This is what life was like in British villages 3,000 years ago

Three millennia ago, a small, prosperous farming community briefly flourished in the freshwater marshes of eastern England.

The inhabitants lived in a cluster of round thatched houses built on wooden stilts above a channel of the River Nene, which flows into the North Sea.

They wore dresses of fine linen, with pleats and tasseled hems; exchanged for glass beads and amber imported from distant places such as present-day Iran; They drank from delicate earthenware cups shaped like poppy heads.

They dined on wild boar leg and honey-glazed venison and gave the table scraps to their dogs.

A year after its construction, this prehistoric idyll came to a dramatic end.

A catastrophic fire devastated the complex; Buildings collapsed and villagers fled, abandoning clothes, tools and weapons.

Everything, including the porridge left in the pots, crashed onto the burning wicker floor and fell to the thick, sticky reeds below and remained there.

The objects eventually sank, hidden and buried, in more than 6 feet of oozing peat and silt.

The river gradually moved away from the camp, but the debris remained intact for almost 3,000 yearskeeping a record of daily life at the end of Bronze Age of Great Britain, from 2500 BC to 800 BC

Sample

That moment frozen in time is the subject of two monographs published Tuesday by University of Cambridge.

Based on a 10-month excavation of what is now known as Must cultivate the quarrya beautifully preserved submerged settlement in the shadow of a chip factory 120 kilometers north of London, the studies are as detailed as a forensic crime scene report.

One article, a summary of the site, is 323 pages long; the other, for specialists, has almost 1,000 more pages.

“This didn’t look archaeological,” said Mark Knight, project director and one of the paper’s authors.

“At times, excavating the site felt a little rude and intrusive, as if we had arrived after a tragedy, rummaged through someone’s possessions, and glimpsed what they had done one day in 850 BC.”

Evidence for life in Bronze Age Britain has traditionally come from religious and fortified sites often found in high, arid landscapes.

Most clues are found in the form of pottery, flint tools and bones.

“We usually have to work with small fragments and barely visible house remains, and read between the lines,” said Harry Fokkens, an archaeologist at Leiden University.

It is necessary to convince anyone that these places were once prosperous settlements a little imagination.

Paul Pettitt, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Durham who was not involved in the new studies, said the monograph – a case study of exceptional preservation combined with highly skilled excavations – reminds us that domestic life in that period was “colourful , rich, varied and not just on metal weapons, as the public’s love for metal detecting would suggest.”

bogged down

Francis Pryor, a British archaeologist best known for his discovery in 1982 Fen flaga Bronze Age site 1.6 kilometers from Must Farm, added:

“The Must Farm report is transforming our understanding of British society in the millennium before the Roman conquest, 2,000 years. Backwards.

Far from being primitive, Bronze Age communities lived in harmony with their neighbors, enjoying life in warm, dry homes with excellent food.”

Until a decade ago, the call Swamp Pompeii He lay buried in a clay brick quarry. The original village is believed to have been twice as large (mining in the 20th century destroyed half the archaeological site) and may have housed several dozen people in family units.

What remained were four substantial round houses and a small square entrance structure erected on a wooden platform and surrounded by a 2m high palisade of sharpened ash stakes, a barrier no doubt designed for defence.

The green wood, fresh wood chips, and no repairs, reconstruction, or insect damage suggested the complex was relatively new at the time of the fire.

An analysis of the outermost growth rings of burned wood indicated late autumn or early winter as the onset date, while the skeletons of 3-6 month old lambs and the charred larvae of a local species of beetle fleas implied that the settlement had been destroyed. in summer or early autumn.

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

Among other things, archaeologists have unearthed 180 textile objects and fibers (yarns, fabrics, knotted nets), 160 wooden objects (bottles, benches, handles for metal tools and wheels), 120 ceramic vases (bowls, jars, jugs) and 90 metal objects (sickles, axes, chisels , a dagger, a hand knife for cutting hair).

Masses of pearls forming part of an elaborate necklace indicated a level of sophistication rarely associated with Bronze Age England.

