Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  I have to confess that I deliberately slightly misled you when I said that the Sweet Track was the earliest timber trackway in Britain. But I can be forgiven because the earlier one was only revealed when the Sweet Track was excavated, and besides, it wasn’t that much earlier: it dates from 3838 BC. The Post Track was originally thought to have been a temporary track that was built as part of the construction process for the later, straighter, Sweet Track. The trouble with that argument, however, is that it was significantly earlier (some thirty years) and was built in a slightly different way and used ash and lime wood for the walkway planks, rather than oak.16 A more likely explanation is that the Post Track was a forerunner of the Sweet Track and showed that the route taken by both tracks (and quite possibly by others also?) had been important for more than a mere decade. This would accord better with the known situation elsewhere in the Somerset Levels, where Bronze and Iron Age tracks abound, somewhat later in prehistory. It would also support the idea that the Sweet Track was providing access to a place that had been widely regarded as spiritually important for a very long time.17

  I can still recall my own first visit to the Sweet Track, sometime in the late 1970s. At that time, the general climate of opinion still favoured the more straightforward, functional explanation and I won’t say for one moment that I thought differently. But I did find the experience strangely moving: the straightness of the track and the precision of its construction were one thing, but something about the superbly preserved timbers set me thinking.

  Before that visit to the Sweet Track, my only insights into the vanished world of prehistory had been provided by more indirect archaeological evidence: the holes dug to receive posts, filled-in ditches and ploughed-out, flattened barrows. But here I was looking at something that Neolithic eyes would instantly have recognized. It was rather like being allowed a glimpse into somebody’s bedroom: it was both personal and intimate. And of course it made me wonder about what those Neolithic men, women and children would have been thinking about as they walked towards Westhay ‘island’. Their world was complex and very varied, just like ours is today, and their thoughts and motivations would have been similarly rich, varied, amusing, happy and sad. Half a century later, I am still thinking about them and their world – and my ideas continue to evolve. Will I ever arrive at ‘the truth’? I once believed such a thing might be possible, but now I’m glad it isn’t. The more I research the past, the more I respect the people who created it. It has been a privilege to have been given the chance to speculate. It has taught me so much about myself and the times in which we live. I am constantly reminded that there is more to history than just the past.

  But now I want to take the story forward. The actual timbers of the Sweet Track may have been quite short-lived, but they followed a well-established route, from the dry land to the south, out towards Westhay ‘island’. Were there other such routes in the Somerset Levels – or indeed elsewhere? I won’t go so far as to say that wherever there are wetlands there are prehistoric trackways, but they do occur widely in the Fens, the Thames valley and elsewhere. In the Somerset Levels, people continued to build trackways throughout the Neolithic and into the Early Bronze Age. The elaborate raised construction of the Sweet Track wasn’t replicated in the dozen or so examples that have been discovered to date: most were either based on logs laid side by side (rather like the squashed-up sleepers of a railway line – a pattern of construction sometimes described as ‘corduroy’). After about 2000 BC, we see the appearance of lighter-weight footpaths based on woven wattlej hurdles.

  Construction of corduroy trackways continued throughout the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. But the Sweet Track wasn’t the only one to have been very carefully made: several of the hurdle and corduroy tracks were very well built and the one that crossed the deep, soft peats of Meare Heath was particularly fine. The Meare Heath track was made from heavier oak timbers than the Sweet Track, but was much later (c. 900 BC).18 It was laid out rather like a railway with close, sleeper-like, heavy-duty split oak bearers, some of which had been fixed into position by long sharpened pegs that passed through mortice-like holes in the bearers. Two substantial oak planks were then laid next to each other, and resting on the bearers. Many of the Bronze and Iron Age trackways could have been crossed by cattle, horses and even light vehicles. Certain traditions persisted, however, and many of the later routes also appear to have included a religious or ritual element, with offerings being placed alongside or below them.

