With one exception, the uprights of the stone circle were made from the distinctive red-coloured stone that matched the colour of the cairn’s kerbstones. The exception was the recumbent stone, which was in white quartz and was clearly selected to stand out.

Bricks and masonry were ideas imported from the Mediterranean, along with towns, most of which didn’t thrive for very long after the Roman withdrawal. The British had returned to using what they were familiar with: building materials and carpentry that had mostly been developed in later prehistoric times. But people hadn’t forgotten about the Roman

In the popular imagination, the Fens and other wetlands were seen as lawless places where thieves and outlaws ruled the roost and where the few small and isolated communities lived in constant fear of attack. Archaeology and local history, however, have shown that the reality was altogether different. There were some places where it was too wet to

the physical measures needed to keep animals are far more prominent than those for growing crops: gates, byres, droveways and markets last longer in the archaeological record than a few ploughshares, millstones or plough-scratches at the base of the topsoil. That is why our first two decades of research at Fengate, and later at Flag Fen, placed so

But when you design and build your own house you are constantly having to make decisions: do you want this sort of skirting board or that type of door surround? And your bookcases (we have many of them): do you want them a certain size and what sort of depth? We soon appreciated the difference between carpenters, who assembled the timber-built barn

Liminal features in the landscape were often chosen for burials and ceremonial sites. There would have been many complex reasons for this, but essentially it was driven by the belief that they were gaining a measure of control. It was also a way of introducing supernatural forces into the operation and control of human societies. Only important peo

Prehistoric Britain is sometimes portrayed as a thickly wooded and very empty place, where people would have journeyed for days through dark forest paths linking far-flung settlements. I hope this book may already have dispelled some of these myths. For a start, the woodlands that covered the British Isles in post-Ice Age times were far from blanke

the parish church, windmill and lovely Georgian houses of the little Fen village of Moulton

The sheer abundance of struck (i.e. worked) Mesolithic flints found at Blick Mead is remarkable and suggests that this was not a briefly occupied, one-off settlement. By 2018, the excavation had revealed a total of 30,608 Mesolithic flints.8 People returned repeatedly to Blick Mead for some four millennia and they must have been aware that groups o