Scenes From
Prehistoric Life
Scenes From
Prehistoric Life
FROM THE ICE AGE TO THE COMING OF THE ROMANS
FRANCIS PRYOR
AN APOLLO BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
An Apollo book
First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Francis Pryor, 2021
The moral right of Francis Pryor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789544145
ISBN (E): 9781789544169
Maps by Jeff Edwards
Head of Zeus Ltd
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
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In fond memory of Teddy Faure Walker
(September 1946–June 2018)
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Setting the Scenes
Scenes – Landscapes – Chronology
Scene 1
Britain During the Ages of Ice (900,000–500,000 years ago)
Happisburgh – Pakefield – Boxgrove
Scene 2
The Persistence of Caves: Life, Death and the Ancestors (30,000 years ago–600 BC)
Goat’s Hole Cave, Paviland – Killuragh and Sramore Caves – Robber’s Den Cave
Scene 3
Inhabiting the Post-Glacial Landscape: Living on the Plains (9000 BC)
The Vale of Pickering – Glacial Lake Flixton
Scene 4
From Wood to Stone on Salisbury Plain (8000–3000 BC)
The Stonehenge Car Park – The Avenue – Blick Mead Spring – Stonehenge
Scene 5
Hunters Become Farmers (from 4000 BC)
Fengate – Etton and Windmill Hill – Clava Cairns – Tomnaverie
Scene 6
From Stone to Bronze: Stone Quarries and Special Places (4000–2500 BC)
The Pike O’Stickle, Langdale – Orkney Islands
Scene 7
Axes and Identities: Bronze Age Individuality and Family Ties (2500–900 BC)
Holme-next-the-Sea – Stonehenge
Scene 8
Getting About: On Land (4000–2000 BC)
The Amesbury Archer – The Sweet Track
Scene 9
Getting About: On Coastal Waters (2000–70 BC)
The Dover Boat – Folkestone and Flag Fen
Scene 10
Food and Round-houses (1500 BC–AD 43)
Cornish Samphire – Fengate Turf Roof – Little Butser
Scene 11
Prosperity from Mud and Mire (1200 BC–AD 300)
The ‘Red Hills’ of Essex – Northey and Fengate – Tetney and the Lincolnshire Marshes – Cowbit and the Fens
Scene 12
Living near Water (1000 BC–AD 200)
Atlantic Britain – Fenland Farmers – Loch Tay and the Isle of Skye
Scene 13
Of Trees, Carpenters and Wheelwrights: The Growing Importance of Woodworking Skills in the Bronze and Iron Ages (1500 BC–AD 43)
Buckets from Thorney – The Fengate Wooden Stake – Woodland Management – The Flag Fen Wheel
Scene 14
Life in the Sky: Hillforts (1200–100 BC)
Maiden Castle – Danebury – Dorset Hillforts – Pen Dinas and Cardigan Bay
Scene 15
And What Then? Daily Life in Roman Times (AD 43–410) and Later
Rural Roman Britain – West Stow – Canterbury – Brixworth
Acknowledgements
Notes
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Introduction
Setting the Scenes
Scenes – Landscapes – Chronology
Modern archaeology can sometimes seem miraculous. It is transforming our understanding of what it would have been like to have lived in Britain and Ireland in the million or so years that human beings have occupied this land. We are discovering about daily life in the warmer interludes of the Ice Age and in the centuries that followed, and we are revealing undreamt-of information about the settlements, economies and lifestyles of the millions of people who led highly organized, civilized lives in the four millennia before Christ.
The more we learn, the more we realize that prehistorica communities were extremely adaptable and were able to settle in a number of very different landscapes, some of which we might view, even today, as being quite challenging, if not actually hostile. This was done by keeping in regular touch with other, often quite widely separated, groups of people. Mutually agreed routes, which later developed into paths, trackways and roads, must have been a feature of the landscape from earliest times. Travel encouraged the spread of new ideas and it also ensured that human and animal bloodlines avoided isolation and, with it, inbreeding.
There has been a huge increase in archaeological activity since planning laws changed in the late 1980s. This has produced large regional data sets of sites, monuments and finds,b both excavated and still in the ground. These are now so vast that there is a danger that any overview of British and Irish prehistory would soon become swamped by facts and figures. In my experience, too many statistics tend to obscure general themes. So in this book I want to sidestep the detail and bring the people of prehistory to the fore: their beliefs, the way they lived their lives, how they acquired the essentials of existence, and how they interacted with those around them. If possible, I also want to glimpse these things both locally and across society as a whole. To achieve this I will have to focus on individual sites and landscapes. My emphasis will be on what it would have been like actually to have visited these places when they were inhabited many millennia ago. That way, I hope we will be able to capture something of the accelerating pace of prehistoric change.
