A 3000-Year-Old Community has been Unearthed in Great Britain : A Well Thought Out Scream by James Riordan

Men of Value Contributor · July 24, 2016

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For the past year British archaeologists have been digging around the Must Farm project in England’s Cambridgeshire Fens and their efforts have unearthed a well-preserved Bronze Age settlement and revealed some very interesting information about a lost time. For example, people in the Brone Age had TV! No, that’s not true. I just wanted to give you a jolt. But the dig has revealed what the experts are calling some “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 which generally means that archaeologists have to do a lot of interpreting as best they can. But Must Farm archaeological dig has turned out to be completely different. To the archaeologists involved, it has been absolutely thrilling. For over ten months now, day by day, week by week — the excavation has yielded up a wealth of valuable discoveries including textiles, metal work, pottery and ancient timbers.

Site manager Mark Knight from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit described it as “a genuine snapshot” of a lost world — a prehistoric settlement from the Bronze Age some 3000 years ago.

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

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.

At one point Knight announced that he was preparing to step inside a Bronze Age round house. Now he has — and not just one but four or five. He is still marveling at it all: “I think I’ve found a landscape that has a story,” he says, “a landscape that hasn’t been described before, hasn’t been visited before. We are the first people to explore it.”

The archaeological site has extraordinary clarity, cogency and intimacy. One can easily imagine what it was like for our ancestors 3000 years ago. Running across one part of the site is a narrow wooden causeway, a series of oak planks less than a meter across. Pre-dating the settlement, it rests there invitingly — cleaned of mud and silt — waiting for us to follow in our ancestors’ footsteps.

From Above the Round Shape of this Bronze Age Dwelling is Clear

Here are some of the amazing discoveries made at the site:

The backbone of a cow was found but scientists aren’t sure if it was for food or decoration.

Marks still left in the wood show that the villages used axes.

The pottery found was nearly intact.

Also found was the head of a spear.

The Villagers had bronze tools for cutting like this one which was discovered at the sit.

Unfortunately, this Bronze Age story does not seem to have a happy ending. We now know that the oak trees used for building the roundhouses were felled in winter. The settlement burnt down the following summer barely six months later; it hardly had time to establish itself. Was it attacked? Had the settlers intruded onto someone’s else’s river bank ? Was the settlement razed because of disease or out of superstition? What is clear is that no one came back to salvage precious belongings from the shallow sediment. Only now, all these years later, have they been retrieved from the dark clay almost as new.

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Men of Value Contributor

Articles by various contributors to Men of Value, an online magazine for American men who value our Judeo-Christian values of faith, family, and freedom.