Scenes from Prehistoric Life

 

Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the coming of the Romans by Francis Pryor, 2021, focuses on the prehistory of Great Britain and Ireland through 15 archaeological excavations (in separate sections chronologically from 900,000 years ago to AD 410). Each excavation reveals information about the people, lifestyle and landscape of the corresponding time period.

For example, the first four sections are:

Scene 1: Britain During the Ages of Ice (900,000-500,000 years ago): Happisburgh – Pakefield – Boxgrove

Scene 2: The Persistence of Caves: Life, Death and the Ancestors (30,000 years ago-600 BC): Goat’s Hole Cave, Paviland – Killuragh and Sramore Caves – Robber’s Den Cave

Scene 3: Inhabiting the Post-Glacial Landscape: Living on the Plains (9000 BC): The Vale of Pickering – Glacial Lake Flixton

Scene 4: From Wood to Stone on Salisbury Plain (8000-3000 BC): The Stonehenge Car Park – The Avenue – Blick Mead Spring – Stonehenge

Francis Pryor is an archaeologist who worked on the excavations that form the basis of each chapter. He was also a member of Time Team, a British television program that presented an archaeological dig to a layperson audience each episode. Perhaps because of his work on this program, he has a casual style of presenting scientific information to the non-specialist reader.

In the introduction, he explains his approach in this book:

“There has been a huge increase in archaeological activity since planning laws changed in the late 1980s. This has produced large regional data sets of sites, monuments and finds, both excavated and still in the ground. These are now so vast that there is a danger than any overview of British and Irish prehistory would soon become swamped by facts and figures. In my experience, too many statistics tend to obscure general themes. So in this book I want to sidestep the detail and bring the people of prehistory to the fore: their beliefs, the way they lived their lives, how they acquired the essentials of existence, and how they interacted with those around them. If possible, I also want to glimpse these things both locally and across society as a whole. To achieve this I will have to focus on individual sites and landscapes. My emphasis will be on what it would have been like actually to have visited these places when they were inhabited many millennia ago. That way, I hope we will be able to capture something of the accelerating pace of prehistoric change.”

Overall, I feel that he doesn’t focus enough on the people, their beliefs or how they lived, but he does capture the feeling of accelerated change in prehistory and provides a lot of information from the archaeological digs he focuses on. He describes this very clearly and also relates them to what they reveal about the people who used them and the changing landscapes they experienced.

He uses a very personal tone and shares his impressions and experiences of each of his excavations. However, I sometimes felt that Pryor included too much personal information throughout the book that didn’t seem relevant to the topic, and that he referred to his books too often. It seemed like self-promotion, and it usually added nothing to the topic he was writing about.

For example, in Scene 12, Living near Water (1000 BC-AD 200), he refers to the growing interest in history in Britain and inserts the following sentence before discussing Crannog Centre, a reconstruction of the Iron Age crannog at Oakbank:

“My growing interest in the gradual evolution of British prehistory and early history led me to write Britain BC, Britain AD and eventually The Making of the British Landscape, a project that took me some five years to finish.”

Why do we need to know this? It adds nothing to the information he writes in the chapter, but just seems like an opportunity to promote his books. He manages to refer to many of his books this way in the body of the text or in the Notes at the end of the book.

His personal input is more useful when commenting on the findings of the archaeological excavations. However, some of his “observations” seemed to have little or no basis. For example, in discussing the post holes found at Stonehenge that predate the standing stones, Pryor notes that archaeologists are not sure what the posts were for. He writes:

“When no obvious practical purpose for a possible structure presents itself, archaeologists tend to reach for their explanation of last resort, namely ‘ritual’, or religion. And that seems to be the best explanation for these very early and quite massive pine posts. Presumably they marked out or formed part of a temple or shrine of some sort, but having said that, we should remember that throughout history Christian churches were important meeting places for local people, so the Stonehenge pine posts may also have served a communal, or social, role.”

To me, making assumptions about the purpose of Mesolithic posts being related to Christian church activity is quite a stretch. And certainly not very scientific!

In fact, throughout the book he goes back and forth between reminding the reader that we cannot assume prehistoric people thought or behaved the way we do, and then making an assumption that does exactly that.

“For me, the past only comes into its own if somehow you can relate it to the present.” Yet, ironically, writing about prehistoric woodwork, he claims that “we must be careful about judging prehistory using modern values.” And when he is careful about judging prehistory using modern values, it is more effective.

I preferred the resulting insights into prehistoric behavior that Pryor presents to explain why they did things a certain way. My favorite example is when he explains the latest theory of how the Stonehenge ‘bluestones’ were moved from their source in the Preseli Hills, southern Wales, to the Salisbury Plain.

“We had always assumed that because there was a large natural waterway, the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary, between Preseli and Salisbury Plain, people would have made much use of it when moving the bluestones. But that fails to take into account the underlaying motives that inspired ancient communities to transport the stones in the first place. If it was just a matter of acquiring cheap rock for an unimportant structure then yes, a raft would probably have been the right decision. But Stonehenge was never a cheap structure and besides, people were building it for very complex social, historical and spiritual reasons. So we shouldn’t simply assume that the bluestones would have been moved in the most efficient, cost-effective manner. That would be rather like suggesting that the Queen should have travelled to Westminster Abbey by bus for her coronation: quick and cheap, yes, but not entirely appropriate to the person, or the occasion.”

I had also assumed that these huge, heavy stones were moved in the most efficient way, by water, but his analogy made me understand more about the prehistoric mindset. And it also gives greater insight into the possible purpose(s) of Stonehenge.

A last note is that it would have been useful to include maps of the excavation areas, since not every reader would be familiar with the place names. And the sketches of various excavation finds are rather simplistic. Photos would have been more interesting.

For a non-academic overview of life in prehistoric Britain and Ireland, written as a personal account, this is an engaging read. For readers who want a more scientific explanation of the research, then this book gives a idea what to focus on.