Living on water in the world of Stonehenge

[Music] hello good evening um lovely to see you all and to be here this evening for this event living on water in the world of stonehenge this is one of the events that is built around the exhibition at the british museum the world of stonehenge which is open until the 17th of july 2022. the exhibition explores the the movement and mobility of people ideas and objects both before during and after the time of stonehenge so to give you a time period that's really from the mesolithic over 10 000 years ago in britain to the later bronze age around 3000 years ago for many visitors to the exhibition to date one of the most surprising and amazing things about the exhibition is how it shows the connectivity mobility and travel of the people who lived during this time in this world of stonehenge the time period that we're just we're talking about and that our speakers this evening are going to tell you about was a time long before road and rail networks crisscrossed the country when relatively large areas of britain were difficult to navigate they were perhaps still woodied and difficult to pass so in that in those times water the the seaways in particular britain being an island but also the river systems and the wetlands of the country provided really important rapid ways for people to to move around move around the country and be connected to other communities in different parts of both britain and indeed continental europe and those same wet locations wetlands and rivers and seaways provided also a rich source of trade and exchange but also of of plants and animal life as a resource for people to live on and with and as we'll hear tonight wet and watery places are sometimes considered socially in religiously significant locations and to take stonehenge as an example the river haven is a really important river connecting monuments within the wider stonehenge landscape linking up the famous stonehenge that we all know with other monuments like durrington walls and the recently discovered bluestonehenge at west amesbury and then later on in the time period we cover after stonehenge rivers in particular became a key location where communities deposited offerings and sacrifices and valuable objects in the hope of of either communicating with the other world or obtaining something in return for their sacrifice so rivers play a key role socially and religiously and i'm delighted tonight that we have three of britain's top archaeologists to talk about their experiences and their work on some of the most important prehistoric sites that we're connected and are connected to and by water by rivers and by the sea and by by wetlands and so tonight we have professor nikki milner from the university of york we have professor duncan garrow from the university of reading and we have a previous winner of archaeologist of the year mark knight from the cambridge archaeological unit and i'm so delighted that they can join us to talk us through these phenomenal archaeological sites and first we're going to start with them with nikki milner and so and nikki it's it's over to you to tell us about your research and your work thank you thank you very much neil for that and thank you very much for inviting me uh this evening so i'm going to be talking a little bit about the mesolithic site of star car um this is dating back about 11 000 years ago um but it's a it's a great site to really explore how people lived by and on water um at this time this is a this is a time period um really before uh stonehenge as we know it existed but lots of there's lots of evidence for mesolithic activity in the stonehenge area um at that time and uh just to locate us first of all so uh the sighted star car is based in um the veil of pickering quite near scarborough and finally and at the time was on what is known as lake flix them also to note at this time that we were britain was actually joined to the rest of europe by a land bridge so all this white area you can see on this map is is a land bridge and there was probably a big river running um right through the middle of this in what is now the north sea but you can see all these uh sites in denmark and uh northern germany are all also early mesolithic sites dating to about the same time period of star car and there's lots of connections between the sites as we'll see a bit later showing that people moved across this vast landscape and probably um along the the coast and by rivers we know that people had boats at this time so this is what the veil of pickering looks like now it's an agricultural landscape mainly pasture land um but 11 000 years ago there was a lake here and we know this from many many years of auguring through layers of heat and this is um tim schradler hall from ucl and for many years with the belly pickering research trust boards of students came out and measured the depths of the heat and this gave us the basal topography which led us to be able to create this plan of the lake it's about four kilometers across it's about two kilometers north or south and you can see there are islands on the lake as well and there's evidence for both paleolithic and mesolithic occupation on the islands again showing people were crossing the water this is the lake with little red dots on it which show um sites that we found around the lake edge showing that it's a a well inhabited landscape with lake paleolithic and mesolithic sites on it and you can see star car there as well so the site was first found um back in 1948 by a local amateur archaeologist john mall um from from scarborough and then excavated for three years by graeme clark who was a lecturer at cambridge at the time and later became a very well-known professor from cambridge you can see these trenches very um deep uh peat so peat is an organic material that is decomposed organics from wreaths and and other vegetation around the lake and what's great about peat is that it excludes oxygen which means that bacteria can't get in and eat away at many of the artifacts that we don't usually find