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

It was high summer, and the machine had finished clearing the topsoil. Now it was time to clean the exposed surface by hand. There was nothing on the air photo of the area where we were working, but I had a hunch (and a few slender clues) that we might find evidence for a Bronze Age building, so I told Chris and the machine to go ahead. The sun burned down relentlessly and the sweat poured off us as we hoed the ground as fast as we could. But we couldn’t go fast enough: the earth was drying out about a metre behind us as we hoed. After two hours we had finished, and although I stared at the ground for about a quarter of an hour I could see nothing. Nothing at all. It was a dejected team that sat exhausted and fed up in the Tea Hut that afternoon.

Although we couldn’t see anything, miracles can sometimes happen, so I let it be known that until further notice, nobody was to walk across the trench we had just hoed clean. Everyone knew that footprints blotted out soil colours, and nobody wanted to rehoe the surface, so the instruction was scrupulously obeyed.

About a week later we had the rain we so urgently needed. I remember noting that the sky to the east, over Whittlesey, was completely black. As we watched, we could see lightning flash and a few seconds later came the rumble of thunder. I reckoned the storm would hit Peterborough in about fifteen minutes, and prayed it wouldn’t be too severe. A torrential downpour would undo all our patient work, and we’d have to reclean the surface yet again.

The first drops of rain began to fall, but mercifully the main body of the storm passed by, further east, and we only caught a fringing shower. But it was enough to dampen the ground. I immediately walked across to the trench, and there, right in the middle, were the just-detectably darker stains of four slight ditches, arranged in a rough square. The sun came out, and almost at once the marks began to fade. I pulled a trowel from my back pocket, jumped down into the trench and scored a deep line around the edges of the darker soil. As I worked I noticed that the ditches did not sit in isolation: there were several pits or post-holes with them. It took about fifteen minutes to mark the ground, and when I climbed back out of the trench I could see no colour differences whatsoever. They had completely vanished.

Our first task was to make an accurate plan of the features I’d outlined on the ground. When that was done I could have shouted for joy. There, on the paper before me was a plan of a small building, similar to one excavated at Haldon in Devon before the last war by my old professor, Grahame Clark. It took us several weeks, and a lot of fine misted water from watering cans and hand-held sprayers, to excavate the four ditches. But it was well worth the effort. The ditches and the small pits and post-holes near them produced an astonishingly rich and diverse collection of finds: lots of flint, big pieces of pottery, but no animal bones. Like those from Haldon, our finds dated to the Earlier Neolithic period, and a radiocarbon date taken from a burnt corner-post gave a date range of 3310 to 2910 BC. There was no doubt about it: our newly discovered house predated the Bronze Age landscape by up to half a millennium.

I had thought little more about our Neolithic house until the train journey back from the Newcastle conference, and even then it was difficult to deconstruct and reinvent something we had discovered so recently. It’s much easier to revise one’s views when they’ve had a little time to ‘settle in’ and mature. As part of my newly-made resolution to examine the ‘before’ landscape of the Bronze Age fields I laid the plans of the Neolithic house on the kitchen table and stared at them long and hard. But I had no moment of revelation, no blinding flash of insight. They looked much as I remembered them. I knew that somewhere on those plans was something trying to catch my attention, some key that would unlock the secrets that lay within, but I couldn’t spot it.

FIG 4 Ground plan of the Fengate Neolithic ‘house’, or mortuary structure

Most years we dug from April to October. Towards the end of the season I would carefully pack up our finds and send them to Canada by sea. It normally took them about six weeks to arrive, and then I’d work my way through them during the Canadian winter. It felt strange to be in Toronto, handling pieces of pottery and flint tools that often came in dried muddy bags, each of which reminded me of a particular wet day on the other side of the Atlantic. But this pattern of work was effective, and allowed me to stay on top of my report-writing as the project progressed. It also meant that I was able to reflect on the previous year’s results before the next season began, and to work out the questions we had to address the following year.

