Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  Crannogs and other houses and settlements built over water are usually thought of as defensive structures. But just like castles or those imposing gateways through town walls in medieval times, or even hillforts in the Iron Age,h there was far more to them than that. They could also have been about the conspicuous display of wealth and power, but I believe that more often, like hillforts, they were symbols of regional identity, both for the benefit of locals – for whom they would have provided a sense of belonging – and for visitors from outside. They are saying that this is our area and we, its inhabitants, welcome you to it.

  The people who actually lived in the house or houses on the crannog might well have been the family of the local chieftain. Dwellings were never just a reflection of an individual’s wealth and prestige, because all societies in pre-Roman Britain were structured around family, clan or tribal ties.12 So the head of the clan, dwelling in his or her crannog, was a symbol of the communities living in the area, most of whom would have been related by blood or marriage.

  12.1 A view of the reconstructed Iron Age (500 BC) house excavated in Loch Tay at Oakbank Crannog. This reconstruction is at the Scottish Crannog Centre, also in Loch Tay, near Kenmore, Aberfeldy, Perthshire.

  © Francis Pryor

  I don’t know whether it was because of the revival of a general interest in history, which was a prominent feature of the nation’s cultural life at the turn of the twenty-first century, but some twenty years ago I found I was becoming increasingly interested in viewing the past as an unfolding, interconnected narrative.13 In contrast, at this time history at school was starting to be taught as a series of isolated snapshots – a trend that was made worse by countless television shows centred on the lives of various kings and queens (all too often Tudor) and much historical ‘re-enactment’ (or flouncing around in pretty dresses). My growing interest in the gradual evolution of British prehistory and early history led me to write Britain BC, Britain AD and eventually The Making of the British Landscape, a project that took me some five years to finish. It was while I was taking pictures for this book that I decided to visit the reconstructed crannog at the Crannog Centre, on the edge of Loch Tay, about 8 kilometres (5 miles) outside the small town of Aberfeldy, in Perthshire. The date of that visit was 26 July 2008, and it was an experience that still lives with me.14

  The focus of the Crannog Centre is an accurate reconstruction of the Iron Age crannog at Oakbank. The site was first revealed by its excavator, Nick Dixon, during a survey that uncovered a total of eighteen crannogs in what is admittedly a large loch. The excavations took place in 1981 and 1982 and revealed a substantial Iron Age round-house, constructed around 500 BC.15 It had a solid wooden floor of alder and stood at the end of a substantial wooden walkway.16 The approach was clearly intended to impress – and it succeeded.

  As I worked on The Making of the British Landscape, I was becoming increasingly aware that its shaping and creation was about more than the construction of impressive buildings, or indeed the need to grow crops, mine coal or conduct trade through large ports. These are all good practical reasons for shaping urban and rural landscapes, but they are only telling a part of the story. Other, more complex and certainly more profound motives were also at work.

  I can remember leaving the crannog and starting to walk back towards the car park, when for some reason I turned off the path and found myself heading down the slight slope leading to the lake shore. My photographer’s instincts were telling me that I had to place the crannog in a wider setting: that view along the walkway was great, but my readers would want more.17 And when I got down to the lakeside, this is what I saw:

  12.2 A reconstruction of the crannog at Oakbank (500 BC) in its setting in Loch Tay, Perthshire.

  © Francis Pryor

  For a moment, the house and the walkway leading up to it were more real than the loch and the mist-shrouded hills of the opposite shore. It was a case of our world, on the lakeside, and other worlds in the loch and beyond. Never had anywhere felt quite so on the edge of reality, so liminal, as that Iron Age reconstruction did at that moment.

  Finds of butchered bones suggest that feasting took place in crannogs; peculiar Bronze Age objects known as flesh-hooks may well have been used to lift and display the meat. These are found on crannogs and other wetland sites, such as Flag Fen.18 But there are also hints that music may have been involved in these, or other, ceremonies. The site at Oakbank Crannog, for example, produced two fragments from wooden objects: one with notches that (with the eye of faith) look a bit like the notches on a lyre bridge, the other resembling part of a small wooden ‘penny whistle’.19

  In 2005, an Iron Age (c. 300 BC) burial of a young woman was found at the entrance to High Pasture Cave on the Isle of Skye.20 This was clearly a place of great significance. The young woman had been buried in a stone-lined grave that formed an integral part of deep blocking deposits, which had been deliberately placed near the entrance to prevent access.21 Within the cave, the archaeological layers were somewhat earlier and had accumulated over several centuries. One of the most remarkable finds from the hearth deposits inside High Pasture Cave was the charred remains of a notched wooden bridge for a stringed instrument.22 The distinguished prehistorian of music, Dr Graeme Lawson, who also happens to be our neighbour across the Fens, is convinced it’s part of the bridge of a lyre, an ancient stringed instrument that can be either strummed or plucked – or both.23 I have heard Graeme play one of his reconstructed ancient lyres and it completely transformed my notions of prehistoric music, which up until then I had rather patronizingly assumed was loud, simple and brash. When Graeme played his lyre, the music could be complex, tranquil, lively and even raucous. In the right hands, the instrument had extraordinary versatility, producing solo melodies, dance rhythms and accompaniment to singing. The Iron Age Celts also possessed a trumpet-like horn – the carnyx – fragments of which have been found in locations as far apart as the south of France and the north of Scotland. Carnyces – today we would refer to them as ‘brass’ – were very carefully fashioned to produce music rather than just the braying, hunting-horn-like sounds we are treated to in so many historical dramas.24

