History made: In an astonishing Bronze Age discovery a 3000-year-old community has been unearthed

British archaeologists working on the Must Farm project in England’s Cambridgeshire Fens can hardly restrain themselves.

Their online diary effervesces with superlatives – “truly fantastic pottery,” “truly exceptional textiles,” “a truly incredible site,” “the dig of a lifetime.”

Typically on prehistoric sites, you are lucky to find a few pottery shards, a mere hint or shadow of organic remains; generally archaeologists have to make do, have to interpret as best they can.

But this archaeological dig has turned out to be completely, thrillingly different.

For the last ten months – day by day, week by week – the excavation has yielded up a wealth of astonishing finds including pottery, textiles, metal work and ancient timbers. The dig offers, as site manager Mark Knight from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit put it, “a genuine snapshot” of a lost world – a prehistoric settlement from the Bronze Age some 3000 years ago.

The dig is almost without precedent the most revelatory of its kind in Britain, if not in Europe, and it has already begun to transform our knowledge of life in the Bronze Age.

Jointly funded by the the government sponsored heritage organization, Historic England and the managers of the clay quarry, Forterra, the dig has been carried out under a large rectangular white tent – about a thousand meters square. It’s the sort of tent you might use for a wedding reception but here it’s perched on the edge of a working quarry. Far below, a big crane is busily extracting clay to make bricks.

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The archaeologists arrived in force last September and, protected from the wind and rain under the tent, they’ve been forensically digging away several meters below sea level. Interest was first aroused in 1999 when a series of wooden posts were discovered sticking out of the clay. Trial excavations followed in 2004 and 2006 when Bronze Age spearheads and a sword were found.

All very promising but still no one realized quite what they’d stumbled on.

Britain’s Pompeii

The site has been described as the British Pompeii.

Of course, the Roman town-city was much larger (a plot of over 60 hectares with a population of approximately 11,000). Here in the English Fens, it was just a small river community of 30 or so people living in nine or ten wooden round houses erected on stilts on a platform by the water. But both places are relics of single dramatic events.

Pompeii was buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 AD. The Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm was destroyed just as suddenly and violently by fire a thousand years earlier. The blaze took hold on a summer’s day and may well have burnt itself out in less than an hour. The round houses – of wattle, reed and timber – and their contents collapsed into the water and more importantly, into the river silt. It’s the speed of the event – the brevity of it, the almost instant entombment of the material – that makes the find so exciting.

Much of what was tipped into the water is in pristine condition. It’s as if the archaeologists have arrived just after the fire, rather than 3000 years later. They’ve found pretty much everything they could have ever hoped for.

The Bronze Age Man

The truth is we didn’t know that much about ordinary Bronze Age man. But according to Cambridge Professor of Archaeology Cyprian Broodbank, it now seems entirely possible that there may have been “a mosaic of thriving communities” scattered along the waterways across the English Fens, and that the people living there were much more sophisticated than previously thought.

We know they had log dug-out canoes, ranging in length from three to nine meters (eight examples, mostly of oak, were found nearby in 2013).

We have already learned more about their diet – featuring a menu of wild boar, red deer and freshwater fish similar to pike. They also had farm animals, lambs and calves.

In time, as the newly discovered artifacts are microscopically examined, we will learn more about how they lived and traded. Beads (some 60 of them, apparently from necklaces) have been found made of glass, amber and jet and seem to originate from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East – possibly from Syria or Turkey.

We will learn more about what they wore – some of the textile fragments (about 80 pieces, including linen) are very finely weaved and a cluster of footprints was discovered in the silt from which shoe sizes can be determined.

Unlike Pompeii, there are no skeletons. The only human bone found was a trophy skull; it apparently hung on the outside of one of the round houses.

There is an unprecedented abundance of burnt timber to analyze (some 4,000 pieces). It’s probable that we will find out what caused the fire – initial forensic research suggests it may have been started deliberately.

Domestic bliss in the Bronze Age?

What has already emerged at Must Farm is a sense of cosy domesticity. Of the five round houses excavated, each had a set of about a dozen pots – simple, plain and beautifully hand-made.

They range in size from little poppyhead cups a few centimeters across to storage pots up to 35 centimeters high. Some still contained food debris – a cereal porridge of some kind.

Bronze Age man farmed the land, managed the woodland. The archaeologists believe the ash palisade – the protective fence encircling the settlement – was harvested from a coppice planted some 20 years earlier.

They were skilled carpenters – they ate off wooden plates; they carved wooden boxes.