Q&A with archaeologist Francis Pryor

I am today posting a Q&A with Dr Francis Pryor, an archaeologist, author and broadcaster with specialist knowledge of the Fens.

Dr Pryor read archaeology and anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge where eventually he took his PhD. After Cambridge he emigrated to Toronto where he joined the staff of the Royal Ontario Museum. 

Using the Museum as a base, he began a series of major excavations (1971-78) in England, at Fengate, on the outskirts of Peterborough. Here he revealed an extensive Bronze Age field system, plus Neolithic and Iron Age settlements. 

After Fengate he turned his attention north of Peterborough, to the Welland Valley, where he excavated two large sites, at Maxey (1979-81) and Etton (1982-87). Etton was a superbly preserved earlier Neolithic (3500 BC) causewayed enclosure, an early type of ceremonial centre. 

In 1982 Dr Pryor also began survey work in the nearby Fens and soon discovered the timbers of a Late Bronze Age (1300-900 BC) timber causeway and religious complex at Flag Fen, just east of Peterborough. This remarkable site was opened to the public in 1987. Today it has become one of the best-known Bronze Age sites in Europe and a principal visitor attraction in the region. Dr Pryor was awarded an MBE ‘for services to tourism’ in 1999. 

Fengate was published in four volumes in the 1970s and ‘80s and major English Heritage monographs on Maxey, Etton and Flag Fen appeared in 1986, 1998 and 2001. 

Dr Pryor’s popular account of this remarkable site, Flag Fen: life and death of a prehistoric landscape, was revised for a second edition in 2005. His book on prehistoric farming, Farmers in Prehistoric Britain is also in its second edition (2006). 

Since 1998 Dr Pryor has devoted himself to writing popular books on archaeology, including Seahenge, an account of the discovery of a Bronze Age timber circle on the Norfolk coast; Britain BC, the story of British prehistory before the Romans and Britain AD, a book about new finds from Dark Age Britain. The third of this series, Britain in the Middle Ages, is on the archaeology of the medieval period and was published in 2006. 

Dr Pryor’s largest book, The Making of the British Landscape, was published in June 2010 and is now in paperback. His fourth and final book in the Britain series, The Birth of Modern Britain, was published by HarperCollins, in 2011. 

More recent books have included Home: A Time-Traveller’s Tales from Britain’s Prehistory, Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape and Paths to the Past: Encounters with Britain’s Hidden Landscapes. These have been followed by The Fens: Discovering Engand’s Ancient Depths. 

Dr Pryor was President of the Council for British Archaeology from 1998-2005 and has written and presented series for Channel 4 on Britain BC, Britain AD and The Real Dad’s Army, a review of archaeological remains surviving from 1940. He is also a regular contributor to, and member of, that channel’s long-running series, Time Team and has presented several half-hour programmes on archaeology for Radio 4. 

Although a freelance author and broadcaster, Dr Pryor retains close links with academia and is currently visiting Professor in Archaeology at the University of Leicester. 

The interview begins …

Q: In the early 1980s you discovered and excavated Flag Fen, a Bronze Age site east of Peterborough that had been developed about 3,500 years ago and which consisted of more than 60,000 timbers arranged in five very long rows. Subsequently, in 2004, Mark Knight and colleagues at Cambridge University excavated Must Farm, near Whittlesey. That site contained a sufficiently high number of finds in good condition that it was dubbed “the Pompeii of the Fens”. What have these two sites taught us about both the Fens and Bronze age Britain that we did not know before? How would you characterise the significance of these finds? 

A: The most important lesson we have learned from these two sites is that you will never understand them unless you take a broader view. Preservation in the Fens is so good that you can study and sample entire landscapes – even three or four thousand years ago. 

When you examine Flag Fen and Must Farm you can appreciate that they were both single components in a highly complex and constantly evolving wetland/dryland environment. Yes, you can discover how they made porridge and how they served and ate it, but you can also reveal the fields and farms where they grew the crops and raised the sheep and cattle. 

One site of the landscape surrounding Flag Fen, at Fengate (about half a mile to the west), has revealed prunings from the earliest hedges known anywhere in the world (around 2000 BC). To my mind, it’s finds like that which really bring the past to life.