A few days after the conference we returned to Canada for the winter. By now I was getting better at coping with jet-lag, but my brain was never at its most active in the three or four days immediately after the flight. So you can imagine my feelings when I discovered, on returning to my office in Toronto, a pile of proofs sitting on my desk, accompanied by a note from the Museum Academic Editor to the effect that they had to be read through and corrected by the end of the week – which was in three days’ time.

The proofs consisted of the unbound pages of my first report on the Fengate project, which was to be published on 28 February 1974. Proof-reading requires a great deal of concentration. Every letter of every word has to be checked and rechecked. I began the task, and soon found my jet-lagged concentration was lapsing. It was hopeless, but I knew that if I missed the deadline, the printer would start another job, and the publication of the report would be delayed for months. So I had to deal with those proofs somehow. Rather than do nothing, I decided to check the artwork first, because I find illustrations sometimes require less close attention. As I was checking through the line drawings I came to the main plan of the Neolithic house. I checked the two scales – one metric and one imperial – and was about to turn the page when I spotted an important omission. For some reason – it’s quite easily done – I had left out the arrow indicating north.

Normally the north arrow points upwards, but in this case I had jiggled the drawing slightly, so that the rectangular building sat square on the page. I knew I wasn’t meant to alter the picture proofs themselves, so I took the original artwork across to my drawing board. I suppose I ought to have moved the artwork that was already there, a plan of the paired Bronze Age droveway ditches, but I couldn’t be bothered, and simply taped the plan of the house on top of it and added the north arrow. When I had finished, I stood back to admire my handiwork and let the ink dry. And then something odd caught my eye.

One would normally expect a square or rectangular building to follow the alignment of the landscape; it looks odd if a new building is positioned without any regard to the features of the land around it. Thus, houses are usually positioned parallel to roads or at right angles to them. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that that rule also applied in Neolithic times, but it was immediately apparent from the two superimposed plans on the drawing board in front of me that the alignment of the two landscapes was significantly different.

If something as profoundly important as the orientation of a landscape can change, then that implies an equally profound change in the way the landscape was used, and indeed in the way people organised themselves to use it. My point is that we don’t realign landscapes willy-nilly. Even stark modern agri-desert landscapes tend to follow the ‘grain’ of the pre-existing countryside. Nowadays, nobody would contemplate setting out the existing landscape afresh, from scratch. It would be pointless and horrendously expensive. But that is what appears to have happened in the period between the construction of our Neolithic house and the laying out of the Bronze Age ditched fields in 2500 BC.

Now for a word of caution. As archaeologists, we have to work with the bits and pieces that time bequeaths us. We’re adept at reconstructing entire Roman inscriptions, such as gravestones, from fragments of just two letters. Or we can imaginatively reconstruct a house on the basis of four post-holes. Unfortunately, sometimes we get things wrong – as, for example, when I mistook a loomweight for a bit of daub. This business of landscape orientation was a case in point. Was it really wise to suggest something as radical as the wholesale reorganisation of a landscape on the basis of just one house? Was I seriously prepared to stand up at a conference and make the case before three hundred highly sceptical colleagues? I decided to wait for further proof. I had had the insight, but unfortunately modern archaeology expects more by way of evidence for such bright ideas.

The following season was spent excavating huge tracts of Bronze Age fields, together with their farms and droveways. It was exciting and rewarding work, but I was conscious that I had ceased to break new ground. But then, in archaeology, as in life, one cannot always be exploring virgin territory. Sometimes one has to pause and consolidate. When I returned to Canada for the winter I was rushed off my feet sorting through finds and preparing illustrations for the Second Fengate Report. I hadn’t worked so hard for a long time. Consolidation can often be labour-intensive and time-consuming.

I returned to England for our fifth season of excavation in April 1975. It was to be one of the busiest I have ever experienced. By now, much pressure was being brought on me to clear land which the New Town authorities wanted to use for building factories. Fengate was starting to live up to its new name, the Eastern Industrial Area, and factories in this part of Peterborough would soon provide most of the employment for the city’s rapidly expanding population. It was a case of dig or bust.