“The interesting thing is that this is the case an inventory of five Bronze Age houses,” Knight said.

“It was like everyone had a wedding registry for a luxury department store.”

Although the bones of fish, cattle, sheep and pigs had been removed from the heaps (halos of rubbish dumped from the cabins above), there was no evidence of human casualties.

The skull of a young woman was found outside a house, but because it had been polished by repeated blows, researchers decided it was more likely a souvenir or ritual decoration than a battle trophy.

“The aunt’s skull nailed over the front door,” Knight surmised.

Mosquitoes and cold porridge

Interest in Must Farm first arose in 1999, when an archaeologist from Cambridge University spotted a series of oak posts protruding from the quarry’s clay beds.

Dendrochronology dated the poles to prehistory, and excitement grew when preliminary excavations uncovered fish traps, bronze swords, and spearheads.

The discovery of nine log boats (canoes up to 88 meters long) buried in the mud alluded to the vast wetlands that once covered the region.

“During the short life of the site there would have been many boat trips through the reed swamps into the woodland,” said Chris Wakefield, the archaeologist on the project. “In the summer that meant walking through clouds of mosquitoes.”

“In the summer that meant walking through clouds of mosquitoes.”

Large-scale research conducted by the University of Cambridge in 2015 and 2016 highlighted the palisade, light walkways, ruins of a circular roof and walls made of woven willow branches called acacia.

The way the beams fell (some vertically, others in eerie geometric lines) allowed the researchers to map the layout of the circular architecture.

One house had about 500 square feet of space and appeared to have distinct “activity zones,” comparable to rooms in a modern home.

The thatched roofs had three levels.

The base layer of insulating straw was covered with turf (soil made up of dead but not completely decomposed plants) and finished with clay, which could form a chimney near the apex of the roof.

“People were confident, successful home builders,” Knight said.

“They had a shot that worked wonderfully for an underwater landscape.”

In what was presumably the kitchen of a residence, bronze knives, wooden plates and clay pots were found, some of them even nested together.

“There was a simple aesthetic at work that felt cohesive and unified,” Knight said.

A clay bowl with fingerprints of its creator It still contained his last meal: a polenta of wheat grains mixed with animal fat, perhaps goat or deer.

A spatula rested inside the plate.

The artisanal workmanship of the recovered artefacts and the presence of logging ships, perhaps the only reliable means of transport, led researchers to conclude that, rather than an isolated outpost, the site may have been a lively crossroads for trade.

“There was a sense that these early swamp dwellers were at the upper end of their 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 ideal for trade and connections; Sites like Stonehenge were now on the periphery.”

History of the tapeworm

The Must Farm community harvested crops and cut down trees on the nearest land.

Sheep and cows also grazed there.

Investigators estimate that wild boars and deer were hunted in local forests within a 2-mile radius of the farm.

“The irony is that the community wanted to live off the water, but their economy was land-based,” Knight said.

Food was evidently so plentiful that the villagers virtually ignored the fish, eels, and waterfowl that swam around the settlement’s foundations.

It turns out there are good reasons:

sanitation was a dubious proposition in swampy areas.

Sausage-shaped blobs found in the settlement’s murky sediments turned out to be fossils of dog and human feces, many of them filled with fish tapeworm eggs and giant kidney worms acquired by foraging in stagnant waterways.

Tapeworms are flat, ribbon-shaped parasites that wrap around a person’s intestines and can grow up to 30 feet long.

Kidney worms stop at 90 centimeters but can destroy vital organs.

The otherwise comprehensive Cambridge monographs left two questions unanswered:

Was the fire the result of an accident or an attack by rivals who perhaps envied the residents’ wealth?

And why didn’t anyone from the Bronze Age bother to salvage all that soggy stuff?

“A settlement like this would have had a lifespan of perhaps a generation, and the people who built it had clearly built similar sites before,” said David Gibson, a Cambridge archaeologist who collaborated on the study.

“Maybe they started over after the fire.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company