This is what rural life was like in Britain 3,000 years ago

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Three thousand years ago, a small, wealthy farming community briefly flourished in the freshwater marshes of eastern England. The inhabitants lived in a cluster of round thatched houses, built on wood stilts over the channel of the River Nene flowing into the North Sea. They wore clothes manufactured from effective linen, with folds and fringes at the underside; were exchanged for glass and amber beads imported from places as distant as today’s Iran; he drank from delicate clay poppy cups; they ate wild boar and venison glazed with honey and fed the dogs with table scraps.

Within a 12 months of construction, this prehistoric idyll met a dramatic end. A catastrophic fire tore through the complex; buildings collapsed and residents fled, abandoning their clothes, tools and weapons. Everything, including the porridge left in the pots, crashed through the burning wicker floor into the thick, sticky patches of reeds below and remained there. Eventually the objects sank, hidden and buried, in greater than six feet of oozing peat and silt. The river step by step moved away from the camp, however the rubble remained intact for nearly 3,000 years, preserving a record of on a regular basis life in late Bronze Age Britain, from 2500 BC to 800 BC

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This frozen moment in time is the topic of two monographs published on Tuesday by the University of Cambridge. Based on a 10-month excavation at what is now often called Must Farm Quarry, a submerged and exquisitely preserved settlement in the shadow of a potato chip factory 75 miles north of London, the research is as detailed as a forensic crime scene investigation report. One article, which is a synthesis of the location, is 323 pages long; the second, intended for specialists, is almost 1,000 pages longer.

“It didn’t feel like archeology,” said Mark Knight, director of the project and one among the paper’s authors. “At times the excavation felt a bit rude and intrusive, as if we showed up after a tragedy, searched through someone’s belongings, and took a peek at what they were doing one day in 850 BC.”

Evidence of Bronze Age life in Britain traditionally comes from fortified structures and spiritual sites, which are sometimes positioned on high, dry land. Most of the clues are pottery, flint tools and bones. “We usually have to work with small fragments and barely visible remains of houses and read between the lines,” said Harry Fokkens, an archaeologist at Leiden University. The belief that such places were once bustling settlements requires a little bit of imagination.

Paul Pettitt, a Paleolithic archaeologist on the University of Durham who was not involved in the brand new research, said the monograph – a case study of remarkable conservation coupled with highly expert excavations – was a reminder that households in the period were “colourful, rich , various and not just about metal weapons, as the public’s fondness for metal detecting would suggest.”

Francis Pryor, the British archaeologist best known for the 1982 discovery of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age site one mile from Must Farm, added: “The Must Farm Report changes our understanding of British society in the millennium before the Roman Conquest, 2,000 years ago . Far from primitive, Bronze Age societies lived in harmony with their neighbors, enjoying life in warm, dry homes and excellent food.”

Just ten years ago, the so-called Pompeii of the Bogs lay buried in a clay brick quarry. The original settlement is believed to have been twice as large – 20th-century mining destroyed half the archaeological site – and may have housed several dozen people in family units.

Four solid circular houses remain and a small square entrance structure built on a wooden platform and surrounded by a six-foot-high palisade of sharpened ash posts, a barrier no doubt intended for defense. The green wood, fresh wood chips, and lack of repairs, reconstruction, or insect damage suggested that the complex was relatively new at the time of the fire.

Analysis of the outermost rings of burned hardwoods indicated that the starting date was late fall or early winter, while skeletons of three- to six-month-old lambs and charred larvae of a local species of flea suggested that the settlement was destroyed in summer or early fall.

By contrasting the material culture of these ancient Britons, the study reveals how houses and the household items they contained were built, what the inhabitants ate, and how their clothes were made.

Archaeologists discovered, among others: 180 textile and fibrous products (yarn, cloth, woven nets), 160 wooden artifacts (spools, benches, handles for metal tools and wheels), 120 ceramic vessels (bowls, jars, jugs) and 90 pieces of metalwork (sickles, axes, chisels , dagger, hand-held hair-cutting razor). The multitude of beads that formed part of the elaborate necklace indicated a level of sophistication rarely associated with Bronze Age England.

