Our Bronze Age Roundhouse build, in partnership with Operation Nightingale, is taking place in fortnightly chunks, when the veterans and volunteers descend on the farm for three days of hard work, ancient skills and team bonding on our beautiful farm. Projects Co-ordinator Trevor Creighton describes the progress during our second Bronze Age building session - featuring Bronze Age carpentry and Bronze smelting!
The second session of our Operation Nightingale project took place on Thursday and Friday, the 6th and 7th of May, and Sunday the 9th of May. The first two days was spent preparing the timber posts that will form the uprights that will support the roof of our building.
Treewright Darren Hammerton was on hand to teach Operation Nightingale team members timber working skills required to fashion oak trunks into structural posts. A treewright is essentially a carpenter who works with traditional building tools, such as axes, chisels and augers, to dress and create joints in wood. Darren and a team of volunteers built Butser's first Saxon house, which was completed in 2016. Darren is now in the process of completing our second Saxon building and took time out of his work to pass some of his vast knowledge on to the team. Everyone involved benefited from and enjoyed learning from Darren. The results of the two days clearly show how much the students gained from the master. In the space of those two days all nine structural posts were prepared, ready to be inserted into the postholes dug during our previous session.
The preparation of the posts involved stripping bark, fashioning tusk tenons and charring the base of each post in an open fire. Stripping bark and the outermost layer of wood from the posts reduces the likelihood of rot by removing the most susceptible material. Charring the bottom couple of feet of each post further increases the durability of the timber, which is particularly important for that portion of the post that is going to be permanently below ground level, where in the damp soil environment timber is most prone to rot and decay. The tusk tenons are fashioned on the other end of the posts and they form the points to which the lintels - horizontal timbers which will carry the rafters - will be secured. Tusk tenons are square pegs that secure timbers with a corresponding hole, called a mortise, made in them. They were made by carefully removing most of the top of the posts with axes to create a square 'tusk', which remains part of the post itself and is comprised of the strong central heartwood. The final finishing of the tenons is done with chisels. Some of this work was done with modern steel tools, some was done using reproductions of Bronze Age originals. The bronze axes were all cast by bronzesmith James Clift and they are based on an original excavated somewhere near Petersfield, not too far from Butser. This type of axe - called a palstave axe - also dates to around the time of our building, so they are appropriate to our experimental build. The comparisons were interesting. Bronze is not as hard as steel and requires more frequent sharpening. Another significant difference is that bronze axes used are much smaller and lighter than the steel axes, which is typical of Bronze Age axes in general. This means that they don't have the same impact on the timber when they strike it. What's more, the way that bronze axes of the type we were using are attached to the handles is not as secure as a modern factory made axe. These factors made the bronze axes slower to work with and more prone to breakage of the handles. Nevertheless, the team found the bronze axes and chisels to be effective tools and as they gained experience they were able to hone their working methods to better suit the rather idiosyncratic Bronze Age tools – in particular the axes – and further enhance their effectiveness. By the end of the second day all posts had been finished to what was, given the relative inexperience of our team, a high standard. Darren was very complementary and, I think, even a little surprised with the speed with which everyone had acquired their new-found timber-working skills!
From the outset, it's been an objective of the Operation Nightingale project to not only create a roundhouse but also to allow people to get a greater understanding of the Bronze Age in general and, in particular, of the technologies and the material culture of the Bronze Age in Britain. What I personally find so intriguing about the Bronze Age is the way it sits tantalizingly close to our vision. When we speak of Bronze Age Britain we are speaking about pre-history, but that's not the case the world over. The pyramids are colossal monuments from the Bronze Age, which means that all of the hieroglyphs that we associate with ancient Egypt herald the beginnings of history, as do the cuneiform texts from Sumeria. And, to the extent it can be thought of as history, the exploits of Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus and Hector during the Battle of Troy chronicled by Homer took place in the Bronze Age. As it happens, the people of Classical Greece – the Athenians, the Spartans, the Corinthians and their fellow Greeks - regarded the Trojan Wars as real, historical events and believe they took place nearly 1000 years before their own time – in the 13th or 12th centuries BCE. As it happens, that's about the same time as our farmers on Salisbury Plain were building our roundhouse.
So the Bronze Age is, in so many ways, the time at which the prehistoric begins to transmute into the historic. But the greatest transmutation of the Bronze Age is surely that which converted raw ores into bronze – mining stone and converting it into a completely new material, utterly unlike the rocks from which it is born. Everyone wants to know who and how the discovery was made. I don't know, but I'm happy to think of it somewhat in the realms of magic and alchemy! Queue our resident alchemist – Fergus Milton. Fergus refers to himself as a 'hair shirt metallurgist'. By that he means no shortcuts, no concessions to modernity. He digs a hole, lines it with clay and makes his furnace, heated by charcoal and powered up to the 1200 degrees plus needed to smelt the ores by goatskin bellows and lots of arm pumping. On the Sunday, Fergus recruited a platoon of fresh (and not so fresh) arms to power his bellows. Brilliant green, copper-rich malachite ore – the material that is more commonly seen polished in lamp bases and jewellery – was pulverised by pestle and mortar, put into a high-fired pottery crucible and heated in those bellows-powered furnaces until the impurities were vaporised and little globs of shining, golden copper remained. Not, in this case, to create new tools, but as great little souvenirs and rewards for a great three days.
If you would like to support our Bronze Age project, and the wider work carried out at Butser, why not visit our new website butserplus.com and become a supporter. For a small monthly donation you can access behind the scenes videos about our Bronze Age build and other experimental archaeology and ancient skills at Butser, all whilst helping to support the work of the farm. Thank you!