Projects Co-ordinator Trevor discusses the first steps in the building of our new Bronze Age House at Butser Ancient Farm. We’ll be giving regular updates here on our blog as the build progresses!
On Thursday April 22nd the first sod of earth was turned to mark the start of a collaborative project between Butser Ancient Farm and Operation Nightingale to build a Bronze Age roundhouse. You can read the background to the project in our first blog post here.
The person turning the earth was none other than Phil Harding, veteran field archaeologist, flint tool authority and, of course, famous for his hat and exploits on Channel 4's Time Team. Phil joined Butser's Director, Maureen Page, Butser Archaeologist, Claire Walton, Operation Nightingale’s Archaeologist Richard Osgood, and around 25 staff and volunteers in welcoming the Operation Nightingale team to the site.
Phil Harding chats to Projects Co-ordinator Trevor and Director Maureen.
Phil Harding and Butser Archaeologist Claire turn the first sod on the Bronze Age build!
Richard Osgood, co-founder of Operation Nightingale and MOD award-winning archaeologist said on the first day of the build “I’m really excited, it’s been quite a long time in preparing this because we did the excavation last summer, with all the lockdowns this has been the one thing to anticipate getting all the veterans together and actually making the post holes that we found on Salisbury Plain into something physical, and filling Butser’s gap of the Bronze Age. So it’s really exciting, and months of fun now!”
We have had a big gap in our building chronology at Butser. At present our buildings jump from the late Stone Age to the Iron Age, missing that crucial period between about 2500 BCE and 800 BCE, when bronze metallurgy was introduced to Britain. The Bronze Age heralds many more changes than simply the introduction of metal. There are new social practices, new modes of burial and monumental display (the last phase of Stonehenge dates to the Bronze Age), the earliest use of the wheel, new forms of pottery and, perhaps, a migration of people into Britain. Alongside all of this, the Bronze Age provides evidence of the first large-scale division of land in Britain. Most of the earliest evidence for farming and field systems date not to the late Stone Age (which we typically associate with the introduction of farming but whose effects are very slight), but the Bronze Age. The field boundaries of the Bronze Age are still visible today, especially in Cornwall where some of the existing hedgerows that still divide the land may well have originated around 3000 years ago!
What we will be building during this project is our interpretation of the evidence of a roundhouse that the Operation Nightingale team uncovered on Salisbury Plain last September. Roundhouses appear to have been the dominant form of domestic architecture in Bronze Age Britain (and Ireland), as they were in the later Iron Age. Of course, we already have six roundhouses already on site. All of them date to the Iron Age. While the shape of our 'new' building will be the same, there are some things which were found in the archaeology that set it apart from any other building we have on site.
Dunch Hill excavation in progress. Photo (c) Harvey Mills
Dunch Hill excavation aerial view. Photo (c) Harvey Mills
We will discuss these in later blogs, but they aren't the only exciting features that set this build apart. It will be built downhill a little from our Iron Age enclosure, alone in a small field that we often use to graze our ancient breed sheep. Behind it is the neighbouring farmer's crop field. Remember how I mentioned the division of land for agriculture in the Bronze Age? Well, one of the reasons for siting the building where we have is to give visitors something of an impression of our house set within a productive agricultural landscape – just as it appears to have been 3200 years ago when dating evidence says the original was built. As well as the small settlements and fields that characterise this period of the Bronze Age (the middle-late Bronze Age), there were also track systems for the movement of both people and animals. And we are reflecting this with the creation of a 'drove way' – a pair of wattle fences set a few metres apart that lead visitors to the roundhouse from one of our existing paths. The fences then widen to create a small enclosure in which our building will sit, safe from marauding sheep. Evidence for fences was excavated right by the original roundhouse. Although we can never get a true snapshot of what the small settlement to which the original roundhouse seems to have belonged was like three millennia ago, we believe that we are setting our building within a good representation of a Bronze Age context – a setting that demonstrates the ways in which thoroughly modern humans modified and organised their world for dwelling, transport, and productivity around 1200BCE.
Artists Impression of what the final build may look like in situ.
Originally we estimated that providing this setting – the drove way and the enclosure – would take us about five or six days. The Operation Nightingale task force had it more or less complete in three. They had also stripped all of the turf from the site of the house (aided by the experienced and hard-working spade of Phil Harding) and dug the postholes ready for the build! I guess that's what happens when military efficiency is involved! And we are so happy to have this efficient team involved, and we're all looking forward to moving the project towards completion over the coming months – hopefully finished some time in September.
Volunteers working on the wattle fence for the drove-way.
Volunteers stripping turf in the location of the new house.
Claire Walton, Butser Archaeologist said “I think it’s really important for Butser as we don’t have a Bronze Age area, that’s the first thing, and as a chronological narrative that’s really important. We’ve missed out a massive section of pre-history so that for me is really exciting. But I am also really thrilled we’re doing this with Operation Nightingale because it’s a continued opportunity to learn and I’m looking forward to working with these people who have a totally different background to me, and to find out who they are and how they’ve come to be here. I’m really looking forward to it.”
We will update this blog regularly so you can keep tabs on our progress and we are featuring discussions about the project and the Bronze Age on our great new Butser Plus platform –along with many other topics!
To close I want to extend a huge thank you to our partners and friends at Breaking Ground Heritage and Step Together Volunteering, who are bringing our volunteers together to participate in the work, and to the South Downs National Park and The Armed Forces Covenant Positive Pathways Fund for their generous financial support. Also to Phil Harding for giving up his time and, especially, to our fantastic volunteer crew for making this project a reality.