Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain

I would never pretend to be a scientist, or even a scientific archaeologist, but I can understand what scientists are saying, and I know enough to ask them questions in their own language. It was not difficult for me to decide, in my first year at university, that this broadly environmental approach would be my own style of work. All my subsequent research has been carried out in a closely-knit team; it’s the only way to do good environmental archaeology. Nowadays my role would be described as ‘Team Leader’. My job is to make sense of the team’s results when we come to write the final report; it is up to me to achieve compromise when there are strong differences between individuals, and to see that the team runs smoothly and happily. It’s a great job, and I love doing it. In my opinion it’s far and away the most successful and satisfying sort of archaeology.

Grahame Clark retired from teaching while I was a student, and he was succeeded by Professor Glyn Daniel. They were as unlike as any two archaeologists could possibly be. It used to be fashionable in certain circles to patronise Glyn Daniel. He was an archaeologist, but he was also a supremely successful populariser of the subject. No other archaeologist has ever been voted ‘TV Personality of the Year’, an accolade he earned by chairing the hugely successful BBC quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? At his best, Glyn was a superb lecturer, and he managed to inspire me with a love of his own favourite period, the Neolithic (or New Stone Age), which I have never lost.

Everything that ever mattered seems to have originated in the Neolithic Age. All of life and death is there. I know Neolithic folk have been dead for nearly five thousand years, but as far as I’m concerned they could have died yesterday. My passion for the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (which in social and cultural terms is much the same thing) is directly due to Glyn’s inspiration.

Glyn taught a course on the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages at Cambridge. The dates of the various periods tend to wander somewhat, as research progresses, but the Neolithic comes first, and in Britain lasted from about 5000 to 2700 BC. It was followed by the Bronze Age (roughly 2700 to 700 BC). The Iron Age was the final prehistoric period, which extended from the close of the Bronze Age to the Roman Conquest of Britain in AD 43. Glyn’s course was known to the university authorities as NBI. Perhaps predictably to the students, it was of ‘No Bloody Interest’. I chose not to study the other option of Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon, or IRA – which for some reason never seemed to acquire a student name.

I remember being puzzled by archaeologists’ periods. Were Neolithic people aware when they woke up on the first morning of 2700 BC that they were entering the Bronze Age? Of course not. The Ages were invented by some inspired Danish archaeologists, working on museum collections in the last century. They came up with the Three-Age System (Stone followed by Bronze and then Iron) in the first instance simply as a way of ordering their collections. Only later did it gradually acquire a wider significance.

At university we were taught that the Three-Age System would soon be a thing of the past, to be replaced by the flood of radiocarbon dates that were then just beginning to arrive. They have indeed had a profound effect on our understanding of the past, but I can see no consistent evidence that the old Three-Age labels are actually being replaced. I think they’ll be with us for a long time yet.

At Cambridge, British archaeology was taught in a rather rigid framework, or straitjacket, of ‘cultures’. In theory, ‘cultures’ were meant to be synonymous with actual communities of people – tribes or confederations of tribes. But in reality ‘cultures’ were no more and no less than types of pottery. So we were taught about the Beaker Culture or the Grooved Ware Culture, and I have to say I found it extremely difficult to imagine the actual people lurking behind these arcane concepts.

The various ‘cultures’ were accompanied by long lists of sites, where the particular types of pottery which were believed to be characteristic of them were found. The lists were, in turn, accompanied by maps, covered with dots and arrows which purported to show how these people/pots moved around Europe. It was all extremely mystifying, and I remember wondering why on earth these people wanted to move around all the time. It seemed, and indeed it still seems, an odd way to behave.

There was a third lecturer at Cambridge who was to have a very profound influence on my subsequent career, partly because, like me, he is a practical, down-to-earth person. He comes from Canada, where I spent much time during my formative years as a field archaeologist. John Coles is remarkable because he has turned his hand to numerous types and styles of archaeology. His doctoral research was on Scottish Bronze Age metalwork, but he is also, or has been, an authority on experimental archaeology, Scandinavian Bronze Age rock carvings, the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age) and wetland archaeology, for which he is perhaps best known.

