Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

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  The flood-free, drier land around the edges of the Fens was often heavily settled in later prehistoric times. During our excavations at Fengate, on the eastern side of Peterborough, we revealed a system of long, straight ditches that had been laid out sometime after 1900 BC, very early in the Bronze Age, and which continued in use for about a millennium.c These ditches marked out (and helped to drain) a complex system of fields and droveways that ran along the edge of the fen for many square kilometres. Much of the system still lies buried beneath thick accumulations of later fen and flood deposits between modern Peterborough and Whittlesey. It’s a large area, covering about 10 square kilometres (4 sq miles). Viewed from the surface, the land seems flat and until very recently it was dominated by two large medieval churches: Peterborough’s massive twelfth-century cathedral and St Mary’s, the parish church of Whittlesey, with its soaring fifteenth-century spire. Both buildings symbolized the wealth of the Fens in the Middle Ages.

  My attention was first drawn to Peterborough when in 1970 I read a news piece in a recently launched archaeological magazine called Current Archaeology, which I’m delighted to say is still thriving.4 The author was clearly very worried about the proposed expansion of Peterborough into a New Town because of the archaeological destruction that would inevitably result. At the time, nobody had made any plans to do anything about it and this was particularly regrettable, because just three years earlier an authoritative survey had revealed the area’s extraordinary archaeological potential.5 At the time I was looking for what was to be my first research project, so I decided to visit Peterborough and do what today would be called a ‘scoping exercise’. I was mindful of the great archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s famous advice: ‘Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.’ So I spent the summer and autumn of 1970 on excavations in the low-lying Nene Valley, just upstream of the city, and was able to do research in various libraries, in Peterborough Museum and, most rewarding of all, in Cambridge University’s extensive aerial photographic archive, where I ordered a set of prints of the fields and farms that run along the Fengate fen-edge, a mile or so east of the magnificent cathedral – which I also visited for the first of many times. By the end of the process, I had put together the bare bones of the Fengate Project, which began in the spring of 1971 and didn’t end until 1980, by which time we were discovering new prehistoric sites and landscapes in nearby parts of the Fens.

  The photos I’d ordered from Cambridge revealed a series of dark lines that were only visible in growing cereal crops in years with a damp spring and a dry early summer. These marks are known to archaeologists as cropmarks and they are often highly distinctive; in certain very dry summers, such as that of 1976, they can reveal extraordinary details, such as the door post-holes of buried Iron Age round-houses. It’s just a matter of knowing where, and when, to look – wherein lies the skill of a good aerial archaeologist. Happily for us, the gravel subsoil at Fengate was ideally suited to the formation of cropmarks.

  To my absolute delight, the marks on my new set of prints were amazingly clear. The edge of the ancient fen showed up as a dark area, where all the cropmarks ended. Just above it, the drier, flood-free gravel soils of the fen-edge were much paler; this was where the cropmarks became very distinct. The ones that interested me were a series of dark lines, which we knew were formed by the naturally filled-in courses of ancient ditches. In these ditches, the layers of soil that filled them retained water better than the loose gravel surrounding them. This dampness encouraged the crops on the surface to grow more lush – and this lush growth showed up from the air as a dark mark. The cropmarks showed clear evidence for Iron Age round-houses, Bronze Age barrows and even a possible henge, but we decided not to investigate them at first – after all, we knew very broadly what we could learn from them. Instead, we opted to examine a series of rather mysterious straight ditches that ran more or less parallel with each other, straight across the gravel terrace, down to the fen-edge, where they terminated. By the autumn of 1972 and the end of our second season of digging, we knew we had discovered one of the earliest field systems in England.

