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

Most axially-perforated cylindrical clay weights weigh about the same, and they are nearly always found near settlements. On the Continent weights of this type have been found in the ground close together and lying in neat rows, as if an upright loom had been abandoned, and the weights which hung from bunches of warp threads below it had simply fallen to the ground. In wet areas some apparent ‘loomweights’ may also have been used as fish-trap or net sinkers. After about 500 BC, in the Early Iron Age, cylindrical loomweights were replaced by triangular weights with holes at the corners. Clearly loom technology had changed, and the requirement was now for an altogether different, more sophisticated style of weight.

I had never actually handled a cylindrical loomweight before, and I looked at it closely. It had been quite carefully made, and the outer surfaces had been smoothed by hand – it was even possible to make out the faintest traces of fingerprints. It may well have been made indoors, because a small flint scraping tool, probably from off the floor, had stuck to the clay, only to be mixed into the weight when the clay was kneaded. Two points struck me forcibly. First, although fired, the clay was by no means hard. If I were to tap it quite lightly it would break into pieces. Second, it was 80 per cent complete, and what little damage there was (it was confined to the ends) could well have happened while it was in use, because it would have hung alongside, and sometimes bashed against, the other weights below the loom. That slight damage apart, it was in remarkably fresh condition.

Now, something as fragile as a clay loomweight that had been made in the Middle or Late Bronze Age could not possibly have survived on the ground surface for over a millennium, and it certainly wouldn’t have come through the process of Roman ditch-digging without so much as a scratch. I was forced to conclude that the weight had been placed, or had rolled into, the bottom of the ditch, a short time after it was cut from the loom, perhaps as long ago as 1400 BC. That meant that the ditch couldn’t possibly be Roman. It had to be Bronze Age. And that, of course, would explain the absence of any Roman pottery from all the trenches we had dug.

Suddenly, now that the immediate excitement was over, those unimpressive finds on the table made sense to me. I rushed over and picked up the supposed piece of burnt clay ‘daub’ we had found before I left for my quick visit to Canada. I looked at it again, more closely this time. Armed with our new discovery I could see at once that the ‘wattle impression’ was nothing of the sort: it was straight, not curved, and it was neat and circular – and thumb-sized, just like the hole in the loomweight which Anne was beginning to clean with a fine watercolour paintbrush.

So, I reflected, for the best part of two months we had been digging the side-ditches of a Bronze Age road or trackway. At the time, such things were almost unheard of, except in the wetlands of Somerset, where special wooden trackways were built across boggy ground. But to find one in Peterborough … And it was big – at least five metres wide, far bigger than the Somerset tracks, which were more like large footpaths than roads capable of taking two-way traffic. But what did it all mean? My preconceptions about the site had been turned upside-down.

We continued work for several weeks, and still all we found were scraps of soft handmade pottery, a few dozen more flint tools and another nearly complete cylindrical loomweight. But now I was far more calm, even though I wasn’t at all sure what it signified, in terms of the archaeology of the ancient landscape, that is. I had phoned Canada late in the afternoon of the day after we found the first loomweight, and told Doug about it. At the end of my breathless account I started to apologise for the scrappiness of what we’d unearthed so far, but he didn’t seem to mind. He told me not to worry about finds; they’d come soon enough. He also advised me to relax and enjoy running the dig. I suspect he had an intuitive feel that the pace of my life would shortly quicken. He told me that in two weeks he’d be in England, for a conference in Oxford. He’d come and see me then. And with that he rang off.

Doug had been friendly and reassuring on the phone, but I was aware that he was no fool, and that although Britain was a long way from his main research interest in the Near East, he would require a coherent story from me. Like many archaeologists of the previous generation, he liked to hear narrative. A dig should tell a story. It was not good enough merely to list the various finds and features one had found. They had to mean something. And if you couldn’t explain why they were there and what they meant, then you had no business to be excavating at all.

