Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain. Francis Pryor

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      FIG 5 Ground plan of Fengate Site 11, showing the position of archaeological trenches

      When I examined the records further, it became clear that the Early Bronze Age Beaker pottery came from this house and from features, such as fireplaces, that may have been part of it. There was no reason to suppose that the rectangular enclosure had anything to do with the house at all. They could have been constructed centuries, even millennia apart.

      It felt good to have sorted this little problem out. But why didn’t I pursue the matter further? What about the rectangular enclosure, for Heaven’s sake? I suppose I was too keen to get back to the writing of those two great volumes. But I had missed a trick. It was to be another five years before the next piece in the jigsaw fell into place.

      I was spending the weekend with the eminent authority on the Neolithic period, Dr Ian Kinnes, at his house in Guildford. On the dinner table before us were drawings of Neolithic pottery from Etton, the site I was then digging and which I’ll discuss later. The drawings were annotated in Ian’s elegant italic hand, and suddenly I remembered the handwriting in the Site 11 notebook. Was Ian the supervisor who made those notes, I asked. He was. It was a part-time job he’d done while he was a post-graduate student at Cambridge.

      He couldn’t remember why his sketch-plan had been crossed out, and he shared my view that if the structure was indeed a Bronze Age roundhouse, then it went with the later fields, and not with the enclosure.

      I was thinking aloud. ‘So that leaves the enclosure high and dry, I suppose?’

      ‘Oh, no it doesn’t,’ he said. ‘Quite the opposite. That house was always a problem. Take the house away, and you’re left with a mortuary enclosure – like the ones that turned up the other day on air photos in Essex.’

      An article about the Essex enclosures had recently appeared in an academic journal, so I was familiar with what he was talking about. Mortuary enclosures and structures were special places that were constructed in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age to receive recently deceased corpses. By and large, they do not seem to have been used as permanent resting places, although burials are often found in them. Sometimes, indeed quite often, the enclosure takes the form of a surrounding wooden wall, or even a roofed building. More often than not, the original enclosure may become incorporated within a later burial mound, or barrow. In short, they are complicated sites and are probably best considered one at a time, as individuals.

      As soon as I returned home, I unrolled my well-used Master Plan, which was now rather grubby and dog-eared. I had not added the Site 11 enclosure to it, as my team hadn’t dug it. As I was drawing it in in its rightful place, I was immediately aware that its alignment precisely followed that of the ‘house’ and the pair of shallow ditches at Vicarage Farm. All four Neolithic sites appeared to process across the Fengate landscape in an orderly row, from north-east to south-west. It was quite extraordinary.

      By this time I had come to the conclusion that the ‘house’ we had dug in 1972 was a mortuary structure, but without a body. Some mortuary structures, indeed most barrows as well, are thought deliberately to echo the houses of the living – as Houses of the Dead. Certainly the rich finds from the ‘house’ would be appropriate for a mortuary house.