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    Flag Fen: A Concise Archæoguide
    Flag Fen: A Concise Archæoguide
    Flag Fen: A Concise Archæoguide
    Ebook69 pages1 hour

    Flag Fen: A Concise Archæoguide

    By Francis Pryor

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    About this ebook

    Flag Fen is one of the best-preserved Late Bronze Age sits yet found in Britain. It was discovered in 1982 and consists of many tens of thousands of timbers which were driven into the muddy waters of a fen on the outskirts of modern Peterborough, between about 1300 and 900 BC. Hundreds of valuable objects, including swords, daggers and jewellery, were dropped into the water around the timbers, as offerings.

    Flag Fen was opened to the public in 1987 and is now a major visitor attraction. It was also the subject of a first-of-its-kind crowdsourced and crowdfunded archaeological dig during the summer of 2012, organised by Digventures.

    This specially commissioned work, written by archaeologist and discoverer of Flag Fen, Francis Pryor MBE, provides a concise companion to anyone seeking an authoritative introduction to this remarkable site.

    Contents (about 57 pages):

    1 The Fens in a Nutshell
    2 Background: The Landscape of Flag Fen
    3 The Discovery of Flag Fen
    4 The Post Alignment
    5 The Platform
    6 The Finds
    7 The Religious Ceremonies
    8 Interpretation: What Does it all Mean?
    9 Wood, Wheels and Status
    10 The Sophistication of Ancient Technology
    11 Flag Fen and the Public
    12 Flag Fen Threatened
    13 Flag Fen: The Future

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBoudicca Books
    Release dateMay 18, 2014
    ISBN9781498906333
    Flag Fen: A Concise Archæoguide
    Author

    Francis Pryor

    Francis Pryor has been researching the Fens of Eastern England since 1970. During this work he has revealed and excavated a number of preserved prehistoric landscapes including a large tract of land immediately east of Peterborough. This landscape was known as Fengate, or 'road to the fen' by the Vikings and it has produced some of the finest preserved prehistoric sites in Europe, including Flag Fen, which was first discovered by Pryor and his team in 1982.

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      Book preview

      Flag Fen - Francis Pryor

      Copyright

      Cover photograph reproduced by kind courtesy of Vivacity.

      First published in Great Britain by High-Res History in 2012.

      This edition published 18 May 2014 by Boudicca Books.

      Francis Pryor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      Flag Fen: a Concise Archæoguide.

      Copyright © Francis Pryor 2012.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express permission of Boudicca Books.

      This edition © Francis Pryor. 2014

      1. The Fens in a Nutshell

      The Fens are a large area (about a million acres or 405,000 ha) of low-lying land around the Wash. Today they occupy large parts of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, with smaller areas in Norfolk and Suffolk. In the past they were marshy and usually flooded in winter; but the modern landscape is entirely drained. Drainage began in early medieval times, but rapidly gathered pace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] To the east, closer to the Wash (and mostly in southern Lincolnshire) the land that forms the Fens was laid-down by the sea, often in times of storm and flood. Driving across these landscapes today, the soil is pale, hence their name: the Silt Fens. This is some of the finest agricultural land in Britain which now grows huge acreages of flowers and vegetables. By contrast, Flag Fen sits at the western edge of the Peat or Black Fens. Here the land has been formed by the growth of freshwater peats, a process that began from about 3000BC, when the rivers that drained into the Fenland basin would flood.[2] Usually this was in winter and spring. Flag Fen was a ‘bay’ of low-lying, waterlogged land immediately south-east of Peterborough. To the east and west the land gradually rises and becomes flood-free. The dry land to the east of the wet Flag Fen basin is known as Fengate, that to the west as Northey. Fengate lies at the edge of what one might think of as ‘mainland’ England; Northey is part of a large ‘island’ in the Fens, which includes the market town of Whittlesey.

      2. Background: The Landscape of Flag Fen

      The archaeological site known today as Flag Fen was completely unknown before its discovery in November 1982. Before that it had lain concealed beneath almost two metres of peat and river-borne flood clay, known as alluvium, which started to cover it up sometime in the later Iron Age, over 2000 years ago. But the discovery did not happen by chance. Like many archaeological finds, this one came to light as the culmination of many years of patient and painstaking research.

      The story began in 1970 when I happened to read in an archaeological magazine that Peterborough New Town was to be extended eastwards to cover the known archaeological site of Fengate. At the time I worked for the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, Canada, and I was in England trying to find a suitable site for a future series of excavations. And Fengate looked very promising indeed. So I returned to Peterborough the following year with a small team of Canadian students and recruited an equal number from various British universities. That first season revealed what we now know to have been one of Britain’s earliest Bronze Age field systems and the results were so good that our Canadian sponsors, together with the old Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments at what was to become the Department of the Environment (the forerunner of English Heritage), decided to back us for the next few years. By the end of the project, in 1979 we had revealed a remarkable story.

      The first farmers arrived in the area sometime around 4000BC and clearance of trees and woodland from the landscape was well under way by 3000BC. That was when a series of Neolithic shrines and other features, which may have been arranged along an ancient route way were constructed. These finds included a rather tragic grave which held the bodies of a man and a woman and (possibly their) two children. The man had been killed by a flint arrowhead which we found lodged between his eighth and ninth ribs. That burial is on display in Peterborough Museum. Some five centuries later, around 2500BC,  at the start of the Bronze Age, the earlier farmed landscape was carefully divided-up into one of the first

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