fifty axes had been used – and this just a few centuries into the Bronze Age, when all believed that bronze was still scarce. If fifty axes had indeed been used, that probably means an absolute minimum of fifty people. Allow for friends and families, and the number of folk on that dune in north Norfolk would probably have been closer to two hundred and fifty. It would have been quite an occasion! So last year the timbers came back home to Norfolk. The King’s Lynn Museum staff have finished the long job of preparing them for display. They also managed to raise money from the National Lottery and other donors to have a brand new gallery built to hold them. I’ve seen all the drawings and computer-generated images and it really is a superb recreation. It’s not just about accuracy; it’s also about atmosphere and what it would have felt like to have been just behind those coastal sand dunes in the early summer of 2049 BC. I am convinced that the people who built Seahenge would find its twenty-first century resting place respectful, yet mysterious – and welcoming. Francis Pryor July 2008 * (#ulink_d26a24f5-1883-555a-b60b-57264ade27e7) Mark Brennand and Maisie Taylor, ‘The Survey and Excavation of a Bronze Age Timber Circle at Holme-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, 1998-9’ Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Vol.69, 2003, pp. 1-84 PROLOGUE John Lorimer’s Discovery (#ulink_4d0c0288-c676-511c-9bbe-76ac87bc951b) IT WAS EARLY SPRING, 1998, on the south side of the Wash in north-west Norfolk. John Lorimer and his brother-in-law Gary took the path through the pine woods, climbed up the dunes and stood at the top to catch their breath. The tide was now well on its way out, and the peat beds, which ran along the beach midway between high and low tide, were just beginning to be exposed. Between them John and Gary held a brand-new shrimping net, and today was to be its first outing. It was home-made, but sturdy and built to last. They knew it would be futile to test the net until the tide had retreated beyond the peat beds, as only then would the seabed be smooth enough to allow them to drag it through the water, so they decided instead to go crabbing and to test the net in an hour or so. At least that way they’d have something to take home for tea. Just beyond the beach, behind a coastal barrier of dunes, was Holme-next-the-Sea Nature Reserve. It was a land of birds and dunes, of thin wiry grasses, orchids and Scots pines. And then of course there was the wind. It was always with you at Holme. Sometimes you thought it had dropped entirely, and that the air was truly still. Then you looked at the ground and saw that the blades of grass had never stopped nodding. It was as if someone had just left the room and had shut the door firmly behind them. There were little swirling drafts – not wind, not even a light breeze. Other times, when the weather came from off the Wash, the gales tore at the dunes with a destructive force that even a modern army couldn’t match. Coastal defences were ripped up. I have seen the aftermath of a fierce storm, when wire, fencing, young trees and posts had been hurled inland. In just two hours, a whole summer’s patient dunes-conservation programme could be reduced to a useless, tangled mess. The Nature Reserve Warden, Gary Hibberd, and his wife Alison lived in The Firs, a large, late-Victorian house that had been built as part of a speculative venture which never got off the ground sometime around the turn of the century. One of the ground-floor rooms had been converted into a small shop and Visitor Centre, and Gary would chalk up a list of rare birds that could currently be seen in the reserve. The pine trees that were presumably planted when The Firs was built covered the dunes between the house and the beach. They were mainly Corsican pines, a more vigorous species than our native Scots pine and better able to cope with the fierce conditions of this coast. They grew particularly well along the Holme dunes. John and Gary knew that the best crabs were to be found lurking in dark nooks and crannies below the shelves of peat. John was walking in the shallow water along the edge of the peat. Before he’d even bent down to feel for a crab, his eye was suddenly taken by something green and metallic in the mud. Without thinking, he picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It wasn’t iron, he knew that. Was it brass? Probably. In which case it could have been a fitting – perhaps part of a porthole, or something from off the bridge – from the old wreck behind him, which he could see was just beginning to emerge from the waves. Still, he thought, it doesn’t exactly look brassy. He had seen pieces off wrecks before, and somehow this wasn’t right: it was more coppery, and with a strange, red-gold surface sheen. Gary saw John standing slightly bent forward, with furrowed brows, turning the thing over and over in his hands, and wandered across to see what he’d found. John was always collecting things from off the beach. He was a regular jackdaw. His house a few miles away at North Creek was stuffed full of treasures: shells, blanched bones, driftwood, weird-shaped stones, pieces from wrecks. If he found anything attractive, John would want to take it home. Gary looked at the piece of metal, shook his head and agreed it was probably something from the wreck. But they had work to do, so they thought no more about it. True to his jackdaw instincts, John slipped it into his back pocket. By now the tide had retreated well beyond the peat, and the timbers of the wreck were fully visible, surrounded by huge expanses of smooth, damp sand. Together John and Gary carried the net out into the shallow water, just above knee-depth. Then they tested it. It worked. In fact it worked well, and is in regular use to this day. John and his wife Jacqui are special-needs workers, who look after children with particular problems. John has found that taking his charges out in the mini-bus for a trip to the beach can do wonders for them. But they must have something useful to do when they get there, or they soon get bored, and mischief is never far behind. Towing a shrimping net and then sorting through the catch is ideal. And once the work’s over, the small brown shrimps are delicious for tea. During the next four weeks, John visited Holme beach regularly, seeking crabs and shrimp. He would often return to the spot where he had found the metal object, which he was becoming increasingly convinced had nothing to do with the wreck. The more he looked at it, the more certain he was that it was an axe. With its crescent-shaped blade, he reasoned, it couldn’t be anything else. It was a week or two after finding the object that he first noticed a large tree-trunk, with two strange-looking branches, like the stumps of amputated arms. It was close to the spot where he’d made his discovery, and was the same colour as the peat beds around it. But it looked odd. As he told me later, he couldn’t put his finger on why it looked so strange, but it did. Just like the metal object, there was a simple explanation, but it didn’t seem to apply. Holme beach was the site of a prehistoric ‘forest bed’ of tree stumps. And that’s what everybody said: his odd-looking stump was just part of the old forest. But John wasn’t happy with that explanation. The peat didn’t actually touch or cover the strange stump, but stopped three or four paces short of it. John noticed that as the tide swirled around it, the water wore the sand and mud from around the trunk. Soon a natural trench began to form, and he was able to feel well down into the grey mud that lay directly below the beach sand into which the tree was embedded. He knew that not even the deepest roots of the forest trees went down this far. The weeks passed, and John couldn’t stop thinking about that peculiar metal object that now sat on the mantelpiece at home. The more he looked at it, the more he became convinced that it had nothing to do with the wreck, which was less than a century old – the remains of a freighter that used to ply a regular route from Norway to King’s Lynn, carrying ice. Besides, he knew what a ship’s fire-fighting axes looked like, and this bore no resemblance to them. One evening he took it down from the shelf and examined it, long and closely. Various things struck him as odd: the clear casting line where two moulds had once joined together; signs of hammering at one end, and at the other the smoothly crescentic cutting edge. It was certainly an axe, but it wasn’t like any axe he had ever used. For a start, there was no hole for a shaft. And besides, it was made from bronze or brass, not from steel. Then he had a bright idea. A friend of his in Fakenham was a keen metal-detectorist, and took all the magazines. Maybe he’d know what it was. The next day found John in Fakenham with a cup of tea and surrounded by dozens of magazines. He leafed through them. There were stories about horse brasses, about Roman coins, about merchants’ tokens, about buckles, about everything under the sun – except axes. Then he struck lucky: in an article about Bronze Age metalwork he found a picture of a three-thousand-year-old bronze axe that looked fairly similar to his. It was by no means identical, but it was certainly close enough to set his mind racing. In the days that followed he couldn’t let the matter rest. Again and again he thought, if it was a Bronze Age axe, then how on earth did it get there? Was it from an ancient wreck, or what? The more he pondered, the more curious he became. Eventually he phoned the Castle Museum at Norwich and described the object. The voice at the other end sounded interested. Could he bring it round to them? The axe was at the Castle Museum for about four weeks. They were in no doubt that it was Bronze Age, and had been made around 1200 BC. They couldn’t find a local axe in their collections that was anything like it. Their best guess was that it may have been made in Ireland. While he waited to hear from the museum, John returned to Holme beach several times. He noticed that the tide was slowly wearing away the surface around the strange stump. Then one day, a few feet away, he spotted the top of another stump. The next day he found another one. And then another. By the end of the week he could clearly discern a circle of stumps around the much larger central tree. The stumps had been hidden below the sand and mud, and as the tides swirled around the central tree they were gradually being exposed to the air. John studied the smaller stumps closely. The circle was positioned on the seaward side of the peat beds; close to them, but not beneath them. Were they all tree stumps from a drowned forest? He knew that was the explanation for most of the wood found on the beach. But a circle? How could that be natural? Surely that had to be man-made? By now John knew he had found something important. But how could he get somebody ‘out there’ interested? He lost no opportunity to talk about his discovery, but nobody seemed to take him seriously. John and his axe and his stumps. He began to feel that people were starting to laugh about him behind his back. Eventually someone came out from the museum to have a look at John’s circle. The expert pronounced that it was probably a fish trap or a salt pan, then walked over to the old wreck and spent the rest of the afternoon photographing that. John told me later he could have exploded with frustration. In August, two weeks after the visit from the museum official, John received a letter from him in which he was told that, far from being unimportant, his find was causing great interest in the museum world. Next, he was contacted by Mark Brennand and Dr Bill Boismier, two members of the Norfolk Archaeological Unit, the team of archaeologists whose job was to investigate new discoveries in the county. They came to Holme beach to have a look, and John showed them the circle of stumps and the strange-looking tree at their centre. Mark and Bill took one look and stood back in silence, thunderstruck. Words seemed superfluous. John was desperate to know more, but Bill wasn’t willing to commit himself. A man of few words at the best of times, he was not going to raise any false hopes at this stage. His field of expertise was the effects of tillage processes on artefact distributions in the ploughzone. Tillage processes had nothing to do with prehistoric religion, but in their hearts Bill and Mark knew what that circle of ‘stumps’ was. And it certainly wasn’t something as mundane as a fish trap or salt pan. As they drove back to the Unit, they could talk of nothing else. Was it really what they both thought? Could it be? They must get some further opinions. That evening, the phone lines from the Norfolk Archaeological Unit hummed. CHAPTER ONE Setting the Scene (#ulink_d0307a71-0262-5e17-8468-6696aeae9e46) ARCHAEOLOGY IS ABOUT human life in the past, but in my experience it isn’t as simple as that. Very often it’s about the life one is living in the present, too. I’ve no idea how it happens – and I know from talking to friends and colleagues that others have experienced this as well – but in some strange way archaeological discoveries happen that are appropriate to the way one is thinking at a given time. When, for example, I started my professional life in 1971, I excavated a well-known site at Fengate, on the eastern side of Peterborough. Here I began to discover details of the way prehistoric people organised their daily lives. This suited me fine, as I was then concerned with practical things too, such as how to organise a large excavation, how to assemble coherent published reports, and so on. About ten years later, I became more interested in the way people thought, and how they ordered their religious and social lives. And what happened? I found myself working in a prehistoric landscape strewn with religious sites, near a small village in Cambridgeshire called Maxey. This more than whetted my appetite for ideology and the afterlife. I was treated to both in ample measure when I then excavated a large Neolithic ceremonial centre at another small village called Etton, near Maxey. But still I wanted more. And it was then, in 1982, that I had the good fortune to discover the extraordinary Bronze Age religious site at Flag Fen, near Peterborough. Flag Fen is a wonderfully rich and complex site, and understanding it – or rather, trying to understand it – has stretched my imagination to the limits, and has been an invigorating and rigorous (although sometimes very frustrating) challenge. It was while I was deeply immersed in Flag Fen in 1998 that John Lorimer reported his remarkable discovery on Holme beach. And then things began to fall into place, and I realised I had to step back from Flag Fen. I was forced to appreciate that prehistory is best understood as an unfolding, continuing story. It is not about individual sites, however fascinating they might be, but is a saga of human beings, and the different ways they chose to cope with their own particular challenges. The process of archaeological discovery has been deeply enmeshed with my professional life, and I don’t see how the two can be disentangled. So I won’t attempt the impossible, but will tell the tale as it unfolded around me, blow by blow. My own life and my research life will be part of the same story. But first I must turn the clock back to the final years of my childhood, when the wonders of archaeology were first revealed to me. It was an afternoon that will live with me forever. The time was autumn, the year 1959, and the place Eton College. There was a warm, dusty smell to the wood-panelled room. A smell I have grown to love: of old books and maps, field notes, brown paper bags, Indian ink, pottery and flint tools. It’s a musty, peaceful sort of smell. A smell that says the world is in proportion. Perhaps it is the atmosphere of antiquity – I don’t know. But whatever it was, it pervaded the Eton College Myers Museum of Egyptology through and through. George Tait was a senior master, and in the late fifties he was also Curator of the Myers Museum, which was housed in a purpose-built wing at the rear of School Hall. One day I found him working on several heaps of papers, which lay across the big central table and cascaded down to the floor by way of three chairs, an old orange crate and something that had once resembled a foot-stool. He could see I was at a loose end. My head was bandaged from a football injury I had received the day before, and the prospect of a tedious afternoon stretched before me. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you something to sit on.’ He cleared away the papers from one of the chairs, then said, ‘I’ve got something over here that may interest you.’ After a moment or two, he reappeared holding two huge volumes, which he placed on top of the papers already on the table in front of me. I was amazed. The two enormous tomes were for me? George Tait returned to his side of the table and lit his formidable pipe. It was a vast smoking machine with a long, straight stalk and a furnace-like bowl, doubtless hewn from timbers drawn from a mummy’s tomb. Into this he stuffed leaves picked from plants grown in his own garden. The dense clouds of smoke smelled just like an autumn bonfire, and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the distinctive aroma of tobacco. Soon my eyes were running freely. But George puffed on regardless, poring over his papers. He was miles away. I started to read. I had been given Howard Carter’s account of the discovery and excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. It was an inspired choice, and I soon found myself completely gripped by the story of the discovery of the boy king’s mummified body and the fabulous treasures which surrounded him. As I read, I was there, amidst the sands of the Nile and the eerie, cool, dry darkness of the tomb. After that day I made many visits to the Myers Museum and its larger-than-life curator. But although George Tait had a huge, commanding and at times stern presence, he was a gentle teacher, and was particularly good at helping his pupils grasp difficult concepts. Thanks to him, I grasped the basic principles of the subject that would soon form the centre of my life. Tait’s archaeology was about people and the way they had lived. It was not about treasures and valuable finds, unless they could shed light on the way ancient communities behaved. Above all else, he explained that archaeology is a methodical discipline: that although Howard Carter made all those extraordinary discoveries in the tomb, he also spent days and days preparing a minute catalogue of his discoveries. He pointed out that Carter was at pains to draw meticulous plans of where everything was found. It took me some time to realise why such care was so crucially important. With hindsight, Tait’s improvised explanation worked well. ‘Just suppose,’ he said, ‘that you’re an archaeologist working two thousand years from now. You discover a room, and in it are two armchairs and a mysterious polished wooden box with a thick glass sheet on one side of it. You have absolutely no idea what this box was used for. Maybe it was worshipped? Maybe it was used to cook with? Who knows? So you decide to seek the help of other archaeologists. Now what do you do?’ ‘I send them a list of what I’ve found,’ I suggested, ‘and I describe the chairs and the shiny wooden box as closely as I can.’ It was feeble, but I couldn’t think of a more sensible answer. ‘I doubt if they’d be any the wiser. Would you be?’ I had to admit I wouldn’t. ‘But if you included a sketched plan of the way the armchairs were arranged, how they faced the glassy side of the polished wooden box, then they might work out that the box was a television set.’ He had taught me an important archaeological lesson. Things only make sense in terms of the way they relate to other things. Later I was to learn that archaeologists refer to these inter-relationships as context. To an archaeologist nothing matters so much as context. Context is all. Without context, a find is just a find, a dead object; but with context it comes alive. My ‘gap’ year out of school in 1963, on what was then known as the Digging Circuit, taught me a great deal about life. Some of the Circuit diggers were perfectly happy to stay as they were. They moved from one dig to another, living in winter squats, tents in summer, or ramshackle caravans. One or two had drink or drug problems, and I soon realised that a high proportion of them were using the Circuit as a retreat from the rat-race. Some of these people were quite sad, but they nearly all shared a belief in what they were doing. I suppose, in the final analysis, that vocation had taken the place of self-esteem, which for many of them had reached a low ebb. Today, things have changed for the better. For a start, most diggers have a professional qualification, or are in the process of earning one. All are vastly better paid than they were in the early sixties. Site conditions have improved enormously, too: there are self-contained mobile toilets, safety clothing and warm site accommodation. Better pay also means that tents are only used in summer, and then by choice, not of necessity. But despite all these improvements, the life of a professional field archaeologist is still hard. Job security is poor, and most people spend large parts of their lives moving from dig to dig all over the country, and abroad. And then there’s the British climate. As a result of my afternoons with George Tait at the Myers Museum, I had decided to study archaeology at Cambridge. If you can’t think about broad issues at university, then you’ll never think about them. In our lectures, my fellow students and I learned what George Tait had drummed into me: that archaeology is the study of the past, based on material evidence – pottery, flints and scientific information – rather than on written documents alone (the province of history). We also learned that archaeology is an effective way of studying broad changes through time – topics like, for example, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or the origins of farming. It’s less good at examining historical events, such as the Norman Conquest – a topic like that is best handled by historians, or by historians and archaeologists working closely together. In my first year at Cambridge, the Professor of Archaeology was a great man: Grahame, later Sir Grahame, Clark. Grahame was a pioneer of what is today called environmental archaeology. As we shall see, it will play a major role in our quest. With his friend the botanist Sir Harry Godwin, Grahame was able to paint an extraordinarily vivid picture of life just after the last great Ice Age, about seven thousand years ago. He relied to a great extent on Sir Harry’s work on the pollen grains and seeds preserved within the peats found at various sites in southern Britain. This botanical research, together with work on preserved bones, insects and shells, provided the evidence they needed to reconstruct what the ancient countryside would have looked like. It showed that nine thousand years ago the East Anglian countryside consisted of stands of birch trees and pools of open water, and that the fauna included fish, herons and other birds, eels and beavers. On the drier land were large oak forests in which deer, wild boar and bear roamed freely. I would never pretend to be a scientist, or even a scientific archaeologist, but I can understand what scientists are saying, and I know enough to ask them questions in their own language. It was not difficult for me to decide, in my first year at university, that this broadly environmental approach would be my own style of work. All my subsequent research has been carried out in a closely-knit team; it’s the only way to do good environmental archaeology. Nowadays my role would be described as ‘Team Leader’. My job is to make sense of the team’s results when we come to write the final report; it is up to me to achieve compromise when there are strong differences between individuals, and to see that the team runs smoothly and happily. It’s a great job, and I love doing it. In my opinion it’s far and away the most successful and satisfying sort of archaeology. Grahame Clark retired from teaching while I was a student, and he was succeeded by Professor Glyn Daniel. They were as unlike as any two archaeologists could possibly be. It used to be fashionable in certain circles to patronise Glyn Daniel. He was an archaeologist, but he was also a supremely successful populariser of the subject. No other archaeologist has ever been voted ‘TV Personality of the Year’, an accolade he earned by chairing the hugely successful BBC quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? At his best, Glyn was a superb lecturer, and he managed to inspire me with a love of his own favourite period, the Neolithic (or New Stone Age), which I have never lost. Everything that ever mattered seems to have originated in the Neolithic Age. All of life and death is there. I know Neolithic folk have been dead for nearly five thousand years, but as far as I’m concerned they could have died yesterday. My passion for the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (which in social and cultural terms is much the same thing) is directly due to Glyn’s inspiration. Glyn taught a course on the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages at Cambridge. The dates of the various periods tend to wander somewhat, as research progresses, but the Neolithic comes first, and in Britain lasted from about 5000 to 2700 BC. It was followed by the Bronze Age (roughly 2700 to 700 BC). The Iron Age was the final prehistoric period, which extended from the close of the Bronze Age to the Roman Conquest of Britain in AD 43. Glyn’s course was known to the university authorities as NBI. Perhaps predictably to the students, it was of ‘No Bloody Interest’. I chose not to study the other option of Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon, or IRA – which for some reason never seemed to acquire a student name. I remember being puzzled by archaeologists’ periods. Were Neolithic people aware when they woke up on the first morning of 2700 BC that they were entering the Bronze Age? Of course not. The Ages were invented by some inspired Danish archaeologists, working on museum collections in the last century. They came up with the Three-Age System (Stone followed by Bronze and then Iron) in the first instance simply as a way of ordering their collections. Only later did it gradually acquire a wider significance. At university we were taught that the Three-Age System would soon be a thing of the past, to be replaced by the flood of radiocarbon dates that were then just beginning to arrive. They have indeed had a profound effect on our understanding of the past, but I can see no consistent evidence that the old Three-Age labels are actually being replaced. I think they’ll be with us for a long time yet. At Cambridge, British archaeology was taught in a rather rigid framework, or straitjacket, of ‘cultures’. In theory, ‘cultures’ were meant to be synonymous with actual communities of people – tribes or confederations of tribes. But in reality ‘cultures’ were no more and no less than types of pottery. So we were taught about the Beaker Culture or the Grooved Ware Culture, and I have to say I found it extremely difficult to imagine the actual people lurking behind these arcane concepts. The various ‘cultures’ were accompanied by long lists of sites, where the particular types of pottery which were believed to be characteristic of them were found. The lists were, in turn, accompanied by maps, covered with dots and arrows which purported to show how these people/pots moved around Europe. It was all extremely mystifying, and I remember wondering why on earth these people wanted to move around all the time. It seemed, and indeed it still seems, an odd way to behave. There was a third lecturer at Cambridge who was to have a very profound influence on my subsequent career, partly because, like me, he is a practical, down-to-earth person. He comes from Canada, where I spent much time during my formative years as a field archaeologist. John Coles is remarkable because he has turned his hand to numerous types and styles of archaeology. His doctoral research was on Scottish Bronze Age metalwork, but he is also, or has been, an authority on experimental archaeology, Scandinavian Bronze Age rock carvings, the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age) and wetland archaeology, for which he is perhaps best known. In the mid and later sixties John was doing far more than his fair share of lectures in the Archaeology Department, and he supervised me in a variety of topics. I don’t think I was a very good pupil towards the end of my time at university, because I couldn’t see that there was a future for me in the subject. Archaeological jobs were extremely scarce, and were invariably snapped up by people with good first-class degrees. I knew I stood little chance against that sort of competition. But John persisted, and somehow he managed to cram sufficient knowledge into my skull to earn me a decent enough honours degree. I don’t want to be unfair to other lecturers in the department, but John seemed unusual in that his head was not stuck in the clouds for most of the time. He was then working in the peatland of the Somerset Levels, and his lecture slides were not just of disembodied artefacts and distribution maps. Instead, he showed us photographs of people with muddy hands, digging trackways in wet peat, or felling trees with flint axes, or wrestling with hazel wattles while reconstructing prehistoric hurdles. Frankly, his lectures were almost the only thing that kept my flickering flame of interest in the subject alive. Archaeology in the mid-sixties was superficially calm. Old ideas, such as the pottery-based ‘cultures’, still just managed to hold on, but a tide of new thinking and new scientific techniques was about to rip through the old order. The subject would never be the same again. As has been mentioned, one of the most profound instruments of change was radiocarbon dating. Although I’m now older and wiser, I still find it almost magical that one can take a piece of bone or charcoal, pop it into a machine for a few days and then be told how old it is – to within, say, fifty years. And if you’re lucky enough to have a decent-sized sample (a teacupful of charcoal, say) it will only cost about ?200. Before Willard F. Libby, a chemist at Chicago University, invented radiocarbon dating in 1949, archaeologists researching in remote places (such as Britain) had to work almost blind. If they wanted to date something – let us say a Neolithic stone-built tomb – they had to find similar tombs elsewhere across Europe, until eventually they reached the well-dated world of the eastern Mediterranean. In areas such as the Aegean it was believed that the dates were more secure, because actual written records – such as the famous Linear B script of Crete and Greece – extended back as far as 1400 BC. These dates may well have been more secure, but the problem didn’t lie there. It lay in the chain of false – or perhaps more truly forced – reasoning that linked the eastern Mediterranean to more peripheral areas. Radiocarbon was to expose this ruthlessly. The idea behind radiocarbon dating is quite straightforward. Libby was researching into cosmic radiation – the process whereby the earth’s outer atmosphere is constantly bombarded by sub-atomic particles. This produces radioactive carbon, known as carbon-14. Carbon-14 is unstable and is constantly breaking down, but at a known and uniform rate: a gramme of carbon-14 will be half broken-down after 5,730 years, three-quarters broken down in twice that time (11,460 years), and so on. Libby’s breakthrough was to link this process to living things, and thence to time itself. Carbon-14 is present in the earth’s atmosphere – in the air we all breathe – in the form of the gas carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide through their leaves, plant-eating animals eat the leaves, and carnivores, in turn, eat the plant-eating animals. So all plants and animals – even vegetarians – absorb carbon-14 while they are alive. As soon as they die they stop taking it in; and, far more importantly for archaeology, the carbon-14 in their bodies – in their bones, their wood or whatever – starts to break down. So by measuring the amounts of carbon-14 in a bone, or piece of charcoal, fragment of cloth or peat, it is possible to estimate its age very accurately. But there are problems. First of all, cosmic radiation has not been at a uniform rate, as Libby at first believed. Sunspots and solar flares are known to cause sudden upsurges of radiation. Nuclear testing has also filled the atmosphere with unwanted and unquantifiable radiation. As if these problems weren’t enough, the quantities of radiation being measured in radiocarbon laboratories around the world are truly minute, especially in older samples. All this uncertainty means that radiocarbon dates are usually expressed in the form of a range of years, say 1700 to 2000 BC, rather than a single central spot-date like 1850 BC. There was a period of about ten years after the publication of Libby’s initial idea before any reliable datings became available. Then the pace began to hot up. By the time I was sitting my final exams, in May 1967, the early trickle had already become a flood. Today, radiocarbon dating is a completely routine process, carried out in various parts of the world hundreds of times every day. Those early radiocarbon dates got me thinking about the prehistoric past in a new way. Perhaps it was the scientific certainty they implied, the fact that radiocarbon doesn’t lie. They seemed to connect us directly to the past, and in a way removed a part of the curtain of mystery which hung between us and them – those shadowy figures of the Neolithic twilight. The new tide of radiocarbon dates produced some extraordinary results. At first, some of the dates were much earlier than archaeologists had expected. But, being human, they were loath to throw out their old ways of doing things just because some scientists told them their dates were wrong. So they pressed on regardless. Then, as the evidence accumulated around them, some conceded that they had underestimated the true age of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and that both periods seemed to have lasted roughly twice as long as was previously believed. All of this they could take: their scheme was basically right, just a bit too young and a bit compressed. They were shortly to be proved wrong. By the time I was doing the revision and research for my final degree exams, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the radiocarbon revolution was not about dates alone. Prehistory was being reassembled in a new order that would have profound effects not just on what we researched – i.e. the subject-matter of our enquiries – but on our thought-processes themselves. In Britain, America and elsewhere in the mid-1960s, archaeologists were questioning the very way they thought about archaeology. How could the processes of archaeological reasoning be improved? Most important of all, how could they be made more explicit, more open to scrutiny and review? Some felt that the new wind blowing through the subject was cold and cheerless. Myself, I found it invigorating. It was good to see the cobwebs being blown away. As a British archaeologist, working on British material, I had always felt something of a poor cousin compared with those who studied the Classical world, Egypt and the Near East. But all of that was about to change. As I realised what was happening around me, I began to feel – and it was a feeling, not a consciously worked-out idea – that British prehistory really did matter. It had its own identity and integrity. It was not a devolved by-product of someone else’s creativity, a feeble copy of something magnificent in the Aegean. No, it was well worth studying for its own sake. That was enough for me: somewhere deep inside I could detect the distant sound of a huntsman’s horn. Without knowing it, I was about to start the quest of a lifetime. CHAPTER TWO The Hunt is On (#ulink_5cb41d12-273f-5ab7-af66-a2af0550ac43) THE GREAT MEGALITHIC STRUCTURES of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe demand explanation. They simply cannot be ignored. For a start, the word itself (derived from the Greek large stones) has a semi-mystical resonance. And the sites themselves are wholly captivating. It’s impossible to pass the ‘hanging stones’ of Stonehenge, or to enter the spectacular circle of Avebury, or to walk along the mysterious stone alignments of Carnac, without wondering who built them – and why? And when? One cannot call oneself an archaeologist without having at least some knowledge of these extraordinary sites: they cry out for, and demand, explanation. And that’s what Glyn Daniel’s lectures at Cambridge provided. I’ve mentioned three of the best-known megalithic monuments, but there are thousands of others, in the Mediterranean basin, in western Spain and Portugal, right across France, all over Ireland, in north and western Scotland, in Wales and parts of England and in Holland, northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. Far and away the majority of these sites are tombs of one sort or another. Often the tombs are communal and hold (or held, as most have been robbed) the remains, or partial remains, of dozens, even hundreds of individuals. Glyn’s explanation of megalithic tombs arose naturally from the prevailing archaeological theories of his time. It was his bad luck that the mass of new radiocarbon dates showed those theories to be mostly worthless. It was my bad luck, too: the course I had opted for was now something of a non-event. Hence the great man’s uncharacteristically lacklustre lectures. It was clear to all of us – lecturer and students – that the whole point of the course had been destroyed. Glyn’s explanation of the monuments was based on the notion that the megalithic builders were initially a distinct community of people, a culture that had its origins in the eastern Mediterranean. This culture – these people – and their ideas spread westwards by two routes, through the Mediterranean via Spain to Ireland and the north, or across France to Scandinavia. England was influenced by both streams. The spread (or ‘diffusion’, to use the jargon word of the time) of megalithic culture was by no means unique. The concept of farming was also thought to have spread across Europe from the eastern Mediterranean, and there were successive waves of diffusion from central and eastern Europe involving Beaker pottery and metal-working in the Early Bronze Age, and Celts in the Early Iron Age. If all this to-ing and fro-ing really did take place, then prehistoric Europe must have been in a permanent state of turmoil – for which there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever. Today, with the possible exception of farming, most of these ‘diffusions’ are seen as at best the spread of a set of ideas, rather than the wholesale movement of people or populations. With hindsight, Glyn’s explanation could not have been otherwise. Like all European prehistorians he relied on the well-documented areas of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to provide him with the dates he needed for his far-flung monuments. This method of dating held within it the seeds of its own fallibility. By looking east for a date, it was also natural to look east for an origin. And that was the fatal flaw which led to the theory’s eventual collapse: when the first radiocarbon dates arrived for megalithic tombs in Ireland and Brittany, they were found to be thousands of years earlier than their supposed progenitors in the eastern Mediterranean. It must have been a bitter pill indeed that Glyn, and many other archaeologists, had to swallow. I finished at Cambridge in 1967, and spent two years out of archaeology. At the time I had no intention of returning to it, but events conspired to draw me back. My time out of archaeology had been very frustrating, and in an attempt to break free from the life I was then leading, I followed the advice of an old friend of the family and made