Extraordinary insights into everyday Bronze Age life
Between 2015 and 2016, Cambridge Archaeological Unit excavated Britain’s most completely preserved prehistoric settlement outside Whittlesey, near Peterborough. As a time-capsule of late Bronze Age life, Must Farm is unique; now, with post-excavation analysis published in full, Carly Hilts explores how the site’s significance lies in its ordinariness.
Such was the vibrancy of this material assemblage, there was a sense upon excavating the settlement that the Bronze Age people had only just left; that you could almost sense the smells, colours, and wonders of their world – the musk of the damp setting, the crunch of dogs gnawing on pike heads, the fleecy warmth of lambs, the sharp milkiness of brewed porridge, the glint of bronze tools hanging on the wattle walls, the dull thud of a fallen pot.’ So write the authors of Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement, a two-volume monograph recently published by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (see ‘Further information’ on p.26). The books set out the illuminating insights that have been gleaned from a late Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire.
The first hints of Bronze Age activity on the site (which lies on the south-east edge of the Flag Fen Basin) had emerged in the 1970s, when quarrying brought fragments of metalwork and pottery to the surface; further clues came in 1999, when local archaeologist Martin Redding spotted a series of stumps sticking out of a flooded quarry pit. Evaluations by Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) followed in 2004 and 2006, but with no immediate threat to the underlying remains they were left largely undisturbed, albeit with careful monitoring in place. The results of the monitoring and their interpretation were equivocal, and therefore an agreement was reached between Forterra and Historic England to excavate the potentially at-risk remains.
When we documented this excavation and early interpretations of Must Farm in CA 312 and 314, the extent of the emerging archaeology was already exciting: the remains of entire collapsed structures; a wealth of artefacts owned by their inhabitants; and tantalisingly tactile traces of the food this community had eaten, the crafts they had carried out, and the far-reaching trade networks they had accessed before a devastating fire forced them to flee their homes forever. Now, with analysis published in full, the unprecedented level of detail that Must Farm provides, and its potential to challenge long-held assumptions about late Bronze Age life, is dazzlingly clear.
A short-lived settlement
The site was once home to a cluster of structures that stood on stilts above a freshwater ribbon running through the reed swamp. This watercourse (a prehistoric tributary of the Nene) was broad, navigable, and – crucially for our purposes – very slow-flowing. The settlement had not stood for long before it was destroyed in a single catastrophic episode: fire tore through its buildings, consuming floors and collapsing timbers. Structural remains and artefacts alike plunged straight downwards into the sluggish waters below, where they barely shifted before they were buried in soft sediments, preserving detailed floorplans for archaeologists to reconstruct millennia later.
When did these events take place? Dating evidence for the settlement’s construction centres on c.850 BC, and dendrochronological analysis of timbers indicates that they all came from trees felled in the same year, between September and March, perhaps suggesting that the structures had been built at roughly the same time. The fact that the timbers have not been burrowed by woodworm or bark beetles indicates that they had only been in place for a short period before the fire, CAU note. As for when the fatal fire took place, the presence of young (3- to 6-month-old) lambs and stockpiles of flax seeds (a crop harvested in mid-/late August) on the site, together with a striking scarcity of fruit stones, indicates that the site’s occupation had been concentrated in the spring and early summer, with a probable end date in the late summer or early autumn.
The settlement’s short life is reflected in its shallow stratigraphy: there are only three main layers – representing construction, occupation, and fiery demise – and their combined depth is just 0.15-0.35m. In some places, unburnt woodchips from the shaping of structural timbers are separated from charred material by just a few millimetres of silt. Within these layers, the team have been able to distinguish the charred items that were lost at the time of the fire from the objects that had been thrown away during the settlement’s lifetime. Taken together, they form the largest late Bronze Age domestic assemblage ever found in Britain: an impressive inventory including 128 pottery vessels, 95 pieces of metalwork, at least 56 beads of various materials, and thousands of animal bones; as well as a diverse array of organic items that seldom survive on dry-land sites, among them 193 wooden artefacts ranging from tiny bobbins to cartwheels; and 155 fragments of fibre and textile, from balls of yarn to some of the finest cloth ever found in Bronze Age Europe.
Resurrecting sunken structures
What can be said about the settlement itself? The stumps of hundreds of piles pick out the footprints of structures, as well as the line of a tall palisade that once enclosed them, and over and around these lay collapsed timbers, roofing materials, and wattle flooring. From this mass of material, the team have identified five individual structures covering an area of 43m by 18m, but the settlement may have originally been more substantial, as its northern portion was truncated by historical quarrying.
Four of the structures are roundhouses, arranged in apparent pairs (Structures 1 and 3, and Structures 2 and 5), while Structure 4 is more rectangular in form, wedged somewhat awkwardly in the middle. Taking as a model Structure 1 – one of the best-preserved – we can tease apart their construction sequence. First, two concentric rings of evenly spread oak piles were driven into the riverbed, and their tops were linked with horizontal beams, each carefully mortised using metal gouges or chisels. On top of these the floors were laid – not solid planking, but a series of lightweight alder poles supporting wattle panels that were possibly covered with clay and matting made of straw, bracken, or reeds (which would explain why they burnt through so quickly). The walls of the buildings were made of wattle, too, and these were crowned with conical roofs formed from alder and ash rafters interwoven with a lattice of willow
rods, possibly topped with turf.
Surviving tool marks attest to the use of axes or adzes to fell the timbers. Axes were also employed in sharpening the ends of piles. Pleasingly, multiple examples of each of the implements identified have been recovered. There is no sign that metal tools were used to split the timbers, so this was probably done using wooden wedges and stone mauls. We can tell that, other than the roundhouses’ ring-beams, structural timbers were not mortised but carefully shaped to rest together, secured not
with pegs or treenails, but with twisted withy bindings.
Structure 4 was different in design, but featured a similar arrangement of concentric lines of piles. Its shape (unusual, but not unprecedented on late Bronze Age sites) may have been influenced by the available space; it is thought that this building was a slightly latter addition, being built over Structure 1’s midden and having not had time to accumulate a refuse heap of its own – but, if so, its timbers still came from trees felled in the same year as those of its neighbours, and debris from its construction
was found in the same horizon as the other structures.
Light walkways of wattle scaffolding provided paths between the lofty buildings, while the entire settlement was surrounded by a wall of timber posts, their sharpened tops rising c.2m above the riverbed. The line of this palisade had first been sketched out using oak ‘marker’ piles placed at regular intervals,
and then each gap was filled with ash uprights. Within the excavated area, 18 oak and 226 ash poles were identified, forming an unbroken wall 49.8m long, but it is thought that the complete oval would have enclosed an area of at least 600m2, with another wattle walkway running around its interior.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CA 412. Read on in the magazine, or click here to read it online at The Past, where you can read all of the Current Archaeology articles in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current World Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and Military History Matters.