Early in the summer we exposed several more acres of Bronze Age fields, and then started work on a substantial Iron Age village, which was occupied between about 350 BC. and into the early Roman period – say AD 150. The inhabitants had placed their hamlet on the edge of the regularly flooded land, close to a small stream known as the Cat’s Water. Like many Iron Age sites in eastern England, the Cat’s Water settlement was producing huge quantities of material, and we were all kept extremely busy.

The story of the next discovery in our quest begins towards the end of the excavation, when we were running out of time and energy. To make matters worse, money was also in short supply. Summer was rapidly turning to autumn, and quite soon the rain would start in earnest. For these and other reasons I was extremely keen to finish.

One morning, while doing the rounds through the various trenches, I came across our new principal site supervisor, David Cranstone, on his hands and knees trowelling away at a patch of pale silt. After several years I had learned a great deal about the natural subsoil at Fengate, and I prided myself on being able to distinguish man-made from natural features. It struck me at once that the patch Dave was trowelling was not a man-made feature. It looked very ordinary indeed: maybe it was the filled-in hole left by the roots of an ancient tree that had blown over a few thousand years ago – who knows? Such things (we call them tree-throw pits) are not uncommon, and given the rush to finish the season’s dig, I couldn’t understand why David wanted to spend time digging one. I could think of many more urgent things that needed doing, but I managed to keep my irritation under wraps, consoling myself with the thought that he was bound to be doing something more constructive in a few hours’ time.

That afternoon I passed through the trench for a second time, and Dave was still at it, trowelling steadily down through the silt patch. This was too much.

‘Dave,’ I said as calmly as I could manage, ‘it’s just another tree-throw pit. For Heaven’s sake, man, you must have more important things to finish, haven’t you?’

He seemed quite impervious to my exasperation. He didn’t even look up when he spoke. He was completely wrapped up in his work.

‘Calm down, Francis. It won’t take long.’

I had been dismissed. More than a little surprised at Dave’s offhand reply, I continued on my way. I was not in the most sunny of tempers.

The following morning I was detained with the project’s accountants in town, and did not arrive back on site until the afternoon. I almost exploded when I saw that Dave was still on his hands and knees in the same spot. I stormed across to his trench.

‘For Christ’s sake, Dave!’

He smiled up at me, holding a small flint blade on the palm of his hand. It glistened in the damp sunlight against his silt-stained skin.

I was staggered at his nerve. Small flint blades and other scraps of ancient flint-working debris frequently find their way into tree-throw pits through the action of earthworms, moles or other animals, so to find a flake on its own meant absolutely nothing. After a few minutes I was again dismissed, and this time I left with ill-concealed irritation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see other members of the team beginning to take an interest in what Dave was up to. I’m not noted for a quick temper, but I knew I was approaching the end of my fuse.

Throughout the whole of the next day, Thursday, I studiously avoided Dave’s trench. By now it was quite deep, and I could only see the top of his head when he straightened up to empty a bucket of soil into his wheelbarrow.

By Friday we only had a week to finish the dig. In seven days’ time the workmen would be arriving on site to start building factories. There would be a ghastly public row if we held them up, so I assembled the crew together in the Tea Hut and suggested we should work through the weekend to get things finished. Everyone nobly agreed, although a few bad-tempered looks went Dave’s way. It was clear that I was not the only person who considered him to have taken temporary leave of his senses. That night Dave and his ‘bloody great hole’ featured prominently in our talk at the pub.

On my way to the site the next day I made up my mind that ‘Dave’s hole’ had now become a major issue. Something had to be done about it, or else I’d look stupid in the eyes of the others. As is the way of these things, I had learned in the pub the previous evening that some of the younger members of the team thought I was losing control over my Principal Supervisor. It was ridiculous to fall out with a good friend like Dave over such a minor matter, but the crunch could not be avoided. It was him or me: site morale – something my mental antennae have always been quite well attuned to – was beginning to creak.

I was about to leave my shed to have the nose-to-nose confrontation I was dreading when there was a rap at the door. It opened, and Dave stood there, grinning hugely. I knew that look: it said ‘I told you so!’ in letters a yard high.

