Project Coordinator Trevor Creighton updates us with the latest progress on the Bronze Age house build , and reflects on the community that has been built along the way, as we race towards the finish line!
Our recent build days were September 22nd, 23rd and 24th. The planned completion is early October. Need I say more about what we were doing? Everything, which, in my case, includes a mild dose of panic.
It really was an all hands to the pump three days – fixing battens high on the roof, while below their already fastened companions were having thatch fixed to them in a race to the top. All the variations of technique in our tasting menu of walls were in play – soil mounds, wattling, daubing, finishing a gabion and cob walling were all happening, with the team moving at a blistering pace. Workers moved by at such speed that they registered on my retina as mere blurs, putting me in mind of the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes Cartoons (both of these phenomena serving to highlight my age).
None of this is to suggest that there is any chaos on the building site (except in my febrile mind). Far from it, in fact. Everyone who is involved has acquired and honed a range of new skills. Some people even like to specialise, while others are eager for a new challenge. So the building is now in the hands of craftspeople who are keen to turn up and get on with things, drawing upon their own experience. Frankly, I love it – I get to sit around and talk, point at things and drink tea. I can't speak for Phelim and Sue, of course. I expect they are nose to the grindstone. It's a good thing that the building is near completion. By the time anyone reads this it will almost be too late for me to appear before any disciplinary tribunal, get the sack or be shouted at.
Actually, there is every reason to think that this is the sort of organisational model that the original builders of our roundhouse would have been familiar with. While we know that there were highly skilled craft specialists in the Bronze Age. Metallurgists, bronzesmiths and jewellers are evidenced by the surviving metalwork, but it is surely the case that there were many other areas of specialisation whose makers worked with less durable materials. At a small settlement like Dunch Hill, however, I think that, if we had a TARDIS, we would see a small community or extended family pitching in with greater or lesser areas of expertise and to the best of their abilities. Some will have seen or participated in building other structures and most would almost certainly be familiar with repairing these relatively fragile buildings. And, yes, in this time travelling of my mind's eye I even see a version of me, lying around in the sun and avoiding work at all times. It is even possible that they were a distant ancestor – perhaps laziness is an inherited trait – surely a worthy study for anyone interested in DNA analysis?
Actually, I would say that we have actually gone beyond just being a 'team' and formed something approaching a community. We share a single objective of completing a roundhouse – a satisfying goal in itself. But no-one secretes themselves away at lunch time, desperate to escape. In fact, we are often visited by other Butser staff who are keen to share in the lunchtime banter. That is a hard thing to test – when does a team become a community? But it is something I think I have felt before, on our recently completed Horton 2 Neolithic building. Whatever you want to call it, it's a great thing and long may it last. Now that we have such a great little group I hope that we can go on to do more projects. All we need do now is give people some tools and materials, point them at a bare patch of earth, give a rough description of what we need built and the job is a good as done. As it happens, we need a new Iron Age roundhouse, as one of our old faithfuls had to be demolished recently. It had succumbed to the ravages of woodworm and age. That, by the way, is not a 'fault' with the building, but an experimental result – it provides us with important data about the lifespan of buildings, which is one of the most important reasons we build them. In fact, the most valuable data often comes from a building's demolition!
So for our next building we already have the construction crew, we just need the resources. And on that note, resource management was something that was vital in prehistory, just as it is now. The Bronze Age wasn't a time of foraging for what you could get, but managing the world around you to ensure you could get what you need. That is a great jumping off point for the next blog!
To support our Bronze Age Roundhouse project with Operation Nightingale and discover more behind the scenes footage of the build head to at www.butserplus.com where we are releasing weekly video episodes about work and projects at the farm. Thank you!