  When one steps back and looks at the prehistoric trackways across the Somerset Levels, you have to conclude that these were structures built by people who not only knew what they were doing, but who had learned from the experiences of their friends, relations and neighbours living around them. Too often, people have imagined that wetlands such as the Somerset Levels and the Fens were inhabited by communities who lived isolated lives out there in the watery wilderness. But those trackways tell a very different story: that people valued the fact that they could stay in touch with one another and went to great lengths to ensure that it happened. Certainly the trackways of the Levels did help to cement communal ties, but they also provided imaginative people with insights into realms far beyond the physical constraints of daily life. Earlier, I noted that there is more to history than the past; I should perhaps have added that there has always been more to a road, track or path, than travel.

  a Whose roots go back to 1516.

  b As we saw at Star Carr and the Vale of Pickering (see Scene 3, page 43).

  c Sadly, John Coles died in October 2020.

  d See Scene 12, pages 236–7.

  e See Scene 13, pages 256–64.

  f For the sacred significance of water, see Blick Mead, Scene 4, pages 67–8.

  g See Scene 5, pages 77–81.

  h See Scene 6, pages 101–110.

  i See Scenes 6 and 7.

  j ‘Wattles’ are pliable rods, usually of hazel or willow, which were woven through uprights to make hurdles or walls for houses and barns.

  Scene 9

  Getting About: On Coastal Waters (2000–70 BC)

  The Dover Boat – Folkestone and Flag Fen

  The first half of the second millennium BC (from 2000 to 1500 BC) was a fascinating period of change and innovation and if I could somehow be transported back in time, this is where I would like to end up. In previous books I have described the major social changes that were taking place around 1500 BC as a ‘Domestic Revolution’ (see Table in the Introduction, pages xxvi–xxvii).1 Revolutions are supposed to happen quite quickly. The blood-soaked French Revolution of 1789–99 is a good example: it took just over ten years. Many, however, were very much slower. Britain’s Industrial ‘Revolution’, for example, took a minimum of four centuries to happen. If anything, I reckon the changes of the Domestic Revolution took about half that time – again, hardly swift and dramatic by French standards, but not protracted either.

  The underlying causes of the Industrial Revolution are fairly clear: greater social mobility at the close of the Middle Ages, following the decline of the more feudal manorial system; and the rise of a new class of independent ‘yeoman’ farmers and with them the appearance of small workshops producing textiles and fabrics – both of which had to be serviced and supplied. In time this led to the first turnpikes, canals and latterly, of course, railways. You can plot the growth and progress of industrialization in the layout of major centres of industry, such as the Ironbridge Gorge or the large, sprawling city of Birmingham with its still magnificent network of canals.2 But what were the causes of the major changes that happened two millennia earlier, around 1500 BC?

  It has long been recognized that the middle of the Bronze Age was a time of considerable change. The great henge monuments were abandoned (those axe carvings at Stonehenge, for example, include no outlines that could belong within the Middle Bronze Age). Barrow burial rapidly declined in importance and very few new barrows were erected. Burials and cremations within barrows after
about 1500 BC tend to be ‘inserted’ into pre-existing mounds. Right across Britain, the specialized Ritual Landscapes that had grown up over the previous 2,200 or so years cease to be maintained. Indeed, by 1300 BC large areas of what was once the Stonehenge Ritual Landscape were now occupied by farms, settlements and a network of small rectangular fields.3

  There were probably many reasons underlying these momentous changes. The available evidence suggests that the population in Britain’s various regions had been steadily growing since the arrival of farming around 4000 BC. You can see this in the progressive stages in which the landscape evolved. Woodland and scrub were steadily cleared to make way for smaller arable fields and large areas of pasture. Existing farms and settlements grew in size and many new ones were founded in areas that had been previously uninhabited. Slowly, a network of roads and tracks was established and by the mid-second millennium BC, if not earlier, many lowland rivers would have supported communities who existed by fishing, trapping eels and hunting wildfowl. We used to think that freshwater craft were quite rare, but recent discoveries at Must Farm, on the western edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, near Peterborough, have shown that large numbers of small craft could have been seen on any suitably sized stream or lake at any one time. All of these developments point towards an increasing population.

