by Hugh Thomson
The introduction of bronze around 2500 BC, and the beginnings of intensive agriculture around 1500 BC, coincided with a demographic explosion that took the British population to a level archaeologists are continually having to revise upwards as they make fresh discoveries, but may have been as high as two million.
Two million is a quite astonishingly high figure, if one remembers that the rural population today is no more than some five million. Given that it now seems most of the country was not only being farmed, but was deforested by 1500 BC, the whole way we view the Bronze Age has changed.
The old Ladybird version of our history, and the one I was taught at school, ran like this: that after a slow and backward evolution on the edges of Europe, through the evolving technologies of stone, bronze and iron implements, we were fast forwarded by the arrival of the Romans; then, after a period of darkness following their departure, the incoming Anglo-Saxons slowly embraced Christianity, cleared the forests and established the village pattern that the Normans and ‘modern history’ inherited. It is a historical model that relies almost entirely on written evidence, which is why the Romans, the first to write that history, figure so prominently.
But a far more radical and interesting way of telling the story has emerged strongly in just the last decade, as archaeology has made an exponential leap with its own new evolving technologies like LIDAR and DNA testing. It is one that I had become fully aware of only as I visited the prehistoric sites along my route.
In this model, history would be retold as follows: the Neolithic found us as part of a wider Atlantic community embracing Spain and Brittany, with an adventurous enterprise that saw monuments built as part of a ritual landscape from the Orkneys to my ring of stones on the Dorset coast; the arrival of the Bronze Age precipitated a period of activity like the Elizabethan or Victorian – one of enormous and confident expansion. We were at the top of the European commodities market, as we had unrivalled access to bronze, with the copper mines of Wales, the tin of Cornwall and the lead of the Somerset Levels allowing us to produce far more than anybody else. Bronze was not just a material but a currency, with bronze axes used for barter, and it is again not until recently that we have realised what an industrial quantity was being produced. It is now estimated that the Great Orme mine in Wales alone provided some 200 tonnes of copper, almost ten times more than was previously thought.
We were in effect printing money, and this golden age – symbolised by the fabulous Mold Cape made of fine beaten gold held by the British Museum – spurred the population growth and intensive clearance of the landscape.
For many years it has been known that the outlines of Bronze Age field systems can be seen on land that modern agriculturists regard as marginal, such as Dartmoor or Exmoor. It was assumed that these areas were farmed only because the wooded valleys were unavailable to prehistoric man. But now almost the reverse is thought – that at no other time in our history was so much land farmed; that Bronze Age farming had extended right across the area of southern England that I had just walked through, from the valleys to the highlands, and that the reason the field systems can still be seen on the moors is simply because more modern agriculture has retreated from such Bronze Age ambition.
The arrival of the new technology of iron in around 800 BC, far from being an advance, prompted the biggest recession in our history, one that lasted almost two centuries from 800 to 600 BC, beside which any eighteenth-century bubble or recent financial crises pale. Iron had been developed in the eastern Mediterranean. It was not a commodity with which England was particularly blessed. The arrival of Celts from Eastern Europe (or at least Celtic culture from Eastern Europe, as it is still difficult and tendentious to track the actual migration of peoples), and a lack of resources, led to population pressure and possible internal warfare, with the Iron Age hill-forts a product of that strife.
Then the Romans arrived. A study of the Catuvellauni and other tribes shows that the contrast Caesar liked to celebrate between the civilisation he brought and the barbarians he found was greatly overstated. Iron Age Britain already enjoyed many of the advantages of Mediterranean trade – and ‘the Roman Interlude’ was a less dramatic change than the classicists who first told our island story liked to make out.
Flag Fen was a rare reminder of that Bronze Age glory. It had been preserved by accident, unlike other wooden monuments in the country, because deposits of peat had settled around it, so preserving the wood that would otherwise have rotted. We are familiar with the idea that bodies can be preserved in this way, like the ‘bog people’ Seamus Heaney commemorated in his poetry; less so with wood.
It was discovered in 1982 by Francis Pryor. He had followed a technique established by fellow archaeologists in Holland: when a drainage dyke is cleared, a natural cut is usually scooped out of the side which gives investigators the chance to see down below the surface, without the labour and cost of digging themselves.
Francis applied the same idea to the fens and literally stumbled – he hit his foot against a post – upon the Flag Fen site, a momentous find. The post was the first of no less than 60,000, which stretched across this wet meadowland as a ceremonial causeway to an artificially constructed platform at its centre, and then on towards the light industrial units I had passed at the edge of Peterborough.
The word ‘ceremonial’ must be used with caution. It is the first that archaeologists reach for when they either don’t understand or wish to aggrandise their findings – but in this case is justified by the remarkable amount of offerings found at the site, a range of bronze swords and jewellery unified by their delicacy of composition.
I once tried to explain the difference between the Bronze and Iron Ages to some young children, with difficulty, until one of them said, ‘So was the Bronze Age the time of the elves, and the Iron Age the time of the dwarves?’ Well, not quite. But the delicacy of Bronze Age art and artefacts is extraordinary: at Flag Fen there were small bronze razors, rare glass beads, jewellery like tiny gold ritual rings, too small for a finger, and elegant bronze sickles, daggers and swords. I was much taken by an exquisite pair of bronze shears, kept in a wooden box that had been hollowed to fit them, like a guitar case. There was also the earliest wheel discovered in Britain, made of alder with oak axles and braces for extra strength.
