Scenes from Prehistoric Life

Scenes from Prehistoric Life
Author: Francis Pryor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-08-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789544165

An invigorating journey through Britain's prehistoric landscape, and an insight into the lives of its inhabitants. 'Highly compelling' Spectator, Books of the Year 'An evocative foray into the prehistoric past' BBC Countryfile Magazine 'Vividly relating what life was like in pre-Roman Britain' Choice Magazine 'Makes life in Britain BC often sound rather more appealing than the frenetic and anxious 21st century!' Daily Mail In Scenes from Prehistoric Life, the distinguished archaeologist Francis Pryor paints a vivid picture of British and Irish prehistory, from the Old Stone Age (about one million years ago) to the arrival of the Romans in AD 43, in a sequence of fifteen profiles of ancient landscapes. Whether writing about the early human family who trod the estuarine muds of Happisburgh in Norfolk c.900,000 BC, the craftsmen who built a wooden trackway in the Somerset Levels early in the fourth millennium BC, or the Iron Age denizens of Britain's first towns, Pryor uses excavations and surveys to uncover the daily routines of our ancient ancestors. By revealing how our prehistoric forebears coped with both simple practical problems and more existential challenges, Francis Pryor offers remarkable insights into the long and unrecorded centuries of our early history, and a convincing, well-attested and movingly human portrait of prehistoric life as it was really lived.

Summary of Francis Pryor's Scenes from Prehistoric Life

Summary of Francis Pryor's Scenes from Prehistoric Life
Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2022-07-21T22:59:00Z
Genre: History
ISBN:

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The past was governed by the same rules as the present, and this was known as uniformitarianism. It was first developed by the Scottish geologist James Hutton in the late eighteenth century, and culminated in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, first published in 1830. #2 Archaeology is a science-based humanity that sets out to reveal the way various communities interacted and how this in turn led to their rise or decline. But you cannot do this simply by studying artifacts. You must also pay attention to the landscapes where people lived. #3 The seaside towns and villages of East Anglia have a charm all of their own. I have a particular fondness for the cliffs at the little village of Dunwich, in Suffolk, with their thick woods that allow tantalizing glimpses of the sea far below. #4 The footprints at Goldcliff in the Severn Estuary were made around 4700 BC, at the end of the Mesolithic, but the ones at Happisburgh were made by a family group who were out foraging for food along the tidal river.

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

Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain
Author: Francis Pryor
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0007380828

A lively and authoritative investigation into the lives of our ancestors, based on the revolution in the field of Bronze Age archaeology which has been taking place in Norfolk and the Fenlands over the last twenty years, and in which the author has played a central role.

Home

Home
Author: Francis Pryor
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2014-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0141971339

In Home Francis Pryor, author of The Making of the British Landscape, archaeologist and broadcaster, takes us on his lifetime's quest: to discover the origins of family life in prehistoric Britain Francis Pryor's search for the origins of our island story has been the quest of a lifetime. In Home, the Time Team expert explores the first nine thousand years of life in Britain, from the retreat of the glaciers to the Romans' departure. Tracing the settlement of domestic communities, he shows how archaeology enables us to reconstruct the evolution of habits, traditions and customs. But this, too, is Francis Pryor's own story: of his passion for unearthing our past, from Yorkshire to the west country, Lincolnshire to Wales, digging in freezing winters, arid summers, mud and hurricanes, through frustrated journeys and euphoric discoveries. Evocative and intimate, Home shows how, in going about their daily existence, our prehistoric ancestors created the institution that remains at the heart of the way we live now: the family. 'Under his gaze, the land starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today . . . Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it' - Guardian Former president of the Council for British Archaeology, Dr Francis Pryor has spent over thirty years studying our prehistory. He has excavated sites as diverse as Bronze Age farms, field systems and entire Iron Age villages. He appears frequently on TV's Time Team and is the author of The Making of the British Landscape, Seahenge, as well as Britain BC and Britain AD, both of which he adapted and presented as Channel 4 series.

The Fens

The Fens
Author: Francis Pryor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786692236

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. 'Francis Pryor brings the magic of the Fens to life in a deeply personal and utterly enthralling way' TONY ROBINSON. 'Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it' GUARDIAN. Inland from the Wash, on England's eastern cost, crisscrossed by substantial rivers and punctuated by soaring church spires, are the low-lying, marshy and mysterious Fens. Formed by marine and freshwater flooding, and historically wealthy owing to the fertility of their soils, the Fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are one of the most distinctive, neglected and extraordinary regions of England. Francis Pryor has the most intimate of connections with this landscape. For some forty years he has dug its soils as a working archaeologist – making ground-breaking discoveries about the nature of prehistoric settlement in the area – and raising sheep in the flower-growing country between Spalding and Wisbech. In The Fens, he counterpoints the history of the Fenland landscape and its transformation – from Bronze age field systems to Iron Age hillforts; from the rise of prosperous towns such as King's Lynn, Ely and Cambridge to the ambitious drainage projects that created the Old and New Bedford Rivers – with the story of his own discovery of it as an archaeologist. Affectionate, richly informative and deftly executed, The Fens weaves together strands of archaeology, history and personal experience into a satisfying narrative portrait of a complex and threatened landscape.

Britain B.C.

Britain B.C.
Author: Francis Pryor
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN:

Based on new archaeological finds, this book introduces a novel rethinking of the whole of British history before the coming of the Romans. So many extraordinary archaeological discoveries (many of them involving the author) have been made since the early 1970s that our whole understanding of British prehistory needs to be updated. So far only the specialists have twigged on to these developments; now, Francis Pryor broadcasts them to a much wider, general audience. Aided by aerial photography, coastal erosion (which has helped expose such coastal sites as Seahenge) and new planning legislation which requires developers to excavate the land they build on, archaeologists have unearthed a far more sophisticated life among the Ancient Britons than has been previously supposed. Far from being the woaded barbarians of Roman propaganda, we Brits had our own religion, laws, crafts, arts, trade, farms, priesthood and royalty. And the Scots, English and Welsh were fundamentally one and the same people.

Flag Fen

Flag Fen
Author: Francis Pryor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

Francis Pryor has been working at the late Bronze Age site of Flag Fen, near Peterborough, for over thirty years and, during that time, it has emerged as one of the most important and most understood prehistoric landscapes in Britain.

Britain AD

Britain AD
Author: Francis Pryor
Publisher: HarperCollins (UK)
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN:

In this book, which accompanies and expands on his Channel 4 television series, leading archaeologist Francis Pryor retells the story of King Arthur, legendary king of the Britons, tracing it back to its Bronze Age originsThe legend of King Arthur and Camelot is one of the most enduring in Britain's history, spanning centuries and surviving invasions by Angles, Vikings and Normans. In his latest book Francis Pryor -- one of Britain's most celebrated archaeologists and author of the acclaimed Britain BC and Seahenge -- traces the story of Arthur back to its ancient origins. Putting forth the compelling idea that most of the key elements of the Arthurian legends are deeply rooted in Bronze and Iron Ages (the sword Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, the Sword in the Stone and so on), Pryor argues that the legends' survival mirrors a flourishing, indigenous culture that endured through the Roman occupation of Britain, and the subsequent invasions of the so-called Dark Ages.

Recreating the Past

Recreating the Past
Author: Victor G. Ambrus
Publisher: History Press (SC)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Archaeological illustration
ISBN: 9780752450339

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Modern Times

Modern Times
Author: Jacques Ranciere
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 183976323X

The critique of modernist ideology from France's leading radical theorist In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time. Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg’s modernism, still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet, implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.