Farmers in Prehistoric BritainFrancis Pryor - regular contributor on Channel 4's Time Team and the man behind the Britain BC and Britain AD television series - maintains that early farming in Britain has been largely misunderstood, due to a loss of contact with the countryside and failure to understand prehistoric farming methods. To redress this problem, this book reconstructs the lives of prehistoric farmers, with the author drawing on his academic research and practical experience, as a professional farmer, to provide details on crop cultivation and flock management. Pryor also shows how, in the millennium leading up to about 700 BC, certain areas of lowland England developed an intensive style of livestock rearing. The success of these prehistoric 'agri-businesses' made many communities extremely prosperous - so prosperous that they were able to bequeath fabulously valuable objects of bronze, iron or even gold to the world of their ancestors. This they did by carefully placing their wealth within rivers, lakes and meres. |
Contents
The illustrations | 7 |
A bridge across the Styx | 131 |
Further afield in time and space | 139 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
Age farming Age field system air photos alluvium ancient archaeological barrows bones Borough Fen Britain Bronze Age droveway Bronze Age field cattle causewayed enclosure cereal community stockyards countryside cropmarks crops dark earth drainage dykeside earlier Neolithic Early Bronze Age earthwork edge enclosure ditch English Heritage entranceway Etton evidence example farmers Fengate Fenland Flag Fen Flag Fen basin flock floodplain forest grass gravel grazing ground hedges herd hillfort hunter-fisher hunter-gatherer important intensive livestock farming Iron Age island lambs land large numbers Late Bronze Age later Lincolnshire livestock lowland Main Drove Maxey meat medieval Mesolithic modern monuments mouflon numbers of animals organised paddocks partition perhaps Peterborough population post alignment pottery prehistoric probably quern revealed river river Welland settlement sheep side soil suggest Thames valley timbers trees wave of advance Welland Bank Quarry Welland valley West Deeping wood