Farmers in Prehistoric Britain

Francis 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.