  Our first three seasons’ work had revealed many acres of prehistoric fields, thanks to the large earth-moving machines we’d used to clear away the topsoil, and I could see from their layout that the long straight ditches had been laid out to manage livestock – and the many sheep and cattle bones from our digs supported this. Droveways divided the system into separate holdings, which my rural background and knowledge of anthropology suggested were probably divided between different clans or families. One other point seemed obvious to me: nearly all the fields were entered by way of corner entranceways. Anyone who has ever tried to drive a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep from one field to another will know that the gates have to be at the corners. Put them in the middle of a long side and the animals won’t go through them: they’ll often bunch up, panic and seem to go a bit mad. But drive them to a corner gate, using the sides of the field as a natural funnel, and everything will run smoothly. Medieval town planners were also aware of this simple expedient and always had roads enter the town’s marketplace at its corners.

  I can remember going to a market in southern Ireland with my mother’s family (who farmed in County Carlow) sometime in the late 1950s, and all motorized traffic had to give way to small herds of cattle and sheep being driven back to their farms in the country round about. Looking back on those Irish farmers, the main focus of their lives appeared to be on livestock: principally dairy cows, sheep and pigs. Yet I was well aware, from living on my grandmother’s farm, that they also grew wheat, barley, oats and of course potatoes. I didn’t realize it then, but the physical measures needed to keep animals are far more prominent than those for growing crops: gates, byres, droveways and markets last longer in the archaeological record than a few ploughshares, millstones or plough-scratches at the base of the topsoil. That is why our first two decades of research at Fengate, and later at Flag Fen, placed so much emphasis on sheep and cattle. We now know, from preserved pollen and other evidence, that prehistoric Fenland farms actually combined livestock herding with crop-growing. It was an arrangement that gave them the flexibility they needed to exploit the many resources of their rich natural surroundings.6

  The life of a full-time field archaeologist in the late 1970s wasn’t particularly easy or secure; in such circumstances, mortgages are hard to come by. But eventually we got one and Maisie and I moved into our new house early in 1980. It was a farmhouse built in 1907 and, unlike other buildings of the early twentieth century in many parts of the Fens, it wasn’t subsiding. It also came with a paddock, a large abandoned yard and one or two ageing outbuildings. The farmer who’d sold it to us suggested we keep some animals there. At first we dismissed the idea, as we were far too busy, but after a few weeks we started to change our minds. A month or two later we discussed it with him again and he said that his father used to keep a few sheep there. So we bought three or four ewe lambs from another farmer, down the drove. Soon we had put them to a neighbour’s ram and the following spring we welcomed our first lambs.

  For some reason, sheep-keeping suited us. For a start, it provided a contrast with the intense activity of a large excavation. During lambing, you spend long hours on your own, with only ewes and lambs for company – plus the occasional visiting barn owl. I suppose today these would be seen as Mindfulness Moments, but there is something so calming and kind about the sight of a ewe nuzzling her drowsy lamb to wake up and take another feed.

  My dual life as an archaeologist and sheep farmer gave me the inspiration to write a book on prehistoric farmers: Farmers in Prehistoric Britain, which was published in 1998.d The preparation of a non-fiction book isn’t a less creative process than the writing of a novel; in fact, sometimes it can make extraordinary demands on one’s imagination. It can also involve some remarkable surprises. I can’t remember the precise moment when it happened, but at some point when I was thinking about the
new book I happened to visit a local sheep farmer. We used to help local farmers – as they did us – at certain busy times of the year. We had worked on this particular farm many times, but on this occasion we had come to give them a hand with sheep-dipping. The flock was quite a large one – maybe 300 animals – and it was a two-stage process. First the sheep were run through a narrow drafting race where they could be inspected and any lambs that were ready for slaughter could be removed. The chemicals used in the sheep dip were highly toxic, which was why the fat lambs ready for butchering had to be taken out.

  I had just bought my own drafting race the previous summer at the East of England Show (the display model was sold off cheap) and I wanted to understand how to work it. Essentially, it consisted of two ultra-long hurdles, which confine about five sheep in a tight line, nose to tail. At one end of the race is an up-and-down guillotine-style gate, and at the other there’s a three-way drafting gate, which can be moved from side to side to send individual sheep left, right or straight ahead. In this particular set-up, the drafting gate sent sheep into two holding pens (to right and left), while straight ahead was the sheep dip. The two side pens were for holding fat lambs and elderly or sick animals, neither of which should be dipped.

