Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain
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A lively and authoritative investigation into the lives of our ancestors, based on the revolution in the field of Bronze Age archaeology which has been taking place in Norfolk and the Fenlands over the last twenty years, and in which the author has played a central role.One of the most haunting and enigmatic archaeological discoveries of recent times was the uncovering in 1998 at low tide of the so-called Seahenge off the north coast of Norfolk. This circle of wooden planks set vertically in the sand, with a large inverted tree-trunk in the middle, likened to a ghostly ‘hand reaching up from the underworld’, has now been dated back to around 2020 BC. The timbers are currently (and controversially) in the author’s safekeeping at Flag Fen.Francis Pryor and his wife (an expert in ancient wood-working and analysis) have been at the centre of Bronze Age fieldwork for nearly 30 years, piecing together the way of life of Bronze Age people, their settlement of the landscape, their religion and rituals. The famous wetland sites of the East Anglian Fens have preserved ten times the information of their dryland counterparts like Stonehenge and Avebury, in the form of pollen, leaves, wood, hair, skin and fibre found ‘pickled’ in mud and peat.Seahenge demonstrates how much Western civilisation owes to the prehistoric societies that existed in Europe in the last four millennia BC.
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Francis Pryor. Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain
SEAHENGE
FRANCIS PRYOR
Copyright
Contents
PLATES
MAPS AND DIAGRAMS
DATES AND PERIODS
PREFACE The Quest
PROLOGUE John Lorimer’s Discovery
CHAPTER ONE Setting the Scene
CHAPTER TWO The Hunt is On
CHAPTER THREE A Trans-Atlantic Commuter
CHAPTER FOUR Direction and Disorientation
CHAPTER FIVE Gardens of Creation
PLATES SECTION 1
CHAPTER SIX Ritual Landscapes
CHAPTER SEVEN Etton and the Origins of Ancestral Authority
CHAPTER EIGHT Rites of Passage in a Private World
CHAPTER NINE The Living Dead: Ancestral Spirits in the Landscape
PLATES SECTION 2
CHAPTER TEN The Wetland Revolution
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Daily Round
CHAPTER TWELVE Between the Tides
PLATES SECTION 3
CHAPTER THIRTEEN The World Turned Upside Down
CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Passage of Arms
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Retrospect and Prospect
FURTHER READING
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
If you enjoyed Seahenge, check out these other great Francis Pryor titles
About the Publisher
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New Discoveries in Prehistoric Britain
of my father-in-law,
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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.
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