I went to see Francis Pryor and his wife Maisie Taylor, who lived not far from Flag Fen on their farm – for Francis, as well as being an archaeologist, is a farmer, and looks like one in a satisfying, whiskery way. Perhaps this has given him more bonhomie than some of his peers; certainly he’s the only archaeologist I’ve ever met who offered me a drink without telling me at length about his fieldwork first.
Francis was putting up a gate when I arrived. His farm was small, at just 50 acres, and supported about 150 lowland Welsh sheep, a breed called Lleyn (described admiringly by Farmers Weekly as ‘quiet in nature, prolific, has great maternal instincts, milky, & will not eat you out of house and home’).
‘They keep me sane,’ he told me.
Much of Francis’s work has been about the importance of a direct connection with the land, like The Making of the British Landscape, a reworking of W G Hoskins’ classic account, so he lives what he preaches. And what he preaches most, understandably, is the chronic lack of awareness of the Bronze Age.
‘The Bronze Age was far more revolutionary than the Industrial Revolution,’ he told me over a lunch of cheese and cider. ‘We went from a country of scattered communities who farmed where they could and came together for ceremonies at a few great monumental henges, to a country that was largely inhabited as it is now. If we were to go back to 1000 BC, we would recognise the culture and the landscape – but go back to 3000 BC and the Neolithic age of Stonehenge, and we would be entering a different, alien world.’
Francis had studied archaeology with the eminent Andeanist Geoffrey Bushnell at Cambridge – at one point he had wanted to concentrate on pre-Columbian cultures in South America – so was sympathetic
to the idea of ritual landscapes as a way of interpreting the Nasca lines or the Inca ruins around Machu Picchu, or for that matter ancient Britain.
His main complaint now was that we were so ‘monument-specific’; that we tended to focus far too much on individual monuments, like Stonehenge, and neglect their setting in a far wider landscape of associated sites that give them meaning.
Sometimes, though, a monument came along that was devoid of such a setting. Together with his wife and fellow archaeologist, Maisie Taylor, Francis had been present at the uncovering in 1999 of what was surely the strangest of all the prehistoric monuments I would come across – what the press dubbed ‘Seahenge’, a Bronze Age circle right on the coast where the Icknield Way ended. But that lay ahead, at the very end of my journey.
‘I don’t do any more digging. It’s a young man’s job. When I was young, old men – and women – hung onto their jobs and grants. It was difficult to get started. I don’t want to be like that. And also I want to be proved wrong. I want new archaeologists to come along with new theories. And it’s not as if there’s much work around for archaeologists anyway. The credit crunch – or bankers’ balls-up, as I call it – has stopped a lot of the developer-led archaeology that boomed after the 1980s.’
Although it hadn’t stopped it all. Francis and Maisie were excited by a find that had only just happened close to Flag Fen, at a site called Must Farm quarry, thanks to the brick manufacturer Hanson, which had sponsored an archaeological dig before extracting clay from Jurassic age levels. The result was spectacular: six boats hollowed out from oak tree trunks at the centre of what was clearly a well-used Bronze Age river channel.
Along with the boats came fish and eel traps in the form of big woven willow baskets, and votive offerings of fine bronze swords and spears, tossed into the river in perfect condition. Preserved by the peat, the site was already being heralded by Francis and other leading archaeologists in the know, for the discovery had yet to go public, as ‘the largest Bronze Age collection ever found in one place in Britain’.
It was hard not to suspect that we stood at the very beginnings of a supremely exciting time for Bronze Age archaeology.
Right away, I felt I had to go and see the Must Farm quarry site for myself. It wasn’t far from Flag Fen as the oystercatcher flies, but the water made it difficult around that part of the world, so I had to go back into Peterborough and then out again. At one point, I walked around yet another of the roundabouts with which New Towns like to stud their outer belts, and came face to face with a building as representative of the early twenty-first century as Flag Fen was of the Bronze Age: a gigantic Amazon UK storehouse, big enough to launch a rocket from and a symbol of the Internet age. Clad in white tiles, it looked functional and clean and faceless. Inside, it was vacuuming up the retail business from bookshops and high-street stores, many of which would soon go to the white-tiled wall.
Did I call it a storehouse? My apologies. According to Amazon it is not a distribution warehouse, as the innocent observer might suppose, but, I discover, a ‘fulfilment centre’. George Orwell couldn’t have made it up.
Compared to the clinical environment of Amazon, the quarry when I reached it looked like something out of Iraq. Hanson had scooped meteorite-sized chunks out of the ground in their quest for Oxford clay, and as far as the eye could see, there were teams of archaeologists and quarry workers in hard hats and hazard-jackets wandering over the desolate site or using Land Rovers to negotiate the mud. Above them, and making the scene even more surreal, a wind turbine farm loomed over the horizon.