Given what I knew at this stage, I didn’t feel at all confident that I could fabricate a convincing narrative around my two Bronze Age ditches. And I only had two weeks in which to think. ‘That’s a ditch a week,’ I thought grimly. My previous confidence was slowly being replaced by nagging anxiety. I was learning that discoveries only become significant when one can attach a convincing explanation to them. Without a good narrative they remain curiosities – no more, no less. Unless I was careful, I might be remembered as the man who found two Bronze Age ditches near Peterborough. I tried thinking around the periphery of the problem. What if the two ditches had nothing to do with a track or roadway at all? What if they happened to run parallel purely by coincidence? There was a simple way to test this.

The field next to the one where we were working had been growing a crop of potatoes the year the air photos were taken. For various reasons, potato plants do not produce cropmarks when they grow, so the photos of that particular field were blank. I wondered whether, if we were to ask the farmer nicely, he would let us dig a couple of trenches in this field, about two hundred metres away from our present dig. If the two ditches were still running parallel, and five metres apart, at this distance away, it would strongly support the road or trackway theory. If, on the other hand, they diverged or came together, I’d have to come up with another idea.

The farmer agreed, we dug two quick trenches by hand, and lo and behold, there were the ditches, five metres apart, parallel, and running as straight as a die. So it simply had to be a road. And a straight one, at that. No wonder the RCHM survey had it listed as ‘probably Roman’. Every school child is taught that Roman roads are straight (very often they’re not, in fact).

It just so happened that a few days later I was driving my ancient Land-Rover along King Street, the Roman trunk road that runs north of the small Roman town of Durobrivae, near the modern village of Water Newton. The buildings of Durobrivae have long since vanished, and it only survives as a series of large banks and smaller humps and bumps, about five miles west of Peterborough. As the Land-Rover, with its rock-solid suspension, bounced slowly along, my mind wandered off to a known Roman road that runs diagonally across the landscape at Fengate. That road is known as the Fen Causeway, and scholars of the Roman period reckoned it was constructed in the years AD 60 and 61 by military engineers who had been ordered to force a route from the garrisons around Durobrivae, and then straight across the Fens. Once they had crossed the Fens, the legions would march into Norfolk, where the Briton Queen Boadicea (Boudica to archaeologists) was leading a successful rebellion against the Roman occupation. Sadly, however, the revolt failed, quite probably because of the reinforcements that came along the Fen Causeway.

As I ground slowly along in four-wheel drive, it struck me that the Fen Causeway might just clip the corner of the field where we were working. I knew a Roman road would be right up Doug’s street, so to speak, and it might draw his attention away from the two narrative-free Bronze Age ditches, which were giving me prolonged anxious moments. Besides, the Boudica link was well worth examining, and Roman roads are always an interesting topic. I could see the subject would certainly appeal to the ROM’s membership, and would make a good piece for the museum’s house journal Rotunda. All in all, it had a lot going for it.

I headed home to have a closer look at the air photos, reasoning that if the road did indeed enter the field where we were working, it ought to show up quite clearly as a pale parch-mark. Roman roads were usually made from rammed-down gravel, and there was precious little moisture in them. As a result, in dry years, crops planted over them would grow pale and parched. Sometimes these pale cropmarks are known as negative cropmarks. As negative cropmarks went, the Fen Causeway was remarkably striking.

I got home at about six o’clock and found an air photo that clearly showed the Roman Fen Causeway as a sharply distinct negative cropmark which headed straight towards our field. On the photo it seemed to pass under the modern road that ran along our northern boundary, but strangely it didn’t appear on the other side, where we were working. I looked at the photograph through the small folding magnifying glass I usually carry in my pocket. No, there could be no doubt at all. So where had it gone? It had either stopped, which seemed most unlikely, or else it turned west and ran directly below the modern road, where it would lie hidden. On the whole I still think that is the most likely explanation. Often modern and medieval roads made use of the hard foundations left behind by Roman engineers.

I was staring at the photo in a blank sort of fashion, pondering these problems, when my eye was caught by three parallel dark cropmarks, doubtless ditches, which quite clearly ran beneath the Roman road. At this point my subconscious clicked in. The ditches ran precisely parallel to the two ditches we were currently digging. That was odd. My pulse quickened immediately.

