Landscape in Britain: Pride of place Home: A Time Traveller's Tales from Britain's Prehistory. By Francis Pryor. Allen Lane; 320 pages; £20. Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place. By Philip Marsden. Granta; 348 pages; £20. TWO new books approach British history by offering different perspectives on the question of belonging and continuity. One of them is even called "Home," and for both authors the building or restoration of their own houses is woven into the feelings they have for their subject. Francis Pryor is an archaeologist of British prehistory who has excavated Neolithic and Bronze Age sites at Etton and Flag Fen in Cambridgeshire. "Home" is a rambling, conversational book, but it carries at its heart a strong conviction: that prehistoric Britain organised itself from the "bottom up," as the author puts it, starting with the family. Mr Pryor rejects the Hobbesian view of prehistory as nasty, brutish and short. The evidence from as early as the ninth millennium BC shows signs of order, stability and even comfort. All of which, he admits, sounds like motherhood and apple pie, but he offers it as a challenge to the more conventional approach to history that focuses on the rulers rather than the ruled. There is no archaeological proof for hierarchies and elites, he says. Nor do the great structured landscapes of Wiltshire, with their henges, avenues and barrows, necessarily suggest them. In that sense, this is a political book, and Mr Pryor often refers to modern political or social conditions. At the same time he is fascinated by the most remote and mysterious aspects of prehistory. He has looked hard at things, at their exact positions and orientations, at upside-down pots in ditches, at broken swords in fen-water, at a piece of string, a knife eased from its hilt, a quern stone (a type of grindstone) set edgeways into the earth - all offerings of some sort. He has wondered about them, as he has about the solar alignment of Iron Age roundhouses. And curiously, it is here, in his thoughts about their sense of time and death and memory, that he brings those distant people closest. Mr Pryor's connection with the past is through human beings. Finding a quern stone in an expected spot raises the hairs on the back of his neck - "as if I had been communicating directly with the people who buried it." In "Rising Ground," a book essentially about the spirit of place, Philip Marsden's connection is through landscape, particularly in Cornwall where he lives and the Mendips where he grew up. He makes a distinction between "space" and "place." "Space" is an abstraction, "a template which can be dropped over any point on the earth's surface." "Place" is particular, untransferable, something to which it is possible to belong. It's a "feeling in the bones," as Peter Lanyon, a Cornish painter, has it. That is how Mr Marsden feels place: Leskernick Hill on Bodmin Moor, for example, ringed by higher hills and, on the skyline, 21 cairns which seem to scrutinise him "like the gaze of high-hung portraits in an ancestral home." He has a gift, not only for language and metaphor, but also for imagining places as they have felt to others. On Bodmin Moor he follows ancient sightlines with Neolithic eyes; in china-clay country, with its ghostly pale workings, he enters the apocalyptic mind of Jack Clemo, a Cornish poet; at Glastonbury he thinks of John Leland, topographist to Henry VIII, who was overwhelmed on a visit to the abbey by "an awe or stupor of some kind." "Rising Ground" is full of people like this, overcome by a sense of "intense connectivity." Here are striding parsons, botanising antiquarians, madmen, painters and poets. Tramping the country, searching local archives for "the truths to be found in...dry documents and damp valleys," Mr Marsden recreates their worlds - and in the process, finds a Cornwall of his own.