A settlement in the east of England burned down in a fire 3000 years ago, falling into a muddy waterway that preserved everything inside the houses including tools, fabric, cooking pots and more
By Chen Ly
20 March 2024
An intact hafted axe found under one of the structures that burnt down at the Must Farm site
Cambridge Archaeological Unit
The remains of a Bronze Age settlement in eastern England have been exquisitely preserved after being destroyed by a fire 3000 years ago. An examination of the site gives us an extraordinary snapshot of how Britons lived at the time, from what people may have eaten for breakfast to the tools they used to build houses.
Archaeologists first stumbled across ancient wooden posts at Must Farm quarry, near the small town of Whittlesey, in 1999. The small-scale investigations that followed sought to figure out whether there was anything interesting there, says Chris Wakefield at the University of York in the UK. But it wasn’t until 2015 that Wakefield and his colleagues conducted a full-scale excavation of the site.
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The team uncovered the structural remains of four large roundhouses – circular dwellings usually made of wood with thatched conical roofs – dating back to between 3000 and 2800 years ago. Wooden stumps suggest these were built on stilts, connected by wooden walkways, over a small river that ran through the area. Based on the size of the channel, there may have been about 10 roundhouses at the settlement, says Wakefield.
Tree-ring analysis on wood from the structures suggests the settlement was destroyed a year after its construction, with the houses falling into the muddy water below. The waterlogged, oxygen-scarce environment prevented the settlement from degrading, preserving it in unprecedented detail, says Wakefield. Charring on the objects from the fire also provided a protective layer against environmental decay. “Pretty much everything that had been there at the time of the fire inside these people’s houses has been preserved to find nearly 3000 years later,” says Wakefield.
The way items fell into the mud gave clues to the layout of each house. As you step through the door, the kitchen area tended to be in the east side of the house, with a sleeping area in the north-west and pens for livestock in the south-east.