Farmers
in Prehistoric Britain by Francis Pryor
Tempus Publishing Limited, Stroud
1998. 159 pp, 67 text illustrations, 21 plates. Hb. ISBN 07524 1403
8. (£18.99).
Seahenge by Francis Pryor
HarperCollins Publishers, London 2001. xxi + 337 pp, 28 text illustrations,
49 plates. Pb. ISBN 0 00 710191 0. (£8.99)
Britain B.C. by Francis Pryor
Tempus 2000. 256 pages, 123 b/w plates, 29
colour plates. ISBN 07524 1498 4 (£19.99)
All three volumes are written
for the general reader, and all three have the immediacy and enthusiasm
of a face-to-face conversation, a characteristic which makes them thoroughly
engaging. The author’s ‘I’ is a welcome one rather
than an intrusive one. It is sometimes difficult to judge whether a
statement is an ‘I believe’ or an ‘I (and/or my colleagues)
have shown’, but this is a price worth paying for a prehistory
peopled with living human beings. A short way into Britain B.C.
the reader is told that ‘The Prehistoric Society, incidentally,
is the national society for the study of all pre-Roman archaeology.
Its Proceedings is an academic journal of record, and is pretty
technical’. Francis Pryor has a surpassing skill in distilling
the ‘pretty technical’ into the stuff of life.
For all these shared characteristics, the books show
a progression. Farmers in Prehistoric Britain and Seahenge
are both firmly rooted in the author’s own experience, and hence
tend to convey the impression that the lower Nene and the lower Welland
were together the epicentre of prehistoric Britain, although Seahenge
makes excursions from this home territory into other monument complexes
in Britain and Brittany, as well as to the Norfolk coast. Britain
B.C. has a wider geographical range - it could, indeed, have been
called Britain and Ireland B.C. - and a longer perspective,
both inherited from the television series on which it is based.
Farmers in Prehistoric Britain is enriched
by Francis Pryor’s other life as a farmer and his experience of
that life’s priorities and preoccupations, as well as of its numberless
low-tech skills, many of which must go back into prehistory. It brings
home wonderfully well that the superficially dramatic transformation
in the earlier second millennium BC from landscapes dominated by earthwork
monuments to landscapes dominated by hedged, fenced, banked and ditched
fields may have entailed far less fundamental change than the plan view
(archaeologists tend to see society in two dimensions) suggests. He
emphasises the precondition of communal will, the contact between people
from different lineages coming together to establish the new boundaries
and to maintain and modify them, with all the communications and transactions
that these periodic gatherings would have entailed. The social divide
between the communal monuments of the Neolithic and early Bronze Age
and the communal field systems of the full Bronze Age narrows in the
space of a few paragraphs. It narrows further with the (dendro)chronology
of Flag Fen, a ceremonial centre visited for centuries by people from
far beyond its immediate neighbourhood, during the second and early
first millennium, when field systems were in place and earthwork enclosures,
the use of which was in many ways comparable, had ceased to be built.
Seahenge breaks down another dichotomy between
monuments and the rest, by bringing into focus the cosmological significance
of trees and of the natural world in general. The erection of a carefully
trimmed, up-ended, fallen oak at the centre of a small timber circle
built in 2049–2050 BC prompts in the reader an openness of mind
about the Victorians’ teutonophile enthusiasm for forest myths
and about the mindset of Fraser’s Golden Bough. Closer
to earth, it prompts re-evaluation of the significance of all those
tree holes beneath and around dry-land monuments. Coincidence or not?
How many of those trees had names and histories? But be warned, ‘Seahenge’
itself, with its haunting, mysterious qualities and all the intense
emotions and botched public relations which its discovery generated,
is in the foreground for only fifty-odd pages out of over three hundred.
In Britain B.C. social structure and beliefs,
both very much present in the two earlier books, surge to the top of
the cauldron. The durée is distinctly longue:
a distinctive national character and an essentially egalitarian attitude
to social relations are presented as persisting from the Neolithic to
the Roman conquest and into the present. One warms to such convictions,
whether or not one shares them. An almost equally long life (at least
into the Roman period) is argued for a nexus of beliefs and practices
centred on the seasonal cycle of growth, decay and regeneration; the
dichotomy between life/the living world/light and death/the ancestors/dark;
and offerings placed in the earth and in water. In this case, the argument
and the evidence amassed to support it are impressive. Not the whole
canvas (what can be?), but some hefty threads of it.
This latest book has many other strengths. The often
forbidding record of the Palaeolithic is distilled with clarity and
a sense of the big issues. The very fact that this period is not the
author’s specialism makes it easier for him to render it accessible
to those who know even less about it. The Mesolithic comes very much
alive. The only point on which I disagree with the author is his assertion
that the archaeology of the period 4500 to 4000 BC remains obstinately
close to invisible. It is surely coming out of the mist, most dramatically
in the shape of the superimposed Mesolithic and Neolithic levels in
the late fifth/early fourth millennium part of the sequence in the Fir
Tree Field shaft in Cranborne Chase, but also in a growing tally of
contemporary radiocarbon dates from less spectacular contexts.
The book’s final flourish emphasises the cruelty
of history. The late Iron Age in Britain was a time of vigorous change
and innovation. The increasing complexity and sophistication of insular
society were taking it somewhere new. But we will never know where.
It all lasted less than two centuries, cut short by the Roman conquest.
This is where the Irish record, interwoven into the whole book, is used
to particular effect. The grandeur, scale, and symbolic depth of the
Navan complex, at once breaking new ground and rooted in the beliefs
and practices of the previous four thousand years, illustrate one of
the directions which the late Iron Age society of the larger island
might have taken.
Britain B.C. is a ripping yarn, personal
without being self-indulgent, thoroughly enjoyable, and soundly informative.
It is a five-trowel book - and the previous two were four-trowel books.
Frances Healy
School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University
Review Submitted: May 2004
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
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