A settlement flash-frozen by fire
In the marshy fens of Cambridgeshire, a settlement of Late Bronze Age roundhouses stood on stilts above a slow-moving river. Built around 850 BCE, the entire village was constructed on a platform of timber piles, surrounded by a two-meter-high palisade of sharpened posts. Walkways connected the main structures, which were raised approximately two meters above the riverbed. The buildings were sophisticated constructions. Two concentric rings of posts supported a roof made of three layers: insulating straw, turf, and a final layer of clay to make it waterproof.
This settlement existed for less than a year. Evidence from the wood used in its construction shows it was still green when a catastrophic fire tore through the village. The blaze caused the houses to collapse into the river below. The combination of charring from the fire and the oxygen-poor, waterlogged silt of the riverbed led to an astonishing level of preservation. This event preserved a record of daily life, known as "Britain's Pompeii". The archaeology was so well-preserved that the collapsed roof timbers of the roundhouses were found lying as they fell.
An inventory of Bronze Age life
The rapid evacuation of the settlement meant that the contents of the homes were left in place, showing a complete picture of domestic life. Each roundhouse appears to have contained a standard household toolkit, including bronze sickles for harvesting crops, axes and gouges for woodworking, and razors. Dozens of ceramic vessels were recovered, many of them unbroken and some even nested together to save space. One pot held the remains of a final meal: a wheat-grain porridge mixed with animal fats, with a wooden spatula resting inside.
The site has yielded the largest collection of Bronze Age domestic metalwork, textiles, and wooden artifacts in Britain. The textiles are among the finest from this period in Europe, made from flax and other wild plant fibers like nettle. Finds included bundles of raw fiber, thread wound onto 36 wooden bobbins, and finished fabrics. An extraordinary discovery was a complete wooden wheel, one meter in diameter, the most complete and earliest of its type found in Britain. The presence of this wheel, along with exotic glass beads from as far as Iran and Denmark, shows this isolated fenland community had connections to the wider world.