The biggest skies in England loom above the fens, in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Lincolnshire, on the country’s eastern edge. It is a flat landscape, low-lying and damp; much of the ground sits only a few feet above sea level. From Must Farm, the site of an old clay quarry, four miles east of Peterborough, you can see the squat medieval tower of the city’s cathedral, the hulking mass of a brickworks, and a McCain fries factory. Below the everyday noise—the rumble of the roads and the railway, the whine of the dragline excavator pulling up clay, the cry of the occasional seagull—is the sound of pumps, which work nonstop to keep the land drained. Without them, the fields and quarries would be flooded, either from the sea or from the rivers that flow out into the Wash, an estuary that opens onto the North Sea. Twelve thousand years ago, before the Ice Age ended and the water levels rose, the sea was dry land and Britain was a peninsula, a tail attached to the body of Europe. One could walk from the land now occupied by Peterborough across to the spot where Amsterdam now stands.
Britain’s geology tells a slow and phlegmatic story, but its early human history is opaque. Archeologists know that Stonehenge, its best-known prehistoric monument, was begun in the Neolithic Age, around five thousand years ago, but they have failed to divine its exact purpose and meaning, although theories abound. The island’s Bronze Age, which lasted from 2500 to 800 B.C., saw the appearance of farming and field systems, roundhouses and settlements, and tools and weapons forged from bronze. But compared with the same period in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, Bronze Age Britain feels remote and dumb. It produced no great palace cultures, like Knossos or Mycenae; it left its traces in no Homeric epics. Writing did not arrive until the Romans invaded, in the first century A.D.; before that, Britain was the stuff of travellers’ tales. At the turn of the fourth and third century B.C., the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia wrote the first account, now lost, of the curious people who lived at the northwestern edge of the known world. But their lives are obscure to us; the British Museum’s display on the Bronze Age in Britain doesn’t even fill a whole room. There is a Welsh cape made from gold, dating from somewhere between 1900 and 1600 B.C.; there are swords, and bronze cauldrons and clay dishes with incised decorations. On the whole, however, what is conveyed is an impression of absence rather than presence. Much of the material has been gleaned from burial sites. Archeologists “have known more about Bronze Age people in death than in life,” Neil Wilkin, the museum’s curator of Bronze Age Europe, told me.
But, from time to time, the soil pushes up clues, particularly in the fens, where the waterlogged earth creates anaerobic conditions that slow decay. One summer day in 1999, a local archeologist was walking at Must Farm, along the edge of a disused clay pit; at one time it was filled with water, but the water level had dropped enough to reveal some wooden stakes poking out. The Cambridge Archaeological Unit, which operates out of the university, an hour’s drive away, did some exploratory work and found, through radiocarbon dating, that the material dated from about 900 B.C. The site was monitored for several years, until Historic England, a government agency devoted to preserving the country’s heritage, began to press for it to be properly excavated. Last September, with funding from Historic England and the brick-making company Forterra, a team of about a dozen archeologists went to work.
Each day, they are making discoveries that are radically expanding the knowledge of Bronze Age Britain. The site is unparalleled in the U.K. for its wealth of artifacts and the pristine state of their preservation. Three thousand years ago, it was a settlement of wooden roundhouses, but life there ended abruptly: a fire tore through it, and the buildings collapsed, sank into the marshland, and were quickly entombed by silt and mud. “In archeology, very occasionally, there is the feeling that you have turned up just a week too late, that the people who were here have just moved on,” Mark Knight, the archeologist in charge of excavation at Must Farm, told me when I visited for a day in April. “This site has that feeling to it. Normally in Britain, when you dig, three thousand years of history seems manifest in the remains, because the most you tend to find is a few postholes and a potsherd. Here, somehow, the time span feels short. It’s so intact, so three-dimensional.” Inevitably, perhaps, the site has been nicknamed the Pompeii of Peterborough.
Knight is tall, red-bearded, and weather-beaten; his voice is a soft West Country burr. When he shook my hand, I noticed that every line and fingernail had peat and soil worked into it. I asked him how he had gotten into archeology. “I am a product of Margaret Thatcher,” he said. As a young man, he’d worked in engineering, mending car radiators, but in the nineteen-eighties, like many Britons, he lost his job. (The unemployment rate in Britain doubled between 1979 and 1983.) “I was put on a training scheme to get back into work,” he said. “I had a choice between working in parks and on an archeological site. I chose the archeological site. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t even pronounce the word, to be honest with you.” He had been placed on a site in Exeter, in Devon, where the city’s medieval waterfront was being excavated. After a couple of months, “something clicked,” he said. He earned a degree in archeology and, in 1995, moved east to work for the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.