  So we must never make the mistake of thinking that prehistoric people who were born with musical gifts were not capable of producing wonderful sounds from their instruments. Indeed, there is no other way of explaining why ancient lyres were constructed with such extraordinary skill and care. It was because the musicians expected it. I would love to have shown Graeme’s reconstructed Iron Age lyre to Stradivarius. I’m sure he would have been very impressed.

  a See Scene 8, pages 150–2, for more on blanket bogs.

  b See Introduction, page xx.

  c See Scene 10, pages 186–95.

  d A revised second edition appeared in 2006, published by Tempus Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire.

  e See Scene 4, pages 65–8.

  f See Scene 8, page 154.

  g The word derives from the Irish Gaelic for a timber dwelling.

  h I cover hillforts in Scene 14.

  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

  It would be so exciting if the Indiana Jones image of archaeology were true, with world-changing discoveries being made every day, and at high speed; but I’m not sure I could stand the pace, nor indeed the constant tension. Hoards of treasure don’t excite me; I’m not interested in things for their saleroom value alone. I want to know where items originated, who might have made them, who would have worn or used them – and when.

  Above all else, I’m profoundly fascinated by what finds, however ordinary or humble, can reveal about people’s lives in the past. Even pieces of shaved wood can give a hint of what it might have been like to have lived in the Iron Age. So in this Scene I will steer cle
ar of the very considerable skills of prehistoric goldsmiths and jewellers and instead turn my attention to those skills – today we often refer to them as ‘trades’ – of the men and women who worked with wood.

  Most archaeological sites are on dry land, where conditions of preservation are poor. This usually means material that cannot decay any further, such as flint, pottery and often bone and metalwork, is all that survives. We tend to forget about all those items made from rot-prone organic materials, such as wood, leather, fabrics and fibres. The recent discovery and excavation of a short-lived settlement of five Bronze Age buildings on a pile-built platform at Must Farm, on the southern side of the Flag Fen basin, near Peterborough, has provided us with a very important inventory of items that were used in the settlement before its collapse, following a disastrous fire, after just one year of occupation.1 Wooden artefacts were at the top of the inventory. There were 160 of them. There were 120 pottery containers, 90 pieces of metalwork and 80 glass beads.

  I have always enjoyed doing a bit of carpentry, but I freely confess I’m not very good at it. Somehow, I can never get joints to fit together snugly. Mine tend to wobble a bit and have to be secured with an additional tack, screw or hidden dribble of wood glue. I have friends who can build boats and do things with wood that simply amaze me and I admire them immensely, but there’s a difference between being a talented amateur and a true professional. My boatbuilding friends tend to work only when they’re feeling in the mood. But professional carpenters turn up for work every day and their standards don’t slip. They would never use a naughty dribble of glue.

  I first began to understand professional carpenters when we were building our house, back in 1994. Of course, I had seen them at work many times throughout my life, and I’d admired what they were doing, but I was never closely involved; I was always something of a spectator. But when you design and build your own house you are constantly having to make decisions: do you want this sort of skirting board or that type of door surround? And your bookcases (we have many of them): do you want them a certain size and what sort of depth? We soon appreciated the difference between carpenters, who assembled the timber-built barn and the timber frame of the house, and joiners, who worked at a later stage of the project on bookcases, banisters, stairs etc. We worked together for about a year and got to know each other very well. At the time, Maisie was excavating and studying the Bronze Age timbers from Flag Fen and our carpenters and joiners provided us with many very useful insights, particularly as regards the uses and strength of various joints and fixings.

  It was while we were sitting with the builders during tea breaks inside the frame of what was slowly becoming our new home that I began to think about crafts in the past. Would there have been professional specialists? Certainly, the standards of prehistoric woodwork were well up to professional standards, but we must be careful about judging prehistory using modern values. Today, for example, we have very different ideas about what constitutes ‘normal’ when it comes to practical, hands-on skills. Most people might be prepared to turn their hands to home improvements, but this is more likely to involve the assembly of a flat-pack desk, table or bookcase than the shaping of actual wood, required by true carpentry. By the same token, our prehistoric ancestors wouldn’t know what to do when confronted by a sheet of fake, lookalike wood, such as MDF.a Judging by the timbers, the joints and the assembly of Bronze and Iron Age houses, now being so vividly rediscovered at Must Farm, most ordinary men and women would have been very skilled with axes and chisels.2 It’s worth remembering that the hours in the day that we devote to reading books and looking at screens could have been spent very differently in the distant past – either developing practical skills, attending to the family or just thinking. Even in pre-literate days, people would have needed time for thought.