“The interesting thing is that this is an inventory of five Bronze Age households,” Knight said. “It was like everyone had a wedding list for a high-end department store.”

Although bones of fish, cattle, sheep and pigs were pulled from the thicket (a halo of garbage thrown from the huts above), there was no evidence of human casualties. The skull of a young woman was found outside the house, but because it had been polished by repeated touching, investigators decided it was a souvenir or ritual decoration rather than a battle trophy. “Auntie’s skull stuck to the front door,” Mr. Knight speculated.

Interest in Must Farm first arose in 1999, when an archaeologist from the University of Cambridge noticed a series of oak pillars protruding from clay deposits in a quarry. Dendrochronology dated the poles to prehistoric times, and excitement ran high when initial excavations uncovered bronze fish traps, swords and spearheads.

The discovery of nine log boats – dugout canoes up to 28 feet long – buried in the mud pointed to the vast wetlands that once covered the region. “Over the short existence of this site, there have been many boat trips through the reed swamps into the forests,” said Chris Wakefield, an archaeologist involved in the project. “In the summer, that meant walking through clouds of mosquitoes.”

Extensive research by the University of Cambridge in 2015 and 2016 uncovered a palisade fence, light walkways, the ruins of a circular roof and walls made of woven willow branches called wickerwork. The way the beams fell – some vertically, others in eerie, geometric lines – allowed researchers to map the layout of the circular architecture. One of the homes was approximately 500 square feet in size and appeared to have distinct “activity areas” comparable to rooms in a modern home.

Thatched roofs had three storeys. A base layer of insulating straw was topped with turf – soil made of dead but not completely decayed plants – and finished with clay that could form a chimney or flue near the top of the roof. “The people were confident and talented home builders,” Knight said. “They had a design that worked perfectly for the sunken landscape.”

Bronze knives, wooden plates and clay pots were stored in a room that was probably the kitchen of one of the houses, some of which were even placed in nests. “There was a simple aesthetic to the work that felt cohesive and unified,” Knight said. The clay bowl, which had the maker’s fingerprints on it, still contained the last meal: porridge made from wheat grains mixed with animal fat, probably from a goat or deer. The spatula rested against the inside of the vessel.

The craftsmanship of the recovered relics and the presence of log boats, perhaps the only reliable means of transportation, have led researchers to conclude that the site may not have been an isolated outpost, but a bustling trade crossroads. “There was a sense that these early bog dwellers were part of the highest class of society and had access to everything that was available at the time,” Knight said. “At the end of the Bronze Age, the rivers of eastern England were a place of trade and connection; places like Stonehenge were now on the periphery.”

The Must Farm community harvested crops and cut down trees on the nearest dry land. Sheep and cattle also grazed there. Scientists estimate that wild boars and deer were hunted in local forests – within a two-mile radius of the enclosure. “The irony is that the community wanted to live on the water and its economy was land-based,” Knight said.

Apparently there was so much food that the villagers almost ignored the fish, eels and waterfowl swimming around the settlement’s foundations. Turns out, with good reason: sanitation was a precarious proposition in wetlands. Sausage-shaped balls found in the settlement’s murky sediment turned out to be fossils of dog and human feces, many of them washed down with eggs of fish tapeworms and giant kidney worms acquired while feeding in stagnant waterways. Tapeworms are flat, ribbon-like parasites that wrap around people’s intestines and can grow to a length of 30 feet. Kidney worms stop at a depth of three feet, but they can destroy vital organs.

Two questions remain unanswered in Cambridge’s otherwise exhaustive monographs: was the fire the result of an accident or an attack by rivals who may have envied the inhabitants’ wealth? And why didn’t any of the Bronze Age people bother to recover all those soggy things?

“Such a settlement would have lasted perhaps a generation, and the individuals who built it had obviously built similar structures before,” said David Gibson, an archaeologist at Cambridge who collaborated on the study. “It may have been that after the fire they just started over.”

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