I have always tried to discourage the team from gathering around the scene of a new discovery – but so far, I have to admit, without much success. As Dave and I walked rapidly across the site, we saw that half a dozen folk had already congregated around his pit, and that others were coming to join them.

When we got there, I was amazed at the size ‘Dave’s hole’ had grown to – he had certainly been hard at work. The bottom of the hole was flat, where Dave had been scraping off silt with his trowel. This smoothed, flat base gave the impression of still water with just the lightest of ripples – the marks left by the trowel. Towards one end of the pit, as if freed from an underwater necropolis, a human skull could be seen emerging. Parts of another, perhaps smaller, one were next to it. Several limb bones and a few vertebrae lay round about the two skulls, like grisly flotsam on the water’s surface.

I have seen many burials, but it was hard not to be moved by the sight of this one. A question immediately came into my mind: what on earth had these poor people done that had led to such an ignominious end, in an unmarked pit on the edge of the Fens? My archaeologist’s eye noted that the grave-pit was a large one, and it was soon apparent that it had been dug to contain more than just two skulls and a few loose bones. There had to be more bones or bodies.

After I had seen the skulls, Dave, with characteristic grace, tried to spare me the large slice of humble pie that was now my rightful lot; I ate it nonetheless, and in public. But how on earth had he known that that apparently unpromising patch of silt would turn out to be so exciting? When I ask him, as I still do whenever our paths cross, he simply shrugs his shoulders and smiles enigmatically. Whatever it was, something made him persist against the full force of my growing fury and the unconcealed scepticism of everyone around him. Moreover, it was not as if he had a record of eccentric behaviour. Frankly, I can’t explain it; nor, I suspect, can Dave.

We now confronted the practical problem that faced us. In theory there were just six and a bit days of excavation to go; but I knew that the discovery of what was probably a complex multiple burial had strengthened our hand enormously. Nobody, not even in those days, could simply have taken a bulldozer to human remains. I took the problem to the powers-that-be, and was eventually able to negotiate a three-week stay of execution that allowed us to excavate the contents of ‘Dave’s pit’ properly. In the event, this required extraordinary care.

The two skulls that were first revealed belonged to a young woman, aged twenty-five to thirty, and a child (hers?), aged eight to twelve, whose bones had been placed higgledy-piggledy in a pile at one end of the pit. At the centre of the pit were the small bones of a younger child, aged three to four. The only complete skeleton was that of a young man, of about the same age as the woman. He had been buried on his side, with his legs drawn up to his stomach, as if crouching.

Like many burials, it was difficult to be certain of its age. We did know that the upper filling of the pit had been cut through by a farm ditch of the much later Cat’s Water Iron Age settlement. That meant that the digging of the pit had to predate the ditch, which we knew was dug sometime around 200 BC. That was some help, but not a lot. The silt that had been thrown into the grave was a whitish pale-brown colour, and we knew that pale soils were often old. My guess was that the grave pit had been dug sometime in the Neolithic period. For all anyone knew, it could have been at the time the house we had found in 1972 was in use, around 3000 BC, or even earlier.

Our guessed date was proved triumphantly correct when Dave’s meticulous excavation revealed how the unfortunate young man had died. Between his eighth and ninth ribs Dave revealed a beautifully made leaf-shaped flint arrowhead with its tip snapped off. Similar damage had been noted in Scandinavia on arrowheads that had been fired into hunted animals, so I reckoned that ours had probably lost its tip when it struck the rib bones. There could be little doubt: the young man had been shot with an arrow.

The discovery of what was then one of the earliest deliberate killings in Britain caused enormous public interest. Breaking with tradition, we decided not to remove the bones one by one and reassemble them for a museum display. Instead, we lifted the entire burial intact in two large blocks of gravel, which we consolidated in a type of liquid plastic (Polyvinyl acetate) and then transported to Peterborough Museum, where it now forms a central part of the prehistoric display. The arrowhead is still in place, undisturbed, exactly where we found it.

