There is something of a contradiction between the main title of this publication and the archaeology presented within its pages. The book details and interprets an impressively large-scale, decade-long excavation of a low-lying Bronze Age site made up of familiar components: barrows, field systems, and settlement. It is an evidently terrestrial landscape of land enclosure bracketed by circular monuments for the dead and roundhouses for the living – what we might term the full 2nd millennium BC package. Dotted among this sequence were pits and post-holes associated with Beaker pottery, large watering holes (some of which yielded waterlogged wood), and, atop everything, an Iron Age smithy.
The first-rate specialist reports describe the site’s material culture (prehistoric pottery, loomweights, and so on) and palaeoenvironmental evidence. And yet, as with the archaeological features, nothing here shouts a watery environment. Quite the opposite: this 55ha window on to a much larger system of Middle Bronze Age ditch-defined fields and droveways describes, for the most part, a patchwork of pasture with some cereal cultivation, grazed by cattle, sheep, and pigs.
The monograph gets its title from Graham Swift’s novel Waterland, its Fenland location, and the site’s proximity to much deeper contours still submerged below layers of silt and peat. Missing from this account, however, is any sense of depth or altitude: the plans have no contours, the sections no heights. It is as if the site’s topography, like its setting, were taken for granted.
