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

Once I was out of Wisbech and heading west, the signs told me I was thirty-four miles from Peterborough. Again the landscape changed. Between Lynn and Wisbech the Fens are more accurately known as Marshland. The landscape I had sped through on leaving Lynn had been formed by the sea. Storms and tides from the Wash have laid down thick layers of sandy-coloured silts, which are now among the most fertile arable soils in Europe. It’s a countryside of orchards, rose and garden-plant nurseries, and vegetables. More vegetables are grown in Marshland than anywhere else in Britain. Sometimes the stench of frosted cauliflowers on the air can be overpowering.

West of Wisbech the Fens become different, and much darker. Spiritually darker too, I sometimes think. Before the widespread land drainage of the last three centuries, this was the haunt of Fen Tygers, those wild young men who wore their long hair in a pigtail and cherished their freedom to hunt and fish the common land and streams within their watery world. Out in the open fen there were huge expanses of water. Whittlesey Mere was the largest lake in Britain, before its drainage in 1852. Closer to the edge were sprawling woods of alder and willow. Here decomposing vegetation gave off methane gas, which spontaneously ignited to form the dreaded ‘corpse candles’ – which on drier land only formed in churchyards, above freshly filled graves. To outsiders it was a dark country in more ways than one.

The Black Fens acquired their name because of their rich peat soils, which formed in pre-drainage times in a wide natural basin between the silts of Marshland to the east, and the higher ground of the fen edge to the west. For thousands of years peat grew and accumulated in this complex network of ponds, lakes, meres and creeks. Before their drainage, which took place mainly in the seventeenth century, the Black Fens were Britain’s largest natural wetland. It was a drowned landscape, but it was also a rich land. There was peat for fuel, reeds for thatch and huge numbers of duck, geese, eels and fish to eat. Elsewhere, in upland Britain, folk went hungry in winter, when protein was always in short supply. But never in the Fens.

You can see a long way in a flat landscape. Perhaps the finest building in Britain, Ely Cathedral, high on its ‘island’ hill, can be seen from twenty miles away. Hence its local name, ‘the Ship of the Fens’. Peterborough Cathedral was built on lower-lying, less spectacular land, but it is still extremely impressive. These buildings were undoubtedly built to the glory of God, but the way they dominated – and still dominate – their landscapes leaves me in no doubt that they were also symbols of real political power down here on earth.

I first caught sight of Peterborough Cathedral from ten miles away, as I drove out of the little village of Thorney. By now I was back on the main road, as I had no idea how to navigate my way through the narrow Fen lanes. I knew from past experience that it’s easy to get almost there in the Fens. You follow your nose, and arrive close to your destination, except that there’s a huge drainage ditch (or dyke, as they’re known in the Fens) blocking the way. And then you discover that the nearest bridge is ten miles away.

Peterborough looked familiar as I drove towards the city centre. It was late afternoon and the sun was sinking behind the cathedral tower. Crows were calling to one another in the large trees of the Bishop’s Palace garden, as if they were getting ready for tea. Which would not be a bad idea, I thought, as I pulled into the car park outside the museum.

Peterborough Museum is a fine stone building in Priestgate, the only street left which gives a feeling of what the old city would have been like. The rest was swept away – today we would say ‘redeveloped’, because it sounds nicer – when the main railway line arrived around 1850. The resulting prosperity carried all before it, including nearly every old building, except of course the churches. They couldn’t pull them down. As Bob Dylan once sang: ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’

Inside the museum I was shown into the library, a tall, dark room lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. There was that wonderful booky, musty smell I had first encountered in the Myers Museum at school, and for a too-short moment I was transported back to my youth. The librarian showed me the shelves that held their archaeological titles. In amongst the dusty volumes I noticed a clean paperbound book with a green spine and the letters ‘RCHM’ in bold black type at top and bottom. Far from being a museum piece, this book, Peterborough New Town: A Survey of the Antiquities in the Areas of Development, had only been published the previous year. It was a survey by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, and I had been trying to get my hands on a copy for several weeks, but every bookshop I tried had sold out. I ignored the wisdom of the ages on the shelves all around me, and opened the book eagerly. The site I was interested in lay on the eastern fringes of the city, at the point where the dryland stopped and the once-wet fen started. It was known as Fengate (from two Norse words meaning ‘road to the fen’), and I wanted to know to what extent it would be affected by the New Town.

