Bronze Age and Iron Age Britons

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BRITAIN’S BRONZE AGE POMPEII’


Bronze Age weapons

Must Farm near Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire, England has been compared to Pompeii. It was occupied only a few months when it suddenly burnt and the circular, oak buildings sank into a river which helped to preserve them. down Despite this, archaeologists say the site gives an “exquisitely detailed” insight into everyday Bronze Age life, including evidence of fine fabric-making, varied diets and vast trading networks. [Source: BBC.com, July 14, 2016 /~]

Katie Hunt of CNN wrote: 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. [Source: Katie Hunt, CNN, March 21, 2024]

The scene is a vivid and poignant snapshot, captured by archaeologists, of a once thriving community at Must Farm, near what’s now the town of Peterborough. In March 2024, a research team published a two-volume monograph that describes their painstaking $1.4 million (£1.1 million) excavation and analysis of the site. Described by the experts involved as an “archaeological nirvana,” the site is the only one in Britain that lives up to the “Pompeii premise.” “

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, an archaeologist with 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. “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.”

‘Britain’s Pompeii’ Houses and Living Arrangements

Katie Hunt of CNN wrote: The Must Farm 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. [Source: Katie Hunt, CNN, March 21, 2024]

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 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.”

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.

People Living in ‘Britain’s Pompeii’

The BBC reported: “At least five circular houses raised on stilts above the East Anglian fens have been found. David Gibson, of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, University of Cambridge, said the site allowed researchers to “visit in exquisite detail everyday life in the Bronze Age”. “Domestic activity within structures is demonstrated from clothing to household objects, to furniture and diet,” he said. “These dwellings have it all, the complete set, it’s a ‘full house’. /~\

“The people living here made their own high quality textiles, like linen. Some of the woven linen fabrics are made with threads as thin as the diameter of a coarse human hair and are among the finest Bronze Age examples found in Europe, Other fabrics and fibres found include balls of thread, twining, bundles of plant fibres and loom weights which were used to weave threads together. Textiles were common in the Bronze Age but it is very rare for them to survive today.

“Animal remains suggest they ate a diet of wild boar, red deer, calves, lambs and freshwater fish such as pike. The charred remains of porridge type foods, emmer wheat and barley grains have been found preserved in amazing detail, sometimes still inside the bowls they were served in There were areas in each home for storing meat and a separate area for cooking.” /~\

“Even 3,000 years ago people seemed to have a lot of stuff. Each of the houses was fully equipped with pots of different sizes, wooden buckets and platters, metal tools, saddle querns (stone tools for grinding grains), weapons, textiles, loom weights and glass beads. Archaeologists say beads found at the site originally came from the Mediterranean or Middle East.” /~\

Katie Hunt of CNN wrote: 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. [Source: Katie Hunt, CNN, March 21, 2024]

Insights Drawn from ‘Britain’s Pompeii’ Reveals Bronze Age Village Frozen in Time

Katie Hunt of CNN wrote: 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 B.C..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.” “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.[Source: Katie Hunt, CNN, March 21, 2024]

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 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. “The second was that a lot of the wood that was used in the construction was unseasoned, it was still effectively green, it hadn’t been long in position,” he said. “The third one is that we have a lack of the kind of insects and animals that are associated with human habitation. It wouldn’t be long before beetles would worm (in) … but there’s no evidence of any of that in any of the 18,000 plus timbers.”

The fact that the site, with its rich and varied contents, was in use for only a year upended the team’s preconceived “visions of everyday life” in the ninth century B.C. and may suggest that Bronze Age societies were perhaps less hierarchical than traditionally thought, according to the 1,608-page report. “We are seeing here not the accumulation of a lifetime, but just a year’s worth of materials,” the authors noted in the report. “It suggests that artefacts such as bronze tools and glass beads were more common than we often imagine and that their availability may not in fact have been restricted.”

Racton Man: Bronze Age Warrior-Chief Killed in Battle

Racton Man — a 4,000-year-old skeleton found on farmland in 1989 near Westbourne, West Sussex — was probably a warrior chief who was killed in battle, scientists said in 2014. Tests on the Bronze Age skeleton showed he was over 45 when he died, probably grew up in southern Britain around what is now West Sussex, and was 6ft tall. The skeleton was found by archaeologist James Kenny. It is named Racton Man after the place where he was found. It is now on display at The Novium Museum in Chichester. [Source: BBC December 15, 2014 |::|]

Racton Man was discovered with one of the earliest known bronze daggers in the UK, leading scientists to believe he was a tribal chief. Experts said that wounds to his upper arm made around the time of his death which had never healed suggested he had died during a fight.