  By the centuries leading up to 2000 BC, the landscape of lowland Britain had been transformed by human action. Rivers, for example, were being increasingly exploited. They probably also formed boundaries and, of course, routes of communication; roads and trackways were now well established and would have been respected by all the communities they passed through, or around. Field systems would shortly start to be constructed and by 1500 BC they would cover substantial parts of both uplands and lowlands;4 even larger areas of what today we would call common land and open pasture were controlled by grazing agreements and other arrangements between the farmers and villagers around them. These local agreements would have been negotiated and updated by the representatives, the elders and the chiefs of the tribes who inhabited and controlled the settlements. This tribal, or family-based, organizational system would have provided the basic structure of all important aspects of communal life.

  It was more than a millennium later (around 900–1000 BC) that we start to see the emergence of the first Iron Age kingdoms (the Iceni etc.), which were all based on earlier tribal systems. I would suggest that these earlier systems first began to appear in the centuries around 1500 BC. This was when local communities became more powerful and influential, perhaps superseding an even earlier tradition where cult or religious leaders played a more prominent part in keeping more widely separated, even far-flung, communities together. One reason why the older way of doing things was replaced by more locally based, tribal and communal systems was that the landscape was now far more fully developed. Communication was now much simpler. There was no need to travel vast distances for major gatherings. Cohesion between different communities could be maintained more simply and more flexibly. I believe the mid-second millennium BC (i.e. from 1500 BC) was when prehistoric people developed their own systems of local governance. They would have been exciting times to have lived through.

  We see the effectiveness of these more locally based arrangements in the rapid development of field systems in the centuries after 2000 BC. Speaking as a sheep farmer myself, I know that fields only make sense if everyone in the region acknowledges your rights to own or lease them. Making good use of land requires agreements and permissions. So locally binding laws or rules (unwritten, of course) would have been essential for the system to work at all. In farming, no two seasons are ever the same, and grazing requirements can change quite rapidly. So again, the rules surrounding communal grazing must be flexible and easily modified, if needs be. To achieve this, you must have a well-established system of local land management. In the Middle Ages this was provided by the courts, committees and officers of the local lord of the manor and there must have been equivalents of the manorial system, doubtless tribally based, in earlier times.

  We see the shift towards more local control in the new religious rites that start to appear in the centuries prior to 1500 BC. These do not centre on massive shrines or large Ritual Landscapes; instead, people chose to convene more locally at rivers or wet places, where they made offerings to the waters. We can tell by the objects that were placed in the water that these offerings were about people’s rites of passage,a the big events of their lives: births, marriages and deaths – even successful apprenticeships. These water-based shrines and holy places are probably best thought of as the prehistoric equivalents of parish churches: they were places where local people solemnized and then celebrated the important events in their lives. Sometimes the wetland shrines actually incorporated existing roads or trackways, as at Flag Fen, in Peterborough (1300–900 BC), where hundreds of offerings of bronze, pottery and other valuables were placed in the waters both beside and within the structure of a massive timber trackway that ran from the Peterborough fen-edge for over a kilometre, across the seasonally flooded Flag Fen, towards the higher ground of Whittlesey ‘island’ to the south-east. We will return to Flag Fen later in this Scene.

  The profound social changes that were taking place between 1500 and 1000 BC need to be understood if we are to make sense of the huge increase in evidence for travel that now becomes apparent. Sites like Flag Fen are by no means unique: we know of similar examples in Sussex, the Thames valley, the Witham valley and of course in the Somerset Levels, where Bronze and Iron Age trackways proliferated.b

  We used to believe that the steady increase in the size and number of settlements throughout the last fifteen centuries BC was essentially a self-contained process: that the different communities of the British Isles maintained close contacts with each other, but rarely looked further afield. More recently, however, scientific analysis of bones and teeth, together with an increased appreciation of pottery and metalwork, have led us to conclude that this self-contained, essentially insular picture of life in pre-Roman Britain was most misleading. The fact that there were regular overseas contacts has now been established beyond any doubt. Britain, of course, is an island; so that must mean there were seagoing craft. It is time to head towards the south coast and to Dover, in Kent, where on a clear day you can still glimpse the French coast, just 33 kilometres (20 miles) away.