The first thing I had to do was to check that the three ditches were indeed parallel with the two we were digging. That wasn’t quite as simple as it seemed, because the air photo that showed them best was taken at an oblique angle (i.e. the plane was not directly overhead), so I had to play around with some elementary geometry and a largescale map before I could be certain. That done, I was convinced. They were indeed parallel.

By now I was getting excited. Whatever these Bronze Age ditches were, they weren’t tracks or roads in the normal sense of the word. There were simply too many of them. Then I looked at the photos lying on the carpet around me. I remember frantically scrabbling though my desk drawer trying to locate my largest and best magnifying glass. When I had found it I stared long, close and hard at each photo in turn. It was an eerie feeling. Everywhere I looked I saw the cropmarks of parallel ditches, either singly or in pairs. I rubbed my eyes. Was I imagining them? Was I going mad? I took a quick stroll outside, then came back and took another look. No, I wasn’t – they were definitely there.

I spent the next day plotting the cropmarks onto a map as accurately as I could. As I worked methodically through each photo, I found ditches that ran at right angles to the main ones. Some of these also had smaller ditches that branched off them, but always at right angles. When I had plotted every ditch I could find, it was absolutely clear that these were not roads, but the ditches that had been dug around a large and carefully-set-out system of Bronze Age fields.

As I dropped off to sleep that night, I reflected that I had always wanted to work on a prehistoric landscape, and now I had discovered it – and it could well prove to be one of the earliest in England. I think I sensed, with just a hint of wistfulness, that I was passing through possibly the most important moment of my archaeological life.

When I look back on my years digging the successive prehistoric landscapes at Fengate, it always makes me smile to recall that the big discovery, the one that set the ball rolling, wasn’t made beneath a blazing sun. There was no trowel in my hand, no native workmen staring wide-eyed into the dark recesses of the long-lost tomb. Just a weary archaeologist surrounded by a scatter of well-thumbed photos on the carpet.

To date we have spent twenty-eight years excavating those Bronze Age field ditches, and I shall be digging some more in the coming years. It’s a huge system, and it’s important because these particular fields did not appear by accident, fully formed, as it were. They were never placed in the middle of nowhere. Farmers only lay out and maintain fields if there’s a good reason for spending so much time and effort on them.

The Fengate Bronze Age fields were carefully laid out to lie at the core of a working landscape. It was a landscape in which countless generations of human beings lived, died and were buried. I knew that it would provide an ideal setting to study people and their histories. If you know how to go about the task, the landscape can reveal an immense amount. But it takes time, some luck, and an enormous amount of patience. As the months turned to years, I became increasingly aware that I was bearing a huge responsibility – to the shades of the people who had lived in this place.

FIG 2 The Fengate Bronze Age fields

Modern development was ripping the old landscape apart. Fields were vanishing, to be replaced by factories and warehouses. Farm tracks, ancient and modern, were being upgraded to roads. Trees were being felled, hedges grubbed up and the rough wayside verges, rich in wildflowers and diverse grasses, were being carefully sculpted into yet another characterless ‘landscaped’, mown suburban streetscape. While these unsympathetic ‘improvements’ were taking place, while old Fengate was being transformed into Peterborough New Town’s Eastern Industrial Area, I could almost hear the screams of protest coming from the inhabitants of the Bronze Age landscape. It was as if the people of my quest were looking over my shoulder. I had to do their story justice, while there was still something left to tell. I could not sell them short. It’s a thought that still haunts me.

After that first season of 1971, Doug must have been impressed with what we were doing, because he set about raising large sums of money in Canada. While he worked on one side of the Atlantic, I worked on the other, and together we accumulated sufficient cash to carry out the large-scale open-area excavations that this complex landscape demanded. My main sources of funding were the British government and the New Town authorities, but I also raised a fair amount from private individuals, local landowners and industry. I now had the financial freedom to do the job properly, and there could be no excuses.