Specialists from England, Wales and Scotland analysed the skeleton's teeth, bones and weapon to learn about the man. He suffered from a number of conditions including spinal degeneration, thought to be due to his age, a chronic sinus infection and tooth decay and died between 2300 and 2150 B.C. |::|

Dr Stuart Needham, a Bronze Age specialist who took part in the study, told the BBC Racton Man would have been "someone of great seniority". "We don't understand the social structure of this time, but he would have been a very prominent member of society," Dr Needham said. Isotope analysis on the skeleton's teeth revealed where he had grown up while radiocarbon dating showed he lived during the Bronze Age. |::|

Bronze-Age Scottish “Frankenstein” Mummies

Erin Mullally wrote in Archaeology: “Instances of deliberate mummification in Europe are rare, but, while performing excavations in 2001 at Cladh Hallan, a Bronze Age settlement on the island of South Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, archaeologists found a pair of 3,000-year-old skeletons that fit the bill. [Source: Erin Mullally, Archaeology, December 6, 2012 |||]

“Both skeletons, one male and one female, were buried in the fetal position. Tests indicated they had been intentionally preserved for some time in nearby peat bogs, where microbes prevented them from fully decomposing, before they were eventually retrieved. “Mummification has been surprisingly widespread throughout world history, but this is the first time we’ve seen clear evidence that it was employed during the Bronze Age on the British Isles,” says University College London archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson.|||

“Further examination of the remains led to another startling discovery. The male skeleton is actually a composite. Its torso, skull and neck, and lower jaw belong to three separate men. New DNA tests prove that the female skeleton is also a composite formed from a male skull, a female torso, and the arm of a third person, whose gender has yet to be determined. Carbon dating indicates that the skull of the female mummy is probably 50 to 200 years older than the torso.” |||

Archaeologists have yet to agree why these remains were mummified and then mixed together. “The mixing of remains could have been designed to combine different ancestries or families into a single line of descent,” Parker Pearson explains. “At the time, land rights would have depended on ancestral claims, so perhaps having ancestors around ‘in the flesh’ was the prehistoric equivalent of a legal document.”

Gold Items from Bronze and Iron Age Britain

A small,"eye-catching", gold hair ring, with an intricate chevron and herringbone pattern, was part of a Bronze Age burial discovered along a road in Wales and reported in 2023. Archaeologists excavating the burial site also unearthed a wooden comb that's thought to be the oldest of its kind ever found in the U.K. Both objects were buried alongside the 3,000-year-old cremated remains of a person who was likely of high social status, the researchers concluded. [Source: Live Science, December 26, 2023]

In 2016, a gigantic gold torc, so big one expert thought it might may have been worn to protect a pregnant woman, was found by a metal detectorist in a ploughed field in Cambridgeshire. It was made from 730 grams of almost pure gold more than 3,000 years ago, and is regarded as the best of its kind found in England in more than a century. The workmanship closely resembles one from nearby Grunty Fen, found in 1844 by a man cutting peat, now in the collection of the archaeology museum of Cambridge University. However, like many torcs that were apparently buried for ritual reasons, that one had been coiled up. The find site is within 50 miles of Must Farm, the extraordinary Bronze Age British Pompeii.[Source: Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, November 28, 2016]

The Guardian reported: Torcs are usually described as collars, with the longer ones thought by some to have been worn as belts, but Wilkin checked in shops and said this torc was longer than even extra-large waist measurements of men’s trousers. Wilkin said they were never found buried with the remains of the dead, and were clearly associated with life — he wondered if it could have been loaned by the tribe to be worn as protection by a woman in late pregnancy. Alternatively, he thought it could have been a magnificent ornament to give extra value to an animal about to be sacrificed, adding: “It would fit a goat or a sheep.”

Four torcs found in Leekfrith, Staffordshire, in England in 2018, are the oldest examples of British Iron Age gold. They can be dated to between 400 and 250 B.C. based on their stylistic qualities, says Julia Farley of the British Museum, who notes they were most likely worn by women. According to Archaeology magazine: The torcs’ age is remarkable because, for several hundred years starting around 800 B.C., people in Britain appear to have largely abandoned wearing and manufacturing gold jewelry. One explanation is that the trade networks that brought gold to England had broken down. Tin and copper, used to make bronze, which had been key imports, were no longer needed once locally produced iron became available. Societies became focused on community survival rather than individual status. “Communal identity might have been more important than things which emphasize an individual’s power, like wearing loads of bling,” Farley explains. She believes the torcs were likely made on the continent and show that personal adornment was coming back into vogue as Europe grew cosmopolitan again. “The simplest explanation,” Farley says, “is that they came across the channel as gifts or trade goods, or perhaps the women even came over wearing them.” [Source: Marley Brown, Archaeology magazine, January-February 2018]

Iron Age “Toilet” from the Shetland Islands Actually a Cooker

Archaeologists in Shetland Islands off Scotland found an object in 2009 that at first they thought but after a more careful look they realized that it is probably an Iron Age‘Rayburn’ cooker. British Archaeology reported: “The object of all this colourful interpretation is a simple stone box, roughly 1.5m long and less than 1m high, which was found during excavations of a late Iron Age broch and village at Old Scatness. The box has a circular hole cut into the top slab. [Source: British Archaeology, February 2000 ^+^]