We stood on a low rise, and in the dip below us was a white tent about a quarter the size of a football field, erected to cover the archeological site and keep it from drying out in the harsh East Anglian wind. Knight led me down a path toward it. At the top of the slope, marking the present day, were fragments of bricks, rejects from the nearby factory. Farther down, he indicated a dark layer of earth. “This is Iron Age peat,” he said. And a few steps later: “This is where the sea came in, in the early Roman period, the first century A.D.” As we approached the tent, he said, “Now we’re down into the period where we’re excavating, around 900 B.C.—river channels. Can you see the shells of freshwater mussels?” Inside the tent, the excavation was being conducted two metres below the surface; had we been able to continue down another eighteen metres, to the level of the base of the quarry, we would have arrived at the Jurassic, a hundred and forty-five million years earlier.
From a viewing platform, we could look down on the whole excavation: a large, muddy, roughly rectangular area from which a number of wooden stakes poked up. Gradually, some of the stakes resolved themselves into the shape of a palisade that had once encircled the whole settlement. Inside this enclosure, I could make out individual objects—a human skull, the spine of a horse, something that looked like a woven-willow fence, the lips of pots, all half-buried. “There are some bowls,” Knight said. “There’s a wooden platter. There’s a big wooden trough. Over there, a storage vessel.”
Also within the perimeter of the palisade were three large shapes, each comprising a number of wooden rafters radiating unevenly outward from a central point, like the spokes of a broken umbrella. These were the collapsed roofs of the roundhouses. Several archeologists were working on excavating a fourth. They had already lifted and removed its roof timbers and were uncovering the dwelling’s contents, now compressed by three millennia of mud. They scraped with their trowels methodically, emptying the dirt into buckets that would later be sifted for small finds. One researcher, who looked to be in his twenties, wore a sweatshirt with the words “MY FUTURE LIES IN RUINS.”
We climbed down from the viewing platform and Knight introduced me to Lizzy Middleton, a young archeologist wearing a Union Jack bandanna and peat-stained jeans. She had just found half of a sparkling green-blue glass bead; it was broken, but its facets glinted with reflected light. “It makes you greedy,” Middleton said. “Today I found one bead—now I want to find a necklace.” An older archeologist, Tony Baker, told me that it had taken him twenty years of digging to find his first complete object, a Bronze Age pinch pot containing human remains; at Must Farm, however, he could point out several whole artifacts waiting to be coaxed from the mud. At first, the excavation at Must Farm had seemed almost too “scratchy-scratchy, fiddly-fiddly” for his taste; he was more accustomed to the barren archeology of walls and ditches than to this wealth of fine detail. “But then I thought, This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I know that I’ll never see the like in my career again.”
Knight led me into the center of the dig. Listing out of the mud was a wooden bucket, its rim blackened from the original fire, its base virtually undamaged; the charring looked so fresh, it might have burned last week. “There’s the roof, and all the stuff that was in this burning building dropped through it onto the floor,” Knight said. “There are whole pots and bits of fabric, wooden boxes, and tools—it’s just incredible.” Near the bucket was a cluster of wood shavings, almost certainly made when the palisade stakes were sharpened; I could make out the scrape marks on the stakes themselves. The timber was extraordinarily well preserved; another archeologist, Iona Robinson, showed me how to recognize ash and oak from their rings. (Both species have porous rings, but oak also has medullary rays that run outward from the center.) Hannah Pighills pointed out a soft-looking lump of what she suspected was dog excrement; it too looked fresh, but thankfully, she said, time had removed the odor. Nearby they had found a cooking pot, with a spoon and traces of food still in it, and a spindle wound with twine.
Nearly every day, something unusual happens, Baker said: “You’re working on your own little bit, then suddenly you hear a hubbub.” In February, the researchers discovered a wooden wheel, the oldest complete specimen ever found in Britain; it had an oaken axle and was made from three boards held in place by a brace with a dovetail joint. Baker said, “I could hear people saying, ‘Is it a bit of the floor?’ Then someone said, ‘It could be a bit of a shield. What if it’s a shield?’ And then it registered: It’s a wheel, it’s got to be a wheel.” A couple of weeks earlier, Knight said, they’d found “a bronze socketed axe, just where Lizzy’s knee is now.”
There are textiles, too. Knight showed me a picture on his phone: a fragment of tightly woven cloth, made from plant fiber, that had been carbonized black by the fire. “We’re getting pleats and tasselled hems,” he said. “We won’t get color, but we will get pattern.” We walked around to the far edge of the area being dug, near the wall of the tent, and Knight pointed out an undistinguished patch of footprints in the mud. I assumed they’d been made by the archeologists, until Knight put me right: the last people to step there had been the fenlanders of three thousand years earlier. The prints had filled with river silts, a different sediment from the surrounding sludge, and been preserved. One of them, it turned out later, when a cast was made, would have taken a men’s size-10 shoe.
