Reviews for Seahenge : New Discoveries in Prehistoric Britain

The average rating for Seahenge : New Discoveries in Prehistoric Britain based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-30 00:00:00 Jose A. Sierra Although the title of this indicates this might be about the discovery of a henge in the sea at Holme in north Norfolk in the late 1990s, but this only really comes to the fore in the last quarter of the book. This is more a history of Pryor’s own career and his work in the Fenland digs around Peterborough. Pryor is very engaging and there is an immediacy about this which makes it engaging. The book focuses particularly on four sites; Fengate, Etton/Maxey, Holme and Flag Fen. What you get is a good deal of detective work and analysis because many of the structures did not have an obvious use. Pryor shows again and again that starting assumptions can be wrong and that it is a mistake to impose our own assumptions. I learnt that objects generally survive better in the damp, peaty, fenlike environments than dry ones. The timescale covered ranges from around 4000BC to about 800BC. Pryor is a practical archaeologist: he farms as well, can drive his own digger and gets his hands dirty. All this means he looks for practical solutions to puzzles rather than esoteric ones. A simple example is the separating of cattle into pens was thought by some to be for ritualistic reasons. Pryor pointed out that it was probably just to keep your herd separate from your neighbours and prevent inbreeding. He is sceptical about a lot of the mythology about druidism and the Celts: although he does accept the vital importance of trees. He rather thinks that ritual and the sacred was very much woven into everyday life. Pryor does make some good points: “Past times are just that – times that have past. Any mystery and magic inherent in them are mystery and magic that were there when they were in the present. The passage of time in itself adds nothing. But neither does it remove anything. That’s one reason why we must be careful not to patronise the lives and achievements of people who after all cannot speak for themselves.” Pryor warns against what he calls chronocentrism: using a past culture for one’s own ends, whether to legitimate a spurious political history or to give false roots to a modern ideology. It’s another form of imperialism. If you are interested in the past and don’t mind a bit of technical archaeology, you may enjoy this.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-27 00:00:00 Mayssa Alwani Archaeology is not some exact science, with answers to give to every question if we only look hard enough. It's partly our own fault: we're overpopulating the Earth, and in the meantime we're destroying great swathes of the archaeological record. We only have fragments of the past, some larger than others -- Seahenge being one of the latter, far ahead of potsherds but perhaps more mysterious -- and while archaeology has some light to shed, I find it best to accept up front that no one can offer a complete answer, and that if anyone claims to be certain, they're speaking beyond the evidence in almost every case. Francis Pryor's book handles this pretty well, in my books, though I have no doubt there's people out there who wish he'd stop equivocating. Much of this book involves setting this in context, linking modern and ancient lives and landscapes, and then using what evidence that offers to spin theories -- theories that could be upset by the next find out of the ground, in some obscure peaty corner or air-tight chamber stumbled upon by chance. Bearing all that in mind, I found this book fascinating. I have no personal expertise to say yay or nay to any of this -- my own research interests lie in a later period, with the dawning of literature, which is in conversation with archaeology more than you'd think -- so I took Pryor's words more or less at face value. Some of his ideas seemed too sketchy, too much based on a gut reaction, but even so his description of the excavations, his impressions of them, the way they came together to synthesise an understanding of the anicent landscape... it's all fascinating, and I would happily read more. If you're looking to learn specifically and solely about the place we've dubbed Seahenge (which was not actually built on the beach, and wasn't in such close proximity to the sea) then only a couple of chapters of this book are of direct interest. But why you would want to look at something like this in isolation when it's clearly part of a larger story and can only be understood in those terms, I don't know. One thing you may feel is that Francis Pryor has too much to say about himself and his team, particularly his wife. I enjoyed it, given that his thought processes were influenced by everything around him. A bare-bones description of the sites and the endless work of extraction and preservation would seem terribly boring to me.