In the mid and later sixties John was doing far more than his fair share of lectures in the Archaeology Department, and he supervised me in a variety of topics. I don’t think I was a very good pupil towards the end of my time at university, because I couldn’t see that there was a future for me in the subject. Archaeological jobs were extremely scarce, and were invariably snapped up by people with good first-class degrees. I knew I stood little chance against that sort of competition. But John persisted, and somehow he managed to cram sufficient knowledge into my skull to earn me a decent enough honours degree.

I don’t want to be unfair to other lecturers in the department, but John seemed unusual in that his head was not stuck in the clouds for most of the time. He was then working in the peatland of the Somerset Levels, and his lecture slides were not just of disembodied artefacts and distribution maps. Instead, he showed us photographs of people with muddy hands, digging trackways in wet peat, or felling trees with flint axes, or wrestling with hazel wattles while reconstructing prehistoric hurdles. Frankly, his lectures were almost the only thing that kept my flickering flame of interest in the subject alive.

Archaeology in the mid-sixties was superficially calm. Old ideas, such as the pottery-based ‘cultures’, still just managed to hold on, but a tide of new thinking and new scientific techniques was about to rip through the old order. The subject would never be the same again. As has been mentioned, one of the most profound instruments of change was radiocarbon dating. Although I’m now older and wiser, I still find it almost magical that one can take a piece of bone or charcoal, pop it into a machine for a few days and then be told how old it is – to within, say, fifty years. And if you’re lucky enough to have a decent-sized sample (a teacupful of charcoal, say) it will only cost about £200.

Before Willard F. Libby, a chemist at Chicago University, invented radiocarbon dating in 1949, archaeologists researching in remote places (such as Britain) had to work almost blind. If they wanted to date something – let us say a Neolithic stone-built tomb – they had to find similar tombs elsewhere across Europe, until eventually they reached the well-dated world of the eastern Mediterranean. In areas such as the Aegean it was believed that the dates were more secure, because actual written records – such as the famous Linear B script of Crete and Greece – extended back as far as 1400 BC. These dates may well have been more secure, but the problem didn’t lie there. It lay in the chain of false – or perhaps more truly forced – reasoning that linked the eastern Mediterranean to more peripheral areas. Radiocarbon was to expose this ruthlessly.

The idea behind radiocarbon dating is quite straightforward. Libby was researching into cosmic radiation – the process whereby the earth’s outer atmosphere is constantly bombarded by sub-atomic particles. This produces radioactive carbon, known as carbon-14. Carbon-14 is unstable and is constantly breaking down, but at a known and uniform rate: a gramme of carbon-14 will be half broken-down after 5,730 years, three-quarters broken down in twice that time (11,460 years), and so on. Libby’s breakthrough was to link this process to living things, and thence to time itself.

Carbon-14 is present in the earth’s atmosphere – in the air we all breathe – in the form of the gas carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide through their leaves, plant-eating animals eat the leaves, and carnivores, in turn, eat the plant-eating animals. So all plants and animals – even vegetarians – absorb carbon-14 while they are alive. As soon as they die they stop taking it in; and, far more importantly for archaeology, the carbon-14 in their bodies – in their bones, their wood or whatever – starts to break down. So by measuring the amounts of carbon-14 in a bone, or piece of charcoal, fragment of cloth or peat, it is possible to estimate its age very accurately.

But there are problems. First of all, cosmic radiation has not been at a uniform rate, as Libby at first believed. Sunspots and solar flares are known to cause sudden upsurges of radiation. Nuclear testing has also filled the atmosphere with unwanted and unquantifiable radiation. As if these problems weren’t enough, the quantities of radiation being measured in radiocarbon laboratories around the world are truly minute, especially in older samples. All this uncertainty means that radiocarbon dates are usually expressed in the form of a range of years, say 1700 to 2000 BC, rather than a single central spot-date like 1850 BC.

