Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  So what was the young man feeling as he rounded North Foreland and headed up into the North Sea? Was it hope? Fear? Or trepidation, perhaps? We can only guess, but I very much doubt that this journey would have been a joyride for him. If he had failed to deliver the quern he would have let down his much-loved older sister, but at the same time he would also have tarnished the honour of his entire family. At first glance, this was a simple enough task: take a large piece of rock from A to B. But the reality was very different. The movement of Stone 27 would have had long-lasting consequences for maybe hundreds of people in at least two families. For everyone concerned, it would have been an anxious time – and we can only hope it all turned out well. To reiterate an earlier theme: journeys were about much more than mere movement.

  a For more on rites of passage, see Scene 4, page 72.

  b See Scene 8, pages 163–4.

  c See Scene 4, page 60.

  d A few important rescue excavations had taken place even earlier, in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s ahead of specific developments, such as the digging of new gravel pits or the expansion of Heathrow Airport.

  e See Scene 7, page 130.

  f See Scene 5, pages 77–81.

  g By ‘nuclear family’, I mean parents and their children.

  h See Scene 15, page 289.

  Scene 10

  Food and Round-houses (1500 BC–AD 43)

  Cornish Samphire – Fengate Turf Roof – Little Butser

  Archaeologists love to classify things – and sometimes in vast detail. There are hundreds of different types of flint tools and literally thousands of styles of pottery and metalwork. And all of these can be dated with greater or lesser precision. In our digital world there are countless easily accessed images of sites and landscapes and, of course, thanks to DNA, science can now trace human ancestry and movement with extraordinary accuracy. Nothing, one could be forgiven for believing, lies beyond the reach of modern research. The trouble is, this view assumes that we all want to ask factual questions with readily defined answers. But life has never been as simple as that. Being human, we also want to ask those questions that might throw light on what prehistoric people felt at various – often quite specific – moments in their lives. I was contemplating this the other day, as I drove home after a late evening book-signing. I was tired and hungry. All I could think about was what I was going to eat before going to bed: an egg? Perhaps toast and a tin of soup? Maybe just some cereal? And then I found myself wondering what a Bronze or Iron Age man would be thinking about in the same circumstances, after a long evening away from home and feeling very peckish.

  Having spent most of my professional life excavating sites where people had built their houses and lived out their lives, I was familiar with what you might call ‘the basics’: we had dug countless rubbish pits and ditches where people had discarded their household waste. So we had a fair understanding of what they ate: beef, mutton, lamb and pork. The bones we recovered were in good condition, because the soils of eastern England are generally low in acid and, as a result, their surfaces were still intact and carried clear traces left from butchery. Direct evidence for the consumption of vegetables is harder to come by, largely because the presence of a leaf in a waterlogged deposit in a settlement does not indicate that it was necessarily brought there to be eaten. But we know that in prehistoric times the fibrous stems of stinging nettles were used to make twine, so it seems reasonable to suppose that its leaves (which cease to sting when boiled) could have been cooked. They are rich in iron. Today, nettle leaves are used to wrap Cornish yarg,a a cheese whose origins can be traced back to the seventeenth century – and quite possibly even earlier.1

  Onions provide the basis for many modern dishes, but the large cultivated varieties originated in the Middle East and Asia and probably only reached Britain in Roman times.2 The native British onion, sometimes called ramsons, or hedge garlic, has a strong oniony taste when raw, but quickly loses it when cooked. It is best chopped up and added to salads or stirred into stews; in our house we eat it a lot, but only for a few weeks in the year, when the leaves are still fresh, crisp and young. In the mid-1990s we planted a large wood to protect our farm from north-easterly gales blowing off the Wash, and it’s now rapidly approaching maturity. Sadly, the ash trees are suffering from ash die-back disease, but every spring the grim sight of so many collapsing trees is enlivened by a strong odour of garlic from the many thousands of ramsons that have spread rapidly through it, since we introduced them to the wood about fifteen years ago. I know of a local wood where they have formed an almost impenetrable ground cover.