Q: Thinking more broadly, what in your view is most distinctive about the Fens? In what ways is it/was it special and why?

 

A: Speaking as someone who has lived in the Fens for over forty years it’s the openness of the environment. The sky is part of your world. Streams, rivers and drainage dykes tend to unite rather than divide the landscape, but subtle contrasts can have big effects. 

 

For example, the shift from the peaty soils of the southern Fens to the silty soils of Lincolnshire brings changes that are profound, ranging from the types of crops grown, the size and shape of fields and the species of trees along verges and in woodlands.

 

Q: What would you say have been the three most significant events and dates for the Fens and its inhabitants, and why?

 

A: As an archaeologist I tend to deal with processes rather than with one-off ‘events’. So my first two events are gradual changes.

 

The first is the formation of the Fens in the millennia associated with the spread of the southern North Sea basin, around 6000 BC. The second is the introduction of farming from about 4000 BC and its gradual adoption.

 

The final one is very much an historical ‘event’: it’s the introduction of the first curved-vane centrifugal pumps, which were used in the drainage of Whittlesey Mere in 1851. This was a major technological development which allowed the widespread drainage of the lowest-lying Fens. I often wish this particular change had never happened – quite so fast.

 

Q: Who would you say have been the three (or four) people who have had the most impact on the Fens and/or the wider world, and why?

A: I hesitate to answer this question because living in a wetland, Fenland communities have to work together. Life has always been more about groups than individuals. And of course in prehistory, when some of the most important developments in Fenland communities took place, individual names haven’t survived.

 

Various bishops of Lincoln, Peterborough and Ely and their predecessors, the priors and abbots of monastic foundations played an important role in establishing the wealth of the medieval Fens.

 

In more recent times we remember the names of key drainage engineers such as Cornelius Vermuyden, John Rennie and Thomas Telford, but Fenland towns also gave the nation some important social reformers such as Thomas Clarkson of the anti-slavery movement and Octavia Hill one of the founders of The National Trust, in 1895. 

Pros and cons of drainage

Q: Today I think most people who write about the Fens deprecate the fact that the area was drained. But things are not always black and white: I wonder what in your view are the pros and cons of the Fens having been drained?

 

A: You are so right: in history, as in archaeology, nothing is ever black or white. The pros are that it made an already prosperous region even more prosperous, and from quite early on – starting in Saxon and early medieval times.

 

It was the large-scale drainage of peat and low-lying Fens from the 17^th century that started to cause problems, which were exacerbated by the heavily-pumped drainage schemes of the mid-19^th century. Some of these later schemes cannot be sustained in the long run, especially given sea level rise and climate change (processes that are not necessarily linked).

 

Q: Do we have any real sense of how the Fens looked before they were drained? Is there a particular picture or illustration that you would point me to/share with me?

 

A: I think it’s a mistake to think about the pre-drainage Fens as a single entity. The reality was hugely variable, ranging from sand banks to tidal mudflats, lakes, meres, rivers and streams – not forgetting, of course, temporary and permanent ‘islands’ within the wetlands.

 

I particularly like this view of alder woodland at the Nene Washes Nature Reserve, near Whittlesey, Cambs. (from my book The Fens, p. 388).

Distinctive Fen character?

Q: Much has been made over the years of the assertion that the people of the Fens had and have a distinctive character, best exemplified perhaps by the way people refer to the so-called Fen Tigers, who resisted the draining of the Fens. Can one really talk of a distinctive Fen character? Is it possible that the Fens and the people who inhabit/have inhabited the area have been a little over romanticised?

 

A: Having lived and worked in the Fens for many decades I can safely say that Fen people do have a distinctive character – and I’d be over-joyed if a little of it had rubbed off on me.

 

But I also agree with you, it has been over romanticised. Far from being rather in-your-face defiant and Tigerish, my experience of Fen people has been very different. I have never found Fen people pushy or ‘in-your-face’; I would characterise the Fen character as quite restrained and subtle.