I won’t describe how we excavated every Bronze Age field boundary ditch, because many of them were extremely unexciting. Like the two ditches at the start of the project, they produced few and scrappy finds; but as time progressed the few finds slowly accumulated, until we had quite a sizeable collection. We were also able to assemble a number of radiocarbon dates, and we now have solid evidence that the system of fields was first laid out around 2500 BC, at the start of the Early Bronze Age, and went out of use in the first half of the first millennium BC – probably between 1000 and 500 BC. So, in broad terms, these long-vanished fields were in use for two millennia. That’s something to think about. Put another way, the Fengate fields had been in use for a thousand years when the young King Tutankhamun was laid in his fabulous tomb in ancient Egypt. Not only were these fields old, but they must also have worked well, for why else would they have been maintained in use for such a long time? I believe they worked well because they suited the landscape and the climate.

The eastern half of Britain is the side of the country with the driest climate and the flattest landscape. Today these conditions allow the farmers of East Anglia and Lincolnshire to grow arable crops, often on a vast scale more akin to the North American prairies than Europe. But it was not always like this. In medieval times, for example, the rich grasslands of eastern England supported huge flocks of sheep. The once-flooded Fens around the Wash have changed perhaps more than any other landscape in Britain. Today they grow huge arable crops, including more daffodils than anywhere else on earth; but again, in the remote past things were different.

In effect, the Fens are an inland extension of that huge shallow bay the Wash, which forms such a distinctive feature of the English east coast. Before their drainage in the seventeenth century, the Fens covered about a million acres of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, and parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, too. Within them, particularly around the edges, were areas of higher ground that formed dry ‘islands’ amidst the reeds and waterways. The Isle of Ely is the best-known and largest of these.

The edges of the Fens slope gradually, and when you drive through the modern, drained Fen landscape it can often be difficult to decide whether you are on once-wet fen or on dry ground. If the road suddenly becomes uneven it’s a sign that it was built on unstable peaty ground, and when that happens you can be sure you’re driving through drained wetland.

The gently sloping plain of drier ground around the edges of the regularly flooded Fens was where prehistoric people liked best to live. By 2500 BC the forest cover here had largely gone. The ground was naturally well-drained, light and fertile, ideal for farming. That is most probably why the various prehistoric field systems at Fengate were laid out on this plain, right on the edge of the regularly flooded fenland. At Fengate the regularly flooded land is known as Flag Fen.

Like the medieval Fenland landscapes three thousand years later, the Early Bronze Age landscape at Fengate was laid out at right angles to the regularly flooded fenland. This expanse of wetter land was by no means a watery wilderness. Far from it. To us it may seem flat and featureless, but that’s because we and our immediate predecessors have drained the heart, soul and guts out of it. Now it’s little more than a vast growing-bag. Before drainage it was otherwise. It was a complex world, or series of worlds, each one of which was subtly different and could yield to the discerning hunter, fisherman or farmer abundance in a variety of forms. All it required to exploit these landscapes was a wealth of experience handed down from previous generations, and the acknowledgement that human beings were just a single, small element in a far larger Creation. To become arrogant and too self-assured in a landscape as potentially dangerous as the low-lying Fens is to court disaster. I fear we will soon learn that lesson the hard way ourselves.

My thoughts were first turned to the neighbouring fen when we had a visit from the late David Clarke, one of the key figures in twentieth-century archaeology. He had just completed his doctoral research into Beaker pottery and was then a junior lecturer at Cambridge. I regarded him then, and indeed I do now, as something of a hero. In his best-known book, Analytical Archaeology (1968), he set down the principles of a new and explicitly scientific approach to the subject. This approach, which has since been superseded several times, was known as the New Archaeology, and was of course vigorously opposed by most of the established authorities of the day. But there was another side to David. He wasn’t entirely cerebral, but enjoyed handling real objects, and loved to visit field projects (although he admitted he wasn’t much of a field archaeologist himself).

When I first started to research the prehistory of Fengate I assumed that the fen nearby was just wet, wet, wet and of no importance, but David was not so sure. At the time he had just finished work on a reinterpretation of the Glastonbury Iron Age Lake Village in Somerset. This had made him think about the way people on the fringes of wet areas lived and how they used the neighbouring fens or bogs. He turned my attention to books on medieval history, and I soon found myself reading about the farmers of the great monastic Fenland estates, at places like Ramsey, Crowland and Thorney Abbeys. The monastic system of farming made use of the fact that the Fens were rarely entirely flooded – inundated – and certainly not all year round. In the drier months of summer there were huge areas of grass and reeds. Sheep and cattle love reeds, so this lush grazing was ideal for the young lambs and calves, and of course for their mothers, who required vastly more food and water when they were in milk. So the farmers of the Middle Ages would take their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep out into the Fens when water levels fell in the springtime, then return to their ‘island’ or dryland base in the late autumn, when the weather broke.