By definition archaeology moves slowly. I’ve been to many digs around the world and watching turtles race would be more exciting. It’s not a spectator sport. Every ten or twenty years there is a major discovery, but just as with fishing or surfing, the good days never happen when you’re there: ‘You should have been here yesterday, mate. The waves/fish were fabulous.’ Or rather, in archaeology: ‘You should have been here five years ago, Señor Profesor.’
So I couldn’t quite believe my luck that a chance encounter with Francis had led me here. I immediately took to Mark Knight, the red-haired project leader of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit doing the work. He was almost hyperventilating with excitement.
‘To find one intact Bronze Age boat would be remarkable. To find two close together was beyond my wildest dreams. To find six is just …’ His voice tailed off. Understandable, given that the find has at one stroke more than doubled the known number of Bronze Age boats in the whole country, and these have that vital archaeological commodity, ‘provenance’, the context within which they have been found.
The boats were lying on the bottom of deep pits, as if they had been in a lake that had been drained – as in some ways they had. Normally they would have disintegrated, but again the peat had preserved them at a considerable depth underground, some twelve to fifteen feet.
To give some sense of comparison: at Stonehenge you might get thirty centimetres of topsoil, most of which has been ploughed and disturbed at some stage anyway; here you get three to four metres, more than ten times as much. Peat accrues fast in deep layers. Such depth brings its own problems. It is well beyond the range of aerial or radar surveys from the surface. These boats would never have been found if they had not been in a quarry.
Mark had found his voice again. ‘And it’s not just the boats: it’s everything that goes with them. The swords, the fishing gear, the jewellery …’ So far, in his excitement, he had been talking in conversational English. Now he lapsed back into archaeology-speak: ‘You could say it’s a whole articulated 3-D Bronze Age landscape!’
What he meant was that the peat gave very precise layers of data: the six boats were deposited over an approximately 600-year timespan, from the first to the last. The dendrologists had yet to do a full analysis on the precise dates, but the early estimate was that the range lay between 1300 BC and 700 BC.
The boats were narrow, like punts, made of oak and decorated with curious criss-cross markings on the sides. Many had been heavily repaired. It was unclear whether they had been abandoned (perhaps when the repairs got too much), or more deliberately left as some form of offering, like the swords and jewellery that were thrown in the water close by.
The longest of the boats, at some twenty-five feet (‘big enough for an entire family and the granny,’ said Mark), had interesting scorch marks at one end of the deck. Mark speculated that the boat family may have kept a fire going on board; oak is so difficult to burn that the boat itself may never have ignited, as you might expect if you burned wood on wood.
Mark led me over to another adjacent quarry pit that was even deeper. ‘Look down at that. That’s the Mesolithic. That’s the level of the North Sea. It’s incredible to be getting down to these depths.’
The archaeologists had been lucky. If there was not a rich vein of Oxford clay for bricks, lying under the peat, at Jurassic levels, Hanson would not have invested the huge amount needed to dig down so far. And the interest in the clay coincided with the 1980s regulations requiring companies to get a site cleared by archaeologists before and while such work was happening. Not that Hanson needed forcing. I was impressed by the enthusiasm with which they had collaborated with the Cambridge team.
‘To be honest,’ one Hanson manager told me, ‘digging for clay is a dull and messy business. Having something like this keeps the digger operators interested. What would have been annoying is to pay a lot of money to the archaeologists, and then have them find absolutely nothing.’ The Cambridge team had been working on and off the site for the previous fifteen years, so it was not surprising they had become so excited on finding something of such value.
Mark explained to me how the landscape along the old course of the River Nene had changed considerably as sea levels rose. ‘At the start of the Bronze Age, around 2500 BC, this was still a dry valley, with the usual monuments and barrows [he waved a map at me that marked them all]. But then the sea levels rose and the ar
ea became wetlands. The inhabitants had to adapt. People turned to fishing and used these riverboats to get around.’
He conjured up an attractive picture of life at the time: ‘We’ve found fish and eel traps near the boats. The eel traps are remarkably like the ones still used. There’s a platform house close by. These banks were lined with willows, and there was probably an abundance of wildlife like otters and pelicans.’
The offerings his team found show how substantial was the trade overseas. The boats weren’t big enough to go offshore themselves – they were for river traffic – but some of the offerings, like a sword, looked Mediterranean. It suggests there may have been some trading posts (or, as Amazon would put it, ‘fulfilment centres’) on the nearby coast, where goods were distributed from ocean-going craft.
Mark gestured over to the fens that stretched out beyond the quarry. ‘The likelihood has got to be that there is more of this as far as the eye can see. We just happen to have found these boats here because this is the only place where anyone is digging to such depths. But this isn’t a unique event.
‘The fens must be the best place for prehistory in the whole of the country. I keep seeing colleagues flying out from Cambridge to sites in Mesoamerica and Africa. They should be just driving up the A1. This is where the action is.’
He shared Francis’s feeling that we were only just on the cusp of further discoveries that will reveal a huge amount about the Bronze Age in the years to come: ‘In the past, it felt as if we were looking at the Bronze Age through a very narrow window, with the curtains partly drawn or slightly misted over. Now it’s as though someone has opened the windows.’