There was a period of about ten years after the publication of Libby’s initial idea before any reliable datings became available. Then the pace began to hot up. By the time I was sitting my final exams, in May 1967, the early trickle had already become a flood. Today, radiocarbon dating is a completely routine process, carried out in various parts of the world hundreds of times every day.

Those early radiocarbon dates got me thinking about the prehistoric past in a new way. Perhaps it was the scientific certainty they implied, the fact that radiocarbon doesn’t lie. They seemed to connect us directly to the past, and in a way removed a part of the curtain of mystery which hung between us and them – those shadowy figures of the Neolithic twilight.

The new tide of radiocarbon dates produced some extraordinary results. At first, some of the dates were much earlier than archaeologists had expected. But, being human, they were loath to throw out their old ways of doing things just because some scientists told them their dates were wrong. So they pressed on regardless. Then, as the evidence accumulated around them, some conceded that they had underestimated the true age of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and that both periods seemed to have lasted roughly twice as long as was previously believed. All of this they could take: their scheme was basically right, just a bit too young and a bit compressed. They were shortly to be proved wrong.

By the time I was doing the revision and research for my final degree exams, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the radiocarbon revolution was not about dates alone. Prehistory was being reassembled in a new order that would have profound effects not just on what we researched – i.e. the subject-matter of our enquiries – but on our thought-processes themselves. In Britain, America and elsewhere in the mid-1960s, archaeologists were questioning the very way they thought about archaeology. How could the processes of archaeological reasoning be improved? Most important of all, how could they be made more explicit, more open to scrutiny and review? Some felt that the new wind blowing through the subject was cold and cheerless. Myself, I found it invigorating. It was good to see the cobwebs being blown away.

As a British archaeologist, working on British material, I had always felt something of a poor cousin compared with those who studied the Classical world, Egypt and the Near East. But all of that was about to change. As I realised what was happening around me, I began to feel – and it was a feeling, not a consciously worked-out idea – that British prehistory really did matter. It had its own identity and integrity. It was not a devolved by-product of someone else’s creativity, a feeble copy of something magnificent in the Aegean. No, it was well worth studying for its own sake. That was enough for me: somewhere deep inside I could detect the distant sound of a huntsman’s horn. Without knowing it, I was about to start the quest of a lifetime.

CHAPTER TWO The Hunt is On (#ulink_5cb41d12-273f-5ab7-af66-a2af0550ac43)

THE GREAT MEGALITHIC STRUCTURES of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe demand explanation. They simply cannot be ignored. For a start, the word itself (derived from the Greek large stones) has a semi-mystical resonance. And the sites themselves are wholly captivating. It’s impossible to pass the ‘hanging stones’ of Stonehenge, or to enter the spectacular circle of Avebury, or to walk along the mysterious stone alignments of Carnac, without wondering who built them – and why? And when? One cannot call oneself an archaeologist without having at least some knowledge of these extraordinary sites: they cry out for, and demand, explanation. And that’s what Glyn Daniel’s lectures at Cambridge provided.

I’ve mentioned three of the best-known megalithic monuments, but there are thousands of others, in the Mediterranean basin, in western Spain and Portugal, right across France, all over Ireland, in north and western Scotland, in Wales and parts of England and in Holland, northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. Far and away the majority of these sites are tombs of one sort or another. Often the tombs are communal and hold (or held, as most have been robbed) the remains, or partial remains, of dozens, even hundreds of individuals.

Glyn’s explanation of megalithic tombs arose naturally from the prevailing archaeological theories of his time. It was his bad luck that the mass of new radiocarbon dates showed those theories to be mostly worthless. It was my bad luck, too: the course I had opted for was now something of a non-event. Hence the great man’s uncharacteristically lacklustre lectures. It was clear to all of us – lecturer and students – that the whole point of the course had been destroyed.