my way to Toronto, where I registered as a landed immigrant in 1969. After a few weeks of unemployment spent among the huge population of US draft dodgers in Canada I eventually got my first ‘real’ archaeological job, as a technician in the Royal Ontario Museum. The ROM was the largest museum in Canada and has magnificent collections, particularly of Chinese antiquities. The Chief Archaeologist, Dr Doug Tushingham, was an anglophile and was proud of the museum’s collections of prehistoric European material, which included a fine assemblage of Bronze Age metalwork that had been dredged from the Thames in the early years of the century. I worked directly for Doug Tushingham, as his technician, for about a year. At the time he was writing up a site he had excavated in Jordan, at a place called Dhiban. My job was to prepare maps and plans for publication, draw and repair pottery and glass, and work through the various sections he had drawn in the field. Sections are a vitally important part of archaeology, and can be difficult to understand. But the principles behind them are straightforward enough. Because the Near East is so dry, people have tended to live in the same places, usually those with good access to water. Over the millennia the houses, which were usually built from unfired mud bricks, collapsed and new ones were built; rubbish accumulated; new roads were constructed; and slowly the ground surface began to rise, in some cases forming huge man-made hills, known as tells. Early in the history of modern archaeology it was realised that if one cut a deep trench into these hills it would expose all the layers that had accumulated over the years. The wall or side of the trench would tell the story. These vertical faces were known as sections. The situation in northern Europe was completely different. Here, if tells occur, as they do in parts of Holland, they were deliberately built up to keep people clear of rising water. The damp climate and the widespread availability of water meant that people could settle down and live almost anywhere, so it’s unusual to find deep sections on excavations out in the countryside. In towns and cities, like London or York, where people have been living on the same spot for two thousand years or more, the sections can be fairly substantial – but even so, they’re shallow by Near Eastern standards. Sections are important, even on shallow rural sites, because they show how the deposits within a particular feature accumulated. Let’s suppose that someone once dug a hole to receive a post. These postholes are the commonest of archaeological features, and are the bare bones of vanished buildings, or timber circles – or whatever. The hole is dug and a post is dropped in. Earth and stones are then back-filled and rammed home around the post to keep it firm. The post forms part of a house, which is then used for a generation. Thirty years later, the occupants die or move away, and eventually the roof falls in. The post then rots, usually at ground level first, and finally collapses. Within a few years it has entirely rotted away, above and below ground. As it rots below ground level, topsoil slowly accumulates where the wood had once been. This topsoil is darker and finer than the stones and soil that had been rammed into the hole all those years ago. Quite often the dark soil accurately preserves the shape of the original post; this is known as a post-pipe. If excavated carefully, the outline of the post-pipe can be recorded in plan view, from above, or as section cut down through the centre of the original post. The variety of buried archaeological features reflects the variety of ancient life: as well as post-holes, there are ditches that may once have run around fields, or alongside roads; there are shallow gullies which took rain from house roofs; there are wells, hearths, kilns and rubbish pits. Above-ground features may occasionally survive, such as road surfaces, stone walls, huge standing stones like those at Stonehenge, or the humble earthen banks that once ran alongside field hedges. The sections at Dhiban were extremely complicated. There were vast numbers of different layers: early house floors were cut through by later house walls, which were in turn cut by even later drainage ditches. And so it went on, for hundreds and hundreds of different, separate deposits. It took Doug and me weeks to work out how it all fitted together, but in the end it made sense. This was superb experience for me: a combination of detective work and jigsaw puzzle – but much better fun than either. Eventually, after almost a year, we finished the technical phase of the Dhiban writing-up, and my services were no longer required. The job had been completed, more or less on time, and Doug seemed well pleased. It was now up to him to write the main report narrative, which took another six months. I had effectively been out of British archaeology for two years, and in that time a lot had been published, which of course I’d missed. As I read my way through this backlog of literature, I was struck by the fact that medieval archaeologists had a great deal to teach we prehistorians. There is so much medieval archaeology in Britain that it is necessary to work on a grand sale. As I read I could discern a shift away from minutiae towards a bigger picture. Many medievalists were excavating entire villages; having done that, they turned their attention to the countryside round about. To put it another way, they worked with entire landscapes, rather than on single, one-off sites. That was precisely what I wanted to do for prehistoric archaeology. While we were completing our work on Dhiban, Doug and I had discussed what I should do next. Doug had long cherished the idea of launching an ROM expedition to Britain, alongside the museum’s existing projects in Central America, Peru, Iran, Egypt and of course in Ontario. He had set aside the then princely sum of ?1,500 for me to use as ‘seed corn’ – in effect to buy my way back into British archaeology. Given my growing predilection for medieval archaeology, I made contact with Peter Wade-Martins, one of its leading exponents. Peter was directing the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon village in deepest rural Norfolk, at a place called North Elmham. I made him my offer, and just as Doug had predicted, he welcomed the money and myself with open arms. I owe an enormous debt to Peter and his team. From them I learned the benefits of opening up huge areas, rather than small trenches. With an open area you can appreciate how everything fits together. You do not need to worry whether a ditch exposed in Trench 1 is the same as another exposed in Trench 15, a hundred metres away, because it’s there for all to see. You can even walk along it. But open-area excavation also demanded a whole battery of new skills, which I had to learn in double-quick time. In order to open huge areas of ground, you have to use earth-moving machines. It’s important to know how to use the various diggers and dumpers to shift the topsoil quickly, but without causing damage to the archaeological layers below. The power of the machines has to be controlled and harnessed, or else they are capable of doing immense harm. Open-area excavation also requires planning (i.e. map drawing) if it is to be fast and accurate. Nowadays one would use laser technology to survey rapid plans, but in those days that hadn’t been invented. So we fell back on ingenuity. While I worked with Peter’s team, I also had my ear closely to the ground. Back in Toronto I had read that the small English city of Peterborough, about eighty miles north of London, was going to be expanded into a huge New Town. The New Towns – there were several of them – were arranged in an inner and an outer ring around London, and were intended to take the capital’s ‘surplus’ population, housing, entertaining and, most important of all, employing them. It was a major piece of social engineering: Peterborough’s population in 1968 was 80,000; today it is closer to 200,000. I knew from my university courses that Peterborough was famous for its prehistoric archaeology. Indeed, one of those horrible pottery ‘cultures’ was even named after the place. We had been taught that Peterborough pottery and the Peterborough Culture played an important part in Later Neolithic Britain, around 2500 BC. I am still not at all sure what the Peterborough ‘Culture’ means or meant, but the term did at least suggest that sites in or near Peterborough had yielded important prehistoric finds. That was good enough for me. I determined to visit the place and see for myself. I didn’t know it then, but my quest was about to start in earnest. For the next quarter of a century I would barely have the time to draw breath. Early autumn has a particular charm in England. Country gardens are at their best. Old-fashioned roses – the kind with loose flowers, kind colours and strong scents – are in their second flush, and even the midday sun lacks the strength to fade them. The true season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has yet to begin, and one is in a never-never world, where summer still lingers and the stillness of evening retains its warmth. It’s my favourite time of year: a little wistful perhaps, but not yet so much as a whisper of melancholy. It was September 1970, and I was looking forward to the drive ahead of me. Norfolk is one of the most attractive counties in England. Noel Coward’s over-quoted ‘Very flat, Norfolk’ simply isn’t true: it’s a county of gently undulating hills, with little villages nestling in the valleys. By and large it’s an unspoiled county that has been spared the gentrification that has blighted many of the once-beautiful villages of the Cotswolds. I decided not to take the direct route along the main road, but to let my car have its head, while I used the sun as a guide to ensure that I went in roughly the right direction. After half an hour, the rolling countryside gave way to the flat coastal plain of north Norfolk, and before I knew it I found myself driving through the beautiful ancient port of King’s Lynn. Today the town is by-passed, and few people bother to divert from the traffic jams that are now an unavoidable part of summer weekends. The roads around King’s Lynn seize solid as the wealthy of the East Midlands migrate towards their seaside holiday homes in shiny four-wheel drives. Lynn is one of the most gorgeous towns of England. In medieval times it was prosperous, and the citizens built magnificent churches and whole streets of splendid timber-framed houses. The prosperity lasted into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but then there were harder times, and the town was spared the wholesale redevelopment that afflicted more prosperous places during the Industrial Revolution. Sadly, the worst damage to this jewel of the North Sea coast took place in the second half of the twentieth century – in the name of ‘improvement’. King’s Lynn is the port on the river Great Ouse, at the point where it enters the Wash. East of the town is the higher ground of Norfolk, including the sandy countryside in which stands Edward VII’s grand country seat, Sandringham House. I once heard Prince Charles say that he always regarded himself as a Norfolk boy, thanks to the happy days he had spent in and around Sandringham. To the west of Lynn, the landscape is altogether different. This is a less yielding, sterner country. The land is flat, and transected by deep drainage ditches. The roads run dead straight, and I soon found my car was travelling far faster than the police might have wished. I didn’t slow down, but roared onwards. This was the life! I was back in the land of the Fens, a part of the world I have grown to love. I like its bleakness. I like its clear, luminous daylight. Above all, I feel free in the Fens: free to breathe deeply and be myself. I also like Fen people. True, they are reserved and rarely press their attentions on one; but I like that, too. There’s warmth aplenty when you need it, but only when you need it. They live in a landscape of space, and they give other people space too. FIG 1 The Fens The next town I came to was Wisbech (pronounced Wis-beach). Like Lynn, it had once seen prosperous times, but then the river Nene which was the source of the town’s wealth silted up, and the cargo ships which had brought loads of timber from the Baltic ports could no longer sail up the river from the Wash. As a result, Wisbech too was spared the depredations of our Victorian forebears. I wasn’t familiar with the town, and as I drove through its centre I was stunned by the fine Georgian houses which fringed the river along North Brink. I know now that this is possibly the finest Georgian streetscape in Britain. Once I was out of Wisbech and heading west, the signs told me I was thirty-four miles from Peterborough. Again the landscape changed. Between Lynn and Wisbech the Fens are more accurately known as Marshland. The landscape I had sped through on leaving Lynn had been formed by the sea. Storms and tides from the Wash have laid down thick layers of sandy-coloured silts, which are now among the most fertile arable soils in Europe. It’s a countryside of orchards, rose and garden-plant nurseries, and vegetables. More vegetables are grown in Marshland than anywhere else in Britain. Sometimes the stench of frosted cauliflowers on the air can be overpowering. West of Wisbech the Fens become different, and much darker. Spiritually darker too, I sometimes think. Before the widespread land drainage of the last three centuries, this was the haunt of Fen Tygers, those wild young men who wore their long hair in a pigtail and cherished their freedom to hunt and fish the common land and streams within their watery world. Out in the open fen there were huge expanses of water. Whittlesey Mere was the largest lake in Britain, before its drainage in 1852. Closer to the edge were sprawling woods of alder and willow. Here decomposing vegetation gave off methane gas, which spontaneously ignited to form the dreaded ‘corpse candles’ – which on drier land only formed in churchyards, above freshly filled graves. To outsiders it was a dark country in more ways than one. The Black Fens acquired their name because of their rich peat soils, which formed in pre-drainage times in a wide natural basin between the silts of Marshland to the east, and the higher ground of the fen edge to the west. For thousands of years peat grew and accumulated in this complex network of ponds, lakes, meres and creeks. Before their drainage, which took place mainly in the seventeenth century, the Black Fens were Britain’s largest natural wetland. It was a drowned landscape, but it was also a rich land. There was peat for fuel, reeds for thatch and huge numbers of duck, geese, eels and fish to eat. Elsewhere, in upland Britain, folk went hungry in winter, when protein was always in short supply. But never in the Fens. You can see a long way in a flat landscape. Perhaps the finest building in Britain, Ely Cathedral, high on its ‘island’ hill, can be seen from twenty miles away. Hence its local name, ‘the Ship of the Fens’. Peterborough Cathedral was built on lower-lying, less spectacular land, but it is still extremely impressive. These buildings were undoubtedly built to the glory of God, but the way they dominated – and still dominate – their landscapes leaves me in no doubt that they were also symbols of real political power down here on earth. I first caught sight of Peterborough Cathedral from ten miles away, as I drove out of the little village of Thorney. By now I was back on the main road, as I had no idea how to navigate my way through the narrow Fen lanes. I knew from past experience that it’s easy to get almost there in the Fens. You follow your nose, and arrive close to your destination, except that there’s a huge drainage ditch (or dyke, as they’re known in the Fens) blocking the way. And then you discover that the nearest bridge is ten miles away. Peterborough looked familiar as I drove towards the city centre. It was late afternoon and the sun was sinking behind the cathedral tower. Crows were calling to one another in the large trees of the Bishop’s Palace garden, as if they were getting ready for tea. Which would not be a bad idea, I thought, as I pulled into the car park outside the museum. Peterborough Museum is a fine stone building in Priestgate, the only street left which gives a feeling of what the old city would have been like. The rest was swept away – today we would say ‘redeveloped’, because it sounds nicer – when the main railway line arrived around 1850. The resulting prosperity carried all before it, including nearly every old building, except of course the churches. They couldn’t pull them down. As Bob Dylan once sang: ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’ Inside the museum I was shown into the library, a tall, dark room lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. There was that wonderful booky, musty smell I had first encountered in the Myers Museum at school, and for a too-short moment I was transported back to my youth. The librarian showed me the shelves that held their archaeological titles. In amongst the dusty volumes I noticed a clean paperbound book with a green spine and the letters ‘RCHM’ in bold black type at top and bottom. Far from being a museum piece, this book, Peterborough New Town: A Survey of the Antiquities in the Areas of Development, had only been published the previous year. It was a survey by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, and I had been trying to get my hands on a copy for several weeks, but every bookshop I tried had sold out. I ignored the wisdom of the ages on the shelves all around me, and opened the book eagerly. The site I was interested in lay on the eastern fringes of the city, at the point where the dryland stopped and the once-wet fen started. It was known as Fengate (from two Norse words meaning ‘road to the fen’), and I wanted to know to what extent it would be affected by the New Town. It was immediately clear that most of Fengate would be destroyed by factories when work on the New Town started in earnest, in 1971 and 1972. Although I was sad for the people and buildings of Fengate, this threat of development meant that I stood a good chance of raising money from the British government, as well as from the ROM. Nowadays developers have to pay for any archaeological excavation their proposals might require, but in the early seventies it was up to government, local government or sometimes archaeological societies to fund such work. With dual sources of funding I might be able to carry out a large-scale open-area excavation. Maybe I’d get the chance to do a proper, wide-ranging project on a landscape which the Royal Commission report suggested would mainly be of pre-Roman date. My mind was racing. Could this be the site I had been looking for? I knew a bit about Fengate – every archaeology student in England knows a bit about Fengate, as it’s one of the key sites of British prehistory. It was Fengate that produced those Late Neolithic Peterborough pots. The sherds of pottery that gave the Peterborough Culture its name were found in hand-dug gravel pits that had been worked in the first three decades of the century. What I had to know now was simple: was anything left? Had the gravel pits destroyed everything? I was itching to find out. The librarian told me that the museum was about to close, and the car park would be locked up in fifteen minutes. I still hadn’t answered those key questions, and was almost exploding with frustration; but at least I now had the book safely secured in my briefcase. This time I drove across the Fens to King’s Lynn and my lodgings in North Elmham using the most direct route possible. I don’t think I have ever driven so fast, or with such abandon, before or since. I took the stairs three at a time and leapt onto the bed, as there was nowhere else to sit. I started to read, and rapidly the truth began to dawn. What a site! It was extraordinary. I couldn’t believe it. The meticulous survey showed that the hand-dug gravel quarry pits were confined to about a quarter of the area