It was immediately clear that most of Fengate would be destroyed by factories when work on the New Town started in earnest, in 1971 and 1972. Although I was sad for the people and buildings of Fengate, this threat of development meant that I stood a good chance of raising money from the British government, as well as from the ROM. Nowadays developers have to pay for any archaeological excavation their proposals might require, but in the early seventies it was up to government, local government or sometimes archaeological societies to fund such work. With dual sources of funding I might be able to carry out a large-scale open-area excavation. Maybe I’d get the chance to do a proper, wide-ranging project on a landscape which the Royal Commission report suggested would mainly be of pre-Roman date. My mind was racing. Could this be the site I had been looking for?

I knew a bit about Fengate – every archaeology student in England knows a bit about Fengate, as it’s one of the key sites of British prehistory. It was Fengate that produced those Late Neolithic Peterborough pots. The sherds of pottery that gave the Peterborough Culture its name were found in hand-dug gravel pits that had been worked in the first three decades of the century. What I had to know now was simple: was anything left? Had the gravel pits destroyed everything? I was itching to find out.

The librarian told me that the museum was about to close, and the car park would be locked up in fifteen minutes. I still hadn’t answered those key questions, and was almost exploding with frustration; but at least I now had the book safely secured in my briefcase. This time I drove across the Fens to King’s Lynn and my lodgings in North Elmham using the most direct route possible. I don’t think I have ever driven so fast, or with such abandon, before or since.

I took the stairs three at a time and leapt onto the bed, as there was nowhere else to sit. I started to read, and rapidly the truth began to dawn. What a site! It was extraordinary. I couldn’t believe it. The meticulous survey showed that the hand-dug gravel quarry pits were confined to about a quarter of the area of Fengate, and the rest of the prehistoric landscape lay out there, untouched. Intact. And what a landscape it was. I had never seen anything like it before. I was aware that I must be looking at one of the richest archaeological areas in the country. Even the Royal Commission, never noted for extravagant hyperbole, enthused: ‘This area shows massive evidence for occupation from the Neolithic period onwards …’ I lay back and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe it. I had hit the jackpot.

CHAPTER THREE A Trans-Atlantic Commuter (#ulink_8ce54748-7b08-5695-959b-195f9df85abe)

I NOW FOUND MYSELF in a strange situation: I was an Englishman working in England for a foreign institution. I was resident – and indeed taxed – abroad, but most of my team were British. After the initial exploratory expedition of 1970 I returned to Canada for the winter, and drew up proposals for a five-year project which would examine all the land threatened by the expansion of the New Town. Although our main funding was from Canada and the British government, the local authority (in this instance the New Town Development Corporation) also provided us with essential help in kind, which included accommodation, storage facilities and the like.

From 1971 to 1978 I would work in Britain for the four or five months from spring to autumn. I had to be careful not to stay for more than six months, or I’d find myself paying both British and Canadian taxes – and my salary wasn’t big enough to take such a knock. The digging season usually started in May, when North American students became available. From June onwards we employed more British students, and the excavations would close after the first frosts and rains of autumn, which were usually in October.

Most of the digs I had worked on previously had been either small and amateur or large and professional, and to be honest I found neither very satisfactory. The small, amateur affairs were relaxed and friendly, but the pace was too slow, there was an enormous amount of talk and not much action. The big digs were less to my liking – that is, as gatherings of human beings (they even had cooks and field kitchens) – but as a way of getting large quantities of archaeology done, they were superb.

Even if I did manage to squeeze big sums of money from my sponsors, I knew that funds wouldn’t be limitless. I also knew that it would take me some time to come to grips with the local geology, and until I had mastered that, it would be impossible to find useful work for a large team. Familiarising yourself with the geology is something that every dig director has to do. Unless you know in detail how the natural subsoil formed and how it was altered after its formation, you cannot hope to identify the slight marks left on it by the hand of man.

