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