| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| REGIONS |
Knowledge of the Fens in prehistory has been transformed over recent decades. Francis Pryor explains
As late as the 1960s, archaeologists knew very little about the Fens in prehistory. Reports of Fenland sites discussed `camps' and short-lived settlements on fen `islands'. Nobody had any real appreciation of the true scale of ancient settlement in and around the Fens basin. It was as if the area in prehistoric times was inhabited by small bands of people who wandered aimlessly about, filling desultory small holes with potsherds.
Over the past three decades, however, our understanding of the Fens has been transformed. Repeatedly occupied from Mesolithic times, the Fens were densely settled and exploited in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, where the impression is of a way of life every bit as sophisticated as elsewhere in Britain. Fenland communities adapted rapidly to the wetter conditions of the Iron Age, and the area only became something of a cultural backwater in Roman times.
People often don't understand what the Fens environment was actually like before the land was drained in the medieval period and more extensively in the 17th century. Unlike the sphagnum bogs of the North and West, the Fens were never constantly wet. This huge region, which extended south to Cambridge, west to Peterborough and almost up to Lincoln in the north, should rather be seen as two areas - one of freshwater marsh and the other of tidal mudflats - which varied according to the season. Broadly speaking, in winter, most of it would be too wet to walk on or exploit, but in summer much of it would dry out and form extremely rich grazing meadows.
Around the edge of the wet basin was a wide flat plain of variable wetness which extended up the valleys of the main rivers draining into the low-lying area. It was on this fen-edge that most of the area's prehistoric settlement has been found.
Fengate, an industrial suburb on the edge of the fen at Peterborough, was one of the first sites to build up this new picture of the Fens. At first, when my team started working there in 1971, I was convinced that we were digging merely a river valley site. It took about two years for the penny to drop: people in prehistory wanted to live here because it was on dry land, but as close to the wetland as they could manage.
Our work there revealed evidence for a large-scale and beautifully laid-out field system which was designed to accommodate livestock, and was dated firmly to the Bronze Age starting at about 1800BC. An intensive style of animal husbandry was employed in which dryland fields were mainly occupied in winter, and in summer the flocks and herds were grazed on the lush natural water-meadows of Fenland. Bronze Age droveways for sheep, with gates leading in to them fromthe fields, led down into the fen. (Phosphate analysis shows beyond doubt they were droveways: they were deep in prehistoric manure.) Medieval maps show that exactly the same farming system was used in the Fens some 3,000 years later.
People were attracted to the fen because each winter it was naturally enriched by the nutrients in silt deposited by rivers in flood; it was also naturally clear of woodland. The drier land, well back from the fen, was often composed of heavy clay with dense woodland, which would have been slow and troublesome to clear: it could have taken two days to fell a single large oak tree. For these reasons, to work the system it was necessary to have the two clearly separate and distinct environments. So when the wetland became too wet, around 500BC, the system ceased to work and Fengate went into recession.
Since the Fengate project, other major pieces of work have filled in more of the picture. Among the many fascinating results of the English Heritage Fenland Survey of 1981-88, directed by David Hall and John Coles, was the strong impression that the Neolithic people of the Fens were not incomers, but were the same people as their Mesolithic forebears. It had long been known that there was a dense Mesolithic presence around the fen edge, and the Fenland Survey showed that, in the main, there was continuous occupation of the same sites across the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods.
A fuller understanding of Neolithic settlement in the Fens has been provided since the 1980s by the work of the Cambridge University Archaeological Unit under Ian Hodder and Chris Evans. Prompted by David Hall's discovery in the mid-1970s of barrowfields in the peat fen near Haddenham (close to Ely), the Cambridge unit began to make a series of spectacular discoveries in the area, including a Neolithic long barrow which contained a massive oak box-like funeral chamber beneath its earthen mound. Nearby was a large middle Neolithic causewayed enclosure, with an unusual and imposing facade.
These and similar discoveries over-turned previous ideas of what life had been like in the Fens when the environment began to grow wetter in the Neolithic. It had been assumed that the brighter and more able inhabitants departed for better climes elsewhere, to leave a backwater in the Fens. But not so. These imposing monuments, designed to impress, and the rich material legacy of pottery found in the area suggest that the Fens were in the country's cultural and material front rank.
Further work by this unit in the lower Ouse Valley has produced, at sites such as Barleycroft Farm, near St Ives, Huntingdonshire, the fields, farms and settlements that may well have been associated with the burial and ritual sites of the deeper fen.
While I was starting work at Fengate, a friend and colleague was completing his doctoral dissertation at Leiden in Holland. Prof Leendert Louwe-Kooijmans did his research (published 1974) on the prehistory of the Rhine/Meuse delta and demonstrated that it was not possible to draw broad pictures of environmental change across huge tracts of countryside. Instead he showed that wetlands were composed of tiny micro-regions and that each had its own unique human and geological history.
The Fenland Survey proved this lesson for the Fens. This large-scale, multi-period survey illustrated the variety and richness of prehistoric and later settlement in the region, demonstrating the scale and number of the various Fenland micro-regions. What we learned from this work, and from later excavations, was that although in the broadest terms the environment changed in the same way across the region - it got wetter - in detail, the environmental changes differed from region to region, and that this affected the pattern of human settlement across the area.
For example, both Fengate and sites in the Lower Welland valley north of Peterborough had extensive field systems in the Bronze Age, but more salt was produced in the Welland Valley. The two communities reacted differently, however, to worsening conditions. The people of Fengate built Flag Fen, a huge communal monument constructed, perhaps, as a symbolic wall to keep the rising waters back. No such monuments seem to have been built in the Welland Valley, but instead a massive Iron Age communal monument - a kind of hillfort - was built there at Borough Fen, just as Flag Fen was going out of use.
We see even more marked differences between the northern fen of the Welland Valley and the southern fen around Ely. In the Neolithic, there are no massive communal monuments in the north, but there are numerous smaller monuments such as causewayed enclosures and these seem to be very early. The enclosure at Etton, for example, dates to about 3800BC. Bronze Age field systems in the north were arranged around droveways, which seem surprisingly absent in the south, perhaps suggesting that less use was actually made there of the fen.
Some of the regional contrasts now evident in Fenland prehistory may have had simple, humdrum functional causes, but I strongly suspect that something more profound is involved. Perhaps we have here evidence for long-lived, but contrasting patterns of cultural and social development. In other words, we are getting glimpses of people forming their own, unique regional identities, despite living only a few miles apart.
Dr Francis Pryor is the Archaeological Director of Flag Fen. Last month he was elected President of the CBA
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1998