Perhaps uniquely, we are seeing the whole repertoire of living at Must Farm – from food procurement to cooking, eating and waste and the construction and shaping of building materials.
- Charles French
Archaeologists have made remarkable discoveries about everyday life in the Bronze Age during their ten-month excavation of 3,000-year-old circular wooden houses at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire, a site that has been described as the 'Pompeii of the fens'.
Believed to be the best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found in Britain, the houses were destroyed by a fire that caused the settlement, which was built on stilts, to collapse into the shallow river beneath. The soft river silt encapsulated the remains of the charred dwellings and their contents, which survive in extraordinary detail.
The range and quality of the many finds have astonished members of Cambridge Archaeological Unit and colleagues at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Division of Archaeology. The fire is thought to have happened soon after the construction of the roundhouses.
“The excellent preservation of the site is due to deposition in a water-logged environment, the exclusion of air and the lack of disturbance to the site. The timber and artefacts fell into a partly infilled river channel where they were later buried by more than two metres of peat and silt,” said Professor Charles French from the Division of Archaeology. “Surface charring of the wood and other materials also helped to preserve them.”
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Image: Latest archaeological finds at Must Farm provide a vivid picture of everyday life in the Bronze Age
Credit: University of Cambridge
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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