Monday, July 29, 2024

Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement - Part 2

 

Food

The extraordinary preservation of material at Must Farm provides a unique opportunity to examine food that was being stored, processed, and possibly eaten shortly before the fire. The food and drink mixtures from Must Farm are exceptional in prehistoric Brit­ain. They represent the remains of porridges, stews, brewing mashes, doughs, and sugary or oily liquids, all of which were being stored or potentially even eaten or drunk at the time the settlement burnt down.

Residue of food in one of the Must Farm bowels
Photo: (c) Must Farm Website

A coarseware bowel found beneath Structure 5 was half full of a thick porridge-like mix of roughly ground wheatmeal. The wooden spatula used to stir this porridge was still leaning against the inner edge of the bowl.

Meat was very evidently an important dietary component. Animal remains included large and small mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibia. Pig/wild boar, followed by sheep/goat, red deer, and fish (pike and perch) were the main animal foodstuffs.

The considerable evidence for fish consumption at Must Farm is unparalleled in British later prehistory, partly because of the exceptional preservation and the recovery methods employed. Evidence for Late Bronze Age fishing practices is provided by fragments of knot­ted net – possibly fishing net – that were associated with a possible ceramic net weight, in Structure 4.

Fish were often eaten either raw or only partially cooked and the fish bones were commonly consumed along with the flesh: fish bones, scales, and teeth (including fish heads) were a regular feature of human excrement.

Two other noteworthy foodstuffs from the settle­ment are milk and honey/beeswax. Organic pot residues of these were widespread suggesting that their use was relatively com­mon.

Cattle are barely represented at Must Farm representing less than 4% of the animal remains in total. Although pigs were clearly an important dietary component, there is little evidence to suggest that they were being raised and slaughtered at the settlement.

Items of pottery from Must Farm
Photo: (c) Must Farm Website

The occupants of Must Farm processed emmer wheat into meal and flour and used these ingredients for making stews, dumplings, and bread. They used ceramic bowels to eat their porridge, mixed their dough in wooden ‘dough’ troughs and carried their drink­ing water in buckets.

Overall, the evidence from Must Farm makes clear that later prehistoric food practices in Britain are more complex and more varied than has previ­ously been recognized. As the Must Farm researchers point out, the food-related evi­dence is outstanding and allows us to imagine not only the food tastes of Must Farm’s occupants’ but also the ‘recipes’ they used. We learn about the food harvested, made, stored, and consumed.

Fabric Production

Must Farm has produced extraordinary evidence of fibre processing and fabric production. All the fabrics from the Must Farm pile-dwelling were made from plant fibres, predominantly flax, although lime bast was also used.

Illustration of one of the Must Farm textiles showing the weave and thread direction
Photo: (c) Must Farm Website

Processed flax fibre was in turn spun and spliced into thread, which was then wound onto wooden dowels or into balls. The site produced at least 8 spindle whorls, 36 dowels or bobbins wound with thread, a number of balls of thread, as well as a cone of thicker cord.

One of the finest examples of textiles was found in Structure 1. This large, fine piece of folded cloth was woven from threads of around 0.3 mm in diameter and must have been made by a highly experienced weaver.

Artefact distributions, suggest that different stages of textile production were performed across buildings. For example, flax was probably processed in Structure 1, with the spinning of fibres into yarn carried out across Structures 2, 4 and 5 (if not all buildings). This was then finally woven into textile on the warp-weighted loom located back in Structure 1.

Wider Connections

The beads, appear to have travelled distances, possibly from Iran, Egypt, Switzerland, and Ireland. The site’s location on a waterway networked into the North Sea made it easier for its inhabitants to acquire objects from further afield.

Socketed bronze axe
Photo: (c) Must Farm Website

Nine logboats, ranging in date from the late Early Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, were found in the Must Farm chan­nel, upstream of the pile-dwelling. Wooden trackways or causeways may have provided a connection between the river and fen-edge.

Comparison with other settlements

The Iron Age Glastonbury ‘Lake Village’ in Somerset is comparable to Must Farm, in terms of size, location and economy. Unlike Must Farm, Glastonbury Lake Village could only be reached by canoe. This limited means of access would have provided an enhanced level of protection.

Glastonbury and Must Farm both represent villages rather than just one or two family groups. A minimum of five structures were in use at the same time at Must Farm. Glastonbury Lake Village was more extensive and accommodated forty roundhouses. At its peak it has been estimated that there were thirteen houses in use.

The Must Farm roundhouses were raised up above the water on tall piles while the lake village settlement was raised above the water by adding large amounts of brushwood and logs, and clay directly to the wet peat. This material was par­tially retained by lines of upright posts, both within the settlement and forming a palisade around the exterior.