  My views on prehistoric cooking were fairly typical of most archaeologists: I knew what they ate and I imagined it wasn’t particularly pleasant. Although I would never have said it, I imagine I assumed that in prehistory people were so worried about eating enough to stay alive that the actual quality of their food didn’t really matter. It was a case of eat till stuffed, then lie back and digest. I rather assumed that the night-time peace of a Bronze Age settlement would have been frequently disturbed by intermittent belches, rumbling stomachs and echoing farts. Then things changed for me. We were filming an episode of Time Team somewhere on the Cornish coast.

  The filming in Cornwall was rather different from normal. Usually when we were making an episode of Time Team we had to follow quite a rigid timetable. Fifty minutes of completed, edited footage is quite a big ask in just three days of filming. So we had to be disciplined about our meal breaks. The midday meal was supplied by professional location caterers and it was always delicious. But on this particular occasion the food was provided by Jacqui Wood, who was in charge of the prehistoric cooking for Phil Harding’s experimental sequence. And today the menu included rock samphire. I’m more used to marsh samphire, which I buy every Friday in summer, at Long Sutton market. But the sort of samphire they ate in ancient Cornwall is known as rock samphire and is very different. It’s actually a distant relative of carrots and, as its name suggests, it grows on coastal outcrops of rock, as distinct from marsh samphire, which prefers intertidal mudflats, like those around the Wash – a few miles from Long Sutton. I had heard rock samphire described as the poor relation of marsh, so I had never been in a rush to try it. But then I tried Jacqui’s dish and I almost floated away. It was delicious and made with a traditional Cornish recipe.

  That dish (and others that followed it) alerted me to the potential of prehistoric cooking. The ability to taste subtle flavours may originally have evolved as a means of survival: we all know, for example, that putrid meat and decayed plants smell and taste vile. But the passage of time allowed more sophisticated culinary understanding to develop; long before the arrival of the Bronze Age, our ancestors had learned to create some very appealing forms of food and drink by encouraging ingredients towards safer forms of decay. Fungi are the most important agents of the process and of course yeast is a tiny, single-celled fungus. Bread and beer are the end products of using selected strains of yeast in carefully controlled circumstances. Having worked in a commercial brewery, I have seen what can happen when the wrong strains of yeast are blown into the brewhouse from outside. Raw beer can acidify very rapidly – and is truly disgusting.

  So I am in no doubt that the ability to cook good, tasty meals has long been appreciated and that the rock samphire that Jacqui Wood prepared for us was a very important moment for me. She had recreated a dish from the past, but in the process she had brought it back to the present, in a very personal and vivid way.3 I think I found it particularly moving because over the previous few years I had been busily involved in the reconstruction of a Bronze Age farming settlement in the park at Flag Fen. We had acquired a small flock of Bronze Age sheep (of the prehistoric Soay breed) and had reconstructed a Bronze Age round-house in its original setting, near a hedged and ditched droveway. It was when I was closely involved with the rebuilding of the house and its surroundings that I began to appreciate that the past is like a great country house: it is better a
ppreciated if you can approach it from several directions. It is a lesson I have never forgotten.

  10.1 Part of a Bronze Age field system revealed at Fengate, on the Fen margins in eastern Peterborough. These fields were laid out between 1900 and 1400 BC and probably went out of use around 900 BC. The droveway for taking livestock to and from the open pastures of Flag Fen, some 500 m (550 yd) to the south-east, is formed by Ditches 8 and 9. The other paired parallel ditches marked out banks (shaded) on which hedges were planted. Note the round-house (str. 1) in field C (see Illus. 10.2).