on archaeological sites so wood and own an antler and because of that um we have these incredible artifacts from the site so here's a headdress or antler front lit as it's sometimes known made out of a red deer skull it's been carved and the antlers have been modified and we think that probably people were wearing these on on their heads 21 of these were found by graham clark and we found another 12 um since then and if you have been to the british museum uh exhibition and slow henge exhibition you will have seen um this right at the beginning of the exhibition and it's about one of these fabulous artifacts we also have these incredible um harpoons or barbed points made out of red deer uh antlers and these artifacts are all so rare i mean there are no other headdresses in this country there's only a few others known from northern germany and these bad points um from star car constitute about 95 percent of far points known in this country so really an incredible um set of artifacts we went back to the site um in 2004 and i co-directed this site with chantal canela from the university of newcastle and barry taylor from the university of chester and we did we actually did 10 years of excavation here and this is a picture from one of the last few years you can see that there's still water in the trench these um this site still gets sort of uh waterlogged helping the preservation of some of these artifacts and this slide shows um the slope down into the waterlogged areas so the very dark material is the heat and that's where the water would have been that's where the lake edge was in the mesolithic period and then the the higher ground which is much paler and that sort of beige color is where we find the structures where people lived right on the edge of this lake and here is um one of those structures this in fact is the earliest known house in britain believe it or not it doesn't look particularly exciting um just like this but it is a very important discovery it's got a hollow in the center and post holes around it and in plan it looks um it looks like this so um you know you get an impression of of what it would have looked like on the ground but it's very difficult to reconstruct what these structures actually look like um when people were living there whether they were where they were domed or tp sort of shape it was absolutely full of flint and it had some organic matter in it which suggests there was a bedding and perhaps weeds put down on the floor but we have to use all these different scientific methods to try and reconstruct what it might have looked like this is one of our reconstructions this is in our experimental center at the university of york this is a more of a tp type shape um it's matched with weeds in this case but it it could have been covered in other materials such as maybe animal skins although it would take a lot of animal skins to cover something like this and given that it was right by the edge of the lake and there was lots and lots of wreaths around the lake the idea that this is thatched is probably um a sense of before one of the other really intriguing things that we've got from this site are these great wooden platforms we found three of these and a big wooden scatter as well and you know hopefully you can see the scale of this i mean some of these pieces of wood are well they they stretch for many meters some of them are sort of four or five meters in length length and some of these are whole trees but some of these have been split and hewn and that's really quite remarkable using the the axes and things that they had available to them and things that are quite hard to reconstruct now um this is the this is actually the earliest evidence of carpentry that we've got in europe now what they're doing on these platforms is you know harder to to say there's not a lot of artifacts around them were they they're right on the edge of the lake probably stabilizing the muds were they used for jetties for boats or were they used in ritual practices and we we don't really know we also though have this very interesting insight into what people were doing and possibly as kind of ritual practices on the edge of the lake this is a very very small bit of archaeology that was left from clark's excavations he basically just didn't excavate this this very small strip and in this uh you get this remarkable accumulation of of material i mean i've never seen anything like this on a mesolithic site it's bone antler flint wood all jam-packed together um and you know thousands and thousands of pieces including a lot of these headdresses these out the front lips and you can see on this one here that it's actually there's a there's a couple of small rodier uh antlers just next to it as well so these are a very mysterious artifacts um we've got the star car one here and this other one is from northern germany and as i mentioned before we get these sort of connections across this vast area and but northern germany is the only other place we know where these sort of headdresses were found and again the interpretation is perhaps that um they were used in some kind of ritual practices so this is taken from ethnography and this is the event um tribe in siberia where they used headdresses and animal skins um and carried out shamanic practices to commune with animal spirits in order to try and ensure a good hunt and try and ensure the the prosperity and health of people in the village and it's thought that maybe these headdresses that we find have some kind of similar connections to these another really intriguing artifact that was found again in the shallows of the lake is this pendant made out of shale now it looks much more robust on this picture but actually it's very very thin and it's very small you can see it's only about three centimeters um in its biggest dimension and it's a bit i mean it's exactly like a guitar plectrum actually and it's got these very little very extremely small engravings on that are really almost impossible to see with the naked eye which you know you wonder what those