of Fengate, and the rest of the prehistoric landscape lay out there, untouched. Intact. And what a landscape it was. I had never seen anything like it before. I was aware that I must be looking at one of the richest archaeological areas in the country. Even the Royal Commission, never noted for extravagant hyperbole, enthused: ‘This area shows massive evidence for occupation from the Neolithic period onwards …’ I lay back and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe it. I had hit the jackpot. CHAPTER THREE A Trans-Atlantic Commuter (#ulink_8ce54748-7b08-5695-959b-195f9df85abe) I NOW FOUND MYSELF in a strange situation: I was an Englishman working in England for a foreign institution. I was resident – and indeed taxed – abroad, but most of my team were British. After the initial exploratory expedition of 1970 I returned to Canada for the winter, and drew up proposals for a five-year project which would examine all the land threatened by the expansion of the New Town. Although our main funding was from Canada and the British government, the local authority (in this instance the New Town Development Corporation) also provided us with essential help in kind, which included accommodation, storage facilities and the like. From 1971 to 1978 I would work in Britain for the four or five months from spring to autumn. I had to be careful not to stay for more than six months, or I’d find myself paying both British and Canadian taxes – and my salary wasn’t big enough to take such a knock. The digging season usually started in May, when North American students became available. From June onwards we employed more British students, and the excavations would close after the first frosts and rains of autumn, which were usually in October. Most of the digs I had worked on previously had been either small and amateur or large and professional, and to be honest I found neither very satisfactory. The small, amateur affairs were relaxed and friendly, but the pace was too slow, there was an enormous amount of talk and not much action. The big digs were less to my liking – that is, as gatherings of human beings (they even had cooks and field kitchens) – but as a way of getting large quantities of archaeology done, they were superb. Even if I did manage to squeeze big sums of money from my sponsors, I knew that funds wouldn’t be limitless. I also knew that it would take me some time to come to grips with the local geology, and until I had mastered that, it would be impossible to find useful work for a large team. Familiarising yourself with the geology is something that every dig director has to do. Unless you know in detail how the natural subsoil formed and how it was altered after its formation, you cannot hope to identify the slight marks left on it by the hand of man. At Fengate the subsoil was gravel that had formed during a warm period in the Ice Age, over ten thousand years ago. The gravels were laid down by rivers, and when they froze and ceased to flow during the next cold spell in the Ice Age, the gravels were torn apart by ice and glaciers. The results of this tearing apart sometimes resembled man-made features, such as ditches, which was to prove a major source of confusion during my first season of excavation. I suppose I was looking for reasons not to have a big team, because that’s what I eventually chose to do. I decided I would organise a small group – perhaps six or eight students – with two or three experienced professional site supervisors to keep a controlling eye on things. That way, we could combine the best of the amateur and professional ways of digging. In the event it worked well; in fact I still dig with a small, select team. I made a flying visit to England over Christmas 1970 and recruited two supervisors and a field assistant, all of whom were about to start post-graduate research at Manchester University. I also found somewhere local to live the following summer. As dig houses went, it wasn’t a palace, but it would have to do. And it was free – offered as a contribution to the project by the local authority. The contrast between mid-winter England and Canada was extraordinary. In Toronto the snow had been lying for three weeks, but in England, five hundred miles closer to the North Pole, the roses were still out. As I drove back to Heathrow in early January a few suburban lawns were being given a light trim. I returned to England for my first full season as an excavation director in April 1971. I was twenty-six years old, and although I did my best to appear supremely confident, I was quaking in my boots. Walking out onto my own site for the first time was a strange experience. There they were: my team of three senior staff and five newly recruited students. Eight pairs of eyes looked to me to make the first move. I knew instinctively that to appear indecisive would be fatal. But we were alone in a field, our tools hadn’t yet arrived, nor had the site huts or the digger. We couldn’t so much as brew a cup of tea. And I certainly couldn’t ask them to scratch at the ground with their bare hands. I had begun to experience a tide of rising panic when there was a shout from the road. It was the truck delivering the hut sections. With a huge sigh of relief I sent everyone across to help unload. I had learned the first lesson of any dig director – ensure that you have work for people to do, no matter how futile the tasks might seem. It’s always better to do something – anything – than nothing. A team’s morale is crucially important, and as soon as it starts to slip, everything else will rapidly follow. I have always believed in leading from the front, and this is particularly important when everyone on the team is of roughly the same age. A team leader’s job is not just about co-ordination and morale; it’s also about inspiration and motivation. In time, our team began to believe that we were the best in Britain. And we may have been, for all I know. This growing sense of pride showed itself in a number of ways. We always made visitors welcome, and I was at pains to see that nobody rammed our growing reputation down other people’s throats; but I was also at pains to see that no visitor left without being seriously impressed by what we were doing. What was happening was no more than the growth of a close-knit, motivated team. Many of us have since moved elsewhere – back to Canada, to continental Europe, even to Hawaii – but we still keep in touch, nearly thirty years later. The first few days of a dig can affect the way the entire season runs. The biggest influence is undoubtedly the weather, and there’s nothing one can do about that. A rainy start is the worst. The huts go up wet; they seldom sit square on the ground, and never seem to lose their dampness. The various delivery trucks stick in the mud, and someone always manages to fall over – but they never hit grass; invariably it’s a broken bottle or a rusty iron spike. Nowadays wooden huts have been replaced by stackable, portable cabins which come ready equipped with electricity, water and well insulated walls. These have made an enormous difference to the quality of life on site. The arrangement of the huts would reflect the way the dig was organised, and I always made a point of agreeing the layout of the compound with my two senior supervisors well in advance. That first season I came across the pair of them, entirely by chance, in a student pub, and together we sketched something incomprehensible on the back of a beer-soaked envelope – which I promptly lost. Anyhow, the compound more or less matched what we had agreed. The huts were arranged around a small, open-sided ‘yard’ which faced onto the areas we were digging, and was surfaced with gravel taken from the dig. The largest hut, which sat at the centre of the yard, was the domain of Anne, our finds assistant. The finds assistant is possibly the most important member of a team. His or her job is to supervise the washing, marking, cataloguing and storing of the finds. They have to be rigorously methodical, and know where anything is at any time. The numbers of finds will vary depending on the type of site one is digging, but I suppose a typical day at Fengate would have yielded perhaps two or three hundred finds; of these, about 30 per cent would be man-made artefacts of one sort or another and the remaining 70 per cent would be animal bones. Sometimes the artefacts were complete objects – brooches, pins, needles or small pots – but more often they were fragments of pottery or sharp flint flakes, the by-products of chipping flint to make tools. Like the artefacts, the animal bones were either found whole or, more usually, broken. They had to be treated with the same care as artefacts, because they could yield just as much information – about the cuts of meat that were eaten, the type of animals kept and the way they were farmed. If, for example, we found a high proportion of bones from older beasts, that might suggest that the younger ones were regularly transported to market. Next to the Finds Shed was a small hut for tools, and a larger Tea Hut in which wheelbarrows were kept overnight. There was a hut given over to the storage of plans and records, and another in which I did my accounts and administration work – which took me about an hour every morning. People soon learned that doing the accounts made me grumpy, and if they were wise they’d stay well clear of my hut between ten and eleven o’clock. The sanitary arrangements were primitive in the extreme, and involved the liberal application of pungent blue liquid. This was our self-contained world for the summer. We baked in the sun, froze in the cold, and soon grew extraordinarily weather-beaten. Most of us wore heavy boots, tattered shorts made from cut-off jeans, and old T-shirts that might once have been coloured. Nowadays, when I look at photos of the team, I’m surprised by how little our appearance has dated, when compared with the images in the glossy magazines of the time, which invariably appear extreme and ridiculous. A 1970s field archaeologist could readily slip unnoticed into a twenty-first-century team. As soon as the panels of the huts were erected, Anne took a small party to town to buy essential supplies, while the rest of the crew started to nail down roofing felt. Rain was forecast overnight, so we had to make everything waterproof by the end of the day. While this was going on, our on-site foreman Sandy and I sat in the Land-Rover with a large aerial photograph and scratched our heads as we tried to decide where to start digging. We had a lot of land and potential archaeological features to choose from. Aerial photography has had a profound effect on archaeology, since its first widespread use during the Great War. In lowland England years and years of ploughing have removed most of the humps and bumps from the actual surface of the ground, but in aerial photographs long-vanished features such as trackways, field ditches, even house foundations, can be seen as dark marks in growing crops. In a dry year, and only in a dry year, the roots of crops such as wheat and barley need to dive deep to find moisture. Above buried and long-filled-in ditches, wells or rubbish pits, the roots find dampness and the crops grow thick, lush and luxuriant. This darker growth shows up clearly from the air. The cropmarks on the photos that Sandy and I were examining looked like a painting by Jackson Pollock: there were lines everywhere. Some were straight, one was a perfectly circular ring, others were squiggly, and there were seemingly random dots and irregular dark splodges. The splodges and squiggly lines were caused by water freezing and thawing during the last great Ice Age, so they could safely be ignored. But the other marks were interesting. The dots might or might not be ancient wells, while the circular ring was almost certainly the quarry ditch around the outside of a Bronze Age barrow, or burial mound. Unfortunately, it was in a neighbouring field, and we were unlikely to get a chance to dig it until at least 1973, when it was scheduled by the New Town authorities to become available for commercial development. One of the frustrating aspects of so-called rescue archaeology, undertaken ahead of specific commercial developments such as factory building or quarrying, is that you cannot carry out a logical pattern of research. Ideally, I like to work my way back in time, starting with the recent material and finishing with the most ancient. But it doesn’t work like that in rescue archaeology. You excavate the land which is under the most urgent commercial threat, whatever the age of the archaeological deposits it contains. In effect this means that the archaeologist has to maintain a number of distinct, but often interweaving, threads or themes in his head. Many times I have found myself looking at an Iron Age grave or house foundation of 300 BC, while my brain is thinking about Neolithic problems of 3000 BC. We decided to place our first trench across two long, straight, dark marks of parallel ditches. By this time I had bought several copies of that RCHM survey which I had first seen the previous year in Peterborough Museum. The survey reckoned that the two parallel cropmarks were probably the drainage ditches on either side of a Roman trackway. Roman features in the Peterborough area were often crammed full of pottery, because from the late second century AD to the end of the Roman period (AD 410) there were highly productive potteries in the lower Nene valley, immediately west of the modern city. Large potteries like those in the Nene valley were among the first true factories, and they produced cooking and tableware for the prosperous homes of the later Roman Empire on a truly industrial scale. The pottery itself looks remarkably modern, and were it not for the fact that it’s unglazed, you would not be surprised to see it holding salt or sugar on a modern-day kitchen table. Most of the Nene valley production sites are known, and to walk across one is a strange experience, especially when the land has recently been ploughed. You walk into what seems like a perfectly ordinary flat field, and suddenly have a strange feeling, as if you were walking on thousands of broken ostrich eggs. The ‘eggs’ are sherds of pottery, and they’re crunchy underfoot. Exactly how these huge quantities of pottery found their way from the industrial suburbs of a Roman town to the field boundary ditches of Fenland farms ten miles away is still a mystery to me. But that’s what happened. Maybe the local peasants were employed by the wealthy pot-factory owners to smash the stuff, in order to keep prices up? Or maybe they were mad? Or just careless? Or perhaps, like farmers today, they simply took their animals to market and bought the pottery, cheap, while they had money in their pockets. Sandy was sure that a trench across the two parallel ditches would establish their date. Once that was done we could start investigating the possible wells, which were potentially far more interesting. I agreed, and we sent the digger off to remove the topsoil, closely watched by one of our supervisors. Later that afternoon I walked across to the trench. I looked in, and saw the two ditches, just as they appeared on the air photo. Then I glanced in the finds trays by each ditch, and was slightly puzzled. There were a few scraps of bone, probably of cattle; a small flint flake, of no particular date, but certainly pre-Roman; and two tiny scraps of soft hand-made pottery, again probably prehistoric. Only one find was of any interest, and it could have been Roman or earlier. It was a small piece of baked clay ‘daub’. Although the Romans introduced mortar and plaster to Britain, the ordinary country people still usually lived in roundhouses built in the traditional pre-Roman, or Iron Age, manner. The walls were made from woven hazel ‘wattles’, which resembled coarse basketwork. This wattlework core was then smeared with a thick layer of clay, usually mixed with straw and cow dung to give it flexibility and strength. The mix of clay and straw was known as ‘daub’. When a house burnt down, which happened quite often, the clay became fired, rather like crude pottery. This firing meant it could survive in the soil indefinitely – ultimately for archaeologists to discover. The piece of daub in my hand was like others I had excavated. I could clearly see the impression left by one of the woven wattles of the wall core. That was encouraging. At least we now had evidence of a house, or houses, somewhere in the vicinity of the two ditches. The single flint and the tiny piece of pottery could have been in the topsoil for several centuries before the Roman British farmer dug out his trackway ditches. To use the technical word, they were probably ‘residual’ from an earlier period. The fragments of animal bone couldn’t be dated. So we were no further forward. Still, we were digging real archaeology on our first day; the sheds were up and water-tight, and the crew hadn’t tried to lynch me. All in all, it had been a good start. The next day it rained as it can only rain in a green and pleasant land. By the end of the afternoon our two ditches were filled to the brim, so when I got back to the house I had rented in town that evening I ordered the digger to return the next day. The driver, Chris Clapham, arrived bright and early, and I decided we should simply extend the trench we had started on the first day and cut another section through the ditches. We could always return to the two flooded sections when they had dried out. Failing that, we could hire pumps, but that was expensive. Then, at the end of the day I had a thought. What on earth was I doing clearing little trenches and fiddling around in this small-minded fashion? Surely my aim was to think big – to think in terms of whole landscapes? So I retained the digger, and did not send it back to the depot. Chris, who soon became very interested in the project and who worked with us for several years, was delighted. It was clear that he was always sad to have to return to normal construction work at the end of each season. By the time I had finished with Chris and the digger, about five days later, we had exposed the two ditches, and the trackway between them, for a distance of some forty metres. The rain held off, and then the weather began to improve. The sun shone, birds sang, and all was suddenly well with the world. We removed the loose earth left by the digger with shovels, and then used onion-hoes to scrape the surface clean. When we had done this, the dark soil which filled the two ditches showed up quite distinctly as two rich brown parallel lines. My suspicions were first aroused while we were still scraping the machine-cleared ground surface with the onion-hoes. I had deliberately positioned myself in such a way that I was scraping down the centre of the most southerly of the two ditches. Normally I would have expected to find small, worn sherds of Roman pottery at the top of a filled Roman ditch. But there weren’t any. Not so much as a scrap. It was peculiar. About a month into the dig, I had to return briefly to Toronto to make the final arrangements for an exhibition of finds from North Elmham that Peter Wade-Martins had kindly loaned to the Royal Ontario Museum. I was away for three weeks, and on my return I learned, to my utter amazement, that we had still not found anything in either of the two ditches that could be reliably dated. There was certainly nothing even remotely Roman. Poor Anne was getting fed up with the trickle of scrappy finds. To vent her frustrations – and I couldn’t blame her – she decided to lay everything we had found to date on a table in the Finds Shed, for me to see on my first day back on site. Through hollow, jet-lagged eyes I viewed Anne’s tabletop exhibition. I was already feeling a bit low, but this display of scrappy potsherds, like so many crumbs of wet digestive biscuit, together with mis-shaped pieces of clay ‘daub’ and nondescript splinters of bone was, quite frankly, pathetic. It was almost more than I could bear. ‘What on earth,’ I thought, ‘will Doug make of this? I’ll arrive in his office at the end of my first season of excavation for the ROM proudly bearing