At Fengate the subsoil was gravel that had formed during a warm period in the Ice Age, over ten thousand years ago. The gravels were laid down by rivers, and when they froze and ceased to flow during the next cold spell in the Ice Age, the gravels were torn apart by ice and glaciers. The results of this tearing apart sometimes resembled man-made features, such as ditches, which was to prove a major source of confusion during my first season of excavation.

I suppose I was looking for reasons not to have a big team, because that’s what I eventually chose to do. I decided I would organise a small group – perhaps six or eight students – with two or three experienced professional site supervisors to keep a controlling eye on things. That way, we could combine the best of the amateur and professional ways of digging. In the event it worked well; in fact I still dig with a small, select team. I made a flying visit to England over Christmas 1970 and recruited two supervisors and a field assistant, all of whom were about to start post-graduate research at Manchester University. I also found somewhere local to live the following summer. As dig houses went, it wasn’t a palace, but it would have to do. And it was free – offered as a contribution to the project by the local authority.

The contrast between mid-winter England and Canada was extraordinary. In Toronto the snow had been lying for three weeks, but in England, five hundred miles closer to the North Pole, the roses were still out. As I drove back to Heathrow in early January a few suburban lawns were being given a light trim.

I returned to England for my first full season as an excavation director in April 1971. I was twenty-six years old, and although I did my best to appear supremely confident, I was quaking in my boots. Walking out onto my own site for the first time was a strange experience. There they were: my team of three senior staff and five newly recruited students. Eight pairs of eyes looked to me to make the first move. I knew instinctively that to appear indecisive would be fatal. But we were alone in a field, our tools hadn’t yet arrived, nor had the site huts or the digger. We couldn’t so much as brew a cup of tea. And I certainly couldn’t ask them to scratch at the ground with their bare hands.

I had begun to experience a tide of rising panic when there was a shout from the road. It was the truck delivering the hut sections. With a huge sigh of relief I sent everyone across to help unload. I had learned the first lesson of any dig director – ensure that you have work for people to do, no matter how futile the tasks might seem. It’s always better to do something – anything – than nothing. A team’s morale is crucially important, and as soon as it starts to slip, everything else will rapidly follow.

I have always believed in leading from the front, and this is particularly important when everyone on the team is of roughly the same age. A team leader’s job is not just about co-ordination and morale; it’s also about inspiration and motivation. In time, our team began to believe that we were the best in Britain. And we may have been, for all I know. This growing sense of pride showed itself in a number of ways. We always made visitors welcome, and I was at pains to see that nobody rammed our growing reputation down other people’s throats; but I was also at pains to see that no visitor left without being seriously impressed by what we were doing. What was happening was no more than the growth of a close-knit, motivated team. Many of us have since moved elsewhere – back to Canada, to continental Europe, even to Hawaii – but we still keep in touch, nearly thirty years later.

The first few days of a dig can affect the way the entire season runs. The biggest influence is undoubtedly the weather, and there’s nothing one can do about that. A rainy start is the worst. The huts go up wet; they seldom sit square on the ground, and never seem to lose their dampness. The various delivery trucks stick in the mud, and someone always manages to fall over – but they never hit grass; invariably it’s a broken bottle or a rusty iron spike. Nowadays wooden huts have been replaced by stackable, portable cabins which come ready equipped with electricity, water and well insulated walls. These have made an enormous difference to the quality of life on site.

The arrangement of the huts would reflect the way the dig was organised, and I always made a point of agreeing the layout of the compound with my two senior supervisors well in advance. That first season I came across the pair of them, entirely by chance, in a student pub, and together we sketched something incomprehensible on the back of a beer-soaked envelope – which I promptly lost. Anyhow, the compound more or less matched what we had agreed.

