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CHAPTER ONE Setting the Scene

ARCHAEOLOGY IS ABOUT human life in the past, but in my experience it isn’t as simple as that. Very often it’s about the life one is living in the present, too. I’ve no idea how it happens – and I know from talking to friends and colleagues that others have experienced this as well – but in some strange way archaeological discoveries happen that are appropriate to the way one is thinking at a given time. When, for example, I started my professional life in 1971, I excavated a well-known site at Fengate, on the eastern side of Peterborough. Here I began to discover details of the way prehistoric people organised their daily lives. This suited me fine, as I was then concerned with practical things too, such as how to organise a large excavation, how to assemble coherent published reports, and so on.

About ten years later, I became more interested in the way people thought, and how they ordered their religious and social lives. And what happened? I found myself working in a prehistoric landscape strewn with religious sites, near a small village in Cambridgeshire called Maxey. This more than whetted my appetite for ideology and the afterlife. I was treated to both in ample measure when I then excavated a large Neolithic ceremonial centre at another small village called Etton, near Maxey. But still I wanted more. And it was then, in 1982, that I had the good fortune to discover the extraordinary Bronze Age religious site at Flag Fen, near Peterborough.

Flag Fen is a wonderfully rich and complex site, and understanding it – or rather, trying to understand it – has stretched my imagination to the limits, and has been an invigorating and rigorous (although sometimes very frustrating) challenge. It was while I was deeply immersed in Flag Fen in 1998 that John Lorimer reported his remarkable discovery on Holme beach. And then things began to fall into place, and I realised I had to step back from Flag Fen. I was forced to appreciate that prehistory is best understood as an unfolding, continuing story. It is not about individual sites, however fascinating they might be, but is a saga of human beings, and the different ways they chose to cope with their own particular challenges.

The process of archaeological discovery has been deeply enmeshed with my professional life, and I don’t see how the two can be disentangled. So I won’t attempt the impossible, but will tell the tale as it unfolded around me, blow by blow. My own life and my research life will be part of the same story. But first I must turn the clock back to the final years of my childhood, when the wonders of archaeology were first revealed to me. It was an afternoon that will live with me forever. The time was autumn, the year 1959, and the place Eton College.

There was a warm, dusty smell to the wood-panelled room. A smell I have grown to love: of old books and maps, field notes, brown paper bags, Indian ink, pottery and flint tools. It’s a musty, peaceful sort of smell. A smell that says the world is in proportion. Perhaps it is the atmosphere of antiquity – I don’t know. But whatever it was, it pervaded the Eton College Myers Museum of Egyptology through and through.

George Tait was a senior master, and in the late fifties he was also Curator of the Myers Museum, which was housed in a purpose-built wing at the rear of School Hall. One day I found him working on several heaps of papers, which lay across the big central table and cascaded down to the floor by way of three chairs, an old orange crate and something that had once resembled a foot-stool. He could see I was at a loose end. My head was bandaged from a football injury I had received the day before, and the prospect of a tedious afternoon stretched before me.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you something to sit on.’ He cleared away the papers from one of the chairs, then said, ‘I’ve got something over here that may interest you.’ After a moment or two, he reappeared holding two huge volumes, which he placed on top of the papers already on the table in front of me. I was amazed. The two enormous tomes were for me?

George Tait returned to his side of the table and lit his formidable pipe. It was a vast smoking machine with a long, straight stalk and a furnace-like bowl, doubtless hewn from timbers drawn from a mummy’s tomb. Into this he stuffed leaves picked from plants grown in his own garden. The dense clouds of smoke smelled just like an autumn bonfire, and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the distinctive aroma of tobacco. Soon my eyes were running freely. But George puffed on regardless, poring over his papers. He was miles away.

I started to read. I had been given Howard Carter’s account of the discovery and excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. It was an inspired choice, and I soon found myself completely gripped by the story of the discovery of the boy king’s mummified body and the fabulous treasures which surrounded him. As I read, I was there, amidst the sands of the Nile and the eerie, cool, dry darkness of the tomb.

After that day I made many visits to the Myers Museum and its larger-than-life curator. But although George Tait had a huge, commanding and at times stern presence, he was a gentle teacher, and was particularly good at helping his pupils grasp difficult concepts. Thanks to him, I grasped the basic principles of the subject that would soon form the centre of my life.

Tait’s archaeology was about people and the way they had lived. It was not about treasures and valuable finds, unless they could shed light on the way ancient communities behaved. Above all else, he explained that archaeology is a methodical discipline: that although Howard Carter made all those extraordinary discoveries in the tomb, he also spent days and days preparing a minute catalogue of his discoveries. He pointed out that Carter was at pains to draw meticulous plans of where everything was found. It took me some time to realise why such care was so crucially important. With hindsight, Tait’s improvised explanation worked well.