“The thing did indeed look like a toilet. A tongue-in-cheek report in The Scotsman referred to it as ‘the venerable thunderbox’ and described the archaeological quest for ‘the lifestyle of the long-dead defecator’. Val Turner, archaeologist with the Shetland Amenity Trust, supported the interpretation by citing a similar late Iron Age toilet discovered some years ago near a broch at Howe in Orkney. The previous find was a stone slab with a circular hole in it, resting over a low cupboard which was thought to have contained a ‘potty’. ^+^

“Now, however, the interpretation of the new find has changed – to something almost as surprising. Recent work has established that the clay-lined inside of the Scatness chest was subject to intense heat, and ash has been found around the base outside. According to Ms Turner, the new evidence suggests the chest was used as a Rayburn-type oven, with hot stones fed in through a hole in the base of one of the sides, and food placed on the stones through the hole in the top.” ^+^

“The Iron Age oven is not the only unusual find made during last season’s excavations. A miniature dagger about 10cm long, thought to be a toy, may date from about the 8th-9th centuries. Carefully carved out of local siltstone, with a trefoil hilt end, the dagger may have been discarded because of its broken point.” ^+^

Pre-Roman Britain

Based on finds at Silchester Iron Age in Hampshire, pre-Roman Britons were more advanced than previously thought. For instance they had olives.Maev Kennedy wrote in The Guardian: “ A single olive stone unearthed at the ancient town of Silchester is among the extraordinary finds that are leading archaeologists to rewrite British history. Many of the plant seeds are familiar from Roman sites across Britain, as the invaders brought the flavours and the medical remedies of the Mediterranean to their wind-blasted and sodden new territory, but there is something extraordinary about the seeds from the abandoned Iron Age and Roman town of Silchester. [Source: Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, July 31, 2012 ==]

“The banal seeds are astonishing because many came from a level dating to a century before the Romans. More evidence is emerging every day, and it is clear that from around 50BC the Iron Age Atrebates tribe, whose name survived in the Latin Calleva Atrebatum, the wooded place of the Atrebates, enjoyed a lifestyle that would have been completely familiar to the Romans when they arrived in A.D. 43. ==

“Their diet would also be quite familiar to many in 21st-century Britain. The people ate shellfish — previously thought to have been eaten only in coastal settlements – as well as cows, sheep, pigs, domesticated birds such as chicken and geese as well as wild fowl, and wheat, apples, blackberries, cherries and plums. They ate off plates, again previously thought a finicky Roman introduction, and flavoured their food with poppy seed, coriander, dill, fennel, onion and celery. They had lashings of wine, imported not just in clay amphorae but in massive barrels, and olive oil. And they had olives. One tiny shrub in the herb garden represents the recent discovery, news of which went round the world: a single battered, charred olive stone excavated from the depths of a well, the earliest ever found in Britain. All the Atrebates needed for the perfect pizza was tomatoes to arrive from the new world. ==

“They had other luxury imports, too: glass jugs and drinking glasses, gold from Ireland, bronze jewellery and weapons from the continent, beautiful delicate pottery from Germany and France. They also had town planning, another presumed later introduction. The Romans were undoubtedly better road engineers; in the torrential rain earlier this summer, their broad north-south road, built with a camber and drainage ditches, stayed dry, while the Iron Age road turned into a swampy river. But the evidence is unarguable: the Iron Age people lived in regular house plots flanking broad gravelled roads, aligned with the sunrises and sunsets of the summer and winter solstices, in a major town a century earlier than anyone had believed. ==

“They feared gods who demanded sacrifices as startling as anything in a gothic novel. Ravens have been found buried across the site, as well as dozens of dog burials, not just slung into a well or cesspit but carefully buried, often with other objects, one with the body of an infant, one standing up as if on guard for 2,000 years. Another tiny skeleton, no bigger than a celebrity’s handbag dog, was one of a handful ever found in Europe from such an early date: the evidence suggests it lived for up to three years, and was then laid curled as if asleep into the foundations of a house. Only last Friday the skeleton of a cat turned up, carefully packed into a clay jar. “==

Professor Michael Fulford of the archaeology department at Reading University, one of the leaders of the Silchester excavation, believes Silchester “was founded around 50 B.C. by Commius, an Atrobates leader once a trusted ally of Julius Caesar, who then joined an unsuccessful rebellion against him and had to leave Gaul sharpish. Whether Commius headed for an existing Atrobates settlement at Silchester, or started to build on a greenfield site, a defensible hill with excellent views, near the navigable Kennet and Thames, is, Fulford suggests, “a million-dollar question – why here?” They have found nothing earlier than 50 B.C. – yet.” ==

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024


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