PETERBOROUGH, Cambridgeshire, England – A new exhibition at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery will display artifacts from Must Farm, a Bronze Age settlement that has been sometimes called “Britain’s Pompeii” for the incredibly well-preserved objects found there.
A view of the excavation of Must Farm; one of the roundhouse structures is in the foreground [Cambridge Archeological Unit]
Must Farm was a settlement in the Flag Fen Basin around 3000 years ago. Built over a now-absent river channel, Must Farm consisted of five houses raised on stilts and a palisade of sharpened posts. However, the settlement caught fire and fell into the riverbed below; archeologists believe that the fire came less than a year after the structure was built.
Evidence suggests that the fire came so quickly that there was no time for any of the inhabitants to grab their belongings – even the livestock, such as sheep who were burned to death in the fire. The objects that survived fell into the wetland soil below, which preserved the artifacts extremely well due to a lack of oxygen.
“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,” Chris Wakefield, who led the Cambridge Archeological Unit’s excavation of the site in 2016, told CNN. “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.”
A bronze sickle from Must Farm [Cambridge Archeological Unit]
The museum exhibition coincides with the publication of a two-volume open-access study of Must Farm by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. The first volume is “a thematic interpretive synthesis of the site, with a focus on landscape, architecture and occupation, whilst Volume 2 offers in-depth studies of the river setting, construction, dating, material culture and biological remains,” according to the publisher. As open-access publications, both volumes are available to read for free through the University of Cambridge’s online repository.
According to the Cambridge Archeological Unit’s Must Farm website, artifacts from the site include “200 wooden artefacts, over 150 fibre and textile items, 128 pottery vessels and more than 90 pieces of metalwork.” The circumstances surrounding the site’s destruction were fortuitous for later excavation: the fire burned through the woven panels that formed the floor of the roundhouses, leading the objects to fall almost directly below where they would have been found inside the settlement. They were further protected by vegetation in the water, and the slow flow of the water meant they didn’t move much before settling into the soil.
Beads found at Must Farm, including glass, amber, siltstone and shale [Cambridge Archeological Unit]
Most archeological remnants from the Bronze Age do not reflect domestic contexts, so Must Farm is especially informative for its insight into how ordinary life might have looked in the period. There are vestiges of tool marks and intact balls of spun thread. Some of the most intriguing items are a collection of decorative glass beads that may have been created in Iran, indicating a wide-ranging trade network connecting Britain and the Middle East more 800 years before the Romans arrived in the British Isles.
“Each of the structures was cluttered full of axes, gouges, chisels, razors – a whole range of tools,” Mark Knight, another member of the Cambridge Archeological Unit, told The Guardian. “There were glass and jet and amber necklaces. There was a real sense of a full household inventory and people who were well provisioned.”
“Introducing Must Farm, a Bronze Age Settlement” will be on display at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery in Cambridgeshire from 27 April to 28 September and is open to the public for free.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.