That year I returned to Toronto somewhat later than normal, because I was unable to arrange for over 20,000 pieces of pottery and probably half a tonne of animal bone to be transported across the Atlantic. Instead, we made arrangements with Peterborough Museum for space to store and study the finds. I took some key maps and plans with me, and several boxes of flints – tools and chippings – which I would study during the long, cold Canadian winter.

Back in my office at the Royal Ontario Museum, I started work on the complex plans of the Cat’s Water Iron Age village. We had discovered over fifty round houses and huge numbers of pits, wells and other features, including several Iron Age graves. I had been working through the plans for about a week when I found myself looking at the sketches and plans of ‘Dave’s hole’. At the time these looked far more inviting than the complexities of the later settlement, so I decided to work on them first.

My initial concern was simple: did the burial pit have any connection with the rectangular house we’d dug in that hot summer, back in 1972? There was only one way to find out for sure. I went to the shelves and pulled down the large-scale map of Fengate on which I had drawn the parallel droveway ditches of the fields that afternoon when lying on the sitting-room carpet surrounded by aerial photos. Subsequently I had added the rectangular house and anything else important. I suppose you could call it my Master Plan.

It took me a few minutes to measure everything in, but when I had finished I was rather disappointed: nothing seemed to line up. I rolled the Master Plan up and was about to throw it back on the shelf in frustration when I remembered two parallel ditches we had also found in 1972. By rights, these should also be included on the Master Plan. They were different from the ‘main’, Bronze Age parallel droveway ditches, being altogether smaller and shallower, and we found them over a kilometre ‘inland’ from the edge of the fen. Most importantly, they had produced no finds other than a fragment of a rare Neolithic polished axe made from Langdale stone.

I suppose I should have remembered to examine the alignment of these smaller ditches when I was proof-reading the First Fengate Report, but my jet-lagged brain failed me. This time I determined to do better, and rolled the Master Plan out on my drawing board for a second time. It took me a few minutes to plot the two shallow ditches accurately, but when I had finished it was quite apparent that their alignment was significantly different from that of the main Bronze Age system. I was pleased that this shift in orientation showed up so well, but for some reason I wasn’t exactly surprised.

Then something clicked. The two shallow ditches were pointing directly at both the Neolithic house and the multiple burial in ‘Dave’s hole’. It was so obvious, I could hardly believe it. We now had three quite separate sites on approximately the same general alignment, and this alignment was significantly different from that of the Bronze Age fields. My theory – that the pre-Bronze Age landscape was set out on a significantly different alignment – was beginning to gain support. But could I be certain that the two shallow ditches were in fact Neolithic?

Happily for me, the site notes and archive for 1972 were still in Toronto. I went down into the museum basement, and when I had got all the papers and finds bags before me I began to sort through them. In 1972 we had opened several trenches, and the one in question was at Vicarage Farm. It sounds a peaceful rural idyll, but in reality it lay next to a Gas Board storage depot and the largest diesel-engine factory in Europe. Peaceful it was not.

The air photos of Vicarage Farm showed cropmarks of several large pits which had been cut into an unusual outcrop of limestone. After removing the topsoil we found, as is usually the case, that the aerial photos only revealed a small proportion of the features that were actually present below the ground. When we dug them we found that the pits were wells, and around them were all sorts of other features belonging to a small Iron Age village of about 500 to 100 BC. Like most such settlements, the features at Vicarage Farm yielded large quantities of pottery, bone and other debris.

Now, the two shallow ditches ran across part of the Iron Age settlement, yet they did not produce so much as a scrap of pottery. I’m certain that this could not possibly have been the case if they had been open when the Iron Age settlement was occupied. There would simply have been too much debris lying around the place, and some of it was bound to have been kicked into an open ditch by someone. By the same token, the ditches were unlikely to have been later than the settlement, otherwise debris would have found its way into them as residual finds lying around in the topsoil. Even the modern drainage ditches around the edges of the factory had residual Iron Age pottery in them. It was everywhere, and hard to avoid.