my newly-made resolution to examine the ‘before’ landscape of the Bronze Age fields I laid the plans of the Neolithic house on the kitchen table and stared at them long and hard. But I had no moment of revelation, no blinding flash of insight. They looked much as I remembered them. I knew that somewhere on those plans was something trying to catch my attention, some key that would unlock the secrets that lay within, but I couldn’t spot it.
FIG 4 Ground plan of the Fengate Neolithic ‘house’, or mortuary structure
Most years we dug from April to October. Towards the end of the season I would carefully pack up our finds and send them to Canada by sea. It normally took them about six weeks to arrive, and then I’d work my way through them during the Canadian winter. It felt strange to be in Toronto, handling pieces of pottery and flint tools that often came in dried muddy bags, each of which reminded me of a particular wet day on the other side of the Atlantic. But this pattern of work was effective, and allowed me to stay on top of my report-writing as the project progressed. It also meant that I was able to reflect on the previous year’s results before the next season began, and to work out the questions we had to address the following year.
A few days after the conference we returned to Canada for the winter. By now I was getting better at coping with jet-lag, but my brain was never at its most active in the three or four days immediately after the flight. So you can imagine my feelings when I discovered, on returning to my office in Toronto, a pile of proofs sitting on my desk, accompanied by a note from the Museum Academic Editor to the effect that they had to be read through and corrected by the end of the week – which was in three days’ time.
The proofs consisted of the unbound pages of my first report on the Fengate project, which was to be published on 28 February 1974. Proof-reading requires a great deal of concentration. Every letter of every word has to be checked and rechecked. I began the task, and soon found my jet-lagged concentration was lapsing. It was hopeless, but I knew that if I missed the deadline, the printer would start another job, and the publication of the report would be delayed for months. So I had to deal with those proofs somehow. Rather than do nothing, I decided to check the artwork first, because I find illustrations sometimes require less close attention. As I was checking through the line drawings I came to the main plan of the Neolithic house. I checked the two scales – one metric and one imperial – and was about to turn the page when I spotted an important omission. For some reason – it’s quite easily done – I had left out the arrow indicating north.
Normally the north arrow points upwards, but in this case I had jiggled the drawing slightly, so that the rectangular building sat square on the page. I knew I wasn’t meant to alter the picture proofs themselves, so I took the original artwork across to my drawing board. I suppose I ought to have moved the artwork that was already there, a plan of the paired Bronze Age droveway ditches, but I couldn’t be bothered, and simply taped the plan of the house on top of it and added the north arrow. When I had finished, I stood back to admire my handiwork and let the ink dry. And then something odd caught my eye.
One would normally expect a square or rectangular building to follow the alignment of the landscape; it looks odd if a new building is positioned without any regard to the features of the land around it. Thus, houses are usually positioned parallel to roads or at right angles to them. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that that rule also applied in Neolithic times, but it was immediately apparent from the two superimposed plans on the drawing board in front of me that the alignment of the two landscapes was significantly different.
If something as profoundly important as the orientation of a landscape can change, then that implies an equally profound change in the way the landscape was used, and indeed in the way people organised themselves to use it. My point is that we don’t realign landscapes willy-nilly. Even stark modern agri-desert landscapes tend to follow the ‘grain’ of the pre-existing countryside. Nowadays, nobody would contemplate setting out the existing landscape afresh, from scratch. It would be pointless and horrendously expensive. But that is what appears to have happened in the period between the construction of our Neolithic house and the laying out of the Bronze Age ditched fields in 2500 BC.
Now for a word of caution. As archaeologists, we have to work with the bits and pieces that time bequeaths us. We’re adept at reconstructing entire Roman inscriptions, such as gravestones, from fragments of just two letters. Or we can imaginatively reconstruct a house on the basis of four post-holes. Unfortunately, sometimes we get things wrong – as, for example, when I mistook a loomweight for a bit of daub. This business of landscape orientation was a case in point. Was it really wise to suggest something as radical as the wholesale reorganisation of a landscape on the basis of just one house? Was I seriously prepared to stand up at a conference and make the case before three hundred highly sceptical colleagues? I decided to wait for further proof. I had had the insight, but unfortunately modern archaeology expects more by way of evidence for such bright ideas.
The following season was spent excavating huge tracts of Bronze Age fields, together with their farms and droveways. It was exciting and rewarding work, but I was conscious that I had ceased to break new ground. But then, in archaeology, as in life, one cannot always be exploring virgin territory. Sometimes one has to pause and consolidate. When I returned to Canada for the winter I was rushed off my feet sorting through finds and preparing illustrations for the Second Fengate Report. I hadn’t worked so hard for a long time. Consolidation can often be labour-intensive and time-consuming.
I returned to England for our fifth season of excavation in April 1975. It was to be one of the busiest I have ever experienced. By now, much pressure was being brought on me to clear land which the New Town authorities wanted to use for building factories. Fengate was starting to live up to its new name, the Eastern Industrial Area, and factories in this part of Peterborough would soon provide most of the employment for the city’s rapidly expanding population. It was a case of dig or bust.
Early in the summer we exposed several more acres of Bronze Age fields, and then started work on a substantial Iron Age village, which was occupied between about 350 BC. and into the early Roman period – say AD 150. The inhabitants had placed their hamlet on the edge of the regularly flooded land, close to a small stream known as the Cat’s Water. Like many Iron Age sites in eastern England, the Cat’s Water settlement was producing huge quantities of material, and we were all kept extremely busy.
The story of the next discovery in our quest begins towards the end of the excavation, when we were running out of time and energy. To make matters worse, money was also in short supply. Summer was rapidly turning to autumn, and quite soon the rain would start in earnest. For these and other reasons I was extremely keen to finish.
One morning, while doing the rounds through the various trenches, I came across our new principal site supervisor, David Cranstone, on his hands and knees trowelling away at a patch of pale silt. After several years I had learned a great deal about the natural subsoil at Fengate, and I prided myself on being able to distinguish man-made from natural features. It struck me at once that the patch Dave was trowelling was not a man-made feature. It looked very ordinary indeed: maybe it was the filled-in hole left by the roots of an ancient tree that had blown over a few thousand years ago – who knows? Such things (we call them tree-throw pits) are not uncommon, and given the rush to finish the season’s dig, I couldn’t understand why David wanted to spend time digging one. I could think of many more urgent things that needed doing, but I managed to keep my irritation under wraps, consoling myself with the thought that he was bound to be doing something more constructive in a few hours’ time.
That afternoon I passed through the trench for a second time, and Dave was still at it, trowelling steadily down through the silt patch. This was too much.
‘Dave,’ I said as calmly as I could manage, ‘it’s just another tree-throw pit. For Heaven’s