are for and lots of people have given us lots of different sorts of ideas of their interpretations whether it's for um tally marks or some kind of communication or a map or all sorts of ideas like that but it's intriguing that again it was found right in the shallow waters of the lake and again we see these connections across this big vast area so we have an amber pendant here which was also um found at starcar the one on the grey black black ground and the his other amber pendant which was found in denmark and in denmark quite a lot of amber pendants like this have been discovered and you can see again they've got these interesting markings on them they've got these geometric lines which just look very similar to the the star car one with the little tally marks on it and so again we we're looking at connections across large areas with people doing similar sorts of things and which is very interesting to to think about and how far these ideas were moving across the landscape so finally i just wanted to show this film a reconstruction by marcus abbott of what starcar might have looked like 11 000 years ago i mean we've seen it looks like agricultural fields now but from all the work that the scientists have been doing on the looking at the environments and the climate and and reconstructing the lake we can begin to build up pictures like this um of a very rich landscape full of birds and fish and other animals that people hunted and gathered and fished um whilst they were they were living here um we have these images of this very shallow water beside the edge of the lake um where people would have placed the timbers and placed their different artifacts and it gives a an impression of what it might have looked like i rather like this um this image where we can really see how shallow it is and and how uh the fish swimming around the different artifacts um gives a i think a good impression of what all these things are that we've found in this case here we've got one of these antler headdresses but we also have reconstructed what that big accumulation that jam-packed area of fines might have looked like just under a shallow amount of water it's very it's such an interesting area this this particular bit and from the radiocarbon dates it looks like this particular part of the site could have been accumulated in just just one year maybe as many as 60 but it might have been a really short-lived event that meant that people were putting all these artifacts into the water all at the same time overall and we know that site was used for 800 years and then we have another image here of the timbers on the edge of the lake and another structure in the background this time more of a rounded shaped structure so um hopefully that's given you a kind of an idea of what star car might have looked like 11 000 years ago and if you would like to know more about about this site we do have a website we have a couple of books which you can get for free um from this um website and also um we do a future learn um mooc so that you can have a it's a free online course if you'd like to know more so thank you very much well thank you so much nikki for that fantastically rich presentation that managed to condense into 15 minutes what i know has been over a decade if not more of research and work so thank you so much for for giving us that overview and for anyone watching we can all thoroughly recommend those those publications um beautifully illustrated and really very accessible for for every type of reader it's a wonderful achievement so now we're going to go further north and we're also going to come forward in time with duncan garrow so duncan i'm going to hand over to you for our next talk thanks very much neil um so i'm i'm going to be moving us forward in time as neil said um into the neolithic around about five and a half thousand years ago um in the outer hebrides and to talk about neolithic chronologues which is part of a project whose name is islands of stone that i'm involved with along with fraser sturt and stephanie blankshine at southampton and angela gannon historic environment scotland funded by the ahrc you might be asking perhaps you are what is a krennog and i've put in brackets to have to be careful making bold claims about this kind of thing today but it's arguably the best known example of people living on water um in britain and ireland through pre-history and beyond you can see a lovely reconstructed crown from lochte in the image there and the definition on the screen um from a formal definition which explains that a chronolog is essentially a nice name for an artificial island um mainly built on locks or legs and dating from prehistoric period to the medieval period there you can see on the screen a map of all the um the island dwellings in scotland and hopefully you can see the the densest concentration in the outer hebrides where we're going to be focusing today i know this is an international audience so i just wanted to make sure that i and while i won't be talking about irish krannerls today hopefully you can see all of those red dots on the screen just to give you a sense of the fact that this is a broad phenomenon but beyond scotland and there really are a lot of krelks in ireland but we've been focusing on scotland scottish one's mainly ourselves going back to that definition an important element of the chronolog is the fact that these have a very wide date range which you can see in the definition and also in that bar chart down the bottom of the number of known sites of different dates so you can see spreading from the prehistoric period before 800 bc as it says there right through into much more recent centuries closer to today and the little green bit of that bar um is going to be the the new sites that we've been we've been working with ourselves so neolithic krannert where did we get there the very first and potential neolithic renault was found in north eust and its name is island donal it was found as a result of the work of ian armit who you can see up on the screen there based in york along