I plan to cover the full time span of British and Irish prehistory, as we currently appreciate it, starting about a million years ago. During the earliest periods, the areas that were later to become the British Isles were often too cold to inhabit. As a consequence, survival of these very old sites is thin and fragmentary. Despite that, they have produced some remarkable finds, including the extraordinary discoveries at Boxgrove and Star Carr.c But the pace of population growth, together with social and technological change, increased rapidly with the arrival of farming, shortly before 4000 BC.d These later four millennia will form the main chronological focus of this book.
But now I want to get a little more personal: archaeology, after all, is a humanity, not a hard science – and its practitioners are only too human. Our own lives inevitably colour our views of time: past, present and future. For about sixteen years I was a member of Channel 4’s Time Team, a programme that was last broadcast in 2014, but which has acquired a flourishing afterlife on digital channels and on YouTube. Time Team was popular because it brought archaeology to life: it showed how people coped with both simple problems and enormous challenges. Above all else, it focused on the daily routines of living, whether in an Iron Age round-house or a Victorian millworker’s basement kitchen. These filmed scenes, or snapshots, from the past painted a far more vivid picture than a broad overview. And that is what I am going to attempt t
o do in this book, but in words and a few photos.
Time Team worked because each episode was specific: we investigated a particular community, at a given time in a known landscape (and we went to great pains, through our on-screen specialist Stewart Ainsworth, to get that landscape right). I plan to follow those principles here. So each Scene will concentrate on a particular landscape or group of landscapes, and I will use information from individual excavations and surveys to recreate a story that captures some aspect of what it might have been like to have lived there at a given time in prehistory. This book cannot pretend to offer a comprehensive view of ancient Britain, but I hope it will convey an impression of change. From around 4000 BC, thousands of small communities slowly evolved towards the strong tribal kingdoms that were eventually to confront the invading Roman army. My intention is to open front doors, peek behind curtains, look into farmyards, fields, gardens and cemeteries where ordinary life was being lived. And there we will see how the pace of change was increasing as time advanced. By the final five hundred years before Christ, the broad sweep of the British landscape would have become recognizable to many people living today: roads, fields, farms and villages had replaced the forests, moors, heaths and open floodplains that dominated the view when the first farmers arrived in Britain, four millennia earlier.
Another reason why Time Team worked so well was that every programme was about the actual process of discovery. All of us on the Team were aware that viewers in millions of homes right across Britain were looking over our shoulders. I slowly came to understand that being present at the moment of discovery was what gave archaeology its special appeal to so many people. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I gradually began to appreciate that I was no different from the millions of viewers who used to join us every Sunday evening, in the three dark months after Christmas.
The actual filming was hard work, but great fun, too. I loved being there, on the spot, when something was revealed. It was far more profound than mere treasure hunting. In some strange way, the process of discovery made you part of the ancient world you were investigating. It happened many times: I would be working away and then, sometimes quite abruptly, I would realize I understood how or why something – often something quite minor – was achieved in the remote past: maybe shaping a stone, butchering a joint of venison or raking out a fireplace. And the evidence was right there, before my very eyes. For the first time in thousands of years I was looking at what some stranger had just completed, before he or she broke off for a meal, or went to bed for the night. That sort of discovery or realization is about far more than excitement alone: it’s almost like I had acquired a feeling of intimacy or familiarity with a particular group of people, or a family, in the past; it explains why I still find many ancient sites and places so special.
My deep engagement with archaeology, as someone who both researches and tries to communicate the subject, has taught me that discovering new information about past human behaviour is far from a simple process. Something might appear blindingly obvious in one trench, but then open another one in a neighbouring field and, lo and behold, what seemed so simple in the first trench is actually quite different. So two ditches parallel in the first trench join together into a single ditch in the second. So what? I can hear sceptical readers mutter. It matters a lot if you had identified the two parallel ditches in the first trench as the edges of a road or trackway. Such ditches never come together. So some other explanation is needed.e Archaeology teaches one to keep an open mind; but, being human, I can assure you it is not always as easy as it sounds.
I have been a prehistorian for almost fifty years and I must confess I still find it difficult to grasp the scale and speed of landscape change over the centuries. At university we were taught about the analysis of ancient pollen grains and other scientific techniques that were starting to reveal how fluctuating temperatures and other climate changes were affecting forest cover and natural vegetation. Today these approaches are far more sophisticated and our understanding of environmental change over the past four million or so years, when the first humans emerged, is now extraordinarily detailed.1 This knowledge is great when one wants to write a textbook, or do research, but I don’t find it very useful when I try to imagine what it would have been like to have actually lived in a certain place at a particular time. How, for example, did people see their surroundings? Were they frightened, or content? Did they view the prehistoric landscape as a hostile environment? And how did they cope with cold winters and other seasonal changes?