  When we showed professional carpenters and woodworkers some of the Bronze Age woodwork at Flag Fen, they were very impressed by the standards of its execution and by its obvious practicality and utility. Everyone who saw it agreed: this was work to a professional standard.

  Our knowledge of prehistoric woodwork has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past four or five decades. This largely reflects the rise of sometimes very large-scale excavations ahead of commercial developments such as housing estates, roads or gravel quarries. My own projects at Fengate and later at Flag Fen were a response to the expansion of the industrial areas of Peterborough New Town, in the 1970s and 1980s. We knew that factories had deep foundations and that everything in their path was inevitably going to be destroyed. So we learned to be quite adventurous in the way we used mechanical excavators. We tried not to leave any area of clay or silt uninvestigated. We’d drop quite deep trenches into anything that looked even slightly promising – and surprisingly often, it paid off. We found several well-preserved Bronze and Iron Age wells in this way.

  A regular supply of clean water is essential to all human life and there is good evidence that people knew how to control and channel water and how to store it in tanks and communal reservoirs, from the earliest times. Indeed, water management was an essential component of Bronze Age salt-extraction processes.b But as the environment becomes more controlled, and as fields, farms and settlements spread across the landscape, ready supplies of water may be harder to come by. In low-lying areas such as the fen-edge to the east of Peterborough, the permanent groundwater table, or ‘sock’ as it is still known to many farmers in the region, lies about 2 metres (6 ft) below the surface in summertime – and much higher in wet winters. Large-scale field systems began to be laid out along the Fen margins in the centuries after about 1800 BC and this is when we start to find the first wells being sunk down to the ‘sock’.

  The sinking of numerous wells down to the ‘sock’ ensured that every house in every farm and village would have had ready access to a reliable source of water. Consequently, it was no surprise that when we were excavating Bronze and Iron Age settlements at Fengate, we frequently came across hand-dug wells. In most cases they were 2 or 3 metres (6–10 ft) deep and their sides were often reinforced against collapse by a woven lining of willow or hazel wattle-work. The ground they were dug through usually consisted of quite loose sand and gravel. This meant that the sides of the well would rapidly have collapsed without the lining, which was remarkably strong in compression; it was also very porous. So these wells would have produced good, clean, naturally filtered (by passing through sands and gravels) water. In some instances, people would have climbed into them, down a notched-log ladder, removing the water when they could reach down to it, using two-piece wooden buckets. It’s their superb conservation allied to their very ordinariness, and the direct light they throw on a routine daily task, that gives these buckets their fascination. It’s as if there was a direct link between the splash as a bucket hit the water in the Bronze Age, followed by over three millennia of silence. And then archaeologists are privileged to come along and witness the ripples.

  Although we never found any ourselves at Fengate, a number of Bronze and Iron Age buckets have been found during pre-development commercial excavation on Fenland sites. One of the earliest (c.1400 BC), and best preserved, was discovered lying at the bottom of a well during excavations ahead of gravel extraction at Tower’s Fen, Thorney, about 5 kilometres (3 miles) east of Peterborough.3 The well had been positioned at the side of a Bronze Age field and there were clear signs that it had been redug, probably several times. This would suggest that it had been used regularly and doubtless frequently. Water for animals would have been tipped into wooden or clay-lined troughs, although sometimes disused gravel pits were converted into watering holes that could be visited by livestock. We know that gravel was spread on house floors and along the slippery surfaces of wooden planks at Flag Fen, and we revealed some Bronze Age hand-dug gravel pits, one of which still had its notched-log ladder, upright in the ground.4

  The Tower’s Fen bucket had been made by hollowing out a log. The outer bark and sapwood had been trim
med off to give a smooth outside finish and it had a single carved handle just above the rim. Other Bronze and Iron Age wooden buckets usually have two slightly smaller loop-like handles on opposite sides of the rim, sometimes with rope still attached to them. Such buckets were for lowering into deeper wells. The base of the bucket was carefully shaped, with a cleanly cut slot below a sloping flange. This would allow a baseplate to be snugly fitted from beneath. There was evidence that some form of resin or fat had been applied to the inside surface, to make the bucket watertight and to prevent seepage. The bucket was carved from a log of alder (Alnus glutinosa), a wet-loving tree and one of the few native British species that is capable of actually growing in water. We grow alders on our farm and the wood is quite soft and relatively easy to hollow out. It’s also quite reluctant to split and doesn’t readily rot when wet, unlike so many other trees. All in all, alder was an excellent and well-informed choice for a bucket. I suspect that Iron Age people would have had a depth of knowledge and experience of trees, wood and carpentry that would amaze us today, living as we do in such environmentally impoverished surroundings.

  The fact that nearly all prehistoric wooden buckets are found in fens and bogs, or at the bottom of disused wells, is no accident. Most carved wooden water containers will very soon split and cracks will appear if they are stored in the open air and allowed to dry out. The same can also be said for canoes and other craft carved from single logs. So they are best kept somewhere dark and damp – like the bottom of a well.