It struck me that the Bronze Age fields at Fengate must have been on the winter, or home base, part of this cycle. They were laid out in a closely similar way to their medieval counterparts, with double-ditched droveways running down to the wetter ground, at right angles. Droveways are still a common feature of the Fenland landscape. In effect, they are green roads, built to be used by animals. They tend to be quite straight and are bounded by deep ditches and impenetrable hedges. Often the ground between the two ditches was built up with soil from the ditches on either side. This helped to keep the grass surface of the droveway dry.

The ditched droves at Fengate were laid out at regular intervals, of approximately two hundred metres, and the fields and paddocks between each drove seemed to have been laid out in different shapes and styles – rather as if the blocks of land defined by the droves belonged to different farmers or farming families.

At this early stage in the project we had yet to discover where the people of Fengate lived, where they were buried and how they had organised their lives. We just had the barest of bare bones. But it was a start. It was a framework, a grand design, and I could sometimes imagine fragments of the picture that was eventually to emerge.

CHAPTER FOUR Direction and Disorientation (#ulink_a8a59a2a-426d-532d-abe6-4cc2c50501ea)

THE FIRST THREE SEASONS of research at Fengate were wholly absorbing. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I was actually becoming too heavily involved. I was so immersed in what I was doing that I was in danger of losing sight of the wood – so extraordinary were its many trees. To be so absorbed is bad if the final objective of one’s research is the reconstruction of life ‘in the round’. An obsessed archaeologist will find it hard to stand back and see his work in perspective. This was a lesson I was about to learn from some of my newly-acquired friends in British academia.

As our team worked, we found that we were slowly piecing together a picture of Bronze Age life on the Fengate site. We unearthed the foundations of our first Bronze Age roundhouse in 1974, and several others in subsequent seasons, and were also able to excavate their yards and outbuildings. The roundhouses themselves were very substantial buildings, with a floor area about the size of a Victorian two-up, two-down cottage. They had stout walls and thick roofs (made from thatch or turf, or a combination of the two); these roofs were well insulated and kept the buildings warm in winter and cool in summer. We worked on a very large scale and were able to place these small farmsteads within their own fields and droveways. Gradually the components of a long-lost landscape were starting to emerge.

Bronze Age life-spans may have been short – most modern estimates suggest that you were old by your mid-thirties – but your three or four decades on earth were pleasant enough; provided, that is, you survived the trials of birth. The roundhouses where people lived were substantial, the fields were carefully laid out and the ditches around them were properly maintained. The discarded meat bones we had found suggested that domestic animals were well-fed. It all appeared efficient and well regulated.

FIG 3 Excavated ground plan of a Bronze Age roundhouse at Fengate

At the end of the second season in 1972 I gave a paper at a conference in Newcastle, in which I described the emerging picture of well-regulated life in the Bronze Age. No sooner had I stepped down from the stage than half a dozen academics declared that such order and organisation could only be due to the presence of a powerful political elite, who controlled those otherwise unruly prehistoric Fen folk. I don’t know why, but this assumption irritated me. Why couldn’t they control the way they behaved themselves? Why do some people always have to look for a ruling class, just because ordinary people seem to be running their lives efficiently and well? But despite my strong gut-feelings to the contrary, I couldn’t counter these arguments with facts of my own. So I held my tongue – which is not something I have ever found easy.

One of the academics at the conference was Professor Richard Bradley. Richard was then a lecturer at Reading University, and he had taken a special interest in our work at Fengate. The previous year he had sent me some of his best and brightest students, and it was an arrangement that was to continue for many years. It was good to have close contact with students – they never let any of us rest on our laurels. If we had a bright idea, we had to test it and then see what could be made of it. This was stimulating, and gave rise to some creative archaeology. I remember thinking that sometimes the chat in our Tea Hut had more in common with a university common room than a draughty field in the Fens.

