from
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/20/europe/must-farm-bronze-age-britain-pompeii-scn

Best to go to the citation to see the drawings.

‘Britain’s Pompeii’ reveals Bronze Age village frozen in time
Katie Hunt
By Katie Hunt, CNN
7 minute read
Updated 11:37 AM EDT, Wed March 20, 2024

9 comments
A metal axe head with wooden shaft was among the many well-preserved
artifacts discovered at Must Farm, near Peterborough in the county of
Cambridgeshire in England.
A metal axe head with wooden shaft was among the many well-preserved
artifacts discovered at Must Farm, near Peterborough in the county of
Cambridgeshire in England. Cambridge Archaeological Unit
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CNN
—
It’s late summer 2,850 years ago. A fire engulfs a stilt village perched
above a boggy, slow-moving river that weaves though the wetlands of
eastern England. The tightly packed roundhouses, built from wood, straw,
turf and clay just nine months earlier, go up in flames.

The inhabitants flee, leaving behind all their belongings, including a
wooden spoon in a bowl of half-eaten porridge. There is no time to
rescue the fattened lambs, which are trapped and burnt alive.

The scene is a vivid and poignant snapshot, captured by archaeologists,
of a once thriving community in late Bronze Age Britain known as Must
Farm, near what’s now the town of Peterborough. The research team
published a two-volume monograph on Wednesday that describes their
painstaking $1.4 million (£1.1 million) excavation and analysis of the
site in the county of Cambridgeshire.

Described by the experts involved as an “archaeological nirvana,” the
site is the only one in Britain that lives up to the “Pompeii premise,”
they say, referencing the city forever frozen in time by the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that has yielded unparalleled information about
ancient Rome.

“In a typical Bronze Age site, if you’ve got a house, you’ve probably
got maybe a dozen post holes in the ground and they’re just dark shadows
of where it once stood. If you’re really lucky, you’ll get a couple of
shards of pottery, maybe a pit with a bunch of animal bones. This was
the complete opposite of that process. It was just incredible,” said
Chris Wakefield of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at the University
of Cambridge, an archaeologist and member of the 55-person team that
excavated the site in 2016.

“All the axe marks had been used to shape and sculpt the wood. All of
those looked fresh, like they could have been done last week by
someone,” Wakefield added.

The remarkably preserved condition of the site and its contents enabled
the archaeological team to draw comprehensive new insights into Bronze
Age society — findings that could overturn the current understanding of
what everyday life was like in Britain during the ninth century BC.

Shown here is an artist's illustration of what the inside of the
roundhouses may have looked like.
Shown here is an artist's illustration of what the inside of the
roundhouses may have looked like. Judith Dobie
Must Farm domesticity — and a mystery
The site, which dates to eight centuries before Romans arrived in
Britain, revealed four roundhouses and a square entranceway structure,
which stood approximately 6.5 feet (2 meters) above the riverbed and
were surrounded by a 6.5-foot (2-meter) fence of sharpened posts.

The archaeologists believe the settlement was likely twice as big.
However, quarrying in the 20th century destroyed any other remains.

Though charred from the fire, the remaining buildings and their contents
were extremely well preserved by the oxygen-starved conditions of the
fens, or wetlands, and included many wooden and textile items that
rarely survive in the archaeological record. Together, traces of the
settlement paint a picture of cozy domesticity and relative plenty.

The excavation of the site in 2016 involved a team of 55 people.
The excavation of the site in 2016 involved a team of 55 people.
Cambridge Archaeological Unit
The researchers unearthed 128 ceramic artifacts — jars, bowls, cups and
cookware — and were able to deduce that 64 pots were in use at the time
of fire. The team found some stored pots neatly nested. Textiles found
at the site made from flax linen had a soft, velvety feel with neat
seams and hems, although it wasn’t possible to identify individual
pieces of clothing.

Wooden artifacts included boxes and bowls carved from willow, alder and
maple, 40 bobbins, many with threads still attached, various tools, and
15 wooden buckets.

“One of those buckets … on the bottom of it were loads and loads of cut
marks so we know that people living in that Bronze Age kitchen when they
needed an impromptu chopping board, were just flipping that bucket
upside down and using that as a chopping surface,” Wakefield said.

“It’s those little moments that build together to give a richer, fuller
picture of what was going on.”

Textiles made from flax linen were among the rare finds.
Textiles made from flax linen were among the rare finds. Cambridge
Archaeological Unit
The circumstances of the event that brought it all to a halt are still a
bit of a mystery. The researchers believe the fire took place in late
summer or early autumn because skeletal remains of the lambs kept by one
household showed the animals, typically born in spring, were three
months to six months old.

However, what exactly caused the devastating fire remains unclear. The
blaze could have been accidental or deliberately started. The
researchers uncovered a stack of spears with shafts over 10 feet (3
meters) long at the site, and many experts think that warfare was common
in the time period. The team worked with a forensic fire investigator
but ultimately couldn’t identify a specific “smoking gun” clue pointing
to the cause.

“An archaeological site is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. At a typical site
you have 10 or 20 pieces out of 500,” Wakefield said. “Here we had 250
or 300 pieces and we still couldn’t get the complete picture on how this
big fire broke out.”

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Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory at the
Institute of Archaeology at University College London, described both
the report and the site “as exceptional.” He wasn’t involved in the
research.

“The fire may have been disastrous for the inhabitants but it is a
blessing for archaeologists, a unique snapshot of life in the Bronze
Age,” he said via email.

Upending ideas about Bronze Age society
The contents across the four preserved houses were “remarkably
consistent.” Each one had a tool kit that included sickles, axes, gouges
and handheld razors used to cut hair or cloth. With almost 538 square
feet (50 square meters) of floor space in the largest, each of the
dwellings appeared to have distinct activity zones comparable to rooms
in a modern home.

“By plotting the positions of all these finds — pots, loomweights, tools
and even sheep droppings, the archaeological team have reconstructed the
houses’ internal use of space,” Parker Pearson noted. “The kitchen area
was in the east, the storage and weaving area in the south and southeast
with the penning area for lambs, and the sleeping area in the northwest,
though we don’t know where the doorway was for each house.”

Not all the items were of practical use, such as 49 glass beads plus
others made of amber. Archaeologists also unearthed a woman’s skull,
smooth from touch, possibly a keepsake of a lost loved one. Some of the
items the researchers found will go on display starting April 27 in an
exhibition titled “Introducing Must Farm, a Bronze Age Settlement” at
the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery.

The village's inhabitants only occupied the site for a short time, but
they owned and used many rich and varied objects.
The village's inhabitants only occupied the site for a short time, but
they owned and used many rich and varied objects. Cambridge
Archaeological Unit
Lab analysis of biological remains revealed the types of food the
community once consumed. A pottery bowl imprinted with the finger marks
of its maker held a final meal — a wheat grain porridge mixed with
animal fat. Chemical analyses of the bowls and jars showed traces of
honey along with deer, suggesting the people who used the dishes might
have enjoyed honey-glazed venison.

Ancient excrement found in waste piles below where the houses would have
stood showed that the community kept dogs that fed on scraps from their
owners’ meals. And human fossilized poop, or coprolites, showed that at
least some inhabitants suffered from intestinal worms.

The waste piles, or middens, were one line of evidence that showed how
long the site was occupied, with a thin layer of refuse suggesting the
settlement was built nine months to a year before it went up in flames.
Two other factors supported that line of reasoning, Wakefield said.