Francis Pryor | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Pryor in 2007 | |
| Born | Francis Manning Marlborough Pryor (1945-01-13)13 January 1945 (age 80) |
| Education | Eton College |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Occupation(s) | Archaeologist,Prehistorian |
| Known for | Flag Fen,Time Team |
| Spouse | Maisie Taylor |
| Children | 1 |
Francis Manning Marlborough PryorMBE FSA (born 13 January 1945) is an Englisharchaeologist specialising in the study of theBronze andIron Ages in Britain. He is best known for his discovery and excavation ofFlag Fen, a Bronze Agearchaeological site nearPeterborough, as well as for his frequent appearances on theChannel 4 television seriesTime Team.[1][2]
Born to aBurke's Landed Gentry[3] family, Pryor attendedEton College before going on to study archaeology atTrinity College, Cambridge. With his first wife, Sylvia Page, he moved to Canada, where he worked as a technician at theRoyal Ontario Museum for a year before returning to Britain.
He has now retired from full-time field archaeology but still appears on television and writes books as well as being a working sheep farmer.
Pryor is the son of Barbara Helen Robertson and Robert Matthew Marlborough Pryor MBE TD (known as Matthew), as well as being the grandson ofWalter Marlborough Pryor DSO DL JP; both his grandfather and father had beenBritish Army officers, serving in theFirst andSecond World Wars respectively.[3] He was educated at the privateTemple Grove School inEast Sussex, then atEton College alongside his first cousin William Pryor,[4] before studying archaeology atTrinity College, Cambridge, gaining a PhD in 1985.
He married Sylvia in 1969 and emigrated with her toToronto,Ontario, Canada, on alanded immigrant scheme. There he started working at theRoyal Ontario Museum as technician, working forDoug Tushingham, who helped fund Pryor's first project in the United Kingdom. This was atNorth Elmham in Norfolk, and the excavation was directed by Peter Wade-Martins, who exposed Pryor to the benefit of opening large-area excavations.
Pryor returned to the UK in 1970, where the construction of thenew town atPeterborough offered the opportunity to do large-scale archaeology ahead of the planned development work. Between 1970 and 1978 he alternated between digs in the UK and writing up the excavation reports and giving presentations on his work in Canada. Pryor and his first wife were divorced in 1977, and during the course of these projects he met his second wife, Maisie Taylor, an expert in prehistoric wood, who later also appeared onTime Team; they worked together on the series of projects in the Peterborough area, the most famous of which isFlag Fen. He has a daughter, Amy, from his first marriage. He was a founding member of theInstitute of Field Archaeologists in 1982.
In 1991 he published his first book about Flag Fen, entitledFlag Fen: Prehistoric Fenland Centre, for a series co-produced byEnglish Heritage andB.T. Batsford. The final monograph on the site – entitledThe Flag Fen Basin: Archaeology and environment of a Fenland Landscape – was published in 2001 as an English Heritage Archaeological Report. Pryor followed this with a third book on the site, published byTempus in 2005. EntitledFlag Fen: Life and Death of a Prehistoric Landscape, it represented what he considered to be a "major revision" of his 1991 work, for instance rejecting the earlier ‘lake village’ concept.[5]Pryor was awarded anMBE "for services to tourism" in the1999 Queen's Birthday Honours.[6]
In the early 2000s he made two short series forChannel 4, Britain BC (2003) and Britain AD (2004), where he argued that historic British cultural change had been throughcultural adoption by a genetically unchanged population rather thanlarge-scale migration.
Since his retirement from archaeology Pryor has devoted his time to sheep farming, being the owner of 40 acres of fenland pasture inLincolnshire. In an interview with theFinancial Times he asserted that through this vocation he felt a connection with the people of Bronze Age Britain, who also lived off this form of subsistence, before also expressing his opinion thathuman overpopulation represented a significant threat to the human species, urging people to have fewer children and eat less meat.[7]
One of Pryor's four times great grandfathers wasSamuel Hoare, the Quaker and founding member of theSociety for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.[citation needed]
