Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain. Francis Pryor
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,