The huts were arranged around a small, open-sided ‘yard’ which faced onto the areas we were digging, and was surfaced with gravel taken from the dig. The largest hut, which sat at the centre of the yard, was the domain of Anne, our finds assistant. The finds assistant is possibly the most important member of a team. His or her job is to supervise the washing, marking, cataloguing and storing of the finds. They have to be rigorously methodical, and know where anything is at any time. The numbers of finds will vary depending on the type of site one is digging, but I suppose a typical day at Fengate would have yielded perhaps two or three hundred finds; of these, about 30 per cent would be man-made artefacts of one sort or another and the remaining 70 per cent would be animal bones.

Sometimes the artefacts were complete objects – brooches, pins, needles or small pots – but more often they were fragments of pottery or sharp flint flakes, the by-products of chipping flint to make tools. Like the artefacts, the animal bones were either found whole or, more usually, broken. They had to be treated with the same care as artefacts, because they could yield just as much information – about the cuts of meat that were eaten, the type of animals kept and the way they were farmed. If, for example, we found a high proportion of bones from older beasts, that might suggest that the younger ones were regularly transported to market.

Next to the Finds Shed was a small hut for tools, and a larger Tea Hut in which wheelbarrows were kept overnight. There was a hut given over to the storage of plans and records, and another in which I did my accounts and administration work – which took me about an hour every morning. People soon learned that doing the accounts made me grumpy, and if they were wise they’d stay well clear of my hut between ten and eleven o’clock. The sanitary arrangements were primitive in the extreme, and involved the liberal application of pungent blue liquid.

This was our self-contained world for the summer. We baked in the sun, froze in the cold, and soon grew extraordinarily weather-beaten. Most of us wore heavy boots, tattered shorts made from cut-off jeans, and old T-shirts that might once have been coloured. Nowadays, when I look at photos of the team, I’m surprised by how little our appearance has dated, when compared with the images in the glossy magazines of the time, which invariably appear extreme and ridiculous. A 1970s field archaeologist could readily slip unnoticed into a twenty-first-century team.

As soon as the panels of the huts were erected, Anne took a small party to town to buy essential supplies, while the rest of the crew started to nail down roofing felt. Rain was forecast overnight, so we had to make everything waterproof by the end of the day. While this was going on, our on-site foreman Sandy and I sat in the Land-Rover with a large aerial photograph and scratched our heads as we tried to decide where to start digging. We had a lot of land and potential archaeological features to choose from.

Aerial photography has had a profound effect on archaeology, since its first widespread use during the Great War. In lowland England years and years of ploughing have removed most of the humps and bumps from the actual surface of the ground, but in aerial photographs long-vanished features such as trackways, field ditches, even house foundations, can be seen as dark marks in growing crops. In a dry year, and only in a dry year, the roots of crops such as wheat and barley need to dive deep to find moisture. Above buried and long-filled-in ditches, wells or rubbish pits, the roots find dampness and the crops grow thick, lush and luxuriant. This darker growth shows up clearly from the air.

The cropmarks on the photos that Sandy and I were examining looked like a painting by Jackson Pollock: there were lines everywhere. Some were straight, one was a perfectly circular ring, others were squiggly, and there were seemingly random dots and irregular dark splodges. The splodges and squiggly lines were caused by water freezing and thawing during the last great Ice Age, so they could safely be ignored. But the other marks were interesting. The dots might or might not be ancient wells, while the circular ring was almost certainly the quarry ditch around the outside of a Bronze Age barrow, or burial mound. Unfortunately, it was in a neighbouring field, and we were unlikely to get a chance to dig it until at least 1973, when it was scheduled by the New Town authorities to become available for commercial development.

One of the frustrating aspects of so-called rescue archaeology, undertaken ahead of specific commercial developments such as factory building or quarrying, is that you cannot carry out a logical pattern of research. Ideally, I like to work my way back in time, starting with the recent material and finishing with the most ancient. But it doesn’t work like that in rescue archaeology. You excavate the land which is under the most urgent commercial threat, whatever the age of the archaeological deposits it contains. In effect this means that the archaeologist has to maintain a number of distinct, but often interweaving, threads or themes in his head. Many times I have found myself looking at an Iron Age grave or house foundation of 300 BC, while my brain is thinking about Neolithic problems of 3000 BC.