  *

  Sadly, I never managed to visit the Dover Boat excavations, but that was because they happened under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances, deep below the surface. In the early 1990s Britain was going through quite a rapid phase of infrastructural development: roads and houses seemed to be being built everywhere. Fortunately for archaeology, in 1989 the government modified planning legislation, making it a legal duty for developers to pay for any excavation or other archaeological work needed to repair the damage caused by their various schemes. ‘Rescue’ archaeology,c as it was then known (we now refer to it as ‘contract archaeology’), had been formalized in law. It had actually come into existence, as a way of doing archaeology, in the later 1960s and 1970s.d

  Today, most archaeological digs take place either as a response to an unexpected discovery made during other work – such as a civil engineering project – or else they are scheduled and executed in advance of development. These pre-planned excavations can be very large indeed and they usually precede housing developments, road-building or gravel extraction. Sometimes they are opened to the public on specific days, but often these events are quite restricted due to time pressures – and the cost of public liability insurance etc.

  The Dover Boat was discovered in September 1992 as part of the building of the A20 Dover bypass.5 It’s probably no exaggeration to say that she’s one of the best, earliest and most completely preserved of prehistoric seagoing vessels. Radiocarbon dates carried out on the outer growth rings of the timbers suggest that she was built sometime between 1575 and 1520 BC, which would place her at the very beginning
of the British Middle Bronze Age.6

  When the remains of boats are discovered, they are usually described in the press as ‘wrecks’ – the most familiar one being the Titanic. The Dover Boat, however, never hit a glacier, nor even a floating log. So far as we can tell, she was in good order when she was pulled ashore onto tidal muds and silts in the mouth of the River Dour, at Dover. The River Dour may not be widely known outside south Kent, but it has a long history. The river gave its name to the town: ‘Dover’ comes from the Latin dubris, which in turn derives from the river’s pre-Roman Celtic name: dubras, meaning ‘the waters’.7 The River Dour is one of the very few streams of any consequence that has eroded a steep valley through the chalk mass of the famous white cliffs of Dover. When you visit Dover you are very aware of the high hills that surround the port and town, but despite its proximity to France, it has never been a major landing place for military forces: Caesar’s two expeditions (of 55 and 54 BC) didn’t land there; nor did the Roman invasion of AD 43, or the Normans in 1066. They would never have fought their way out of the natural harbour, and up the narrow Dour valley.

  The boat was found near the mouth of the river under about 5 metres (16 ft) of tidal silts that had accumulated over it. These silts hid it, but they also kept it wet and protected it. When it was revealed, the excavators discovered that the pointed board at the bow had been removed, as had the upper planks along the boat’s sides. It’s not easy to explain why this was done other than to suggest that the removal of these important parts of the boat’s structure was a deliberate act to render the vessel incapable of putting to sea. It has been suggested that the timbers were taken off to be used as spares in another vessel. The trouble with that explanation is that seasoned oak is almost unbelievably hard. I’ve tried to cut it with a bronze axe and it simply bounces off, or makes a rather bruised, shallow cut. It’s hard enough to work with a sharp steel blade. This means that it would be extremely difficult to fit the pieces that were removed into another vessel. When Bronze Age boats are made, the boatbuilders use freshly felled, unseasoned oak, which splits readily and can easily be cut by a bronze axe or chisel. It’s also quite pliable and can be steam-treated to bend it to fit curved shapes; again, this can’t be done with old, hardened, seasoned oak. So why was she treated in this way? We will probably never know for certain, but for now I think there is no other explanation than that it was a deliberate act. Her owners believed that the time had come to cease sailing, despite the fact that she had many miles, indeed years of sailing in her. One could think of her as a sort of sacrificial offering for reasons we will never understand: maybe somebody had drowned when out at sea? We just don’t know, but I feel quite certain that the reasons for her abandonment lie in the realms of ritual and religion.8