Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain. Francis Pryor

       PREFACE The Quest

      I DECIDED to write a book on prehistoric religion about two years before the discovery in spring 1998 of the site which has since become widely known as ‘Seahenge’. My original aim was to demystify the subject, to blow away the fog of romance which so often appears when it is raised. I wanted to show how ancient shrines such as Avebury and Stonehenge were made and used by people who were like ourselves. Although they constructed places of worship that seem remote, alien and strange to us, they themselves were none of those things.

      I was fascinated by the outward form – the appearance – of their religion. Why, for example, did circles play such an important role? Why were offerings placed in the ground? And why were many sites placed within the fields and lanes of the working countryside, while others were hidden away in inaccessible and remote places? We can only attempt to answer these questions if we try to understand the social context of these ancient beliefs; and to do that, we must examine the evidence provided by archaeology.

      I also wanted to write about the way in which modern archaeologists can study discarded prehistoric rubbish, long-lost objects and the fragmentary remains of ancient places to recreate the way people thought and behaved. Like fictional detectives, we make deductions from the slightest of clues; but today, increasingly, we go further than that: we try to understand the motives that drove people in the past to construct great monuments like Stonehenge, or small shrines like Seahenge. Almost daily, new scientific techniques are removing the ties that once restricted our imaginations. But these new freedoms carry with them new responsibilities. It’s becoming easier to sound authoritative, simply by quoting evidence uncovered by science. To reveal a precise date through some new wonder-technique is one thing, but it is quite another to understand why something happened in the past. In this book I want to make a start at answering some of those why questions.

      The practice of religion has always happened in the here and now, and I wanted my book to be set in a real prehistoric world, in which children were born and educated, families farmed the land, and law and order prevailed – a world which has been rapidly revealed by excavation in the 1970s and subsequent decades. I decided to use the discoveries made on my own particular excavations to colour the picture I wanted to paint.

      My research into British prehistory has been a long quest. It began in 1971 when I directed an eight-year excavation at Fengate, near Peterborough. Fengate is one of the best-known sites in British prehistory. It was continuously occupied for four thousand years, from Neolithic to Roman times, and possesses an extraordinarily diverse succession of settlements, field systems, barrows and burials. After Fengate I turned my attention to two major religious centres: the Bronze Age henges and other shrines at Maxey in Cambridgeshire and the partially waterlogged Neolithic ritual enclosure at nearby Etton. Etton was one of the earliest sites of its type yet found in Britain, and is certainly the best preserved. Then, in 1982, I discovered the waterlogged timbers of what is probably the largest Bronze Age religious site in Europe, at Flag Fen, on the outskirts of Peterborough. I have been working there ever since.

      These are major excavations and they have produced a wealth of material, not to mention eight volumes of scholarly research. It is, however, hard to extract the essential narrative thread from this

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