We decided to place our first trench across two long, straight, dark marks of parallel ditches. By this time I had bought several copies of that RCHM survey which I had first seen the previous year in Peterborough Museum. The survey reckoned that the two parallel cropmarks were probably the drainage ditches on either side of a Roman trackway. Roman features in the Peterborough area were often crammed full of pottery, because from the late second century AD to the end of the Roman period (AD 410) there were highly productive potteries in the lower Nene valley, immediately west of the modern city. Large potteries like those in the Nene valley were among the first true factories, and they produced cooking and tableware for the prosperous homes of the later Roman Empire on a truly industrial scale.

The pottery itself looks remarkably modern, and were it not for the fact that it’s unglazed, you would not be surprised to see it holding salt or sugar on a modern-day kitchen table. Most of the Nene valley production sites are known, and to walk across one is a strange experience, especially when the land has recently been ploughed. You walk into what seems like a perfectly ordinary flat field, and suddenly have a strange feeling, as if you were walking on thousands of broken ostrich eggs. The ‘eggs’ are sherds of pottery, and they’re crunchy underfoot.

Exactly how these huge quantities of pottery found their way from the industrial suburbs of a Roman town to the field boundary ditches of Fenland farms ten miles away is still a mystery to me. But that’s what happened. Maybe the local peasants were employed by the wealthy pot-factory owners to smash the stuff, in order to keep prices up? Or maybe they were mad? Or just careless? Or perhaps, like farmers today, they simply took their animals to market and bought the pottery, cheap, while they had money in their pockets.

Sandy was sure that a trench across the two parallel ditches would establish their date. Once that was done we could start investigating the possible wells, which were potentially far more interesting. I agreed, and we sent the digger off to remove the topsoil, closely watched by one of our supervisors.

Later that afternoon I walked across to the trench. I looked in, and saw the two ditches, just as they appeared on the air photo. Then I glanced in the finds trays by each ditch, and was slightly puzzled. There were a few scraps of bone, probably of cattle; a small flint flake, of no particular date, but certainly pre-Roman; and two tiny scraps of soft hand-made pottery, again probably prehistoric. Only one find was of any interest, and it could have been Roman or earlier. It was a small piece of baked clay ‘daub’.

Although the Romans introduced mortar and plaster to Britain, the ordinary country people still usually lived in roundhouses built in the traditional pre-Roman, or Iron Age, manner. The walls were made from woven hazel ‘wattles’, which resembled coarse basketwork. This wattlework core was then smeared with a thick layer of clay, usually mixed with straw and cow dung to give it flexibility and strength. The mix of clay and straw was known as ‘daub’. When a house burnt down, which happened quite often, the clay became fired, rather like crude pottery. This firing meant it could survive in the soil indefinitely – ultimately for archaeologists to discover. The piece of daub in my hand was like others I had excavated. I could clearly see the impression left by one of the woven wattles of the wall core. That was encouraging. At least we now had evidence of a house, or houses, somewhere in the vicinity of the two ditches.

The single flint and the tiny piece of pottery could have been in the topsoil for several centuries before the Roman British farmer dug out his trackway ditches. To use the technical word, they were probably ‘residual’ from an earlier period. The fragments of animal bone couldn’t be dated. So we were no further forward. Still, we were digging real archaeology on our first day; the sheds were up and water-tight, and the crew hadn’t tried to lynch me. All in all, it had been a good start.

The next day it rained as it can only rain in a green and pleasant land. By the end of the afternoon our two ditches were filled to the brim, so when I got back to the house I had rented in town that evening I ordered the digger to return the next day. The driver, Chris Clapham, arrived bright and early, and I decided we should simply extend the trench we had started on the first day and cut another section through the ditches. We could always return to the two flooded sections when they had dried out. Failing that, we could hire pumps, but that was expensive. Then, at the end of the day I had a thought. What on earth was I doing clearing little trenches and fiddling around in this small-minded fashion? Surely my aim was to think big – to think in terms of whole landscapes? So I retained the digger, and did not send it back to the depot. Chris, who soon became very interested in the project and who worked with us for several years, was delighted. It was clear that he was always sad to have to return to normal construction work at the end of each season.