‘Just suppose,’ he said, ‘that you’re an archaeologist working two thousand years from now. You discover a room, and in it are two armchairs and a mysterious polished wooden box with a thick glass sheet on one side of it. You have absolutely no idea what this box was used for. Maybe it was worshipped? Maybe it was used to cook with? Who knows? So you decide to seek the help of other archaeologists. Now what do you do?’

‘I send them a list of what I’ve found,’ I suggested, ‘and I describe the chairs and the shiny wooden box as closely as I can.’ It was feeble, but I couldn’t think of a more sensible answer.

‘I doubt if they’d be any the wiser. Would you be?’

I had to admit I wouldn’t.

‘But if you included a sketched plan of the way the armchairs were arranged, how they faced the glassy side of the polished wooden box, then they might work out that the box was a television set.’

He had taught me an important archaeological lesson. Things only make sense in terms of the way they relate to other things. Later I was to learn that archaeologists refer to these inter-relationships as context. To an archaeologist nothing matters so much as context. Context is all. Without context, a find is just a find, a dead object; but with context it comes alive.

My ‘gap’ year out of school in 1963, on what was then known as the Digging Circuit, taught me a great deal about life. Some of the Circuit diggers were perfectly happy to stay as they were. They moved from one dig to another, living in winter squats, tents in summer, or ramshackle caravans. One or two had drink or drug problems, and I soon realised that a high proportion of them were using the Circuit as a retreat from the rat-race. Some of these people were quite sad, but they nearly all shared a belief in what they were doing. I suppose, in the final analysis, that vocation had taken the place of self-esteem, which for many of them had reached a low ebb.

Today, things have changed for the better. For a start, most diggers have a professional qualification, or are in the process of earning one. All are vastly better paid than they were in the early sixties. Site conditions have improved enormously, too: there are self-contained mobile toilets, safety clothing and warm site accommodation. Better pay also means that tents are only used in summer, and then by choice, not of necessity. But despite all these improvements, the life of a professional field archaeologist is still hard. Job security is poor, and most people spend large parts of their lives moving from dig to dig all over the country, and abroad. And then there’s the British climate.

As a result of my afternoons with George Tait at the Myers Museum, I had decided to study archaeology at Cambridge. If you can’t think about broad issues at university, then you’ll never think about them. In our lectures, my fellow students and I learned what George Tait had drummed into me: that archaeology is the study of the past, based on material evidence – pottery, flints and scientific information – rather than on written documents alone (the province of history). We also learned that archaeology is an effective way of studying broad changes through time – topics like, for example, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or the origins of farming. It’s less good at examining historical events, such as the Norman Conquest – a topic like that is best handled by historians, or by historians and archaeologists working closely together.

In my first year at Cambridge, the Professor of Archaeology was a great man: Grahame, later Sir Grahame, Clark. Grahame was a pioneer of what is today called environmental archaeology. As we shall see, it will play a major role in our quest. With his friend the botanist Sir Harry Godwin, Grahame was able to paint an extraordinarily vivid picture of life just after the last great Ice Age, about seven thousand years ago. He relied to a great extent on Sir Harry’s work on the pollen grains and seeds preserved within the peats found at various sites in southern Britain. This botanical research, together with work on preserved bones, insects and shells, provided the evidence they needed to reconstruct what the ancient countryside would have looked like. It showed that nine thousand years ago the East Anglian countryside consisted of stands of birch trees and pools of open water, and that the fauna included fish, herons and other birds, eels and beavers. On the drier land were large oak forests in which deer, wild boar and bear roamed freely.

I would never pretend to be a scientist, or even a scientific archaeologist, but I can understand what scientists are saying, and I know enough to ask them questions in their own language. It was not difficult for me to decide, in my first year at university, that this broadly environmental approach would be my own style of work. All my subsequent research has been carried out in a closely-knit team; it’s the only way to do good environmental archaeology. Nowadays my role would be described as ‘Team Leader’. My job is to make sense of the team’s results when we come to write the final report; it is up to me to achieve compromise when there are strong differences between individuals, and to see that the team runs smoothly and happily. It’s a great job, and I love doing it. In my opinion it’s far and away the most successful and satisfying sort of archaeology.

Grahame Clark retired from teaching while I was a student, and he was succeeded by Professor Glyn Daniel. They were as unlike as any two archaeologists could possibly be. It used to be fashionable in certain circles to patronise Glyn Daniel. He was an archaeologist, but he was also a supremely successful populariser of the subject. No other archaeologist has ever been voted ‘TV Personality of the Year’, an accolade he earned by chairing the hugely successful BBC quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? At his best, Glyn was a superb lecturer, and he managed to inspire me with a love of his own favourite period, the Neolithic (or New Stone Age), which I have never lost.

Everything that ever mattered seems to have originated in the Neolithic Age. All of life and death is there. I know Neolithic folk have been dead for nearly five thousand years, but as far as I’m concerned they could have died yesterday. My passion for the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (which in social and cultural terms is much the same thing) is directly due to Glyn’s inspiration.