 

Fen folk have a very distinctive and self-deprecatory sense of humour which is often tinged with irony. A great deal can be expressed in a slightly frowning smile…

 

Q: I believe you farm 40 acres of Fenland pasture in Lincolnshire, mainly I think breeding sheep. In a 2011 interview with the Financial Times, you said that doing so makes you feel connected to the past. In today’s increasingly urbanised world I guess the number of people who can feel connected to the past in that way is falling year by year. Should that worry us? What are they missing out on, particularly in terms of the specific environment of the Fens?

 

A: I do worry about the increasing urbanism of British culture which will inevitably have a deleterious effect on rural people and communities everywhere – not just in the Fens.

 

Increasingly popular, urban-originating concepts, such as re-wilding and Veganism, completely ignore the fact that for thousands of years we raised livestock and tilled fields in ways that, if anything, enhanced the environment. I think they’ve picked the wrong targets because they’re easier to hit and have big appeal to an urban audience. Rather than farmer-bashing they should be hitting-out at coal, oil, cars, factories and industrialisation.

 

They should be more concerned about what mankind has done over the past three or four centuries, rather than millennia.

Climate change

Q: What do you think the implications of climate change are for the Fens, both in the short and long term? I note that in your book, The Fens, Discovering England’s Ancient Depths you added an epilogue that you called “Farewell to Boston.” In this, you said you had concluded that it is inevitable the Fens will flood again. As you put it, “it’s a process that cannot be delayed forever”. You went on to suggest that Boston, Spalding and Wisbech, as well as Fengate and much of eastern Peterborough, were particularly vulnerable. 

What are the implications of this threat for those who live in the Fens, especially those in the lowest lying areas? Do you anticipate your farmland going underwater at some point in the future, or is the land sufficiently high that that is unlikely?

 

A: Even if by some miracle we do manage to control and reduce climate change, I think it will be inevitable that areas of the Fens will flood. The trick will be to manage it. That way we could ultimately make it work for us, by attracting visitors to the new nature reserves and water parks.

 

What we don’t want is more Austerity where government removes money from environmental schemes and flood control measures. Control means control and it has to be paid for. The Benedictine monks of Fenland abbeys understood that. But modern politicians have had trouble grasping it.

 

It may not be till later this century, but yes, if we cannot control climate change my own small farm will indeed flood. My office, where I am writing this, is around two metres above sea level.

Q: There are a number of projects today focused on restoring and re-creating the Fens. Which projects do you think hold out greatest hope? Is it possible that such schemes have come too late to have a meaningful impact?

 

A: I think it’s too easy to state that the restoration projects came too late, after all, Woodwalton Fen was one of the earliest nature reserves of all. The same goes for Wicken Fen. Both of these contributed to The Great Fen Project, which is on a scale large enough to play an important role when the process of widespread Fen re-wetting starts in earnest in the next two decades.

 

There are many new schemes in the silt Fens of Lincolnshire, which need to be brought together into a more coherent project comparable with The Great Fen.

 

I would also like to see more conservation in the North and Middle Levels, but taken together, no, I think the Fens have done quite well and the existing schemes, suitably enlarged if possible, will have a meaningful impact. 

New book 

Q: As I understand it, you will shortly be publishing a new book called Scenes from Prehistoric Life. Can you say something about that book and why you decided to write it?

 

A: I have long thought that archaeology has a slightly dubious popular image: a cross between treasure-hunting and rather arid science. Too often archaeologists appear on radio and TV talking in jargon and their academic books are hopelessly impenetrable.

 

In several of my more recent books I have tried to bring the past to life by seeing what modern techniques can reveal about day-to-day existence a very long time ago. I tried to do this in the prehistoric chapters of The Fens – which was very favourably received. I used shorter sketches in Paths To The Past and in HOME I followed the theme of domestic life in British prehistory. Both went down well.

 

In Scenes from Prehistoric Life in Britain I am revisiting the short sketch format of Paths to the Past, but I am giving myself greater length and hopefully depth in order to try and penetrate a bit deeper.

 

So far, my wife and the editors at Head of Zeus (my London publishers) seem to like it. So fingers crossed!