a shoe-box of finds before me. “There,” I’ll announce, “that’s what you paid thousands of dollars to discover.” ’ No, I couldn’t bear it – it was too depressing for words. I think my misery must have communicated itself to Anne, whose eyes had gone moist. She was starting to bite her lip. I put an arm around her shoulder and was about to make some pathetic excuse along the lines of ‘Honestly Anne, it’s not the finds, it’s just the jet-lag,’ when the door was noisily kicked open. We almost jumped out of our skins. It was Sandy holding a finds tray which contained something which looked like – I rushed across to have a closer look – which looked like … a large lump of mud. Somehow I concealed my extreme disappointment (not to mention irritation) and picked the thing up. I turned it over carefully in both hands, in case it fell to bits – and it was just as well that I did, because on the underside I saw that what looked like earth was not earth, but grey-coloured baked clay. A sharp-eyed student digging in one of the trackway ditches had spotted this too, and had put the entire lump in the tray. Although the clay had been quite lightly fired, possibly by being dropped into a bonfire for an hour or so, it held together well and I was able to remove the earth that clung to its surface. As I gently lifted off the soil, piece by piece, the object began to take on a familiar shape. By now I was getting excited, and was having trouble preventing my hands from trembling. Three or four students who were working in the Finds Shed sensed this excitement and drew close around me, partially obscuring the light. But I didn’t care. I turned the object gingerly on its end, and suddenly recognised it for what it was. So did everyone else. As if on a command, every head rose, and the frowns of a few minutes ago were replaced by the broadest of smiles. The object in my hand resembled a large, short length of giant macaroni, and weighed as much as a bag of sugar. It was the hole through the centre that had made us all look up. It was round and neat, and just big enough to fit one’s thumb. We all knew it could only be one thing. I was ecstatic. I could have hugged everyone. Instead, being British, I patted Sandy on the shoulder in a manly sort of fashion. To give it its technical name, the object was an axially-perforated cylindrical clay loomweight. (I love the precision and rhythm of that academic description. It says it all, in a wonderfully rich way – like thick, brown, beefy gravy.) I knew from my textbooks that loomweights of this sort were made and used in the Later Bronze Age, in the two or three centuries before and after 1000 BC. Most axially-perforated cylindrical clay weights weigh about the same, and they are nearly always found near settlements. On the Continent weights of this type have been found in the ground close together and lying in neat rows, as if an upright loom had been abandoned, and the weights which hung from bunches of warp threads below it had simply fallen to the ground. In wet areas some apparent ‘loomweights’ may also have been used as fish-trap or net sinkers. After about 500 BC, in the Early Iron Age, cylindrical loomweights were replaced by triangular weights with holes at the corners. Clearly loom technology had changed, and the requirement was now for an altogether different, more sophisticated style of weight. I had never actually handled a cylindrical loomweight before, and I looked at it closely. It had been quite carefully made, and the outer surfaces had been smoothed by hand – it was even possible to make out the faintest traces of fingerprints. It may well have been made indoors, because a small flint scraping tool, probably from off the floor, had stuck to the clay, only to be mixed into the weight when the clay was kneaded. Two points struck me forcibly. First, although fired, the clay was by no means hard. If I were to tap it quite lightly it would break into pieces. Second, it was 80 per cent complete, and what little damage there was (it was confined to the ends) could well have happened while it was in use, because it would have hung alongside, and sometimes bashed against, the other weights below the loom. That slight damage apart, it was in remarkably fresh condition. Now, something as fragile as a clay loomweight that had been made in the Middle or Late Bronze Age could not possibly have survived on the ground surface for over a millennium, and it certainly wouldn’t have come through the process of Roman ditch-digging without so much as a scratch. I was forced to conclude that the weight had been placed, or had rolled into, the bottom of the ditch, a short time after it was cut from the loom, perhaps as long ago as 1400 BC. That meant that the ditch couldn’t possibly be Roman. It had to be Bronze Age. And that, of course, would explain the absence of any Roman pottery from all the trenches we had dug. Suddenly, now that the immediate excitement was over, those unimpressive finds on the table made sense to me. I rushed over and picked up the supposed piece of burnt clay ‘daub’ we had found before I left for my quick visit to Canada. I looked at it again, more closely this time. Armed with our new discovery I could see at once that the ‘wattle impression’ was nothing of the sort: it was straight, not curved, and it was neat and circular – and thumb-sized, just like the hole in the loomweight which Anne was beginning to clean with a fine watercolour paintbrush. So, I reflected, for the best part of two months we had been digging the side-ditches of a Bronze Age road or trackway. At the time, such things were almost unheard of, except in the wetlands of Somerset, where special wooden trackways were built across boggy ground. But to find one in Peterborough … And it was big – at least five metres wide, far bigger than the Somerset tracks, which were more like large footpaths than roads capable of taking two-way traffic. But what did it all mean? My preconceptions about the site had been turned upside-down. We continued work for several weeks, and still all we found were scraps of soft handmade pottery, a few dozen more flint tools and another nearly complete cylindrical loomweight. But now I was far more calm, even though I wasn’t at all sure what it signified, in terms of the archaeology of the ancient landscape, that is. I had phoned Canada late in the afternoon of the day after we found the first loomweight, and told Doug about it. At the end of my breathless account I started to apologise for the scrappiness of what we’d unearthed so far, but he didn’t seem to mind. He told me not to worry about finds; they’d come soon enough. He also advised me to relax and enjoy running the dig. I suspect he had an intuitive feel that the pace of my life would shortly quicken. He told me that in two weeks he’d be in England, for a conference in Oxford. He’d come and see me then. And with that he rang off. Doug had been friendly and reassuring on the phone, but I was aware that he was no fool, and that although Britain was a long way from his main research interest in the Near East, he would require a coherent story from me. Like many archaeologists of the previous generation, he liked to hear narrative. A dig should tell a story. It was not good enough merely to list the various finds and features one had found. They had to mean something. And if you couldn’t explain why they were there and what they meant, then you had no business to be excavating at all. Given what I knew at this stage, I didn’t feel at all confident that I could fabricate a convincing narrative around my two Bronze Age ditches. And I only had two weeks in which to think. ‘That’s a ditch a week,’ I thought grimly. My previous confidence was slowly being replaced by nagging anxiety. I was learning that discoveries only become significant when one can attach a convincing explanation to them. Without a good narrative they remain curiosities – no more, no less. Unless I was careful, I might be remembered as the man who found two Bronze Age ditches near Peterborough. I tried thinking around the periphery of the problem. What if the two ditches had nothing to do with a track or roadway at all? What if they happened to run parallel purely by coincidence? There was a simple way to test this. The field next to the one where we were working had been growing a crop of potatoes the year the air photos were taken. For various reasons, potato plants do not produce cropmarks when they grow, so the photos of that particular field were blank. I wondered whether, if we were to ask the farmer nicely, he would let us dig a couple of trenches in this field, about two hundred metres away from our present dig. If the two ditches were still running parallel, and five metres apart, at this distance away, it would strongly support the road or trackway theory. If, on the other hand, they diverged or came together, I’d have to come up with another idea. The farmer agreed, we dug two quick trenches by hand, and lo and behold, there were the ditches, five metres apart, parallel, and running as straight as a die. So it simply had to be a road. And a straight one, at that. No wonder the RCHM survey had it listed as ‘probably Roman’. Every school child is taught that Roman roads are straight (very often they’re not, in fact). It just so happened that a few days later I was driving my ancient Land-Rover along King Street, the Roman trunk road that runs north of the small Roman town of Durobrivae, near the modern village of Water Newton. The buildings of Durobrivae have long since vanished, and it only survives as a series of large banks and smaller humps and bumps, about five miles west of Peterborough. As the Land-Rover, with its rock-solid suspension, bounced slowly along, my mind wandered off to a known Roman road that runs diagonally across the landscape at Fengate. That road is known as the Fen Causeway, and scholars of the Roman period reckoned it was constructed in the years AD 60 and 61 by military engineers who had been ordered to force a route from the garrisons around Durobrivae, and then straight across the Fens. Once they had crossed the Fens, the legions would march into Norfolk, where the Briton Queen Boadicea (Boudica to archaeologists) was leading a successful rebellion against the Roman occupation. Sadly, however, the revolt failed, quite probably because of the reinforcements that came along the Fen Causeway. As I ground slowly along in four-wheel drive, it struck me that the Fen Causeway might just clip the corner of the field where we were working. I knew a Roman road would be right up Doug’s street, so to speak, and it might draw his attention away from the two narrative-free Bronze Age ditches, which were giving me prolonged anxious moments. Besides, the Boudica link was well worth examining, and Roman roads are always an interesting topic. I could see the subject would certainly appeal to the ROM’s membership, and would make a good piece for the museum’s house journal Rotunda. All in all, it had a lot going for it. I headed home to have a closer look at the air photos, reasoning that if the road did indeed enter the field where we were working, it ought to show up quite clearly as a pale parch-mark. Roman roads were usually made from rammed-down gravel, and there was precious little moisture in them. As a result, in dry years, crops planted over them would grow pale and parched. Sometimes these pale cropmarks are known as negative cropmarks. As negative cropmarks went, the Fen Causeway was remarkably striking. I got home at about six o’clock and found an air photo that clearly showed the Roman Fen Causeway as a sharply distinct negative cropmark which headed straight towards our field. On the photo it seemed to pass under the modern road that ran along our northern boundary, but strangely it didn’t appear on the other side, where we were working. I looked at the photograph through the small folding magnifying glass I usually carry in my pocket. No, there could be no doubt at all. So where had it gone? It had either stopped, which seemed most unlikely, or else it turned west and ran directly below the modern road, where it would lie hidden. On the whole I still think that is the most likely explanation. Often modern and medieval roads made use of the hard foundations left behind by Roman engineers. I was staring at the photo in a blank sort of fashion, pondering these problems, when my eye was caught by three parallel dark cropmarks, doubtless ditches, which quite clearly ran beneath the Roman road. At this point my subconscious clicked in. The ditches ran precisely parallel to the two ditches we were currently digging. That was odd. My pulse quickened immediately. The first thing I had to do was to check that the three ditches were indeed parallel with the two we were digging. That wasn’t quite as simple as it seemed, because the air photo that showed them best was taken at an oblique angle (i.e. the plane was not directly overhead), so I had to play around with some elementary geometry and a largescale map before I could be certain. That done, I was convinced. They were indeed parallel. By now I was getting excited. Whatever these Bronze Age ditches were, they weren’t tracks or roads in the normal sense of the word. There were simply too many of them. Then I looked at the photos lying on the carpet around me. I remember frantically scrabbling though my desk drawer trying to locate my largest and best magnifying glass. When I had found it I stared long, close and hard at each photo in turn. It was an eerie feeling. Everywhere I looked I saw the cropmarks of parallel ditches, either singly or in pairs. I rubbed my eyes. Was I imagining them? Was I going mad? I took a quick stroll outside, then came back and took another look. No, I wasn’t – they were definitely there. I spent the next day plotting the cropmarks onto a map as accurately as I could. As I worked methodically through each photo, I found ditches that ran at right angles to the main ones. Some of these also had smaller ditches that branched off them, but always at right angles. When I had plotted every ditch I could find, it was absolutely clear that these were not roads, but the ditches that had been dug around a large and carefully-set-out system of Bronze Age fields. As I dropped off to sleep that night, I reflected that I had always wanted to work on a prehistoric landscape, and now I had discovered it – and it could well prove to be one of the earliest in England. I think I sensed, with just a hint of wistfulness, that I was passing through possibly the most important moment of my archaeological life. When I look back on my years digging the successive prehistoric landscapes at Fengate, it always makes me smile to recall that the big discovery, the one that set the ball rolling, wasn’t made beneath a blazing sun. There was no trowel in my hand, no native workmen staring wide-eyed into the dark recesses of the long-lost tomb. Just a weary archaeologist surrounded by a scatter of well-thumbed photos on the carpet. To date we have spent twenty-eight years excavating those Bronze Age field ditches, and I shall be digging some more in the coming years. It’s a huge system, and it’s important because these particular fields did not appear by accident, fully formed, as it were. They were never placed in the middle of nowhere. Farmers only lay out and maintain fields if there’s a good reason for spending so much time and effort on them. The Fengate Bronze Age fields were carefully laid out to lie at the core of a working landscape. It was a landscape in which countless generations of human beings lived, died and were buried. I knew that it would provide an ideal setting to study people and their histories. If you know how to go about the task, the landscape can reveal an immense amount. But it takes time, some luck, and an enormous amount of patience. As the months turned to years, I became increasingly aware that I was bearing a huge responsibility – to the shades of the people who had lived in this place. FIG 2 The Fengate Bronze Age fields Modern development was ripping the old landscape apart. Fields were vanishing, to be replaced by factories and warehouses. Farm tracks, ancient and modern, were being upgraded to roads. Trees were being felled, hedges grubbed up and the rough wayside verges, rich in wildflowers and diverse grasses, were being carefully sculpted into yet another characterless ‘landscaped’, mown suburban streetscape. While these unsympathetic ‘improvements’ were taking place, while old Fengate was being transformed into Peterborough New Town’s Eastern Industrial Area, I could almost hear the screams of protest coming from the inhabitants of the Bronze Age landscape. It was as if the people of my quest were looking over my shoulder. I had to do their story justice, while there was still something left to tell. I could not sell them short. It’s a thought that still haunts me. After that first season of 1971, Doug must have been impressed with what we were doing, because he set about raising large sums of money in Canada. While he worked on one side of the Atlantic, I worked on the other, and together we accumulated sufficient cash to carry out the large-scale open-area excavations that this complex landscape demanded. My main sources of funding were the British government and the New Town authorities, but I also raised a fair amount from private individuals, local landowners and industry. I now had the financial freedom to do the job properly, and there could be no excuses. I won’t describe how we excavated every Bronze Age field boundary ditch, because many of them were extremely unexciting. Like the two ditches at the start of the project, they produced few and scrappy finds; but as time progressed the few finds slowly accumulated, until we had quite a sizeable collection. We were also able to assemble a number of radiocarbon dates, and we now have solid evidence that the system of fields was first laid out around 2500 BC, at the start of the Early Bronze Age, and went out of use in the first half of the first millennium BC – probably between 1000 and 500 BC. So, in broad terms, these long-vanished fields were in use for two millennia. That’s something to think about. Put another way, the Fengate fields had been in use for a thousand years when the young King Tutankhamun was laid in his fabulous tomb in ancient Egypt. Not only were these fields old, but they must also have worked well, for why else would they have been maintained in use for such a long time? I believe they worked well because they suited the landscape and the climate. The eastern half of Britain is the side of the country with the driest climate and the flattest landscape. Today these conditions allow the farmers of East Anglia and Lincolnshire to grow arable crops, often on a vast scale more akin to the North American prairies than Europe. But it was not always like this. In medieval times, for example, the rich grasslands of eastern England supported huge flocks of sheep. The once-flooded Fens around the Wash have changed perhaps more than any other landscape in Britain. Today they grow huge arable crops, including more daffodils than anywhere else on earth; but again, in the remote past things were different. In effect, the Fens are an inland extension of that huge shallow bay the Wash, which forms such a distinctive feature of the English east coast. Before their drainage in the seventeenth century, the Fens covered about a million acres of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, and parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, too. Within them, particularly around the edges, were areas of higher ground that formed dry ‘islands’ amidst the reeds and waterways. The Isle of Ely is the best-known and largest of these. The edges of the Fens slope gradually, and when you drive through the modern, drained Fen landscape it can often be difficult to decide whether you are on once-wet fen or on dry ground. If the road suddenly becomes uneven it’s a sign that it was built on unstable peaty ground, and when that happens you can be sure you’re driving through drained wetland. The gently sloping plain of drier ground around the edges of the regularly