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

Description

An investigation into the lives of our prehistoric ancestors, focusing on the revolution in Bronze Age archaeology which has been taking place since the 1980s, and in which the author has played a central role. One of the most haunting and enigmatic archaeological discoveries of recent times was the uncovering in 1998 at low tide of the so-called Seahenge on the north coast of Norfolk. This circle of wooden planks set vertically in the sand, with a large inverted tree-trunk in the middle, likened to a ghostly "hand reaching up from the underworld", has now been dated to around 2020 BC. It focused national attention on archaeology to an extent not seen for many years, and the issues raised by its removal and preservation made it a "cause celebre". Francis Pryor has been at the centre of British archaeological fieldwork for nearly 30 years, piecing together the way of life of Bronze Age people, their settlement of the landscape, their religion and rituals. The famous wetland sites of the East Anglian Fens have preserved ten times the information of their dryland counterparts like Stonehenge and Avebury, in the form of pollen, leaves, wood, hair, skin and fibre found "pickled" in mud and peat. "Seahenge" demonstrates how much Western civilization owes to the prehistoric societies that existed in Europe in the last four millennia BC.

Francis Pryor is one of Britain's most distinguished living archaeologists, and the excavator of Flag Fen. He is the author of Home, Britain BC, Britain AD, Seahenge and The Making Of The British Landscape.