Glyn’s explanation of the monuments was based on the notion that the megalithic builders were initially a distinct community of people, a culture that had its origins in the eastern Mediterranean. This culture – these people – and their ideas spread westwards by two routes, through the Mediterranean via Spain to Ireland and the north, or across France to Scandinavia. England was influenced by both streams. The spread (or ‘diffusion’, to use the jargon word of the time) of megalithic culture was by no means unique. The concept of farming was also thought to have spread across Europe from the eastern Mediterranean, and there were successive waves of diffusion from central and eastern Europe involving Beaker pottery and metal-working in the Early Bronze Age, and Celts in the Early Iron Age. If all this to-ing and fro-ing really did take place, then prehistoric Europe must have been in a permanent state of turmoil – for which there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever. Today, with the possible exception of farming, most of these ‘diffusions’ are seen as at best the spread of a set of ideas, rather than the wholesale movement of people or populations.

With hindsight, Glyn’s explanation could not have been otherwise. Like all European prehistorians he relied on the well-documented areas of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to provide him with the dates he needed for his far-flung monuments. This method of dating held within it the seeds of its own fallibility. By looking east for a date, it was also natural to look east for an origin. And that was the fatal flaw which led to the theory’s eventual collapse: when the first radiocarbon dates arrived for megalithic tombs in Ireland and Brittany, they were found to be thousands of years earlier than their supposed progenitors in the eastern Mediterranean. It must have been a bitter pill indeed that Glyn, and many other archaeologists, had to swallow.

I finished at Cambridge in 1967, and spent two years out of archaeology. At the time I had no intention of returning to it, but events conspired to draw me back. My time out of archaeology had been very frustrating, and in an attempt to break free from the life I was then leading, I followed the advice of an old friend of the family and made my way to Toronto, where I registered as a landed immigrant in 1969.

After a few weeks of unemployment spent among the huge population of US draft dodgers in Canada I eventually got my first ‘real’ archaeological job, as a technician in the Royal Ontario Museum. The ROM was the largest museum in Canada and has magnificent collections, particularly of Chinese antiquities. The Chief Archaeologist, Dr Doug Tushingham, was an anglophile and was proud of the museum’s collections of prehistoric European material, which included a fine assemblage of Bronze Age metalwork that had been dredged from the Thames in the early years of the century.

I worked directly for Doug Tushingham, as his technician, for about a year. At the time he was writing up a site he had excavated in Jordan, at a place called Dhiban. My job was to prepare maps and plans for publication, draw and repair pottery and glass, and work through the various sections he had drawn in the field. Sections are a vitally important part of archaeology, and can be difficult to understand. But the principles behind them are straightforward enough.

Because the Near East is so dry, people have tended to live in the same places, usually those with good access to water. Over the millennia the houses, which were usually built from unfired mud bricks, collapsed and new ones were built; rubbish accumulated; new roads were constructed; and slowly the ground surface began to rise, in some cases forming huge man-made hills, known as tells. Early in the history of modern archaeology it was realised that if one cut a deep trench into these hills it would expose all the layers that had accumulated over the years. The wall or side of the trench would tell the story. These vertical faces were known as sections.

The situation in northern Europe was completely different. Here, if tells occur, as they do in parts of Holland, they were deliberately built up to keep people clear of rising water. The damp climate and the widespread availability of water meant that people could settle down and live almost anywhere, so it’s unusual to find deep sections on excavations out in the countryside. In towns and cities, like London or York, where people have been living on the same spot for two thousand years or more, the sections can be fairly substantial – but even so, they’re shallow by Near Eastern standards.