flooded Fens was where prehistoric people liked best to live. By 2500 BC the forest cover here had largely gone. The ground was naturally well-drained, light and fertile, ideal for farming. That is most probably why the various prehistoric field systems at Fengate were laid out on this plain, right on the edge of the regularly flooded fenland. At Fengate the regularly flooded land is known as Flag Fen. Like the medieval Fenland landscapes three thousand years later, the Early Bronze Age landscape at Fengate was laid out at right angles to the regularly flooded fenland. This expanse of wetter land was by no means a watery wilderness. Far from it. To us it may seem flat and featureless, but that’s because we and our immediate predecessors have drained the heart, soul and guts out of it. Now it’s little more than a vast growing-bag. Before drainage it was otherwise. It was a complex world, or series of worlds, each one of which was subtly different and could yield to the discerning hunter, fisherman or farmer abundance in a variety of forms. All it required to exploit these landscapes was a wealth of experience handed down from previous generations, and the acknowledgement that human beings were just a single, small element in a far larger Creation. To become arrogant and too self-assured in a landscape as potentially dangerous as the low-lying Fens is to court disaster. I fear we will soon learn that lesson the hard way ourselves. My thoughts were first turned to the neighbouring fen when we had a visit from the late David Clarke, one of the key figures in twentieth-century archaeology. He had just completed his doctoral research into Beaker pottery and was then a junior lecturer at Cambridge. I regarded him then, and indeed I do now, as something of a hero. In his best-known book, Analytical Archaeology (1968), he set down the principles of a new and explicitly scientific approach to the subject. This approach, which has since been superseded several times, was known as the New Archaeology, and was of course vigorously opposed by most of the established authorities of the day. But there was another side to David. He wasn’t entirely cerebral, but enjoyed handling real objects, and loved to visit field projects (although he admitted he wasn’t much of a field archaeologist himself). When I first started to research the prehistory of Fengate I assumed that the fen nearby was just wet, wet, wet and of no importance, but David was not so sure. At the time he had just finished work on a reinterpretation of the Glastonbury Iron Age Lake Village in Somerset. This had made him think about the way people on the fringes of wet areas lived and how they used the neighbouring fens or bogs. He turned my attention to books on medieval history, and I soon found myself reading about the farmers of the great monastic Fenland estates, at places like Ramsey, Crowland and Thorney Abbeys. The monastic system of farming made use of the fact that the Fens were rarely entirely flooded – inundated – and certainly not all year round. In the drier months of summer there were huge areas of grass and reeds. Sheep and cattle love reeds, so this lush grazing was ideal for the young lambs and calves, and of course for their mothers, who required vastly more food and water when they were in milk. So the farmers of the Middle Ages would take their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep out into the Fens when water levels fell in the springtime, then return to their ‘island’ or dryland base in the late autumn, when the weather broke. It struck me that the Bronze Age fields at Fengate must have been on the winter, or home base, part of this cycle. They were laid out in a closely similar way to their medieval counterparts, with double-ditched droveways running down to the wetter ground, at right angles. Droveways are still a common feature of the Fenland landscape. In effect, they are green roads, built to be used by animals. They tend to be quite straight and are bounded by deep ditches and impenetrable hedges. Often the ground between the two ditches was built up with soil from the ditches on either side. This helped to keep the grass surface of the droveway dry. The ditched droves at Fengate were laid out at regular intervals, of approximately two hundred metres, and the fields and paddocks between each drove seemed to have been laid out in different shapes and styles – rather as if the blocks of land defined by the droves belonged to different farmers or farming families. At this early stage in the project we had yet to discover where the people of Fengate lived, where they were buried and how they had organised their lives. We just had the barest of bare bones. But it was a start. It was a framework, a grand design, and I could sometimes imagine fragments of the picture that was eventually to emerge. CHAPTER FOUR Direction and Disorientation (#ulink_a8a59a2a-426d-532d-abe6-4cc2c50501ea) THE FIRST THREE SEASONS of research at Fengate were wholly absorbing. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I was actually becoming too heavily involved. I was so immersed in what I was doing that I was in danger of losing sight of the wood – so extraordinary were its many trees. To be so absorbed is bad if the final objective of one’s research is the reconstruction of life ‘in the round’. An obsessed archaeologist will find it hard to stand back and see his work in perspective. This was a lesson I was about to learn from some of my newly-acquired friends in British academia. As our team worked, we found that we were slowly piecing together a picture of Bronze Age life on the Fengate site. We unearthed the foundations of our first Bronze Age roundhouse in 1974, and several others in subsequent seasons, and were also able to excavate their yards and outbuildings. The roundhouses themselves were very substantial buildings, with a floor area about the size of a Victorian two-up, two-down cottage. They had stout walls and thick roofs (made from thatch or turf, or a combination of the two); these roofs were well insulated and kept the buildings warm in winter and cool in summer. We worked on a very large scale and were able to place these small farmsteads within their own fields and droveways. Gradually the components of a long-lost landscape were starting to emerge. Bronze Age life-spans may have been short – most modern estimates suggest that you were old by your mid-thirties – but your three or four decades on earth were pleasant enough; provided, that is, you survived the trials of birth. The roundhouses where people lived were substantial, the fields were carefully laid out and the ditches around them were properly maintained. The discarded meat bones we had found suggested that domestic animals were well-fed. It all appeared efficient and well regulated. FIG 3 Excavated ground plan of a Bronze Age roundhouse at Fengate At the end of the second season in 1972 I gave a paper at a conference in Newcastle, in which I described the emerging picture of well-regulated life in the Bronze Age. No sooner had I stepped down from the stage than half a dozen academics declared that such order and organisation could only be due to the presence of a powerful political elite, who controlled those otherwise unruly prehistoric Fen folk. I don’t know why, but this assumption irritated me. Why couldn’t they control the way they behaved themselves? Why do some people always have to look for a ruling class, just because ordinary people seem to be running their lives efficiently and well? But despite my strong gut-feelings to the contrary, I couldn’t counter these arguments with facts of my own. So I held my tongue – which is not something I have ever found easy. One of the academics at the conference was Professor Richard Bradley. Richard was then a lecturer at Reading University, and he had taken a special interest in our work at Fengate. The previous year he had sent me some of his best and brightest students, and it was an arrangement that was to continue for many years. It was good to have close contact with students – they never let any of us rest on our laurels. If we had a bright idea, we had to test it and then see what could be made of it. This was stimulating, and gave rise to some creative archaeology. I remember thinking that sometimes the chat in our Tea Hut had more in common with a university common room than a draughty field in the Fens. On the train home from the conference, I reflected that it had indeed been useful, as it had given my quest a new impetus and a new direction. The resulting shift in emphasis, away from straight landscape reconstruction and towards patterns of prehistoric social organisation, was to have far-reaching consequences. I did not know it then, but I would soon find my quest moving from the world of the living to the lands of the dead. The train sped through the huge, open plain-like fields of Lincolnshire, and I was struck by the fact that even the relentless advance of modern, intensively farmed arable agriculture had not managed to destroy everything – yet. As we flashed through tunnels and cuttings I could just spot, through the flying trackside trees and scrubby hedges, that the open countryside still included isolated fragments of earlier landscapes: pockets of woodland, ploughed-out hollow ways, small villages nestling within shrunken remnants of meadows and paddocks. I knew that it was these earlier fragments which will allow future historians to place the modern changes in context. Their survival could tell them much about the type of land that was not needed for modern farming – and by implication the sort of land that was needed. The enlargements and modifications to farmhouses, and the conversion of old livestock buildings such as stables to farm offices, would reveal much about the size and organisation of the estates that made these changes. In other words, to understand the process of change, you need both a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. And it’s good news indeed if you can find a ‘during’. Unfortunately, they are rare. I sat back in my seat, closed my eyes and tried to assemble my thoughts. It was difficult: I was tired, the conference had been good fun and I hadn’t slept much. My brain refused stubbornly to work. So I dozed off. When I awoke we were approaching Peterborough. The sun was low and caught the magnificent Early English west front of the great cathedral. Then light dawned inside me. I had successfully used medieval analogy to illuminate the workings of the Bronze Age Fens. Surely, I reasoned, I could also turn the process on its head. To understand how social organisation worked in the Bronze Age, I should try to see how it differed from the previous period, the Neolithic. Hitherto I had tended to concentrate on the ‘after’ rather than the ‘before’. This approach had worked well, but I knew there were limits to what it could reveal. Essentially I was using a historical approach, whereas what I really needed was one that was much more radical. To understand the remote past I would have to examine the even more remote past; a daunting but exciting prospect. It was time to think in time-depth – to see how the lives of people and the landscapes in which they lived gradually changed. I had spent too long contemplating a single millennium. It had been rewarding and exciting, but it was now time to turn the clock back a long way indeed. I was aware that I had already made a start on this way of thinking the previous season, when we had discovered the slight foundation trenches of a small rectangular building, measuring about seven by eight and a half metres. It was one of those completely unexpected discoveries that happen from time to time, and which make archaeology such a delight. As it was later to prove so important to my quest, I shall describe how we found it in some detail. I won’t deny that it was a piece of luck, but I also like to think it was rather more than that – let’s call it structured luck. Sometimes the work at Fengate could be frustrating. 1972 had been a hot summer, and while sunshine is far better for team morale than continuous rain, it does make for practical problems in the dig. When the machines have removed the topsoil, we clear away all loose earth and scrape the freshly exposed surface clean with hoes or trowels. Usually there is enough moisture left in the ground for its natural colours to show up clearly, so ancient field ditches, post-holes or wall foundation slots that have been filled in for thousands of years will appear as dark marks on the surface of the subsoil. This darker colour is partly because they contain soil that slipped into them when they were abandoned, but partly too because they are damper – which, of course, is why they cause cropmarks to form. After a dry summer, the marks are much fainter and more difficult to detect. In time a really good field archaeologist will develop almost a sixth sense. He or she (I think women, possibly because they usually have better colour vision than men, are often better at this) will be able to look at a patch of freshly cleaned subsoil and spot any number of post-holes and ditches, most of which would have been missed by a novice. This skill in ‘reading’ the ground is tested to the full with Neolithic and Bronze Age features. For some reason, possibly to do with the ‘washing effect’ of the seasonal rise and fall of water in the ground, Iron Age, Roman and later features are much easier to spot: they seem to have sharper, more distinctive edges and good dark earth within them. It was high summer, and the machine had finished clearing the topsoil. Now it was time to clean the exposed surface by hand. There was nothing on the air photo of the area where we were working, but I had a hunch (and a few slender clues) that we might find evidence for a Bronze Age building, so I told Chris and the machine to go ahead. The sun burned down relentlessly and the sweat poured off us as we hoed the ground as fast as we could. But we couldn’t go fast enough: the earth was drying out about a metre behind us as we hoed. After two hours we had finished, and although I stared at the ground for about a quarter of an hour I could see nothing. Nothing at all. It was a dejected team that sat exhausted and fed up in the Tea Hut that afternoon. Although we couldn’t see anything, miracles can sometimes happen, so I let it be known that until further notice, nobody was to walk across the trench we had just hoed clean. Everyone knew that footprints blotted out soil colours, and nobody wanted to rehoe the surface, so the instruction was scrupulously obeyed. About a week later we had the rain we so urgently needed. I remember noting that the sky to the east, over Whittlesey, was completely black. As we watched, we could see lightning flash and a few seconds later came the rumble of thunder. I reckoned the storm would hit Peterborough in about fifteen minutes, and prayed it wouldn’t be too severe. A torrential downpour would undo all our patient work, and we’d have to reclean the surface yet again. The first drops of rain began to fall, but mercifully the main body of the storm passed by, further east, and we only caught a fringing shower. But it was enough to dampen the ground. I immediately walked across to the trench, and there, right in the middle, were the just-detectably darker stains of four slight ditches, arranged in a rough square. The sun came out, and almost at once the marks began to fade. I pulled a trowel from my back pocket, jumped down into the trench and scored a deep line around the edges of the darker soil. As I worked I noticed that the ditches did not sit in isolation: there were several pits or post-holes with them. It took about fifteen minutes to mark the ground, and when I climbed back out of the trench I could see no colour differences whatsoever. They had completely vanished. Our first task was to make an accurate plan of the features I’d outlined on the ground. When that was done I could have shouted for joy. There, on the paper before me was a plan of a small building, similar to one excavated at Haldon in Devon before the last war by my old professor, Grahame Clark. It took us several weeks, and a lot of fine misted water from watering cans and hand-held sprayers, to excavate the four ditches. But it was well worth the effort. The ditches and the small pits and post-holes near them produced an astonishingly rich and diverse collection of finds: lots of flint, big pieces of pottery, but no animal bones. Like those from Haldon, our finds dated to the Earlier Neolithic period, and a radiocarbon date taken from a burnt corner-post gave a date range of 3310 to 2910 BC. There was no doubt about it: our newly discovered house predated the Bronze Age landscape by up to half a millennium. I had thought little more about our Neolithic house until the train journey back from the Newcastle conference, and even then it was difficult to deconstruct and reinvent something we had discovered so recently. It’s much easier to revise one’s views when they’ve had a little time to ‘settle in’ and mature. As part of my newly-made resolution to examine the ‘before’ landscape of the Bronze Age fields I laid the plans of the Neolithic house on the kitchen table and stared at them long and hard. But I had no moment of revelation, no blinding flash of insight. They looked much as I remembered them. I knew that somewhere on those plans was something trying to catch my attention, some key that would unlock the secrets that lay within, but I couldn’t spot it. FIG 4 Ground plan of the Fengate Neolithic ‘house’, or mortuary structure Most years we dug from April to October. Towards the end of the season I would carefully pack up our finds and send them to Canada by sea. It normally took them about six weeks to arrive, and then I’d work my way through them during the Canadian winter. It felt strange to be in Toronto, handling pieces of pottery and flint tools that often came in dried muddy bags, each of which reminded me of a particular wet day on the other side of the Atlantic. But this pattern of work was effective, and allowed me to stay on top of my report-writing as the project progressed. It also meant that I was able to reflect on the previous year’s results before the next season began, and to work out the questions we had to address the following year. A few days after the conference we returned to Canada for the winter. By now I was getting better at coping with jet-lag, but my brain was never at its most active in the three or four days immediately after the flight. So you can imagine my feelings when I discovered, on returning to my office in Toronto, a pile of proofs sitting on my desk, accompanied by a note from the Museum Academic Editor to the effect that they had to be read through and corrected by the end of the week – which was in three days’ time. The proofs consisted of the unbound pages of my first report on the Fengate project, which was to be published on 28 February 1974. Proof-reading requires a great deal of concentration. Every letter of every word has to be checked and rechecked. I began the task, and soon found my jet-lagged concentration was lapsing. It was hopeless, but I knew that if I missed the deadline, the printer would start another job, and the publication of the report would be delayed for months. So I had to deal with those proofs somehow. Rather than do nothing, I decided to check the artwork first, because I find illustrations sometimes require less close attention. As I was checking through the line drawings I came to the main plan of the Neolithic house. I checked the two scales – one metric and one imperial – and was about to turn the page when I spotted an important omission. For some reason – it’s quite easily done – I had left out the arrow indicating north. Normally the north arrow points upwards, but in this case I had jiggled the drawing slightly, so that the rectangular building sat square on the page. I knew I wasn’t meant to alter the picture proofs themselves, so I took the original artwork across to my drawing board. I suppose I ought to have moved the artwork that was already there, a plan of the paired Bronze Age droveway ditches, but I couldn’t be bothered, and simply taped the plan of the house on top of it and added the north arrow. When I had finished, I stood back to admire my handiwork and let the ink dry. And then something odd caught my eye. One would normally expect a square or rectangular building to follow the alignment of the landscape; it looks odd if a new building is positioned without any regard to the features of the land around it. Thus, houses are usually positioned parallel to roads or at right angles to them. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that that rule also applied in Neolithic times, but it was immediately apparent from the two superimposed plans on the drawing board in front of me that the alignment of the two landscapes was significantly different. If something as profoundly important as the orientation of a landscape can change, then that implies an equally profound change in the way the landscape was used, and indeed in the way people organised themselves to use it. My point is that we don’t realign landscapes willy-nilly. Even stark modern agri-desert landscapes tend to follow the ‘grain’ of the pre-existing countryside. Nowadays, nobody would contemplate setting out the existing landscape afresh, from scratch. It would be pointless and horrendously expensive. But that is what appears to have happened in the period between the construction of our Neolithic house and the laying out of the Bronze Age ditched fields in 2500 BC. Now for a word of caution. As archaeologists, we have to work with the bits and pieces that time bequeaths us. We’re adept at reconstructing entire Roman inscriptions, such as gravestones, from fragments of just two letters. Or we can imaginatively reconstruct a house on the basis of four post-holes. Unfortunately, sometimes we get things wrong – as, for example, when I mistook a loomweight for a bit of daub. This business of landscape orientation was a case in point. Was it really wise to suggest something as radical as the wholesale reorganisation of a landscape on the basis of just one house? Was I seriously prepared to stand up at a conference and make the case before three hundred highly sceptical colleagues? I decided to wait for further proof. I had had the insight, but unfortunately modern archaeology expects more by way of evidence for such bright ideas. The following season was spent excavating huge tracts of Bronze Age fields, together with their farms and droveways. It was exciting and rewarding work, but I was conscious that I had ceased to break new ground. But then, in archaeology, as in life, one cannot always be exploring virgin territory. Sometimes one has to pause and consolidate. When I returned to Canada for the winter I was rushed off my feet sorting through finds and preparing illustrations for the Second Fengate Report. I hadn’t worked so hard for a long time. Consolidation can often be labour-intensive and time-consuming. I returned to England for our fifth season of excavation in April 1975. It was to be one of the busiest I have ever experienced. By now, much pressure was being brought on me to clear land which the New Town authorities wanted to use for building factories. Fengate was starting to live up to its new name, the Eastern Industrial Area, and factories in this part of Peterborough would soon provide most of the employment for the city’s rapidly expanding population. It was a case of dig or bust. Early in the summer we exposed several more acres of Bronze Age fields, and then started work on a substantial Iron Age village, which was occupied between about 350 BC. and into the early Roman period – say AD 150. The inhabitants had placed their hamlet on the edge of the regularly flooded land, close to a small stream known as the Cat’s Water. Like many Iron Age sites in eastern England, the Cat’s Water settlement was producing huge quantities of material, and we were all kept extremely busy. The story of the next discovery in our quest begins towards the end of the excavation, when we were running out of time and energy. To make matters worse, money was also in short supply. Summer was rapidly turning to autumn, and quite soon the rain would start in earnest. For these and other reasons I was extremely keen to finish. One morning, while doing the rounds through the various trenches, I came across our new principal site supervisor, David Cranstone, on his hands and knees trowelling away at a patch of pale silt. After several years I had learned a great deal about the natural subsoil at Fengate, and I prided myself on being able to distinguish man-made from natural features. It struck me at once that the patch Dave was trowelling was not a man-made feature. It looked very ordinary indeed: maybe it was the filled-in hole left by the roots of an ancient tree that had blown over a few thousand years ago – who knows? Such things (we call them tree-throw pits) are not uncommon, and given the rush to finish the season’s dig, I couldn’t understand why David wanted to spend time digging one. I could think of many more urgent things that needed doing, but I managed to keep my irritation under wraps, consoling myself with the thought that he was bound to be doing something more constructive in a few hours’ time. That afternoon I passed through the trench for a second time, and Dave was still at it, trowelling steadily down through the silt patch. This was too much. ‘Dave,’ I said as calmly as I could manage, ‘it’s just another tree-throw pit. For Heaven’s sake, man, you must have more important things to finish, haven’t you?’ He seemed quite impervious to my exasperation. He didn’t even look up when he spoke. He was completely wrapped up in his work. ‘Calm down, Francis. It won’t take long.’ I had been dismissed. More than a little surprised at Dave’s offhand reply, I continued on my way. I was not in the most sunny of tempers. The following morning I was detained with the project’s accountants in town, and did not arrive back on site until the afternoon. I almost exploded when I saw that Dave was still on his hands and knees in the same spot. I stormed across to his trench. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dave!’ He smiled up at me, holding a small flint blade on the palm of his hand. It glistened in the damp sunlight against his silt-stained skin. I was staggered at his nerve. Small flint blades and other scraps of ancient flint-working debris frequently find their way into tree-throw pits through the action of earthworms, moles or other animals, so to find a flake on its own meant absolutely nothing. After a few minutes I was again dismissed, and this time I left with ill-concealed irritation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see other members of the team beginning to take an interest in what Dave was up to. I’m not noted for a quick temper, but I knew I was approaching the end of my fuse. Throughout the whole of the next day, Thursday, I studiously avoided Dave’s trench. By now it was quite deep, and I could only see the top of his head when he straightened up to empty a bucket of soil into his wheelbarrow. By Friday we only had a week to finish the dig. In seven days’ time the workmen would be arriving on site to start building factories. There would be a ghastly public row if we held them up, so I assembled the crew together in the Tea Hut and suggested we should work through the weekend to get things finished. Everyone nobly agreed, although a few bad-tempered looks went Dave’s way. It was clear that I was not the only person who considered him to have taken temporary leave of his senses. That night Dave and his ‘bloody great hole’ featured prominently in our talk at the pub. On my way to the site the next day I made up my mind that ‘Dave’s hole’ had now become a major issue. Something had to be done about it, or else I’d look stupid in the eyes of the others. As is the way of these things, I had learned in the pub the previous evening that some of the younger members of the team thought I was losing control over my Principal Supervisor. It was ridiculous to fall out with a good friend like Dave over such a minor matter, but the crunch could not be avoided. It was him or me: site morale – something my mental antennae have always been quite well attuned to – was beginning to creak. I was about to leave my shed to have the nose-to-nose confrontation I was dreading when there was a rap at the door. It opened, and Dave stood there, grinning hugely. I knew that look: it said ‘I told you so!’ in letters a yard high. I have always tried to discourage the team from gathering around the scene of a new discovery – but so far, I have to admit, without much success. As Dave and I walked rapidly across the site, we saw that half a dozen folk had already congregated around his pit, and that others were coming to join them. When we got there, I was amazed at the size ‘Dave’s hole’ had grown to – he had certainly been hard at work. The bottom of the hole was flat, where Dave had been scraping off silt with his trowel. This smoothed, flat base gave the impression of still water with just the lightest of ripples – the marks left by the trowel. Towards one end of the pit, as if freed from an underwater necropolis, a human skull could be seen emerging. Parts of another, perhaps smaller, one were next to it. Several limb bones and a few vertebrae lay round about the two skulls, like grisly flotsam on the water’s surface. I have seen many burials, but it was hard not to be moved by the sight of this one. A question immediately came into my mind: what on earth had these poor people done that had led to such an ignominious end, in an unmarked pit on the edge of the Fens? My archaeologist’s eye noted that the grave-pit was a large one, and it was soon apparent that it had been dug to contain more than just two skulls and a few loose bones. There had to be more bones or bodies. After I had seen the skulls, Dave, with characteristic grace, tried to spare me the large slice of humble pie that was now my rightful lot; I ate it nonetheless, and in public. But how on earth had he known that that apparently unpromising patch of silt would turn out to be so exciting? When I ask him, as I still do whenever our paths cross, he simply shrugs his shoulders and smiles enigmatically. Whatever it was, something made him persist against the full force of my growing fury and the unconcealed scepticism of everyone around him. Moreover, it was not as if he had a record of eccentric behaviour. Frankly, I can’t explain it; nor, I suspect, can Dave. We now confronted the practical problem that faced us. In theory there were just six and a bit days of excavation to go; but I knew that the discovery of what was probably a complex multiple burial had strengthened our hand enormously. Nobody, not even in those days, could simply have taken a bulldozer to human remains. I took the problem to the powers-that-be, and was eventually able to negotiate a three-week stay of execution that allowed us to excavate the contents of ‘Dave’s pit’ properly. In the event, this required extraordinary care. The two skulls that were first revealed belonged to a young woman, aged twenty-five to thirty, and a child (hers?), aged eight to twelve, whose bones had been placed higgledy-piggledy in a pile at one end of the pit. At the centre of the pit were the small bones of a younger child, aged three to four. The only complete skeleton was that of a young man, of about the same age as the woman. He had been buried on his side, with his legs drawn up to his stomach, as if crouching. Like many burials, it was difficult to be certain of its age. We did know that the upper filling of the pit had been cut through by a farm ditch of the much later Cat’s Water Iron Age settlement. That meant that the digging of the pit had to predate the ditch, which we knew was dug sometime around 200 BC. That was some help, but not a lot. The silt that had been thrown into the grave was a whitish pale-brown colour, and we knew that pale soils were often old. My guess was that the grave pit had been dug sometime in the Neolithic period. For all anyone knew, it could have been at the time the house we had found in 1972 was in use, around 3000 BC, or even earlier. Our guessed date was proved triumphantly correct when Dave’s meticulous excavation revealed how the unfortunate young man had died. Between his eighth and ninth ribs Dave revealed a beautifully made leaf-shaped flint arrowhead with its tip snapped off. Similar damage had been noted in Scandinavia on arrowheads that had been fired into hunted animals, so I reckoned that ours had probably lost its tip when it struck the rib bones. There could be little doubt: the young man had been shot with an arrow. The discovery of what was then one of the earliest deliberate killings in Britain caused enormous public interest. Breaking with tradition, we decided not to remove the bones one by one and reassemble them for a museum display. Instead, we lifted the entire burial intact in two large blocks of gravel, which we consolidated in a type of liquid plastic (Polyvinyl acetate) and then transported to Peterborough Museum, where it now forms a central part of the prehistoric display. The arrowhead is still in place, undisturbed, exactly where we found it. That year I returned to Toronto somewhat later than normal, because I was unable to arrange for over 20,000 pieces of pottery and probably half a tonne of animal bone to be transported across the Atlantic. Instead, we made arrangements with Peterborough Museum for space to store and study the finds. I took some key maps and plans with me, and several boxes of flints – tools and chippings – which I would study during the long, cold Canadian winter. Back in my office at the Royal Ontario Museum, I started work on the complex plans of the Cat’s Water Iron Age village. We had discovered over fifty round houses and huge numbers of pits, wells and other features, including several Iron Age graves. I had been working through the plans for about a week when I found myself looking at the sketches and plans of ‘Dave’s hole’. At the time these looked far more inviting than the complexities of the later settlement, so I decided to work on them first. My initial concern was simple: did the burial pit have any connection with the rectangular house we’d dug in that hot summer, back in 1972? There was only one way to find out for sure. I went to the shelves and pulled down the large-scale map of Fengate on which I had drawn the parallel droveway ditches of the fields that afternoon when lying on the sitting-room carpet surrounded by aerial photos. Subsequently I had added the rectangular house and anything else important. I suppose you could call it my Master Plan. It took me a few minutes to measure everything in, but when I had finished I was rather disappointed: nothing seemed to line up. I rolled the Master Plan up and was about to throw it back on the shelf in frustration when I remembered two parallel ditches we had also found in 1972. By rights, these should also be included on the Master Plan. They were different from the ‘main’, Bronze Age parallel droveway ditches, being altogether smaller and shallower, and we found them over a kilometre ‘inland’ from the edge of the fen. Most importantly, they had produced no finds other than a fragment of a rare Neolithic polished axe made from Langdale stone. I suppose I should have remembered to examine the alignment of these smaller ditches when I was proof-reading the First Fengate Report, but my jet-lagged brain failed me. This time I determined to do better, and rolled the Master Plan out on my drawing board for a second time. It took me a few minutes to plot the two shallow ditches accurately, but when I had finished it was quite apparent that their alignment was significantly different from that of the main Bronze Age system. I was pleased that this shift in orientation showed up so well, but for some reason I wasn’t exactly surprised. Then something clicked. The two shallow ditches were pointing directly at both the Neolithic house and the multiple burial in ‘Dave’s hole’. It was so obvious, I could hardly believe it. We now had three quite separate sites on approximately the same general alignment, and this alignment was significantly different from that of the Bronze Age fields. My theory – that the pre-Bronze Age landscape was set out on a significantly different alignment – was beginning to gain support. But could I be certain that the two shallow ditches were in fact Neolithic? Happily for me, the site notes and archive for 1972 were still in Toronto. I went down into the museum basement, and when I had got all the papers and finds bags before me I began to sort through them. In 1972 we had opened several trenches, and the one in question was at Vicarage Farm. It sounds a peaceful rural idyll, but in reality it lay next to a Gas Board storage depot and the largest diesel-engine factory in Europe. Peaceful it was not. The air photos of Vicarage Farm showed cropmarks of several large pits which had been cut into an unusual outcrop of limestone. After removing the topsoil we found, as is usually the case, that the aerial photos only revealed a small proportion of the features that were actually present below the ground. When we dug them we found that the pits were wells, and around them were all sorts of other features belonging to a small Iron Age village of about 500 to 100 BC. Like most such settlements, the features at Vicarage Farm yielded large quantities of pottery, bone and other debris. Now, the two shallow ditches ran across part of the Iron Age settlement, yet they did not produce so much as a scrap of pottery. I’m certain that this could not possibly have been the case if they had been open when the Iron Age settlement was occupied. There would simply have been too much debris lying around the place, and some of it was bound to have been kicked into an open ditch by someone. By the same token, the ditches were unlikely to have been later than the settlement, otherwise debris would have found its way into them as residual finds lying around in the topsoil. Even the modern drainage ditches around the edges of the factory had residual Iron Age pottery in them. It was everywhere, and hard to avoid. As if to clinch the matter, the only find from either of the two ditches was the fragment of a Neolithic polished stone Langdale axe. In the New Stone Age (which is what ‘Neolithic’ means) stone was the most important material for making edge-tools, such as axes. Some stone was much better for this purpose than others, and became much prized. Like many things we humans touch and cherish, there was a fine balance between beauty and utility. And the most beautiful stone of all was quarried high in the mountains of the Lake District, at a place called Great Langdale. Langdale stone is hard, fine-grained and a subtle greyish-green in colour. It looks even better when polished to a silky sheen – and Neolithic axes were almost always patiently polished to a fine, smooth finish. As well as Langdale there were other so-called ‘axe factor’ sites in Britain, in Wales, Cornwall and elsewhere, and they all exported their products to distant parts of the country. A large number of Langdale axes were sent to communities on the other side of the country. Fengate, for example, is 175 miles south-east of Langdale. There seemed little doubt that the two shallow ditches were Neolithic – and probably Earlier Neolithic, too. I would guess they were dug well before 3000 BC. As I’ve already mentioned, the rectangular house had produced many finds, including some rather unusual pieces. One of these was a large flake that had been deliberately removed – with a sharp blow – from a polished Langdale axe. Another was a beautifully-made and highly-polished jet bead. This wasn’t a little bead – it was large enough to have just covered, say, the top joint of one’s thumb. Jet is a shiny, coal-like material whose nearest source is the beautiful Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby, some 130 miles to the north of Fengate. In addition to these rare finds there was a lot of fine pottery and a remarkable collection of flint implements, including a most