  People stood on each side of the drafting race, checking udders, teeth and ear tags. I think I’d just nipped behind a bush for a pee, but I can remember returning to the race and as I approached it the people standing on either side suddenly reminded me of the animal-handling landscapes we’d revealed at Fengate almost twenty years earlier. I must have been thinking about the book subconsciously, because I couldn’t help reflecting that there must have been similar scenes in the Bronze Age (but without the nasty chemicals), when people sorted through their livestock at the beginning and end of the long summer season. Every spring and autumn – and at least once in the summer – we had to use our drafting race. It was hard work and we always tried to enlist as much help as we could find. Even so, it could be very exhausting. But aching muscles don’t feel half so bad if there’s plenty of banter and good-natured teasing.

  We ate our sandwiches with lanoline-covered fingers and our clothes reeked from that moment on, but my sheep-keeping had now acquired a new dimension: instead of just my friends and helpers, my mind’s eye could see, smell and hear people in Bronze Age clothes, all with the same smelly fingers and slices of crusty bread. Certain tasks are timeless – as are the ways we perform them. I don’t know whether my imagination was playing tricks, but sometimes I’ll swear those Bronze Age farmers were laughing about the shape and behaviour of their sheep, and how they resembled certain friends and relatives. I wouldn’t admit for one moment that we would ever have behaved so inappropriately ourselves – perish the thought! – but the knowing looks I saw those tired men exchange told me much about Bronze Age humour – and our shared humanity.

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  Water has been a recurrent theme throughout these Scenes from prehistoric Britain, but this doesn’t simply reflect the fact that the British Isles have a wet climate. Water is just as important – maybe even more so – in the Near East or in sub-Saharan Africa, for the simple reason that it is essential to the maintenance of life. This fundamental truth has been evident to humans since earliest times and it would help explain why springs, rivers and lakes have always been treated as special places. It would also explain why water has traditionally played such an important part in rituals surrounding the anointing of new chiefs or leaders – and of course at the very start of life, when families gather around a water-filled font to welcome a new baby into the world and the church. We saw at Blick Meade how water can be seen as a symbol of life, when you glimpse your reflection on the surface – and of death, when you pass through it and drown. And it’s this reflective, symbolic aspect of water that I want to touch on now.

  If you require a spectacular, uplifting landscape setting, most people would probably opt for hills or snow-capped mountains. Such thoughts surely lay behind the selection of the locations of places like Edinburgh Castle and Lincoln or Durham Cathedral. But flat landscapes too can have an openness and breadth that allows the imagination to ascend into the sky and escape the grip of life here on Earth. As I write this, we are passing through the peak of the first Covid-19 lockdown and I concede that when I have woken in the depths of the night it has often proved hard to return to sleep: there are so many people and things to worry about. But as soon as I get up and draw back the curtains, the sight of our garden, wood and the flat fields of the surrounding Fenland landscape, emerging from the mists of morning, has an immediate calming effect. Reality and a sense of proportion returns: yes, the pandemic is bad, but it could be a lot worse and (so far) British society is coping – if not always very efficiently. Personally, I find comfort and reassurance in old buildings and enjoy spotting the numerous medieval church spires that still adorn the Lincolnshire Fens. Indeed, many of these were built in years of far more deadly plagues.

  I was pondering these matters while standing at the edge of our garden pond. Below me in the water were two smooth newts. Every so often their tails would wiggle and they’d swim rapidly to the surface, where they’d grab a mouthful of food and a lungful of air, before returning to the depths. Their lives were completely unaffected by the horrors of coronavirus. As humans, we take the world as we find it – the spires on the horizon, the newts in the pond – and then we make it ours. In prehistoric times, the spires might have been lone oaks or huge barrow mounds, but those newts would have been the same. If you were born into a family that lived near water, wildlife and nature would have been integral parts of your existence. You weren’t concerned with notions of symbolism or aesthetics, because they were irrelevant. People had more sense than to analyse their behaviour. For the residents of the Fens, or the lochs of the Scottish Highlands, the water, like the hills or the flatlands, was just there, an essential part of their lives. Sometimes it would have been comforting, at other times threatening; but it was never taken for granted.

