Understanding the past requires a feel for the land, claims Francis Pryor
Recently I did something I do very rarely these days - I turned on the television. I sat back in my seat and slowly drifted off to a deep sleep, lulled by the sweet smell of apple logs in the fire. It could have been minutes, hours or days later, but I awoke. And there he was on the TV screen - the Alpine Ice Man, looking more like an enormous Bombay duck, and being inserted into a stainless steel fridge by equally stainless Swiss technicians. They wore white coats and masks - just like the chaps in our local slaughterhouse after its latest EC-required makeover.
Suddenly I recognised the programme. It was the second of a trilogy on Ice Mummies. They were talking about symbolism and ritual. Then I started to drift off again. Ritual has that effect on me sometimes.
When I was 16, I spent several months in the Italian Dolomites, trying to learn Italian, but actually teaching dark-eyed Italian girls to speak English. Anyhow, one magical day they took me with their brothers high up into the mountains to watch the sheep leaving for the upland pastures. I remember drinking coffee from a camping stove in a VW microbus parked high above a defile, while below were thousands of sheep and a few shepherds, snaking their way along narrow paths, relentlessly upwards. The weather was lovely, but what would have happened when a storm struck? As soon as the discovery of the Ice Man's body was announced I knew that that was how the poor chap had met his end.
Then the screen started to talk sense. The Ice Man had been a shepherd - even archaeologists, they said, were now agreed. But the payoff line left me gasping: wasn't it extraordinary that those sheep migration routes were older even than ancient Egypt. Wow! Who'd 'a thought it? The programme did also admit - rather too quietly for my taste - that the local country people knew perfectly well what the Ice Man had been about from the day he was found. But I doubt whether the white coats were in a rush to seek their views.
Will we ever persuade archaeologists in Britain to take a sane view of their own past? Can we make them accept that rural patterns of behaviour have roots millennia old? I doubt it very much because most care little about rural roots or the way country people live - or lived until very recently. They are too bound up with trendy issues that are very relevant indeed to them personally but are largely irrelevant, I would suggest, to British antiquity. Many of the issues reflect hyper-active lives within the fiercely competitive worlds of academia and contract archaeology. But are those appropriate places from which to examine a past rural world? Everything is wrong: place, culture and intellectual climate.
An anonymous academic outside reader for a paper I published in the June Antiquity questioned my premise that prehistoric livestock farmers managed their flocks intensively. Surely, he/ she reasoned, in the Bronze Age of Britain, it was like parts of the Aegean today: a handful of sheep and a few children with sticks; there was no need to posit elaborate handling systems and the like. How does one reason with that? What has happened to common sense? For reasons I fail to comprehend he/ she chose to ignore the evidence of complex field systems that were patently laid out with animals in mind. There were stockyards, droveways, managed access to common land and all the other trappings of the livestock farmer's landscape. Some children, some sticks!
I am not suggesting that urban academics should come to my farm for six months and stir sheep muck. Nor am I suggesting that the hoards of vegetarian students suddenly become omnivorous. No, I am asking for two things. First that archaeologists try to learn something about country life and practices (fat chance!). Second, that a suburban profession should accept that rural folk have something important and relevant to teach archaeology. There are many people who could throw light on even the remotest past, if the archaeologists in their redbrick and ivory towers deigned to acknowledge their existence. But sadly, as any graduate student knows, it's easier to get British research money to live with the inhabitants of Ruanda than Rutland.
Francis Pryor is a sheep farmer, prehistorian and Director of Flag Fen
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