325 pages
Published 2021
Read from August 28 to September 11
Rating: 3 out of 5
I knew I’d have issues with this author in the introduction, when he pointedly used BC in place of BCE. The first chapter confirmed it, as he refused to entertain the notion that Stone Age flint-knappers and kill-butchers could be anything other than male.
These fusty attitudes predisposed me to dislike Pryor’s narration, which certainly reads like a television presenter’s voice. He sometimes spends more time digressing about his own life and experiences as a rural sheep farmer than he does documenting sites and explaining landscapes. You can just imagine it as a relatable voice-over to make the past real for the pub-going masses.
Still, there’s some fascinating stuff here. I love both landscape archaeology and experimental archaeology, and Pryor brings viewpoints from both to the prehistoric sweep of Britain. Pryor has a tendency to present an analogy from modern anthropology or contemporary rural life and treat it as convincing, without much in the way of evidence. But as an exercise in thinking about bygone life and ancient conceptualizations of landscape, it’s a fine starting point.
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