'Britain's Pompeii' reveals Bronze Age village frozen in time

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/20/europe/must-farm-bronze-age-britain-pompeii-scn/index.html

by peutetre • 2 years ago

87 24 2 years ago

Full text, open access:

Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Volume 1. Landscape, architecture and occupation: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/400b29d5-2e22-4321-87...

Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Volume 2. Specialist reports: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/7bc599e9-d8be-4a49-8d...

coldcode• 2 years ago

Whenever I read a story like this, I wonder what people thousands of years from now (if there are any) will think of us.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

"If we are remembered at all, it will be as the contemporaries of Herodotus and Mark Twain." — Gene Wolfe

My favorite idea on the subject. This assumes that people in the future are more or less like us, which is anybody's guess.

SamBam2• 2 years ago

I'm reading Stanisław Lem's Fiasco at the moment (recommended to me from here) which is a sci-fi set sometime in the far future, probably at least 2500.

I'm enjoying it, but characters are constantly saying things like "imagine if people from 1950, or even 1990, saw our ships descend from the sky..." Dude, 500 years from now you think people are going to have a good idea of 1950 vs 1990?? And this is on top of other things, like every work of literature that characters reference is from the 20th c.

CrzyLngPwd• 2 years ago

You would probably find "motel of the mysteries" a fun read :-)

UberFly• 2 years ago

That axe-head looks really well-crafted. Was definitely somebody's prized possession.

hex4def6• 2 years ago

That's what's interesting to me. Even after a fire, wouldn't someone want to go scrape through the remains to find stuff like that?

To me that seems like that might lean towards a deliberate fire / untimely fate for the inhabitants from an enemy, who might not know where that axe would have been stored.

tokai• 2 years ago

Or maybe the fire was understood divine punishment for something arbitrary and digging through the site would anger the gods even more. With out clear evidence its hard to say anything about the cause.

Milner08• 2 years ago

I assumed it fell into the bog and so it was basically impossible to get to?

SamBam2• 2 years ago

Good NYT article as well

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/science/archaeology-brita...

https://archive.is/R2nA5

A tidbit I found interesting:

Interest in Must Farm was first aroused in 1999 when a Cambridge University archaeologist spied a series of oak posts poking out of the beds of clay at the quarry. Dendrochronology dated the poles to prehistory,

I love that dendrochronology is now at a level that we can quickly look at some tree rings from a fragment of wood and fairly accurately date it. From my understanding, though the field has been around for a while, it's only been in the past decade or so that we're able to do that kind of thing.

jl6• 2 years ago

Archaeologists also unearthed a woman’s skull, smooth from touch, possibly a keepsake of a lost loved one.

Everything else - the kitchen tools, the animal domestication - seems relatable. And then we get to the skull smoothing…

soperj• 2 years ago

Someone's going to look back at people with urns of ashes, and think the same thing.

lapetitejort• 2 years ago

Keeping a loved-one's skull around seems downright tame compared to how some people treat their dead in modern times. How about the Indonesian tribe that digs up their dead every year [0]?

[0] https://htschool.hindustantimes.com/editorsdesk/knowledge-vi...

Aromasin• 2 years ago

The weave on that flax linen is fantastic. It's very tight-knit for something that would be hand-woven. A great amount of time would have gone into that.

hprotagonist2• 2 years ago

you’d be amazed at the fineness of the work you can get with a drop spindle. Most machines can’t come close.

superkuh• 2 years ago

In the 200MB (lite!) pdf book they suggest the finest woven objects (and most of the metal-work) were from regional trade not produced locally. And many of the items of the site came from Ireland and some as far away as Iran.

lm411• 2 years ago

Very interesting. I'd never heard of this before.

More discovered items and info here: https://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/discoveries/

tetris11• 2 years ago

skeletal remains of the lambs kept by one household showed the animals, typically born in spring, were three months to six months old

I wonder when human birth cycles detached from the seasons. I say this because I once plotted the dates of celebrities birthdays on wikipedia and saw nothing but a random distribution.

mharig• 2 years ago

On YT you will find a lot of interesting videos about Must Farm. E.g. a BBC docu from 2016 and "Making Must Farm".

'Britain's Pompeii' reveals Bronze Age village frozen in time

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