See
http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/bronze-age-discoveries.40792/page-5#post-1567818
(this thread, p. 5) for previous article on this site:
UK's best bronze age site dig ends but analysis will continue for years
Houses full of linen, pottery and weapons, preserved in silt over 3,000 years, are worthy of own museum, say archaeologists
Maev Kennedy
Thursday 14 July 2016 07.00 BST
One winter some 3,000 years ago, a development of highly desirable houses was built on stilts over a tributary of the river Nene in Cambridgeshire, by people whose wealth and lifestyle would still have seemed enviable to medieval peasants. Then six months later it was all over.
Disaster overwhelmed the people and they fled, leaving their clothing and jewellery, tools and furniture, their last meals abandoned in the cooking pots as they tumbled through the burning wicker floors into the water below. Nobody ever came back to retrieve the tonnes of expertly carpentered timbers and the masses of valuable possessions lying in shallow water, which over the centuries all sank together, hidden and preserved by the oozy silt.
An extraordinary archaeological excavation at
Must farm, in a working brick clay quarry in the shadow of a chip factory on the outskirts of Peterborough, which has peeled back the millennia on the best bronze age site ever found in Britain, will end in 10 days time. Years of work remain to be done on the thousands of objects astonishingly preserved in the mud.
“Elsewhere we only have the ghosts of what was going on – here we have the whole body,” said Graham Appleby, who is working on the most metal objects ever found on a domestic site of the period, including a spear head so pristine it has been mistaken even by experts for a replica.
Work analysing the finds will continue for years. “We have only found out half of what this site has to tell us,” said the site’s director, Mark Knight, from Cambridge University’s archaeology unit. “On other bronze age sites you’d have a row of post holes and you’d be delighted to find one pot shard. Here we have looked through the window and then walked into the middle of their lives.”
Discoveries are still being made daily. On Monday Susanna Harris, an ancient textiles expert from Glasgow university, studied an unprepossessing bundle of blackened fibres and found a reel of thread spun from plant fibre, finer than a human hair.
Appleby’s moment of disbelief came when Knight rang him to say they’d found a complete spear. “Yeah mate, we’ve got loads of those,” he replied ungenerously. No, Knight insisted, the whole spear. “You’ve got the stick bit too?” Appleby asked, abandoning scientific terms in his amazement. He only knows of one other ever found – but three days later Knight rang again to say they had another one.
Other unique finds include the largest, best-preserved
bronze age oak wheel ever found, woven linen finer than the lightest of today’s fabrics, an old sword cut down into a useful kitchen knife, glass and amber beads imported from the continent and the Middle East, and the five round huts themselves, from the wicker floors to the clay chimneys – not just crude smoke holes – in the thatched roofs, still lying where they collapsed 3,000 years ago.
The unprecedented richness of the finds has revealed how the people lived, what they wore, what they ate, the butchered lamb carcasses they cured hanging from their rafters, the remains of a slaughtered red deer still sprawled on a patch of gravel. They farmed animals and cereal crops, including ancient strains of wheat and barley, and though they chose to live over the water, they had such lavish food sources that they virtually ignored the fish swimming just below their wicker floors.
Complete sets of pottery from egg cup to storage jar were found in each house, and all seem to have been made by the same potter. “It was almost like a John Lewis wedding list for each house,” Knight said.
One of the greatest mysteries remains tantalisingly unsolved: was the fire a kitchen disaster among the densely built thatched houses; deliberate destruction and abandonment by the residents; or an attack by enemies who perhaps envied their wealth? No casualties were found: the scraps of human bone, and a single skull, may have been older than the houses.
The scorched timbers and charred thatch are still being studied by a fire investigations expert, Karl Harrison, but his first impressions are that it looks less like an accident started inside a house, and more like a fire deliberately set from outside.
The site is regarded as one of the most important discoveries from the period in Europe, an insight into the unguessed at material wealth of some, perhaps most, in bronze age Britain. When the scale of the finds was revealed at a recent international conference, “jaws were dropping,” Knight said. The excavation won the “discovery of the year” title in this week’s British archaeological awards, voted for by other archaeologists.
The other unresolved question is what happens to the thousands of finds and the remains of the houses when the experts have finished their work. Historic England, which commissioned the excavation, which was also part funded by the quarry firm Forterra, found extra money when the dig planned to end in spring had to be extended twice as objects continued to pour out of the mud.
The team has welcomed archaeologists from all over the world, but public access to a site yards from the giant crater of the working quarry – which probably swallowed the other half of the settlement – is regarded as impossible, and the excavation will be reburied to preserve any underlying archaeology. However all of the timbers, flooring and roof materials of the best preserved house have been saved for conservation treatment and possible reconstruction.
Historic England’s chief executive, Duncan Wilson, said cautiously that discussions are ongoing with all the stake holders, including the local authority, and that there will probably be a
Heritage Lottery Fund bid.
Mark Knight, asked whether Must farm and the window it opened on a lost ancient world lying just two metres below our own is special enough to deserve its own museum, said without a moment’s hesitation, “Yes”.
https://www.theguardian.com/science...ite-must-farm-dig-ends-analyis-continue-years