Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England
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Mark Knight, site manager of the dig, poses for a portrait at Must Farm. 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, 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. Bronze Age wheel discovered at 'Britain's Pompeii'.
Prehistoric Britain
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.
Several species of humans have intermittently occupied Britain for almost a million years. The Roman conquest of Britain in 43 AD is conventionally regarded as the end of Prehistoric Britain and the start of recorded history in the island, . made Britain a more worthwhile place to remain until the following period of cooling. Human prehistory is the period between the use of the first stone tools c. million years ago The first use of the word prehistory in English, however, occurred in the Foreign Quarterly Review in The use of the Remains from this period are few and far between, often limited to middens. In forested areas, the first.
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 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 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.
History made: In an astonishing Bronze Age discovery a 3000-year-old community has been unearthed
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, 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.
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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.
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A prized discovery was the almost perfectly preserved wheel of a wooden cart. And they left us their most treasured bronze possessions axe heads, five sickle heads and five spear heads.
In one of the rarest finds, a spear head was found with its haft or handle still in tact. Did ancient Egypt suffer from climate change? Archaeologists now also know precisely how the round houses were built. They have the architecture -- the wattle, the uprights, the posts.
You can see the axemarks. The later Iron Age inhabitants of the Northern Isles were probably Pictish , although the historical record is sparse. Coutts was helping visiting archaeologists led by A. O'Dell of Aberdeen University at a dig on the island. The silver bowls, jewellery and other pieces are believed to date from approximately AD O'Dell stated that "The treasure is the best survival of Scottish silver metalwork from the period" and that "the brooches show a variety of typical Pictish forms, with both animal-head and lobed geometrical forms of terminal".
Shetland was colonised by Norsemen in the late 8th and 9th centuries; [26] the fate of the previous indigenous population is uncertain. According to the Orkneyinga Saga , Vikings then used the islands as a base for pirate expeditions against Norway and the coasts of mainland Scotland.
Some scholars believe that this story is apocryphal and based on the later voyages of Magnus Barelegs. Nonetheless, as the Viking era developed Shetland emerged from the prehistoric period and into the era of written history. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 2 August March "The Mesolithic in the Northern Isles: Antiquity 78 No Retrieved 12 December Retrieved 1 May The Regional Dimension" in Clapperton p.
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Retrieved 22 Mar The military presence of Rome lasted for little more than 40 years for most of Scotland and only as much as 80 years in total anywhere. At no time was even half of Scotland's land mass under Roman control. Antiquity 33 No A Silver Hoard Discovered on St. Ninian's Isle, Zetland on 4th July, St Ninian's Isle Treasure Lunnasting stone. Battle of Mons Graupius Great Conspiracy.