Bronze Age Treasures Unearthed After 3,000 Years Beneath a British Bog

Around 3,000 years ago, a small Bronze Age settlement in the Cambridgeshire Fens, near present-day Cambridge, England, was destroyed by fire. The village, known today as Must Farm, was built atop stilts over a river. During the blaze, the platform supporting the settlement's nine or ten roundhouses collapsed into the water, forcing the inhabitants to flee so quickly they left behind nearly everything — their jewelry, tools, clothing, spinning yarn, and even their unfinished meals. Everything sank into the water, and once the fire was put out, the remnants of their lives were buried beneath layers of mud.

Though the tragic event was disastrous for the 30 or so residents of Must Farm, the outcome was an archaeologist’s dream: the sudden fire, followed by the collapse of the platform and its burial in fine, non-porous sediment, led to the incredible preservation of the site. The belongings of the Must Farm inhabitants have undergone little decay, even after 3,000 years of sitting in a bog. This near-perfect preservation has turned Must Farm into an extraordinary time capsule, offering a rare glimpse into daily life during the late Bronze Age. So well preserved is the site that it’s been dubbed Britain’s very own Pompeii.

Must Farm was initially discovered in 1999, when some of its wooden posts were spotted protruding from the ground at a former brick quarry site. Formal excavation efforts began in 2006, with an extensive eight-month dig launched in September 2015. The purpose was to examine the settlement's structural remains and recover the artifacts from the timber platform that had fallen into the river during a catastrophic fire. The excavation has uncovered some of the most extraordinary discoveries in archaeological history: a bowl of vitrified grain with a spoon still lodged in it, complete garments, fabric pieces, and even fully intact balls of yarn.

"It is highly unusual to find preserved fibres and fabrics when excavating a Bronze Age site," says Dr. Susanna Harris, an archaeology professor at the University of Glasgow, in an email. "In Britain, when they do surface, they are typically fragments from a burial or cremation. However, Must Farm is different because the entire production process has been preserved in the houses of the settlement. There are bundles of fiber, neatly wound balls, bobbins of fine thread, and even completed fabrics."

Additional treasures and artifacts have been uncovered at Must Farm, many of which are documented in the Must Farm Site Diary. Among these are metal weapons and household tools, distinctive pottery, a wheel that was being repaired indoors when the fire broke out, a fragile wooden box containing its original contents, glass and amber beads, several longboats — some of which were patched with clay — as well as plenty of information about the local diet, including animal bones and even the tracks of wild and domesticated animals found in the surrounding mud.

The items that have yielded the most new insights into Bronze Age life are the plant-based textiles. While no journal articles have been published yet from the Must Farm excavation, researchers have determined that the villagers produced fabric from at least two plants: flax, used to make fine linen — some of the best in Europe from that era — and also a material made from nettles and the inner bark of wild lime trees, foraged from the environment rather than grown.

"When the Must Farm village was destroyed by fire, bundles of plant fibers were ready to be spun into yarn, with balls and bobbins of thread waiting to be woven into cloth," explains Dr. Margarita Gleba from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. "A common misconception is that prehistoric cloth was rough and coarse, but the reality is that Bronze Age weavers created fabrics of remarkable quality. Some threads found at Must Farm are as thin as 0.1 mm — about the width of a coarse human hair — and they were made by hand. Uncovering these details is both thrilling and humbling."

The excavation of the Must Farm site is nearly complete, and soon the team will begin the process of officially publishing their findings. In the meantime, you can keep up with their discoveries by following the Must Farm Facebook page.