A review by tamarant4
Home: A Time Traveller's Tales from Britain's Prehistory by Francis Pryor

informative reflective slow-paced

3.75

..what we might loosely term ‘religion’ was increasing in importance. But instead of being removed from daily life to somewhere less accessible, more and more remote, more liminal, it was brought closer to home, because that was where it was needed. [loc. 3445]

I've read and enjoyed a couple of Pryor's other books (Britain BC and Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans) so it's probably not surprising that some parts of this engaging book, which Pryor describes as being 'about home and family life and the way ordinary people managed their affairs in the nine or so millennia between the end of the Ice Age and the coming of the Romans', felt familiar. He focuses closely on Britain, and on the archaeological record: there are many anecdotes about his own work in the field -- and I do mean in the field, and in the fen. He's fascinated by the ways in which the lives of prehistoric Britons can be understood from the remains of houses, places of worship and boundaries.

Pryor's overarching theme here is that it was families and small communities, rather than an elite class of warriors and leaders, who drove most of daily life during British prehistory. He posits a major change around 1500BC (the end of the Early Bronze Age), when some kind of religious 'revolution' seems to have occurred: the grander ritual sites, such as barrows and henges, were abandoned, and smaller and more community-based rituals ('often based around water ... but show clear links to aspects of ordinary domestic life') became commonplace.

Pryor is at his best when he conveys the excitement of archaeology: not the grinding monotony of trowel-work, but moments like seeing Mesolithic footprints, left by adults and children in the mud of the Severn. "I found it hard to accept that those footprints had survived for perhaps seven thousand years and then been exposed for just two or three hours, before the next tide washed them away, for ever.' [loc. 1543] In Home, he isn't attempting an objective, scholarly review of the evidence, but a very personal and 'bottom-up' account of the archaeological record and his feelings about it. I disagreed with some of his more sweeping statements ('had the Romans not invaded in AD 43, I’m in little doubt that Britain’s subsequent history would not have been adversely affected' [loc. 4882]), but it felt more like a friendly argument than an author enforcing his views.

Fulfils the ‘moment’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, just because of that bit about the footprints.