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