Sections are important, even on shallow rural sites, because they show how the deposits within a particular feature accumulated. Let’s suppose that someone once dug a hole to receive a post. These postholes are the commonest of archaeological features, and are the bare bones of vanished buildings, or timber circles – or whatever. The hole is dug and a post is dropped in. Earth and stones are then back-filled and rammed home around the post to keep it firm. The post forms part of a house, which is then used for a generation. Thirty years later, the occupants die or move away, and eventually the roof falls in. The post then rots, usually at ground level first, and finally collapses. Within a few years it has entirely rotted away, above and below ground. As it rots below ground level, topsoil slowly accumulates where the wood had once been. This topsoil is darker and finer than the stones and soil that had been rammed into the hole all those years ago. Quite often the dark soil accurately preserves the shape of the original post; this is known as a post-pipe. If excavated carefully, the outline of the post-pipe can be recorded in plan view, from above, or as section cut down through the centre of the original post.

The variety of buried archaeological features reflects the variety of ancient life: as well as post-holes, there are ditches that may once have run around fields, or alongside roads; there are shallow gullies which took rain from house roofs; there are wells, hearths, kilns and rubbish pits. Above-ground features may occasionally survive, such as road surfaces, stone walls, huge standing stones like those at Stonehenge, or the humble earthen banks that once ran alongside field hedges.

The sections at Dhiban were extremely complicated. There were vast numbers of different layers: early house floors were cut through by later house walls, which were in turn cut by even later drainage ditches. And so it went on, for hundreds and hundreds of different, separate deposits. It took Doug and me weeks to work out how it all fitted together, but in the end it made sense. This was superb experience for me: a combination of detective work and jigsaw puzzle – but much better fun than either. Eventually, after almost a year, we finished the technical phase of the Dhiban writing-up, and my services were no longer required. The job had been completed, more or less on time, and Doug seemed well pleased. It was now up to him to write the main report narrative, which took another six months.

I had effectively been out of British archaeology for two years, and in that time a lot had been published, which of course I’d missed. As I read my way through this backlog of literature, I was struck by the fact that medieval archaeologists had a great deal to teach we prehistorians. There is so much medieval archaeology in Britain that it is necessary to work on a grand sale. As I read I could discern a shift away from minutiae towards a bigger picture. Many medievalists were excavating entire villages; having done that, they turned their attention to the countryside round about. To put it another way, they worked with entire landscapes, rather than on single, one-off sites. That was precisely what I wanted to do for prehistoric archaeology.

While we were completing our work on Dhiban, Doug and I had discussed what I should do next. Doug had long cherished the idea of launching an ROM expedition to Britain, alongside the museum’s existing projects in Central America, Peru, Iran, Egypt and of course in Ontario. He had set aside the then princely sum of £1,500 for me to use as ‘seed corn’ – in effect to buy my way back into British archaeology. Given my growing predilection for medieval archaeology, I made contact with Peter Wade-Martins, one of its leading exponents. Peter was directing the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon village in deepest rural Norfolk, at a place called North Elmham. I made him my offer, and just as Doug had predicted, he welcomed the money and myself with open arms.

I owe an enormous debt to Peter and his team. From them I learned the benefits of opening up huge areas, rather than small trenches. With an open area you can appreciate how everything fits together. You do not need to worry whether a ditch exposed in Trench 1 is the same as another exposed in Trench 15, a hundred metres away, because it’s there for all to see. You can even walk along it. But open-area excavation also demanded a whole battery of new skills, which I had to learn in double-quick time.

In order to open huge areas of ground, you have to use earth-moving machines. It’s important to know how to use the various diggers and dumpers to shift the topsoil quickly, but without causing damage to the archaeological layers below. The power of the machines has to be controlled and harnessed, or else they are capable of doing immense harm. Open-area excavation also requires planning (i.e. map drawing) if it is to be fast and accurate. Nowadays one would use laser technology to survey rapid plans, but in those days that hadn’t been invented. So we fell back on ingenuity.

While I worked with Peter’s team, I also had my ear closely to the ground. Back in Toronto I had read that the small English city of Peterborough, about eighty miles north of London, was going to be expanded into a huge New Town. The New Towns – there were several of them – were arranged in an inner and an outer ring around London, and were intended to take the capital’s ‘surplus’ population, housing, entertaining and, most important of all, employing them. It was a major piece of social engineering: Peterborough’s population in 1968 was 80,000; today it is closer to 200,000.

