Projects Co-ordinator Trevor Creighton gives an update on the latest progress on our Bronze Age build, featuring Lime tree cutting to make fibre for cordage and pottery pit firing.
Our most recent Operation Nightingale activities, 23rd – 25th June, have been many and varied. Wednesday was spent in the woods of darkest Hampshire gathering lime. Not the little green things that add delicate sharpness to a nice Thai meal, but the Common European Lime tree (Tilia x europaea is it’s anything but common botanical name). In fact, it’s a bit unfair to call it common at all, because Lime is useful in somewhat uncommon ways. In our case, Claire, our staff archaeologist, led a stout crew into the forbidding wilderness to gather lime so it could be stripped of its bast. Bast is a layer of soft material directly beneath the bark. It is very fibrous and those fibres make the perfect basis for cordage.
Cordage is made with any number of fibres. In essence, the fibres are stripped from the source – in our case lime bast, but brambles, nettles and all sorts of plants have good fibres for making cordage – then twisted by hand into a twine. The cordage can be used in its own right – nettle can be made into very fine and delicate thread for weaving, for example. Individual strands of cordage can also be combined and twisted to make rope. And it was the search for rope-making materials that led our intrepid team to sally forth, returning like conquering Bronze Age foragers with raw materials. (Thanks to Jackie Crutchfield for the photos from the Lime processing in the woods)
Lime bast needs some process and making cordage needs some up-skilling so on the Friday the lime – rope project began. But I am getting ahead of myself. If you read our last blog you will know that an Operation Nightingale team made a whole swag of pots a couple of weeks back, under the careful scrutiny of the man I now like to call the ‘Pot Meister’, Butser stalwart Phelim. Two weeks is a good amount of time to let fresh made pots dry out nice and gently, ready to be fired. Wet posts have an irritating habit of exploding, so those same potters were able to take their now dry creations, put them in a specially dug hole in the ground, set a fire and create some ceramic masterpieces.
Phelim had warned at the making stage that the failure rate for this sort of Bronze Age style earth-firing can be as high as 80%. As it turned out, the success rate was about 95% - that’s a model display of under-promising and over-delivering and it delighted everyone. And that’s what earned Phelim his new sobriquet – Pot Meister (notwithstanding his expertise, Phelim was the most relieved person after the fired pots were revealed). Now we have a series of hand-crafted pots, reflecting the some of the pottery of the Bronze Age. (Thanks to Phelim McIntyre and Rachel Willis for the photos of the pottery firing and results)
Back to Friday again. Before it can be stripped into the fibres we want for cordage, the lime bast must be soaked in water – a process called retting (in effect, rotting), which allows the fibrous parts to be stripped from the bast. We are doing a little experiment with this process. One lot of bast now sits in a bath of plain water, the other in a bath of salt water. In a few weeks we will see if one or the other works better. Once the rather goopy strips of bast were in the water (it’s a bit slimy to handle but a number of us seemed to have nice soft hands afterwards!) the team split in two – one group getting on with the building, the other learning how to make cordage.
Spinning guru (nothing to do with Whirling Dervishes) Kat was on hand to give expert guidance. As we couldn’t yet use the lime bast, Kat had gathered a number of other suitable materials, including nettle and rhubarb. Many a cordage maker found this a very meditative activity and had produced some beautiful lengths by the day’s end. (Thanks agin to Jackie Crutchfield for the photos from the cordage session)
So do we know whether people in Bronze Age Britain used cordage? We certainly do! Although organic materials are generally poorly preserved in prehistoric archaeology – especially in the acid soils in our part of the world - there are sometimes rare and wonderful survivors. And there is no better example of Bronze Age fibres than those from Must Farm. Actually, the Must Farm examples are spun fibre, rather than cordage. But we do have plenty of evidence for prehistoric cordage. I use the example of Must Farm because the work – which is in essence twisted plant fibres, just like cordage – is of such breathtakingly exquisite quality. It is a demonstration of the sophistication of the use of fibres in the Bronze Age and I would urge anyone to have a look at it.
Must Farm is an astonishingly well preserved site from the Late Bronze Age (around 1000 – 800 BCE, only a little later than our building, from about 1200). It was a small settlement built over the water on stilts in what is now the Cambridgeshire Fens. I saw some examples of the textiles and many other things in Peterborough Museum some years ago and was bowled over. If you have read this far but aren’t familiar with Must Farm then you will almost certainly be interested in the checking it out. www.mustfarm.com is a brilliant site, with lots of snippets of information, dig diaries, and great pictures.
On the subject of snippets of information, a documentary was made in 2016 called ‘Britain’s Pompeii’. It was hosted by Professor Alice Roberts and dealt with the short life and rapid demise of the Must Farm settlement. The whole place seems to have been burned down within about a year of its construction. To give some idea of how quickly a roundhouse might burn, they burned a roundhouse. That very roundhouse was built here at Butser by David Freeman. Butser is surely the most filmed experimental archaeological site in Britain. As a random example, and one close to my heart, the farm (at its original site just north of where we are now) was featured in the Dr Who episode ‘Mysterious Planet’. While in the area the crew also zoomed down to Portsmouth and filmed Daleks at the IBM building. Sadly, no Daleks at Butser, but then rough ground was always the fly in the ointment for the Daleks’ otherwise flawless plans for conquering the universe.
That’s probably enough digression for one blog. We are doing more wall building soon and making bold plans for the roof. But I’ll leave that for another day.
To support our Bronze Age project and discover more about the process through behind the scenes documentaries, support our new online platform www.butserplus.com where we are documenting the entire progress from start to finish.