Glyn taught a course on the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages at Cambridge. The dates of the various periods tend to wander somewhat, as research progresses, but the Neolithic comes first, and in Britain lasted from about 5000 to 2700 BC. It was followed by the Bronze Age (roughly 2700 to 700 BC). The Iron Age was the final prehistoric period, which extended from the close of the Bronze Age to the Roman Conquest of Britain in AD 43. Glyn’s course was known to the university authorities as NBI. Perhaps predictably to the students, it was of ‘No Bloody Interest’. I chose not to study the other option of Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon, or IRA – which for some reason never seemed to acquire a student name.

I remember being puzzled by archaeologists’ periods. Were Neolithic people aware when they woke up on the first morning of 2700 BC that they were entering the Bronze Age? Of course not. The Ages were invented by some inspired Danish archaeologists, working on museum collections in the last century. They came up with the Three-Age System (Stone followed by Bronze and then Iron) in the first instance simply as a way of ordering their collections. Only later did it gradually acquire a wider significance.

At university we were taught that the Three-Age System would soon be a thing of the past, to be replaced by the flood of radiocarbon dates that were then just beginning to arrive. They have indeed had a profound effect on our understanding of the past, but I can see no consistent evidence that the old Three-Age labels are actually being replaced. I think they’ll be with us for a long time yet.

At Cambridge, British archaeology was taught in a rather rigid framework, or straitjacket, of ‘cultures’. In theory, ‘cultures’ were meant to be synonymous with actual communities of people – tribes or confederations of tribes. But in reality ‘cultures’ were no more and no less than types of pottery. So we were taught about the Beaker Culture or the Grooved Ware Culture, and I have to say I found it extremely difficult to imagine the actual people lurking behind these arcane concepts.

The various ‘cultures’ were accompanied by long lists of sites, where the particular types of pottery which were believed to be characteristic of them were found. The lists were, in turn, accompanied by maps, covered with dots and arrows which purported to show how these people/pots moved around Europe. It was all extremely mystifying, and I remember wondering why on earth these people wanted to move around all the time. It seemed, and indeed it still seems, an odd way to behave.

There was a third lecturer at Cambridge who was to have a very profound influence on my subsequent career, partly because, like me, he is a practical, down-to-earth person. He comes from Canada, where I spent much time during my formative years as a field archaeologist. John Coles is remarkable because he has turned his hand to numerous types and styles of archaeology. His doctoral research was on Scottish Bronze Age metalwork, but he is also, or has been, an authority on experimental archaeology, Scandinavian Bronze Age rock carvings, the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age) and wetland archaeology, for which he is perhaps best known.

In the mid and later sixties John was doing far more than his fair share of lectures in the Archaeology Department, and he supervised me in a variety of topics. I don’t think I was a very good pupil towards the end of my time at university, because I couldn’t see that there was a future for me in the subject. Archaeological jobs were extremely scarce, and were invariably snapped up by people with good first-class degrees. I knew I stood little chance against that sort of competition. But John persisted, and somehow he managed to cram sufficient knowledge into my skull to earn me a decent enough honours degree.

I don’t want to be unfair to other lecturers in the department, but John seemed unusual in that his head was not stuck in the clouds for most of the time. He was then working in the peatland of the Somerset Levels, and his lecture slides were not just of disembodied artefacts and distribution maps. Instead, he showed us photographs of people with muddy hands, digging trackways in wet peat, or felling trees with flint axes, or wrestling with hazel wattles while reconstructing prehistoric hurdles. Frankly, his lectures were almost the only thing that kept my flickering flame of interest in the subject alive.

Archaeology in the mid-sixties was superficially calm. Old ideas, such as the pottery-based ‘cultures’, still just managed to hold on, but a tide of new thinking and new scientific techniques was about to rip through the old order. The subject would never be the same again. As has been mentioned, one of the most profound instruments of change was radiocarbon dating. Although I’m now older and wiser, I still find it almost magical that one can take a piece of bone or charcoal, pop it into a machine for a few days and then be told how old it is – to within, say, fifty years. And if you’re lucky enough to have a decent-sized sample (a teacupful of charcoal, say) it will only cost about £200.

Before Willard F. Libby, a chemist at Chicago University, invented radiocarbon dating in 1949, archaeologists researching in remote places (such as Britain) had to work almost blind. If they wanted to date something – let us say a Neolithic stone-built tomb – they had to find similar tombs elsewhere across Europe, until eventually they reached the well-dated world of the eastern Mediterranean. In areas such as the Aegean it was believed that the dates were more secure, because actual written records – such as the famous Linear B script of Crete and Greece – extended back as far as 1400 BC. These dates may well have been more secure, but the problem didn’t lie there. It lay in the chain of false – or perhaps more truly forced – reasoning that linked the eastern Mediterranean to more peripheral areas. Radiocarbon was to expose this ruthlessly.