  There is a tendency to exaggerate the importance of spectacular scenery. I suspect this may partly have arisen from the rise of the Romantic view of the Lake District landscape, as taken by the Wordsworths, closely followed by Burns, Scott and others in Scotland.7 I love both areas, but even Lake Windermere or the charming Scottish Borders market town of Peebles can be somewhat uninviting on a cold, foggy day. Perhaps it’s too easy to overestimate the importance of such iconic scenery to our daily lives.

  I remember meeting a delightful, smiley elderly gentleman visitor when I was a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. We got to chatting and it turned out he was the owner of a small farm near the town of Welland in the Niagara Peninsula. A few weeks earlier I had driven close by Welland on my way to visit the Niagara Falls, where I had been almost blown away by the scale, energy and deafening din of the massive waterfalls. I told him how impressed I had been, and he smiled. ‘You must visit the whole time?’ I asked. Again, he smiled and shrugged. It turned out he sometimes took young visitors to the Falls, but only if they asked him specially. Niagara was just a part – and not a very large part – of his life as a farmer, which he found far more absorbing.

  While we were chatting, I couldn’t help reflecting on my years as a student at Cambridge. Had I ever visited King’s College Chapel during that time? I realized that I had not done so until five years after I graduated. Or the Fitzwilliam Museum? Again, no – that took slightly longer, maybe seven years to happen. So, despite society’s fetishizing of the spectacular, we tend not to get too excited by the dramatic views, sites and monuments on our doorsteps. Indeed, I can remember being far more moved when I discovered the parish church, windmill and lovely Georgian houses of the little Fen village of Moulton than when I first encountered the magnificence of Lincoln Cathedral. I suspect this disparity was a result of my growing interest in Fenland history and it illustrates well how knowledge, relevance and setting have always been more important to us than visual impact a
lone. A memorable scene involving water, for example, can be achieved by contriving unusual or striking foreground interest against a contrasting background. In such instances, scale doesn’t matter: it could be a tub on a balcony, a garden pond, a Highland loch or a goldfish bowl; you don’t need to own an island in the Bahamas to enjoy the restorative powers of water. The complexity of our relationship with water is well illustrated by the way our understanding of prehistoric life near rivers, lakes and on islands has been transformed over the past 170 or so years.

  In 1854, engineering work to improve the lakeside harbour at Zurich, in Switzerland, led to the discovery of the first ‘Lake Village’, which was excavated by Ferdinand Keller, a remarkable man who was an excellent writer as well as a gifted archaeologist. Keller’s reports on Swiss ‘pile dwellings’ (stilt houses) reached a huge audience right across Europe.8 I even have a few dusty volumes of his on my own shelves. Soon, new sites were being found elsewhere in the Alps and also much further afield, in Holland, Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland and England.9 The sites fired people’s imaginations. Waterlogging meant their level of preservation was superb: wooden tools, baskets, fabrics and even items of food in remarkably good condition were found within the timber and woven-wattle walls of buildings, excellently conserved in the muds of the lakebeds.

  The two major sites revealed in England were at Glastonbury and Meare in the Somerset Levels.f In Scotland, public and academic interest was fuelled by the influential Rhind Lectures given in 1888 by Dr Robert Munro on ‘The Lake-Dwellings of Europe’.10 I have a copy of the book that was published two years later, in 1890.11 It’s a weighty volume – not the sort of thing you’d take with you on the train – but beautifully bound and printed on top-quality paper. Munro’s style is authoritative, but refreshingly light, and his voice has a distinctive ring to it. He deserves to be better known. His book is also packed full of excellent illustrations, which I still find inspiring. Soon, ‘lake-dwellings’ were being discovered on the shores of many of Scotland’s lochs. Lake dwellings dating from early medieval times, when they acquired their Celtic name ‘crannog’, had been known about for some time.g Today, the word is used to describe all lake dwellings in Ireland and Scotland.