Projects Co-ordinator Trevor Creighton discusses the background to the next exciting project at Butser Ancient Farm, our Bronze Age house collaboration with Operation Nightingale. Read on to find out more about the idea and what we hope to achieve…
Here at Butser we're about to start a new project to build a Bronze Age roundhouse in collaboration with Operation Nightingale. Operation Nightingale is an initiative to assist the recovery of wounded, injured and sick military personnel and veterans by getting them involved in archaeology.
I first learned about Operation Nightingale's work six or seven years ago when I was watching an episode of the ever-popular Time Team, where they were involved in an important excavation of an Anglo Saxon cemetery. That's a good few years before I started work at Butser, but Operation Nightingale's mission really struck a chord with me. Part of my work at Butser involves co-ordinating volunteer projects and it had been in the back of my mind to get in touch with Operation Nightingale some day and see if we could work together on a project. When a colleague told me that Richard Osgood was on site one day about a year ago this long, vague gestation of a collaboration came suddenly into focus. Richard is an MOD archaeologist and the archaeological director of Operation Nightingale. Well, it took about 10 minutes for us both to realise that this was an idea whose time had come.
I'll backtrack a little now and explain a little about Butser, in case you aren't familiar with the chronology – the time periods – of our buildings. All our buildings are from British archaeology and the earliest reconstructions date from the Neolithic, or Late Stone Age. That's from around 6000 to 4500 years ago. Our next buildings date from the Iron Age – about 2800 to 2000 years ago. Then we move on to Roman and Anglo Saxon buildings. You have probably noticed that there's a big chunk missing – the entire Bronze Age! It starts about 4500 years ago and gradually morphs into the Iron Age in Britain around 2800 years ago. And it's a really exciting period. Of course we see the first metalwork, but there is a lot more besides that – new ways of burial, new pottery and new ways of farming the land. Society in Britain was transformed by the Bronze Age, so that was a big gap! It just so happened that Operation Nightingale were about to excavate a Bronze Age site on MOD land on Salisbury Plain. Subsequently, they uncovered the foundations of a Bronze Age roundhouse and, based on that archaeology, that's what we are about to start building.
So this is an incredibly exciting and important project on a number of levels. It fills our chronological gap – once the structure starts going up we can begin to tell our visitors the story of the Bronze Age in a much more tangible way. Our house will be set in its own small enclosure, surrounded by our sheep enclosures and backed onto by the neighbouring farm's crop fields. What better way to highlight the intensification and diversification of farming in the Bronze Age?
Butser Ancient Farm Manx Loaghtan sheep and Lambs in a field adjacent to where our new Bronze Age house will be built. Our Iron Age enclosure and roundhouses can be seen in the background.
As well as the archaeology though, we are going to be contributing to a programme to help others. That has long been a part of what we do at Butser through our volunteers programme and our Operation Nightingale project is an extension of that. And, of course, all of our volunteers contribute enormously to Butser's success. In this case we will get a fascinating new building, unlike any other on our site. This one is extra special as it will be built by the people who excavated it. And, we very much hope, those same people – the volunteers from Operation Nightingale - will be coming back to join us to tell our visitors the story of the Bronze Age through the medium of their house.
Are we excited by this project? You bet!
We are delighted to have received funding and support from the South Downs National Park, The Armed Forces Covenant Positive Pathways Fund, Breaking Ground Heritage, Step Together Volunteers and Operation Nightingale for this project to go ahead. Thank you!
If you are a veteran who would like to get involved please contact elaine.corner (at) step-together.org.uk for more information.