  © Francis Pryor

  *

  I was never a great fan of Mrs Thatcher, although I have to concede she was a remarkable person; but she set Britain on a rapid rightward course that I strongly disagree with. She was prime minister from 1979 until 1990 and in the penultimate year of her tenure of office, she established in law that the developer must pay for (i.e. ‘rescue’) any archaeological sites and finds affected by the planned work.4 That change was to transform archaeology in Britain.b

  Earlier in her premiership (1979) she had privatized the regional water boards, which became PLCs. Anglian Water was the new authority serving Peterborough and it had a large sewage treatment plant in Fengate. During the privatization process, the newly established Fenland Archaeological Trust, which managed Flag Fen, found itself able to rent some 8 hectares (20 acres) of land at the edge of the sewage works – and for a peppercorn rate. This land included the Bronze Age site, but it was large enough to give us ready access to it. For the first time, we were able to drive to the site rather than having to trudge beside a huge dyke carrying everything we needed for the day’s excavation: spades, shovels, cameras, surveying equipment and of course seed trays for finds and polythene bags for waterlogged wood.

  The new management team at Anglian Water included many people who lived locally and who valued Flag Fen highly: the site had put Peterborough on the archaeological and historical map. In 1987 we opened a temporary visitor centre at Flag Fen and it soon started to attract appreciable numbers of tourists to the area – which was also good for the local economy. When I mentioned that I wanted to use the proposed new land to reconstruct a Bronze Age farm in its landscape, local Anglian Water managers greeted the idea enthusiastically. Now, in theory it would have been great if we could have dug the field and droveway ditches by hand, using authentic Bronze Age tools. But there were two problems. First, even today we still don’t know how they would have done the digging. Digging-sticks have been discovered, but these would have been used to lift roots or set cuttings: they’d make useless spades. Hand shovels were made from ox shoulder blades, and these have been found from time to time in ancient ditches, but I cannot imagine them as heavy-duty tools for breaking through turf or digging into tightly packed gravels.

  The other problem was more immediate: time and money – or rather the lack of both. I mentioned the second problem to my friends at Anglia Water and a week or so later a Hy-Mac tracked excavator appeared on site, with a full tank of diesel. I had ‘casually’ mentioned that I had a digger-driver’s licence and to my delight they had taken the hint.

  I spent the next few weeks driving the Hy-Mac while a couple of archaeologists rushed about with tapes and levels. They were surveying in the precise outline of the Bronze Age fields that we’d excavated half a mile to the west, on the dry land at Fengate, immediately next to Flag Fen. I still have the copy of the Third Fengate Report that they used as a source for the layout of those fields – it’s much thumbed and still covered with mud.5 As I dug out the ditches surrounding our recreated Bronze Age fields, I was constantly reminded of the back-breaking work this would originally have involved. Now, admittedly, I don’t think they were initially dug to the depths we revealed when we excavated them: that would have been the result of many hundreds of regular maintenance and cleaning-out operations, which I presume were carried out during the quieter times of the farming year, but only when it was dry. I’m writing this during the record-breaking wet winter of 2019–20, when nobody in their right mind would be thinking of digging out ditches. Having said that, I don’t think Bronze Age Fen farmers would have been impressed by the sodden state of the fenland fields I saw when I made a much dreaded trip to the dentist yesterday. Bronze Age farmers had many problems to contend with, but man-made climate change wasn’t one of them.

  I would never have made a good academic because I have always believed in following my instincts. The sort of imagination-restricting discipline you require for certain types of analytical research is not for me, because occasionally I have to change my mind and head off in new directions. However, now that I have reached a period in my life when I can look back reasonably dispassionately, I can appreciate that my digressions were all heading in a particular direction. They weren’t as random as I once thought. We had completed the Fengate project and were starting to think about the Flag Fen reconstructions when Maisie and I together decided that it would be fun to run a few sheep in the paddock alongside the old Fen farmhouse where we lived. Maisie’s father’s family had kept cattle in the Scottish Highlands and my family are still active farmers in north Hertfordshire. You could say that farming was in our blood. I also felt a degree of frustration, because I knew that I didn’t fully understand how the field systems we had revealed at Fengate actually ‘worked’. In other words, how would they have been used and why were they laid out in what was clearly a very carefully thought-out fashion. Those people clearly knew what they were doing. Slowly it dawned on me that I could share their knowledge and expertise if I learned a bit about livestock farming myself. So we became sheep farmers. At first our flock was very small, but from 1995 it rapidly expanded and for the next twenty-five years it consisted of about a hundred breeding ewes.6