The remains of a wooden bucket that contained scrap bronze
associated with Structure 4
Photo: (c) Must Farm Website

At Glastonbury, the village was located on a sig­nificant water transport route, as was Must Farm. Glastonbury relied on the neighbouring dryland for the basis of its food economy, despite the exploitation of wetland resources. The same was true at Must Farm.

Late Bronze Age sites in Ireland such as Ballinderry crannog No. 2, Co. Offaly and Rathtinaun, Co. Sligo, are still amongst the richest settle­ment sites from the period, in terms of artefacts despite the discovery, in the last decade, of significantly more ‘dryland’ settlements in Ireland.

Late Bronze Age crannogs or lake-dwellings have produced evidence for livestock (animal bones) and food production (saddle querns), as well as domes­tic pottery, wooden finds, and basketry. Some sites have produced evidence of high-status goods, such as socketed axes, bronze rings, swords, and spearheads, and amber and lignite.

For example, Late Bronze Age wetland settlements, like Rathtinaun, Co. Sligo, have produced evidence for industrial or metalworking activities, such as layers of burnt stone, clay mould fragments, saddle querns in large numbers, and evidence for large hearths and fires.

Abandonment of Settlement

The summer/early autumn end date for the settlement is indicated by the 3–6 month old lambs killed in the fire. The rarity of fruit stones and seeds (sloes, cherries, hazel nutshell) suggests much of the settlement’s occupation was during the spring/early summer months when such fruit was absent.

There seems to have been little effort by the occupants of Must Farm to return and recover precious frag­ments of their lives, despite the obvious material wealth that had been lost. Retrieving precious items in the aftermath of the fire may there­fore have been taboo.

The abandonment of wetland settlements is likely to have been a complex social process. The death of a person strongly associated with the dwelling such as a tribal leader or shaman, can result in abandonment and the dwelling may even be burnt down.

Conclusion

In the mid-9th century BC, a disaster happened to a small community when fire swept through their palisade-enclosed pile-dwelling settlement, built only a year earlier across a narrow sluggish river channel in a wetland landscape.

The fire caused the collapse of the structures, and as the floors burnt through, the contents of the buildings and walkways came crashing down into the shallow muddy waters below and were buried by river borne silts. The occupants escaped with their lives and in a matter of hours, they lost their homes and possessions, as well as their means of subsistence: tools, food stores, livestock.

A wooden artefact from Must Farm - exact use unknown
Photo: (c) Must Farm Website

The Must Farm settlement gives us a rare glimpse of life in the Bronze Age. There were live lambs inside the buildings at the time of the fire, beside rushes and flax harvested in late summer and willow withies cut when the leaves had fallen in the winter.

The Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm, with its remarkable survival of a wide range of evidence, provides a unique opportunity to think about how people understood their worlds. The anthropolo­gist, Clifford Geertz, considered that the important questions we should ask of any society are: who do people think they are; what did they think they were doing, and to what end did they think they were doing it?

In the words of Volume 1 contributor Aidan O’Sullivan:

“… the objects found at Must Farm – beads from Iran, Switzerland, Ireland; amber long circulating from the Baltic regions; a bucket and other bronze fragments from Ireland – all hint at far-flung water-borne connections. But for all that, most of the objects recovered, including pottery, wooden bowls, platters, buckets and troughs, balls of thread and woven, twined and knotted fabrics of flax and lime bast indicate that they were doing ordinary, routine things; living in houses, chatting, sleeping, cooking and eating, raising children, storing stuff, making clothes, managing resources, presumably all the time, feeling that they were ‘at home’.”

The people who inhabited Must Farm possessed a deep-rooted familiarity with erecting structures in the wet: knowledge of piling and of which timbers to cut at what lengths; knowledge of how to support heavy roofs, elevated floors, and hearths above an active waterway.

The skill displayed by the architecture sug­gest that this was not the first or only pile-dwelling to be founded in the wetland. As construction could have required labour input from beyond the resident group, this building knowledge may have been widely available in the local community, sug­gesting wetland living was commonplace.

For more information see:

“Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Vol. 1. Landscape, architecture and occupation.” (2024). Edited by Mark Knight, Rachel Ballantyne, Matthew Brudenell, Anwen Cooper, David Gibson & Iona Robinson Zeki

“Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement: Volume 2. Specialist reports.” (2024). Edited by Rachel Ballantyne, A. Cooper, D. Gibson, Mark Knight & I Robinson Zeki

Both volumes are freely accessible via the Must Farm website

https://www.mustfarm.com/bronze-age-settlement/

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