By the time I had finished with Chris and the digger, about five days later, we had exposed the two ditches, and the trackway between them, for a distance of some forty metres. The rain held off, and then the weather began to improve. The sun shone, birds sang, and all was suddenly well with the world. We removed the loose earth left by the digger with shovels, and then used onion-hoes to scrape the surface clean. When we had done this, the dark soil which filled the two ditches showed up quite distinctly as two rich brown parallel lines.

My suspicions were first aroused while we were still scraping the machine-cleared ground surface with the onion-hoes. I had deliberately positioned myself in such a way that I was scraping down the centre of the most southerly of the two ditches. Normally I would have expected to find small, worn sherds of Roman pottery at the top of a filled Roman ditch. But there weren’t any. Not so much as a scrap. It was peculiar.

About a month into the dig, I had to return briefly to Toronto to make the final arrangements for an exhibition of finds from North Elmham that Peter Wade-Martins had kindly loaned to the Royal Ontario Museum. I was away for three weeks, and on my return I learned, to my utter amazement, that we had still not found anything in either of the two ditches that could be reliably dated. There was certainly nothing even remotely Roman. Poor Anne was getting fed up with the trickle of scrappy finds. To vent her frustrations – and I couldn’t blame her – she decided to lay everything we had found to date on a table in the Finds Shed, for me to see on my first day back on site.

Through hollow, jet-lagged eyes I viewed Anne’s tabletop exhibition. I was already feeling a bit low, but this display of scrappy potsherds, like so many crumbs of wet digestive biscuit, together with mis-shaped pieces of clay ‘daub’ and nondescript splinters of bone was, quite frankly, pathetic. It was almost more than I could bear. ‘What on earth,’ I thought, ‘will Doug make of this? I’ll arrive in his office at the end of my first season of excavation for the ROM proudly bearing a shoe-box of finds before me. “There,” I’ll announce, “that’s what you paid thousands of dollars to discover.” ’ No, I couldn’t bear it – it was too depressing for words.

I think my misery must have communicated itself to Anne, whose eyes had gone moist. She was starting to bite her lip. I put an arm around her shoulder and was about to make some pathetic excuse along the lines of ‘Honestly Anne, it’s not the finds, it’s just the jet-lag,’ when the door was noisily kicked open. We almost jumped out of our skins. It was Sandy holding a finds tray which contained something which looked like – I rushed across to have a closer look – which looked like … a large lump of mud.

Somehow I concealed my extreme disappointment (not to mention irritation) and picked the thing up. I turned it over carefully in both hands, in case it fell to bits – and it was just as well that I did, because on the underside I saw that what looked like earth was not earth, but grey-coloured baked clay. A sharp-eyed student digging in one of the trackway ditches had spotted this too, and had put the entire lump in the tray.

Although the clay had been quite lightly fired, possibly by being dropped into a bonfire for an hour or so, it held together well and I was able to remove the earth that clung to its surface. As I gently lifted off the soil, piece by piece, the object began to take on a familiar shape. By now I was getting excited, and was having trouble preventing my hands from trembling. Three or four students who were working in the Finds Shed sensed this excitement and drew close around me, partially obscuring the light. But I didn’t care.

I turned the object gingerly on its end, and suddenly recognised it for what it was. So did everyone else. As if on a command, every head rose, and the frowns of a few minutes ago were replaced by the broadest of smiles. The object in my hand resembled a large, short length of giant macaroni, and weighed as much as a bag of sugar. It was the hole through the centre that had made us all look up. It was round and neat, and just big enough to fit one’s thumb. We all knew it could only be one thing. I was ecstatic. I could have hugged everyone. Instead, being British, I patted Sandy on the shoulder in a manly sort of fashion.

To give it its technical name, the object was an axially-perforated cylindrical clay loomweight. (I love the precision and rhythm of that academic description. It says it all, in a wonderfully rich way – like thick, brown, beefy gravy.) I knew from my textbooks that loomweights of this sort were made and used in the Later Bronze Age, in the two or three centuries before and after 1000 BC.