One of the most striking aspects of the settlement is that it was there at all. Archeologists working in the fens had always assumed that the patterns of prehistoric settlements broadly presaged those that came later—that is, the people of that time would have lived on higher, drier ground. The medieval cathedral of Peterborough is built on what is essentially an island seventeen metres above sea level. But the Bronze Age settlement was riverine. Knight thinks that the huts were built on a platform above a marshy slope that led down to a tributary of the River Nene. In 2013, in an extraordinary find nearby, researchers discovered eight prehistoric boats, one nearly nine metres long; they were dated to between 1600 and 1000 B.C. Mounting evidence suggests that the area, though watery, was relatively populous and busy. Knight pointed toward the cathedral.
“On the island, there’s evidence of Bronze Age fields, herds of cattle, and so on, but no settlement,” he said. “So our feeling is that they were living here, on the wetland, but creating their agricultural surplus there, on the dry land. Why?” One explanation, Knight said, is that the rivers were highways to both central Britain and Continental Europe. Perhaps these people controlled the routes and the associated trade, benefitting materially in the process. “If there was a catalogue of what you might want in the Bronze Age, these guys had the lot,” Knight said. The pottery from the hut being excavated was so coherent and familiar, he said, that it felt like “a complete set,” from tiny cups to large storage vessels.
The sheer quantity and sophistication of the objects at Must Farm has come as a surprise to archeologists. “There’s a sense of people moving in for the long term,” Knight said. “They have looms, spindle wheels, textiles, furniture—all the earmarks of a permanent settlement. In the early Bronze Age, the impression is of a life that is much more ephemeral: they have so little, it’s as if their feet barely touch the ground. This, on the other hand, sometimes feels like my household. The number of cups and bowls doesn’t feel so very different from what I have. There is a feeling of a life-assemblage. And there’s a feeling that they are producing more than they can eat. They are trading the surplus, and that’s shown in the fact that they have glass beads and well-made textiles. It feels complex—and that’s not something that we’ve associated with this period before.”
I wondered aloud about the power structures; was it possible to infer who was in charge? “There’s a slight sense of, dare I say it, democracy,” Knight told me. The buildings, and the traces of other contemporary roundhouses, all seem to be roughly the same size, he said; the field systems tend to be regular and even. So, I asked, there’s no sense of a wealthy central power ruling over a wide territory? “No, nor have we found evidence of paupers, for that matter,” Knight said. “Not that I’m not suggesting this was some kind of utopia; there are plenty of swords and spears.”
This depth and breadth of information has greatly enlarged the picture that archeologists will be able to build of life in the settlement. “With analysis of the food remains in the pots, we will know what was being eaten on the day of the fire,” Knight said. “We can get toward not just what the food was, but toward an idea of culinary practice—what was a mealtime.” They will be able to understand what people were wearing; how they arranged their possessions; where they ate and slept; how the residents moved around and used their homes. “If we can achieve all that, it will be stunning,” Knight said. “Archeologists usually talk about how little material they have to go on; they talk about the missing ninety per cent. Here, we’ve got it.”
At a moment when Britain is anxiously debating its relationship to the Continent, the kind of story one chooses to tell about the nation’s past matters a great deal. According to recent polling, the area around Peterborough is the second most skeptical of E.U. membership in Britain. One archeologist at Must Farm told me that he and his colleagues sometimes joke about the contradictory narratives that could plausibly describe the former life there. “You could probably write either a Euroskeptic or a Europhile account of this site,” he said. One researcher might see an indigenous community that was closely tied to the landscape of East Anglia; another might see an outward-looking people linked to the Continent by its waterways. Archeology is always an encounter between a fixed past and a shifting present; we bring to it our fantasies, prejudices, and predilections—this year different from last year, next year different again.
David Gibson, the archeological manager at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, told me that, to him, objects carry more truth than words do. “Material shows what people actually do rather than what they say they do,” he said. Knight compared the archeology at Must Farm to the processes of early photography. “In long-exposure photography, as soon as people moved, they didn’t exist in the image—they became ghosts,” he said. “That’s what we are doing: we are taking a long-exposure photograph of a Bronze Age settlement. The people have faded out, but the static objects have become much clearer. You see much more: the vases on the shelves, the broom against the door. But we are not losing the people; we are finding the things that they made, they used, they cherished, they didn’t care about.” In their absence, the occupants are observable. “They are present in their clothes, in their shelters, in their pots, in their bowls, in their tools,” he said. “These things are their shells.”
The excavation at Must Farm will come to an end this summer. The remaining timbers will be lifted from the mud, the artifacts underneath will be recorded and removed, and everything deemed unimportant will be discarded. The material of value—the metalwork and wood, pots, textiles, food, even the pollen—will be sent to specialists to analyze. There will be dendrochronology and there will be radiocarbon dating. And there will be excavation reports, in which Knight will have a chance to write his story of Must Farm, one that is likely to be revised in the years to come. Then, Knight said, “we will backfill the whole site. We’ll take down the building, and here they will build a haulage road for the quarry.” The rip in time will be mended; the landscape will return to work.
