Pryor - Home: a time travellers tales from British prehistory

Im a family man I regard the family as the greatest organization ever created by human beings. I couldnt believe my ears. It was Sir Michael Caine. A familiar voice from my youth was expressing the thoughts I had been trying to frame for weeks. I was awake at an ungodly hour and Caines words issued from a small radio on my wife Maisies side of the bed. As often happened, she had woken earlier, switched on the World Service, volume turned right down, and had then drifted back to sleep. It was now nearly five oclock and it was my turn to wake up. I was suffering from a bad case of early morning busy brain. What is it about the wee small hours that makes your mind get everything out of proportion? Everyday problems become complex-verging-on-the-insuperable and everyone seems to be out to get you. Then, a couple of hours later, you cant understand why you were getting so het up.

I rolled out of bed and stumbled downstairs repeating Caines simple, but profoundly important, words over and over again. At my desk I scribbled them down. That done, I leaned back in my office chair. I looked down at my scribbled note. I knew hed hit a nail on the head, but for a strange sleep-befuddled moment, I couldnt think which one. At face value the words were bland. Nobody would disagree with him. Nobody. So why did I rush downstairs in such a panic? I suppose my brain was trying to make sense of my unconscious. For a brief moment, I considered returning upstairs to get more sleep, but for some reason I hesitated. Then slowly it all started to come back to me: instinctively, I turned on my laptop. I had begun to research this book.

It goes back to my very first days in archaeology, in 1963, before I even went to university. I was working as a volunteer on an Iron Age hillfort in Bedfordshire which was directed by James Dyer, an inspirational leader if ever there was one. It was there that I learned, probably from James, that archaeology is about the past as experienced by ordinary people. So it was very unlikely that our hillfort had ever been visited by anyone famous by Julius Caesar or even Queen Boudicca. But that didnt matter. Even if such figures had visited the place, it wouldnt have altered anything. Through history monarchs could, and often did, visit lowly parish churches, but the buildings remained unaltered, as did the lives of the parishioners who attended services there every Sunday. I would be more than surprised if any of those visits left even the slightest archaeological trace.

Back at home at weekends people would ask me about the dig: word spreads fast in a rural village and people were fascinated by what I was doing. In those days, Time Team hadnt done its amazing job of public education, and folk in Weston (Hertfordshire) still thought that excavations only happened abroad. I remember explaining to wide-eyed astonishment that I was helping excavate the remains of an Iron Age round-house. To most British people in the early sixties, prehistory was indeed another country: aside from a few students and professionals, nobody knew that there had been houses before the Romans arrived.

I was aged 18, and my tales of the Bedfordshire dig soon became famous in the local pub, the Barley Mow, where a pint of bitter cost 1/10d (roughly 8p). On many nights Id be carried home after too many beers, bought for me by my new-found audience. Today we tend to look back on post-war pub life as male dominated and either stiff or drunken; but in reality, and especially in rural areas at a weekend, the local became a home-from-home for many people. I recall lively domestic arguments between husbands and wives across the dominoes table, and daughters beating their fathers at darts. And yes, boys flirted with girls and teenagers got drunk; but it was all part of pub life and ordinary life, too. It started to dawn on me that history doesnt just have to be about the acts of kings and queens. Details of ordinary people, their lives and homes how their hearths were built, the direction in which their front doors faced were, to me, much more fascinating, simply because here were details that everyone could identify with and recognize.