Present concerns? “Having spent all my life researching the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Britain (4000 to 1000 BC), I decided at the turn of the millennium to broaden my horizons.” He has immense fun teasing specialists of other periods, he says. “Archaeology is far too important to be taken too seriously.” He is reading about “the biggest upsetter of them all” in Darwin: The life of a tormented evolutionist by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Penguin, 1991). Darwin was “an astounding genius whose many achievements simply leave one gasping. As an archaeologist his work on earthworms affects everything I do.”
When not in a trench? You’ll find him in the lambing pens. He and his wife Maisie Taylor have a flock of 120 pure-bred Lleyns. He admires the early animal breeders and is reading Pat Stanley’s Robert Bakewell and the Longhorn Breed of Cattle (Farming Press, 1995).
You’ll find Pryor’s “all-time top 10” books in his book Britain BC (Harper Perennial, 2004).
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