Bronze Age site offers archaeological treasures

Press, 30 August 1985, Page 16

Bronze Age site offers archaeological treasures

By

VIRGINIA BURDON,

London Press Service science staff

Archaeologists in Britain believe they have uncovered the richest single prehistoric site in the country, dating back to the time of the Bronze Age, around 800 BC. The site, at Flag Fen near the River Nene in East Anglia, consists of an oval-shaped artificial wooden island constructed between two peninsulas in marshland. The Bronze Age settlers who lived there made the island by floating out ash tree trunks which they laid on the bottom of the fen and topped with a lattice work of timber before capping the island off with brush wood.

According to the site director, Francis Pryor, it is estimated that between three and five million timbers were floated out to the location all told, partly for protection the site would have been surrounded by about a hundred metres of water — but primarily for prestige and power. “We know quite a lot about the social stucture of Britain at that period,” he explains, “and it would appear that society was controlled by chieftains. The same period saw the appearance of the first hill forts which are generally associated with chiefly power and we

believe this site is a low-lying equivalent.” The excavations, which began in 1983, have exposed a house about seven metres wide with walls so far extending for about 20 metres with internal partitions. The building is already considered the best preserved Bronze Age building found in Britain and will inevitably throw new light on what has been called British archaeology’s “dark hole.”

It is floored with split oak planks which are in turn dressed with a thick deposit of coarse white sand, and in the sand the remains of meat bones — mostly sheep — have been found as well as flint tools, shards of pottery, and organic material such as pollen, seeds, leaves and twigs. “These things have been preserved because we are dealing with a water-logged site,” adds Mr Pryor. “Such organic material would normally vanish on a dry site, but basically they have been pickled in rather slow moving water which is free from oxygen — a stagnant, peaty mud.” It is estimated that it will take another 15 to 20 years to excavate

the rest of the one hectare site, but in the short-term the most pressing problem is how to preserve the timbers which are already beginning to rot as the water table drops due to modern drainage methods. Samples are being taken and stored in the site laboratory, and selected round wood is undergoing tree ring analysis. Meanwhile, casts are being taken of better worked pieces and the most outstanding pieces will eventually be preserved in water soluble wax. “We consider this site to be outstandingly important, partly because it is so large and is completely unexpected, but mainly because it belongs to an archaeological period which is very poorly understood,” Francis Pryor said. “In the two or three, maybe four centuries aound 1000 BC — the socalled late Bronze Age — all we really know is that they used metal tools, and we have found a lot of metal tools but very few settlements. Flag Fen being a site of this period and so very well preserved should answer a lot of the questions that have been puzzling pre-historians about this mini dark age.” — London Press Service.