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