These were difficult questions and I soon realized they could not be answered simply by reading books and by doing conventional library research. They required additional personal experience that I didn’t then possess. But having been brought up in the country by a farming family, and being a fairly practical sort of person, I decided to devote a major part of my life to the establishment and running of a small sheep farm. Shortly before we made that decision, we had revealed archaeological evidence for some of the earliest prehistoric livestock farming in Britain. I was concerned not just about the way these early farmers managed their animals, but how they related to their neighbours and to other communities in the region. And back then, that sort of information was only to be found out there in the real world. Books could help, but they never joined the various aspects of a farming life together: they never told a coherent story. And that was what fascinated me: I was deeply interested in, almost obsessed with, the way our prehistoric ancestors farmed their land and conducted their lives. I have discussed families and farming in other books.2 In these pages, I want to examine how prehistoric people blended into – and in many cases changed – the places where they lived. It is only once I had done so myself, through my work as a farmer, that I came to realize how ancient communities could have altered their surroundings to accord with their social, economic and religious lives. This, in turn, has led me to appreciate the richness and diversity of their cultures. I can now understand, just a little bit better, how it was they could produce some of the beautiful objects that now adorn the display cases of our museums.
My journey into the world of practical farming began about twenty-five years ago, when we laid out the fields and paddocks of our farm in the Lincolnshire Fens, not far from the small market town of Holbeach. We built our house, two barns and a farmyard alongside a medieval drovers’ road at the fringe of a rural parish, some 5 kilometres (3 miles) from the village. It was, and is, quite a lonely spot. In this open, flat landscape, the wintery gales blew in fiercely from off the Wash and the North Sea, which was less than 16 kilometres (10 miles) away. To cut these winds, we planted a wood of native British trees along the north-easterly edge of our land, but even so, for the first five years they seemed to freeze the muscles in my legs, arms, back and neck. Carrying bales and feeding sheep became something of a nightmare on the coldest days of January and February. At first, the eight-acre (3.25 ha) wood seemed to be growing very slowly. Indeed, after the first year, only a few plants had ventured to poke their leading shoots above the protection provided by their knee-high green plastic growing-tubes.
But then things started to happen. In the first two years the young trees established their root systems and then they began to grow. After five years, the trees were as tall as me. Soon after that, if I took a walk through the young wood, I could not be seen from outside it. Wildlife was returning to what had once been an arable ‘grain plain’. And not just in the wood: molehills were appearing in the meadow where we cut hay for the sheep in winter. It took five years for the earthworm population in the soil to increase following decades of intensive arable cropping – and the moles were feeding on them. Anthills also started to appear in the meadow – and soon we saw them being pecked over by green woodpeckers. After twenty years, we had buzzards nesting in the trees. The place had been transformed, and in less than a single human generation. The experience of watching wildlife return and seeing natural pasture becoming established by grazin
g sheep has given me some inkling of what prehistoric farmers must have felt as they saw their clearings within the trees, or as they established their paddocks along the edges of river floodplains. It isn’t just a feeling of security or of achievement. It’s far more profound than that – and moreover it’s something that can never be taken away. So I don’t regret what some professional colleagues have seen as my ‘diversion’ into farming.
*
I’m a great fan of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, and his opening words – ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ – are of course memorable. But they’re wrong. Profoundly wrong. I believe that the past is an integral part of the present and we must use it if we are to cope with the challenges of the future. I do not see archaeology or history as being somehow irrelevant to modern society and its social and political concerns, because knowledge of the past – in all its many aspects – is the only way to inform our choices for the future. You cannot isolate just one aspect of life, be it politics, religion or identity, from the rest of human culture and experience. All must be taken together and viewed as a whole, in the social context of a particular culture or region. This applies as much to the past as to the present. If you respect the people of earlier generations, you will treat their descendants properly. In fact, I would go further: if you learn to love the past, you will do everything in your power to ensure there is a future. Having said that, you can never turn the clock back and return to an earlier state of being. There is always a danger that our view of the past becomes distorted by being looked at through rose-tinted spectacles. That is why phrases like ‘let’s make America great again’ are so very misleading.
Time cannot stand still. This applied as much in prehistory as it does today. By definition, prehistory cannot be revealed by historians because there are no documents for them to study. So the first prehistorians had to work out how to date and age the various sites and objects that seemed to be earlier than the Romans. The first real progress was made by some Danish museum curators in the early nineteenth century, who were trying to make sense of their collections of tools and implements made from stone, bronze and iron, which they knew pre-dated the Roman expansion across northern and western Europe.3 Roman writers were the first people to record early military and political history in these regions (which included Britain), mostly in the final two centuries BC. The rationalization of museum collections gave rise to the three-Age system of Stone, followed by Bronze and then Iron. It’s a system that is essentially based on the complexity of the technologies involved.
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 1
