3 ms·

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

87 points by peutetre 3y ago

hprotagonist 3y ago
Full text, open access: Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Volume 1. Landscape, architecture and occupation: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/400b29d5-2e22-4321-878c-cb122d291660 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-4a49-8dfe-4bb6c324fac4 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/7bc599e9-d8be-4a49-8d...
coldcode 3y 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 3y 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.
  - SamBam 3y 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.
    - _xerces_ 3y ago
      Reminds me of reading Asimov's books set in the distant future and they still use tapes and other things from the 1950's. Maybe if pressed he could argue that the technology in the future was vastly different, but wanted to use the name of a storage media his readers were familiar with and avoid having to make up a new word.
      - scoot 3y ago
        Which is why Star Wars is set "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."; things look dated now? Well of course, it was a long time ago!
    - notahacker 3y ago
      Not familiar with that particular story, but doesn't it just reflect the popular mid-late twentieth century scifi conceit that interstellar travel would start at the end of the twentieth century and be the most important thing ever? In which case the 1950/90 distinction probably would be a consideration for someone with a half decent knowledge of history, a bit like someone today saying "imagine telling someone in 1450 or even 1492 what the Americas would be like today..." Minus points for thinking the literature would stand the test of time though :)
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      > like every work of literature that characters reference is from the 20th c A lot of literature today refers to bronze age religious texts(2700 years ago), Shakespeare(400 years ago), the Ramayana(2600-3kya), Romance of the Three Kingdoms(600ya), and so on. There are threads of Porto-Indoeuropean mythology preserved in the Vedas, Roman Mythology, and the Scandinavian Sagas. I don't know much about Australian Aboriginal mythology, but there's strong evidence that their stories contain accurate details of extinct species and geographic features from thousands of years ago. So it seems entirely possible that enough cultural material from the mid 20th century will survive until the 2500s for people at that time to have a good understanding of the 1950s in at least some places.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  You would probably find "motel of the mysteries" a fun read :-)
UberFly 3y ago
That axe-head looks really well-crafted. Was definitely somebody's prized possession.
- hex4def6 3y 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.
  - Milner08 3y ago
    I assumed it fell into the bog and so it was basically impossible to get to?
  - tokai 3y 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.
SamBam 3y ago
Good NYT article as well https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/science/archaeology-britain-must-farm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/science/archaeology-brita... https://archive.is/R2nA5 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 3y 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 3y ago
  Someone's going to look back at people with urns of ashes, and think the same thing.
  - lapetitejort 3y 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-vine/digging-up-the-grave-the-toraja-tribe-of-indonesia-and-their-strange-funeral-traditions https://htschool.hindustantimes.com/editorsdesk/knowledge-vi...
    - defrost 3y ago
      How about the European tribes who dig up and clean human bones to make massive art installations with chandeliers, frescos, alters and the like in grand ossuaries? Sedlec Ossuary being the prime example, with many others on a smaller scale.
Aromasin 3y 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.
- hprotagonist 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Very interesting. I'd never heard of this before. More discovered items and info here: https://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/discoveries/ https://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/discoveries/
tetris11 3y 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 3y 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".

87 points by peutetre 3y ago

Full text, open access: Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Volume 1. Landscape, architecture and occupation: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/400b29d5-2e22-4321-878c-cb122d291660 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-4a49-8dfe-4bb6c324fac4 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/7bc599e9-d8be-4a49-8d...

coldcode 3y 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 3y 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.
- SamBam 3y 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.
  - _xerces_ 3y ago
    Reminds me of reading Asimov's books set in the distant future and they still use tapes and other things from the 1950's. Maybe if pressed he could argue that the technology in the future was vastly different, but wanted to use the name of a storage media his readers were familiar with and avoid having to make up a new word.
    - scoot 3y ago
      Which is why Star Wars is set "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."; things look dated now? Well of course, it was a long time ago!
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Not familiar with that particular story, but doesn't it just reflect the popular mid-late twentieth century scifi conceit that interstellar travel would start at the end of the twentieth century and be the most important thing ever? In which case the 1950/90 distinction probably would be a consideration for someone with a half decent knowledge of history, a bit like someone today saying "imagine telling someone in 1450 or even 1492 what the Americas would be like today..." Minus points for thinking the literature would stand the test of time though :)
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    > like every work of literature that characters reference is from the 20th c A lot of literature today refers to bronze age religious texts(2700 years ago), Shakespeare(400 years ago), the Ramayana(2600-3kya), Romance of the Three Kingdoms(600ya), and so on. There are threads of Porto-Indoeuropean mythology preserved in the Vedas, Roman Mythology, and the Scandinavian Sagas. I don't know much about Australian Aboriginal mythology, but there's strong evidence that their stories contain accurate details of extinct species and geographic features from thousands of years ago. So it seems entirely possible that enough cultural material from the mid 20th century will survive until the 2500s for people at that time to have a good understanding of the 1950s in at least some places.
CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
You would probably find "motel of the mysteries" a fun read :-)

UberFly 3y ago

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

hex4def6 3y 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.
- Milner08 3y ago
  I assumed it fell into the bog and so it was basically impossible to get to?
- tokai 3y 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.

SamBam 3y ago

Good NYT article as well https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/science/archaeology-britain-must-farm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/science/archaeology-brita... https://archive.is/R2nA5 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 3y 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 3y ago
Someone's going to look back at people with urns of ashes, and think the same thing.
- lapetitejort 3y 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-vine/digging-up-the-grave-the-toraja-tribe-of-indonesia-and-their-strange-funeral-traditions https://htschool.hindustantimes.com/editorsdesk/knowledge-vi...
  - defrost 3y ago
    How about the European tribes who dig up and clean human bones to make massive art installations with chandeliers, frescos, alters and the like in grand ossuaries? Sedlec Ossuary being the prime example, with many others on a smaller scale.

Aromasin 3y 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.

hprotagonist 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

Very interesting. I'd never heard of this before. More discovered items and info here: https://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/discoveries/ https://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/discoveries/

tetris11 3y 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 3y 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".