  Certain aspects of animal behaviour have remained consistent for a very long time. Sheep, for example, often panic when isolated from the rest of the flock, so animals tend to bunch together when threatened. And yet all the textbooks on prehistoric farming maintained that primitive breeds of sheep couldn’t be managed with the help of sheepdogs. It didn’t take my well-trained Border collie long to show that was a myth.7 I concede that modern sheepdogs are not precisely like their Neolithic equivalents, but sheep behaviour was very similar and I am sure that prehistoric farmers could have managed their flocks far more effectively than we believed until quite recently. Indeed, the sophisticated layout of their fields and stock-management systems proves this.

  If we were to reconstruct a Bronze Age round-house, it would have to be set in an accurate recreation of the fields and yards around it. One feature of the fields and yards we had revealed in our excavations was the number of closely set parallel ditches. We knew from their arrangement that some undoubtedly formed the sides of droveways, but many of the narrower settings simply didn’t make sense as droves, which have to lead to and from somewhere – but these narrower settings seemed to closely follow the edges of fields. We now realize that they were dug to provide earth for the low banks on which hedges were planted. And that was how we recreated them when we laid out our own Bronze Age-style fields at Flag Fen.

  The house we chose to rebuild had originally been located alongside the droveway defined by Ditches 8 and 9 (Illus. 10.1: str. 1). I won’t pretend for one moment that we reconstructed the Bronze Age round-house using entirely authentic tools and equipment. Frankly, that was a luxury we couldn’t afford, as we were doing most of the building after work and lacked the time and certainly the money to be 100 per cent authentic. But I was at pains to finish all visible timbers using axes and adzes because it irritates me to see chainsaw cuts and suchlike in a supposedly ‘authentic’ reconstruction (and I have seen more than a few!).

  Before we started the project, we closely studied the plan of a house we had excavated back in 1976. One thing puzzled us. There was quite clearly a ring of post-holes for posts that would have supported the roof. By the Iron Age, the conical roofs of round-houses were nearly always thatched
and were pitched at an angle of forty-five degrees. That angle is important, because it makes the roof timbers form a very strong equilateral triangle, which for most single-family houses does not require internal supports. It’s also the pitch that allows a thatched roof to shed water most effectively: any flatter and water will start to seep into the roof – especially if the rain is prolonged. The thatching of steep-pitched roofs demands secure fixing and most of the complex skills of a modern thatcher. But for some reason, thatched roofs seem to have had flatter pitches in the Bronze Age.

  A roof pitch flatter than forty-five degrees is less integrally strong and cannot be secured as well with tie beams; so supporting posts are needed – like those we discovered in 1976. But twelve or so years later I was beginning to understand more about livestock management and I couldn’t help wondering about the thickly thatched roofs you see in rural villages today and which invariably crown all reconstructed round-houses. I found it hard, and still find it hard, to look at a picture postcard Cotswold roof and not think that it represents half a winter’s fodder for a medium-sized flock. There are tons of top-quality straw up there!

  Shortly after we began work on the reconstruction, I found myself showing a group of Scandinavian archaeologists around the site. We began discussing the roof. I said I was very unhappy about using thick layers of thatch. One of them was smiling at me, but in a puzzled way. I started to re-explain my problem, but he interrupted me. I can’t remember his precise words, but the gist of what he said was: ‘No, they didn’t use thick thatch. With a flatter roof pitch they would have used turf.’ And then I thought of those many ‘green roofs’ in Norway and Sweden and the turf-roofed blackhouses on Lewis and elsewhere in the Highlands.8 He was right! All I had to do now was prove it.