the notebooks I came across an unpublished pre-excavation pencil sketch-plan. It was a good sketch-plan, and was annotated in an elegant italic hand. Subsequently it had been scratched out by, possibly, a different hand. The features shown in the initial sketch bore an uncanny resemblance to the first Bronze Age roundhouse we had excavated back in 1974. Everything was there: the front-door posts, the ring-gully eaves-drip gutter; even the alignment of the doorway was right. It was simply too good to have been invented.
FIG 5 Ground plan of Fengate Site 11, showing the position of archaeological trenches
When I examined the records further, it became clear that the Early Bronze Age Beaker pottery came from this house and from features, such as fireplaces, that may have been part of it. There was no reason to suppose that the rectangular enclosure had anything to do with the house at all. They could have been constructed centuries, even millennia apart.
It felt good to have sorted this little problem out. But why didn’t I pursue the matter further? What about the rectangular enclosure, for Heaven’s sake? I suppose I was too keen to get back to the writing of those two great volumes. But I had missed a trick. It was to be another five years before the next piece in the jigsaw fell into place.
I was spending the weekend with the eminent authority on the Neolithic period, Dr Ian Kinnes, at his house in Guildford. On the dinner table before us were drawings of Neolithic pottery from Etton, the site I was then digging and which I’ll discuss later. The drawings were annotated in Ian’s elegant italic hand, and suddenly I remembered the handwriting in the Site 11 notebook. Was Ian the supervisor who made those notes, I asked. He was. It was a part-time job he’d done while he was a post-graduate student at Cambridge.
He couldn’t remember why his sketch-plan had been crossed out, and he shared my view that if the structure was indeed a Bronze Age roundhouse, then it went with the later fields, and not with the enclosure.
I was thinking aloud. ‘So that leaves the enclosure high and dry, I suppose?’
‘Oh, no it doesn’t,’ he said. ‘Quite the opposite. That house was always a problem. Take the house away, and you’re left with a mortuary enclosure – like the ones that turned up the other day on air photos in Essex.’
An article about the Essex enclosures had recently appeared in an academic journal, so I was familiar with what he was talking about. Mortuary enclosures and structures were special places that were constructed in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age to receive recently deceased corpses. By and large, they do not seem to have been used as permanent resting places, although burials are often found in them. Sometimes, indeed quite often, the enclosure takes the form of a surrounding wooden wall, or even a roofed building. More often than not, the original enclosure may become incorporated within a later burial mound, or barrow. In short, they are complicated sites and are probably best considered one at a time, as individuals.
As soon as I returned home, I unrolled my well-used Master Plan, which was now rather grubby and dog-eared. I had not added the Site 11 enclosure to it, as my team hadn’t dug it. As I was drawing it in in its rightful place, I was immediately aware that its alignment precisely followed that of the ‘house’ and the pair of shallow ditches at Vicarage Farm. All four Neolithic sites appeared to process across the Fengate landscape in an orderly row, from north-east to south-west. It was quite extraordinary.
By this time I had come to the conclusion that the ‘house’ we had dug in 1972 was a mortuary structure, but without a body. Some mortuary structures, indeed most barrows as well, are thought deliberately to echo the houses of the living – as Houses of the Dead. Certainly the rich finds from the ‘house’ would be appropriate for a mortuary house.
FIG 6 Ground plan of the Neolithic mortuary structure at Fengate discovered in 1997 by the Cambridge University archaeological team
The latest piece of this jigsaw, which so far has taken over a quarter of a century to assemble, fell into place in July 1997. By this time the old way of doing research, in which a local team tried to grapple with the particular problems of a given region, had been replaced by the modern system of competitive tendering, where the lowest price wins. All too often this system produces half-digested results that are not adequately tied into the regional story. The work is done for money – and it shows. But in this case the project, at the edge of my earlier
Cat’s Water excavation, was won by a team from Cambridge University, with which I have always been friendly. They did an excellent job, and kept me closely informed. However, this was a truly independent excavation – independent of me and my pet theories, that is.
The Cambridge team were digging at the extreme edge of the wet ground on a low gravel knoll, which reached out a short distance into the shallow waters where peat had begun to form around 2000 BC. On this knoll they found a rectangular arrangement of small pits and post-holes and a collection of finds which included big pieces of Neolithic pottery, but no animal bones. As with the ‘house’ I had dug twenty-four years previously, it would appear that the objects found in the ground were not a random selection of household debris, but gave every appearance of having been carefully selected. Quite independently, the Cambridge team interpreted their site as a mortuary structure. And when they came to plot its position on the map, lo and behold, it was orientated north-east to south-west; what is more, it lined up beautifully with the other four Neolithic sites.
It had taken nearly twenty-five years to uncover evidence to support my original theory. It was now clear that the landscape had changed its orientation sometime between four and five thousand years ago. But why? And what did it mean? Most important of all, why was there this emphasis on death, with a multiple burial and three mortuary structures?
CHAPTER FIVE Gardens of Creation
MY QUEST INTO the lives of prehistoric people was taking me in unexpected directions – such as, for example, Death itself. I knew that I wanted to bring their world forward, into our time, but I was finding myself being drawn back further and further into theirs. It was as if I was the centre of a ghostly tug-o’-war. I felt they were leading my footsteps, holding my hand, like wise grandparents with a young child. Where, I wondered, were they going to take me next? The quest was now about to enter a philosophical, almost a mystical, stage.
I was facing some of the Big Questions of human existence. I knew full well that I could never do these Big Questions justice, because – like most of my colleagues – I simply don’t possess the necessary philosophical background. Having said that, I feel it is arrogant in the extreme to dig up religious and mortuary sites without making at least some effort to understand what those places might have meant to the people who built them.
I should have realised that one cannot hope to understand the lives and deaths of ancient people – any people – if one chooses to ignore their history. By history I don’t mean a dry account of a succession of archaeological ‘cultures’, or indeed of presidents, prime ministers, kings or queens. I mean history in the sense that we all understand it, as a series of stories about the past that provides us with an all-enveloping explanation of why and how we are here. The Battle of Britain affirms my reluctant feeling of patriotism, and tales of my grandmother – such as the time she was supposed to have wrestled a crocodile to its death somewhere in India – make me feel part of my family. We each have all sorts of histories: individual, family, local and national. All of these different stories comprise history as it affects our daily lives. Prehistoric people
