Scenes From Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans by Francis Pryor

Author:Francis Pryor [Pryor, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology, anthropology, Cultural & Social, history, Europe, Great Britain, General, Ancient, nature
ISBN: 9781789544169
Google: CmUAEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd
Published: 2021-08-05T23:27:33.332110+00:00

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I have long been a keen gardener and I frequently find myself having to buy compost for potting up my tomatoes and house plants – and for at least twenty-five years I have studiously avoided all that were peat-based. The substitutes aren’t always very good, but they’re getting better; even so, nothing will persuade me to return to peat. The reason for my horror at using peat isn’t simply the environmental damage that its extraction causes – although that is serious and usually irreversible – but I have also witnessed the archaeological harm caused by peat-digging. If anything, that is even worse and it is certainly irreversible. Given time and sufficient water, peat will eventually regrow, but it’s a process that is very slow – think more in terms of centuries and millennia than the mere years or decades it takes to remove entire peat bogs.

Archaeological sites, however, are irreplaceable. Once they have been destroyed they have gone for ever. Sadly, peat extraction has removed thousands of important prehistoric sites, for the simple reason they occur relatively high in the bogs. Most peat bogs in Britain and Ireland originated in the final centuries of the Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago.7 This was a time when Britain had still not been re-inhabited following the end of the last Ice Age. And when people did return, it was a slow, gradual process.b So archaeological remains are relatively infrequent in peat bogs until about the fifth millennium BC, during the later Mesolithic and Neolithic periods – and with the start of farming, the evidence for settlement increases rapidly. These later remains tend to be found in the higher layers of peat, which of course are – or in most cases, sadly, were – the first to be removed during the process of extraction.

Certain peats are better than others for making into composts and growbags. Some of the best are found in Ireland and in the Somerset Levels and this is where many spectacular archaeological discoveries have been made. Happily, extraction has been massively reduced in the Levels, but it continues in Scotland and in England it still takes place in the lower reaches of the River Trent, between Doncaster and Scunthorpe. This low-lying land in north Lincolnshire is known as the Isle of Axholme. Peats from the Fens tended not to be used in composts, largely, I suspect, because they were very fertile if left in place. I suppose you could see the Fens as a vast growbag – but one quite rapidly approaching the end of its useful life.8

Peatlands are archaeologically important because of the process of peat formation, in which the natural rotting of soft, and once-living, material is halted through a mixture of acidity, waterlogging and a shortage of oxygen. This occurs in situations where water flow is slow or absent and where drying out never happens. This process can lead to the near-perfect preservation of organic materials including plant matter, fabrics and even flesh, skin and hair. When

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