Britain BC by Francis Pryor

There is a problem in archaeology, which Francis Pryor neatly encapsulates in at the start of his book Britain BC:

Stories have plots and themes, and I have fashioned this book around what I think are the most important. But inevitably I have had to omit an enormous amount of significant material, simply because it fell outside the immediate scope of the story. However Britain BC is not intended to be a textbook, nor is it in any way comprehensive. It’s essentially a narrative – and a personal one at that.

(Pryor 2004:xxvi)

It’s a problem referred to by Campbell (1996), idea that popular and scholarly are polar opposites. Ultimately it leads to the belief that if a text is written so as to be inaccessible then by logic it must be highly scholarly. If (by avoiding writing a textbook) Pryor aimed to produce an unscholarly work he has, thankfully, failed spectacularly. Britain BC is an ambitious book. It seeks to tell the tale of all British prehistory from the depths of the Palaeolithic to the arrival of the Romans. His is right that the sheer scale means that the book will only ever show the tip of the prehistoric iceberg, but similar criticisms could be made of many of staples of undergraduate prehistory courses. While the single authorship may mean that some chapters are written from a non-specialist viewpoint, it also gives the book a unity. Britain BC is a grand narrative which can show the continuity of culture across ages in a way that multiple-authored books can lose. Further, while Pryor may not be a Palaeolithic expert, his non-specialist viewpoint is far more informed than Joe Bloggs’s.

The book starts with the most difficult period, the Palaeolithic. The evidence in the period compared with later Prehistory is slight, and questions more abstract. Creating human interest in a story is easier said than done when one of the major debates is how ‘human’ were these people? It would be tempting to decide the end of the Ice Age provided a clean slate and start the story from there, but Pryor takes three chapters, broadly one each for the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. This period does not lend itself well to Pryor’s ritual-rich explanations of human action. It is not the period has no evidence of ritual, but rather that ritual is explained in a cognitive framework rather than a post-processual approach. In many ways then the Palaeolithic section is the greatest triumph of the book. He humanises the past by drawing on the experience of sites in the present to illustrate the problems. In addition he welcomes debate, highlighting where minimalists such as Clive Gamble would disagree with him and question his conclusions. It’s far easier to deal with certainties rather than ambiguities, and this section pulls of the tricky aim of both creating a narrative without ignoring the continuing debate that shapes our ideas and makes the narrative possible.

The Mesolithic is tagged onto the beginning of the Neolithic in the second major section of the book. The title of this section “An Island People” pretty well sums up one of the major themes than runs through the book that the British Isles, by being cut off from mainland Europe, had something uniquely ‘other’ about them in Prehistory. This is Pryor’s own view and it is from here that the book takes a more personal tone. He introduces the Mesolithic with a cheeky dig at the lectures of Sir Grahame Clark. However the comment is not gratuitous as it illustrates the problem of reaching the interesting questions, the social questions, from the source material – which could so easily be seen as a collection of rather dull rocks.

For the advent of farming he presents the mainstream position extremely well. He does not ignore other views, he also tackles the rôle of DNA evidence as evidence for the advance of farming fairly, but as he states from the start this is his picture of the past. He splits discussion of the Early Neolithic into three, with chapters for daily life, monuments and finally death ritual. It works, partly because it shows that the questions people are asking of the data don’t quite match, and the overall picture is slightly inconsistent. In many ways this is the strongest section of the book. The evidence seems to be drawn from a wider geographic area, so this is the part of the book where you do get a sense of the scale of Britain BC.

The final section of the book is “The Tyranny of Technology”. It opens with the Neolithic / Bronze Age transition as the ‘Age of Stonehenge’. To a degree some of the broad vision is missing from this latter section. Yet I suppose you could ask how thick (and repetitive) would the book be if he expanded it. Pryor gives an excellent explanation of the ideas put forward by Parker-Pearson and Ramilisonina on the use of Stonehenge as a monument for the dead. In many ways Pryor is much more convincing than the original source. While I don’t agree with it, it is well-argued and I’ll need a better argument than “It doesn’t seem right” when dealing with it. It’s an obvious point, but the book also does well in rejecting the ‘Bronze Age’ as a single coherent unit. The mid and later Bronze Ages form their own chapter, pulling heavily from Pryor’s own work at Flag Fen and further afield, but because of the poor excavation record the story is heavily biased towards the south of England.

The story of the Iron Age opens with a personal tale which is part of the joy of the book. Written by someone else this would appear to be an exercise in name-dropping, but Pryor has worked closely with most of the people he mentions. He’s generous with the credit for good ideas, rather than out to impress. Parker Pearson makes a couple of appearances again, once with the cosmology of Iron Age roundhouses and another with eclipse prediction at Fiskerton. On the first he is plausible, but it is a bit of disappointment that Fiskerton’s eclipses make an appearance. The idea that the construction of the causeway at Fiskerton corresponds to eclipse hasn’t passed peer-review. It is a concern because the idea plainly doesn’t stand up to statistical or astronomical analysis. Pryor can’t be expected to spot this, but more worryingly there is no archaeological evidence for it either. It’s a small but jarring note, and it leaves me wondering how sound the rest of the evidence is.

This last point aside, the book is excellent. Not only is it (largely) sound, it’s also literate. Reading it as actually a joy rather than a chore. A few years back my MPhil thesis noted the relative absence of competent archaeologists from the bookshelves. It’s hard to complain about people reading Graham Hancock when no alternative exists. Pryor’s book is a positive sign that archaeologists are returning to the public arena. Writing like this won’t eliminate pseudo-archaeology, but the presence of a choice will at least ensure the heyday of pseudo-archaeologists has passed.

Campbell A. 1996. Tricky Tropes: Styles of the Popular and the Pompous in Popularizing Anthropology eds MacClancy and McDonaugh. Routledge

Pryor, F. 2004. Britain BC. Harper Perennial. —–