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