Читать книгу Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain - Francis Pryor - Страница 13

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.

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.