unusual and beautifully-made sickle blade in lustrous blue-black flint. I returned upstairs from the basement and spread some of the finds from the rectangular house on my desk. They really were beautiful. Could they, in all truthfulness, have been cast aside as debris – mere rubbish, the sweepings off the kitchen floor? As I handled the large flake of Langdale stone, my doubts vanished. I was now certain that the rectangular building was not merely a house. It had to be a special place. I must now take the story temporarily forward a few years. I completed the Fengate project in 1978, and spent the next two years writing the final two reports, which were published in 1980 and 1984. Part of my background research included a detailed survey of all previous excavations in or near Fengate. The last excavation to have happened before our campaign began was in 1968, at a place called Site 11. The site was first spotted on an air photo, as a cropmark, and it looked a bit strange. It consisted of a straight-sided rectangular enclosure, defined by a continuous single ditch, with sharp corners. It measured about fifty by thirty metres, but there was no sign on the air photos of an entrance of any sort. This made me sit up and take notice. The excavations produced decorated pottery and flint tools in the distinctive style of the Early Bronze Age Beaker ‘Culture’. In the brief report that appeared shortly after the dig, it was suggested that the enclosure and the pottery belonged together, and that the whole site was a small farmstead or settlement of some sort. This seemed a quite reasonable conclusion at the time, but when I came to reexamine the Site 11 report at the end of the Fengate project, I couldn’t reconcile it with what we had found. It simply didn’t fit in. By now alignment and orientation were becoming something of an obsession with me. I checked the orientation of the Site 11 enclosure, and it bore no relationship at all to the Bronze Age fields in which it was supposed to sit. If the dating of either the fields or the enclosure was correct, they had to have been in use in the first few centuries of the second millennium BC. So how could they fail to share a common alignment? It didn’t make sense. This was something of a side-issue to my main work, the writing of two large reports, and I resolved to go back to the original site notes and records from 1968 to see if they would clear matters up for me. They did, but in a completely unexpected fashion. In one of the notebooks I came across an unpublished pre-excavation pencil sketch-plan. It was a good sketch-plan, and was annotated in an elegant italic hand. Subsequently it had been scratched out by, possibly, a different hand. The features shown in the initial sketch bore an uncanny resemblance to the first Bronze Age roundhouse we had excavated back in 1974. Everything was there: the front-door posts, the ring-gully eaves-drip gutter; even the alignment of the doorway was right. It was simply too good to have been invented. FIG 5 Ground plan of Fengate Site 11, showing the position of archaeological trenches When I examined the records further, it became clear that the Early Bronze Age Beaker pottery came from this house and from features, such as fireplaces, that may have been part of it. There was no reason to suppose that the rectangular enclosure had anything to do with the house at all. They could have been constructed centuries, even millennia apart. It felt good to have sorted this little problem out. But why didn’t I pursue the matter further? What about the rectangular enclosure, for Heaven’s sake? I suppose I was too keen to get back to the writing of those two great volumes. But I had missed a trick. It was to be another five years before the next piece in the jigsaw fell into place. I was spending the weekend with the eminent authority on the Neolithic period, Dr Ian Kinnes, at his house in Guildford. On the dinner table before us were drawings of Neolithic pottery from Etton, the site I was then digging and which I’ll discuss later. The drawings were annotated in Ian’s elegant italic hand, and suddenly I remembered the handwriting in the Site 11 notebook. Was Ian the supervisor who made those notes, I asked. He was. It was a part-time job he’d done while he was a post-graduate student at Cambridge. He couldn’t remember why his sketch-plan had been crossed out, and he shared my view that if the structure was indeed a Bronze Age roundhouse, then it went with the later fields, and not with the enclosure. I was thinking aloud. ‘So that leaves the enclosure high and dry, I suppose?’ ‘Oh, no it doesn’t,’ he said. ‘Quite the opposite. That house was always a problem. Take the house away, and you’re left with a mortuary enclosure – like the ones that turned up the other day on air photos in Essex.’ An article about the Essex enclosures had recently appeared in an academic journal, so I was familiar with what he was talking about. Mortuary enclosures and structures were special places that were constructed in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age to receive recently deceased corpses. By and large, they do not seem to have been used as permanent resting places, although burials are often found in them. Sometimes, indeed quite often, the enclosure takes the form of a surrounding wooden wall, or even a roofed building. More often than not, the original enclosure may become incorporated within a later burial mound, or barrow. In short, they are complicated sites and are probably best considered one at a time, as individuals. As soon as I returned home, I unrolled my well-used Master Plan, which was now rather grubby and dog-eared. I had not added the Site 11 enclosure to it, as my team hadn’t dug it. As I was drawing it in in its rightful place, I was immediately aware that its alignment precisely followed that of the ‘house’ and the pair of shallow ditches at Vicarage Farm. All four Neolithic sites appeared to process across the Fengate landscape in an orderly row, from north-east to south-west. It was quite extraordinary. By this time I had come to the conclusion that the ‘house’ we had dug in 1972 was a mortuary structure, but without a body. Some mortuary structures, indeed most barrows as well, are thought deliberately to echo the houses of the living – as Houses of the Dead. Certainly the rich finds from the ‘house’ would be appropriate for a mortuary house. FIG 6 Ground plan of the Neolithic mortuary structure at Fengate discovered in 1997 by the Cambridge University archaeological team The latest piece of this jigsaw, which so far has taken over a quarter of a century to assemble, fell into place in July 1997. By this time the old way of doing research, in which a local team tried to grapple with the particular problems of a given region, had been replaced by the modern system of competitive tendering, where the lowest price wins. All too often this system produces half-digested results that are not adequately tied into the regional story. The work is done for money – and it shows. But in this case the project, at the edge of my earlier Cat’s Water excavation, was won by a team from Cambridge University, with which I have always been friendly. They did an excellent job, and kept me closely informed. However, this was a truly independent excavation – independent of me and my pet theories, that is. The Cambridge team were digging at the extreme edge of the wet ground on a low gravel knoll, which reached out a short distance into the shallow waters where peat had begun to form around 2000 BC. On this knoll they found a rectangular arrangement of small pits and post-holes and a collection of finds which included big pieces of Neolithic pottery, but no animal bones. As with the ‘house’ I had dug twenty-four years previously, it would appear that the objects found in the ground were not a random selection of household debris, but gave every appearance of having been carefully selected. Quite independently, the Cambridge team interpreted their site as a mortuary structure. And when they came to plot its position on the map, lo and behold, it was orientated north-east to south-west; what is more, it lined up beautifully with the other four Neolithic sites. It had taken nearly twenty-five years to uncover evidence to support my original theory. It was now clear that the landscape had changed its orientation sometime between four and five thousand years ago. But why? And what did it mean? Most important of all, why was there this emphasis on death, with a multiple burial and three mortuary structures? CHAPTER FIVE Gardens of Creation (#ulink_6e9f650d-6acb-5dc7-8f88-e0d6fe510de9) MY QUEST INTO the lives of prehistoric people was taking me in unexpected directions – such as, for example, Death itself. I knew that I wanted to bring their world forward, into our time, but I was finding myself being drawn back further and further into theirs. It was as if I was the centre of a ghostly tug-o’-war. I felt they were leading my footsteps, holding my hand, like wise grandparents with a young child. Where, I wondered, were they going to take me next? The quest was now about to enter a philosophical, almost a mystical, stage. I was facing some of the Big Questions of human existence. I knew full well that I could never do these Big Questions justice, because – like most of my colleagues – I simply don’t possess the necessary philosophical background. Having said that, I feel it is arrogant in the extreme to dig up religious and mortuary sites without making at least some effort to understand what those places might have meant to the people who built them. I should have realised that one cannot hope to understand the lives and deaths of ancient people – any people – if one chooses to ignore their history. By history I don’t mean a dry account of a succession of archaeological ‘cultures’, or indeed of presidents, prime ministers, kings or queens. I mean history in the sense that we all understand it, as a series of stories about the past that provides us with an all-enveloping explanation of why and how we are here. The Battle of Britain affirms my reluctant feeling of patriotism, and tales of my grandmother – such as the time she was supposed to have wrestled a crocodile to its death somewhere in India – make me feel part of my family. We each have all sorts of histories: individual, family, local and national. All of these different stories comprise history as it affects our daily lives. Prehistoric people also had histories of this sort, and they were probably equally old, odd, at times jingoistic and improbable. But the huge time-span of archaeology has taught me that the individual events of history don’t matter. It’s the broad pattern and purpose behind them that tells a human story. It began to be apparent to me that my interest in landscape development was fine as far as it went, but it was too impersonal. To see things from the perspective of once-living people, I had somehow to take myself back; and in such a way that I could imagine what their histories might have included. What, for example, might Bronze Age folk have seen as The Beginning? All societies need Creation myths. Today, if we are unbelievers we have the Big Bang, if we are Christian we have Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and there are hundreds of others. Creation myths justify our place in the world and give us a sense of belonging. The story of human beings is essentially one of continuous change and gradual development. There are few times when the whole world is suddenly turned on its head. One such occasion was undoubtedly the Industrial Revolution. In archaeological terms it was remarkably swift – a mere two to three hundred years at the outside – and nowadays there is hardly anywhere on the globe that has not felt its effects. Hidden within the Industrial Revolution were other revolutions, which could not have taken hold without the new context created by the industrial world – revolutions such as the Agricultural Revolution or the Medical Revolution. Currently we all have to grapple with a great-grandchild of the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, which some of us have attempted to master with greater or lesser success. There is something rather attractive about the idea of revolutions. They imply phenomena bigger than mere human beings. A revolution is something that happens despite our wishes; it has a momentum all of its own. There is more than a hint of the hand of God. So when in the 1930s someone suggested the notion of the wonderfully portentous-sounding Neolithic Revolution, the archaeological community greeted it with acclamation. The Neolithic Revolution was quite simply the invention or beginnings of farming. From this came settled life, the production of pottery and a number of other typically Neolithic traits, such as the use of polishing, instead of chipping or flaking alone, to make stone axes. Communal tombs and villages also came with the Revolution. It was an attractive idea, and in certain parts of central and southern Europe the spread of the new Neolithic way of life must have seemed like a revolution. I was taught about the Neolithic Revolution at university; then the first radiocarbon dates, those ultimate spoilsports of our subject, came along and showed that, as revolutions went, this one was slow (in Europe it lasted for about three millennia). Further dates then demonstrated that it happened at various times in different parts of the world, which makes the use of the singular word ‘revolution’ problematical. The core of the original Neolithic Revolution concept was the invention of farming. This too was sometimes given a portentous-sounding definition – like, for example, the shift from hunter-gatherer to food producer. Unfortunately the basis of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ was flawed. It assumed that a clear, distinct and rapidly-formed fault-line separated food producers from those who hunted and gathered. But it was not as simple as that. Research into modern hunting-and-gathering communities has shown that they don’t simply breeze through the woods plucking ripe mulberries when the mood takes them. Their way of life is far more rich and complex. For a start, they conserve and husband their resources. And it’s not a big step from husbanded resources to animal husbandry – which of course is an important form of farming. Another precept behind the Neolithic Revolution was the idea that hunter-gatherers spent most of their time and energies gathering nuts and berries or stalking elusive deer. Farmers, on the other hand, were thought to have the time to sit around the family hearth, recite myths and legends, and generally develop a rich and complex ideological world. I remember attending a lecture in Canada by the University of Toronto anthropologist Richard B. Lee, in which he turned this idea on its head. He showed that the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa were so efficient at procuring their food that they had plenty of time to weave the richest of ideologies; the same can be said for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Meanwhile farmers had to spend wearisome hours guarding their crops and flocks, while in constant pain, unable to focus their thoughts, as dental caries ate into their teeth – a condition rare amongst hunting societies. Research into the lives of hunting people has also shown that they conserve prey with great care. They encourage beasts to congregate in the same places, such as clearings made around watering-holes, so that the hunters are not forced to take part in long-distance stalking. The idea is to hunt efficiently and not to expend energy unnecessarily. The difference between encouraging wild animals regularly to enter a clearing, and actually farming your own domestic flocks, seems pretty minimal. Large parts of lowland Britain were covered with forest after the retreat of the last Ice Age some twelve thousand years ago. We know this from the patient work of archaeological scientists over the past sixty or seventy years. In the 1930s and forties Sir Harry Godwin and other pioneers of pollen analysis were able to reconstruct past environments by identifying and counting prehistoric pollen grains preserved in lake beds and peat bogs. Their work was to inspire contemporary archaeologists and other environmental scientists, who then turned their attention to our subject. One might reasonably ask how hard science can possibly help us investigate something as deeply rooted in the world of the imagination as a myth of creation. The answer is that archaeological science has become far more than a mere ‘add-on’ to conventional archaeology. Science, and most particularly environmental science, allows us to recreate the surroundings in which people lived. We have learned that past communities did not merely react to changes in their natural environment; they helped to cause changes, then modified the landscape and the way they lived within it once the changes had happened. We now know that this relationship between people and their landscapes was both subtle and complex. And we owe many of these insights to science. Some archaeologists have acquired a full scientific training; they still see themselves first and foremost as archaeologists, but with specific scientific skills. Like any non-scientific archaeologist, such as myself, their main interest is in past people. Science is just a technique that allows them to approach this ultimate goal. One of my oldest friends and closest colleagues, Charly French, is Canadian. He was a key member of the various teams I led from 1975 until 1989, and he wrote his doctoral thesis, for the Institute of Archaeology, London University, on the ancient environment of Fengate and the Peterborough region. In those days his main techniques were sediment and molluscan analysis, which perhaps need a few words of explanation. Sir Harry Godwin showed how the analysis of preserved pollen grains could help recreate the numbers and types of plants that were growing in the past at any particular time. This general approach works well for other things too. The shells of molluscs, of which snails are the most commonly found, resist decay quite well and are often preserved in the ground. We’re all familiar with large garden snails, a common species of which was introduced to Britain by the Romans as an edible snail. But there are also hundreds of other, much smaller snails which lurk in shady spots, in water, in ditches or even underground. Snails are fussy about the conditions they require. The technique of molluscan analysis takes all snails, great and small, from a sample of ancient soil and uses the ‘fussiness’ of the individual species to draw a picture of conditions in the past. So if you find species of snails that like it wet alongside those that like it dry, you can reasonably assume that the local environment was regularly flooded, but dried out in hot seasons. Unlike pollen analysis, which receives pollen grains from miles away, molluscan analysis paints on a smaller canvas; but sometimes the pictures can be remarkably accurate. Charly’s other skill in our early days together was sediment analysis. This is a geological technique which examines the physical composition of a soil or sediment. The size range of particles within a sample can tell how it was formed: whether, for example, it was laid down by flooding water, or whether it washed down the side of a hill. In the Fens hill-wash is rare, but thick layers of water-borne clay, known as alluvium, are crucially important. They blanket the ground surface, enriching and building up the topsoil beneath. After many years, alluvial deposits can accumulate to massive thickness, and their presence on the surface protects archaeological features buried beneath them from damage by modern intensive farming. Although it is sticky, horrid stuff to walk over, Fenland archaeologists have grown to love alluvium. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/francis-pryor/seahenge-a-quest-for-life-and-death-in-bronze-age-britain/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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