On the train home from the conference, I reflected that it had indeed been useful, as it had given my quest a new impetus and a new direction. The resulting shift in emphasis, away from straight landscape reconstruction and towards patterns of prehistoric social organisation, was to have far-reaching consequences. I did not know it then, but I would soon find my quest moving from the world of the living to the lands of the dead.

The train sped through the huge, open plain-like fields of Lincolnshire, and I was struck by the fact that even the relentless advance of modern, intensively farmed arable agriculture had not managed to destroy everything – yet. As we flashed through tunnels and cuttings I could just spot, through the flying trackside trees and scrubby hedges, that the open countryside still included isolated fragments of earlier landscapes: pockets of woodland, ploughed-out hollow ways, small villages nestling within shrunken remnants of meadows and paddocks. I knew that it was these earlier fragments which will allow future historians to place the modern changes in context. Their survival could tell them much about the type of land that was not needed for modern farming – and by implication the sort of land that was needed. The enlargements and modifications to farmhouses, and the conversion of old livestock buildings such as stables to farm offices, would reveal much about the size and organisation of the estates that made these changes. In other words, to understand the process of change, you need both a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. And it’s good news indeed if you can find a ‘during’. Unfortunately, they are rare.

I sat back in my seat, closed my eyes and tried to assemble my thoughts. It was difficult: I was tired, the conference had been good fun and I hadn’t slept much. My brain refused stubbornly to work. So I dozed off. When I awoke we were approaching Peterborough. The sun was low and caught the magnificent Early English west front of the great cathedral. Then light dawned inside me. I had successfully used medieval analogy to illuminate the workings of the Bronze Age Fens. Surely, I reasoned, I could also turn the process on its head. To understand how social organisation worked in the Bronze Age, I should try to see how it differed from the previous period, the Neolithic.

Hitherto I had tended to concentrate on the ‘after’ rather than the ‘before’. This approach had worked well, but I knew there were limits to what it could reveal. Essentially I was using a historical approach, whereas what I really needed was one that was much more radical. To understand the remote past I would have to examine the even more remote past; a daunting but exciting prospect. It was time to think in time-depth – to see how the lives of people and the landscapes in which they lived gradually changed. I had spent too long contemplating a single millennium. It had been rewarding and exciting, but it was now time to turn the clock back a long way indeed.

I was aware that I had already made a start on this way of thinking the previous season, when we had discovered the slight foundation trenches of a small rectangular building, measuring about seven by eight and a half metres. It was one of those completely unexpected discoveries that happen from time to time, and which make archaeology such a delight. As it was later to prove so important to my quest, I shall describe how we found it in some detail. I won’t deny that it was a piece of luck, but I also like to think it was rather more than that – let’s call it structured luck.

Sometimes the work at Fengate could be frustrating. 1972 had been a hot summer, and while sunshine is far better for team morale than continuous rain, it does make for practical problems in the dig. When the machines have removed the topsoil, we clear away all loose earth and scrape the freshly exposed surface clean with hoes or trowels. Usually there is enough moisture left in the ground for its natural colours to show up clearly, so ancient field ditches, post-holes or wall foundation slots that have been filled in for thousands of years will appear as dark marks on the surface of the subsoil. This darker colour is partly because they contain soil that slipped into them when they were abandoned, but partly too because they are damper – which, of course, is why they cause cropmarks to form. After a dry summer, the marks are much fainter and more difficult to detect.

In time a really good field archaeologist will develop almost a sixth sense. He or she (I think women, possibly because they usually have better colour vision than men, are often better at this) will be able to look at a patch of freshly cleaned subsoil and spot any number of post-holes and ditches, most of which would have been missed by a novice. This skill in ‘reading’ the ground is tested to the full with Neolithic and Bronze Age features. For some reason, possibly to do with the ‘washing effect’ of the seasonal rise and fall of water in the ground, Iron Age, Roman and later features are much easier to spot: they seem to have sharper, more distinctive edges and good dark earth within them.