I knew from my university courses that Peterborough was famous for its prehistoric archaeology. Indeed, one of those horrible pottery ‘cultures’ was even named after the place. We had been taught that Peterborough pottery and the Peterborough Culture played an important part in Later Neolithic Britain, around 2500 BC. I am still not at all sure what the Peterborough ‘Culture’ means or meant, but the term did at least suggest that sites in or near Peterborough had yielded important prehistoric finds. That was good enough for me. I determined to visit the place and see for myself. I didn’t know it then, but my quest was about to start in earnest. For the next quarter of a century I would barely have the time to draw breath.

Early autumn has a particular charm in England. Country gardens are at their best. Old-fashioned roses – the kind with loose flowers, kind colours and strong scents – are in their second flush, and even the midday sun lacks the strength to fade them. The true season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has yet to begin, and one is in a never-never world, where summer still lingers and the stillness of evening retains its warmth. It’s my favourite time of year: a little wistful perhaps, but not yet so much as a whisper of melancholy.

It was September 1970, and I was looking forward to the drive ahead of me. Norfolk is one of the most attractive counties in England. Noel Coward’s over-quoted ‘Very flat, Norfolk’ simply isn’t true: it’s a county of gently undulating hills, with little villages nestling in the valleys. By and large it’s an unspoiled county that has been spared the gentrification that has blighted many of the once-beautiful villages of the Cotswolds.

I decided not to take the direct route along the main road, but to let my car have its head, while I used the sun as a guide to ensure that I went in roughly the right direction. After half an hour, the rolling countryside gave way to the flat coastal plain of north Norfolk, and before I knew it I found myself driving through the beautiful ancient port of King’s Lynn.

Today the town is by-passed, and few people bother to divert from the traffic jams that are now an unavoidable part of summer weekends. The roads around King’s Lynn seize solid as the wealthy of the East Midlands migrate towards their seaside holiday homes in shiny four-wheel drives. Lynn is one of the most gorgeous towns of England. In medieval times it was prosperous, and the citizens built magnificent churches and whole streets of splendid timber-framed houses. The prosperity lasted into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but then there were harder times, and the town was spared the wholesale redevelopment that afflicted more prosperous places during the Industrial Revolution. Sadly, the worst damage to this jewel of the North Sea coast took place in the second half of the twentieth century – in the name of ‘improvement’.

King’s Lynn is the port on the river Great Ouse, at the point where it enters the Wash. East of the town is the higher ground of Norfolk, including the sandy countryside in which stands Edward VII’s grand country seat, Sandringham House. I once heard Prince Charles say that he always regarded himself as a Norfolk boy, thanks to the happy days he had spent in and around Sandringham.

To the west of Lynn, the landscape is altogether different. This is a less yielding, sterner country. The land is flat, and transected by deep drainage ditches. The roads run dead straight, and I soon found my car was travelling far faster than the police might have wished. I didn’t slow down, but roared onwards. This was the life!

I was back in the land of the Fens, a part of the world I have grown to love. I like its bleakness. I like its clear, luminous daylight. Above all, I feel free in the Fens: free to breathe deeply and be myself. I also like Fen people. True, they are reserved and rarely press their attentions on one; but I like that, too. There’s warmth aplenty when you need it, but only when you need it. They live in a landscape of space, and they give other people space too.

FIG 1 The Fens

The next town I came to was Wisbech (pronounced Wis-beach). Like Lynn, it had once seen prosperous times, but then the river Nene which was the source of the town’s wealth silted up, and the cargo ships which had brought loads of timber from the Baltic ports could no longer sail up the river from the Wash. As a result, Wisbech too was spared the depredations of our Victorian forebears. I wasn’t familiar with the town, and as I drove through its centre I was stunned by the fine Georgian houses which fringed the river along North Brink. I know now that this is possibly the finest Georgian streetscape in Britain.