This wonderful book is published in 2018, at a time when Britain is convulsed over questions of identity, trying to forge a sustainable future whilst faced with alarming anxieties and insecurities. And here are these two eloquent men, Ray and Thomas, mining our deep history and finding evidence of migrations and climate change, trade routes and new technologies, new patterns of food and farming, clear practices of government and belief. Neolithic Britain suddenly seems thrillingly familiar.
Time is the great theme of the book. We begin to understand not only how we might see our modern world in the context of a society that evolved between six and four thousand years ago, but also, and spectacularly, how those ancestors might have understood and celebrated their own sense of the past. The authors convey brilliantly the ways in which memory and commemoration are captured in the life of household objects, rituals, and architecture.
There’s a joy in finding history told here not by ‘the victors’ but by the scientists and the storytellers. For this lay reader, one of the pleasures of the book is how—at a fingertip level—these archaeologists work, and the sophistication with which modern technology helps them clarify what they find. This pleasure is redoubled by the dialogue that ensues about interpretation. In the dynamic exchange of ideas Ray and Thomas keep the past with us, part of our contemporary reality.
There’s a delightful irony in the way this is the written history that itself was a technology unavailable to the people whose story they tell. The book’s illustrations and photographs serve as vivid representation of the objects and artefacts and traces of lives that unearth their truths. At best, it gives the reader not the results of Ray and Thomas’s archaeology, but the experience of being part of their excavations and discoveries.
There’s a nagging sense, though, whether you have dipped into this book over months or wolfed it at one sitting, that it isn’t the last word on the subject. Rather, it feels like the starting point for a conversation about who we are. It’s a conversation with two exceptional guides who inform our understanding of humanity through their curiosity about the nature of evidence and their reading of stone, and land, and water. It’s the story of civilization.
Peter Florence
Director,
Hay Festival