with nikki who have just been hearing from and ian actually went to that site to dig it because he thought it was going to be an iron age site but very quickly realized that it was an iron age it had lots of nearly pottery but uncovered a fantastic sequence of buildings over the course of several years in the 1980s some of which you can see on the right there so they've got stone building the foot footings of walls hearths that kind of thing once they've found that site everyone was very surprised and you don't need to read the quotes on the screen here it's just to make the point that everyone got excited everyone was surprised but then thinking perhaps there are loads more of these neolithic crannogs as you can see in various of the quotes there but no one actually after that excavation found any until chris murray um and his colleague mark elliott um a local um who lives in the isle of lewis where we've been working um chris is a an ex-royal navy diver and a man of many talents and curiosities and chris was out walking his dog one day around one island and wondered what it was and whether he might have a little dive and see what he found knowing obviously that it was a historic umly interesting sight um so chris um got his um dusted off his um diving gear and went into one of the locks um and as you can see um on the screen there came out with some fantastically preserved um neolithic pottery the one in the center of the screen is what we'd call an unseen bowl so dating to around about five or six thousand years ago and very typical of the outer hebrides in orkney um you can see loads more um on the photo on the right there and and you can also see from these photos that chris is a fantastic photographer and has got an eye for the excalibur light pot emerging from the the lock um which has been a real bonus to in terms of the recording of all of what chris and mark did so um they then um literally went on to google earth um to find other crannogs that they might um investigate and there you can see um our map that we've produced in collaboration with chris of all of the sites that chris and sometimes with mark also dived um and there you can see hopefully the red ones the dots um in red are the ones on which they found similar quantities of neolithic material deposited in to the locks around the little krennog for reasons i won't go into today i think it's coincidence that those green dots are all in that middle strip i'm not sure it's meaningful um so just to give you a sense of where we're at i thought i'd add a chronolog onto the the um english heritage's timeline of stonehenge and you can see um the nice red arrow showing where we are so um before the main stonehenge monument was built but around the same time that long barrow burial mounds and causeway enclosure gathering sites were being constructed in that same landscape but before the hinge itself was created so in terms of where we're at now in terms of the history of the project the work that chris and and mark undertook um certainly created new understandings but also generated more questions as archaeology so often does they'd shown that crownogs were two and a half thousand years older than anyone had previously expected but they created they found all this new material but we don't really know what these sites were for quite a lot of the ones that that chris and we have been working on see are much smaller than the one i showed you um dugway e and ahmet they're too small to be settlements there's lots of material deposited into the locks around them so we're not quite sure what's going on um it's possible that they were especially created for ritual practices associated with water as neil pointed out in the introduction at the beginning perhaps even burial science that kind of thing but this these kind of questions remain to be answered so um since 2016 um fraser and i and subsequently steph and angela have been working on the sites in collaboration with chris and others um so what we first did we went to undertake some um survey work you can see it's quite rudimentary um involving paddling um a rib with some extremely expensive scientific equipment strapped on um these sites are quite inaccessible at times so we've been able to create the bathymetric models of the locks that we've been working on you can see on the screen there we've also been able to carry out side scan sonar and hopefully you can see the kind of blurry image on the screen the red dots are a pottery um but it's basically an image of the lock bed so you can see individual rocks and things like that and potentially even shirts of pottery and some amazing resolution and images from from that boat but we've also been carrying out diving surveys as you might imagine showing one of the shirts um on the bottom of the lock and the kind of situation in which you find them in the amazing motivations that they're in basically um here's another um nice photo of felix and bob emerging with another it looks similar but it's a it's a different vessel um out of the water and on the right there hopefully you can see the two main sites that we've been working on um the the crannogs models of the crannogs and with the blue line showing where the water is now and clearly all of the red dots um the pots of the salt that we've just been looking at deposited into the lock and then found on the bottom of the lock and brought up by by divers just as chris did at the beginning as well as all of that pottery underwater we've also been finding the remnants of of timber architecture and hopefully you can see on the screen there some horizontal flat timbers basically um emerging from from from on the top of the screen there the edge of the stone architecture of the chronolog and we think some of these timbers that were originally upright vertical and subsequently collapsed so kind of holding the edge of the stone architecture in potentially um i'll just take you on a quick drone flight to one of the sites to give you a sense of the kind of um place that we've been working the beautiful landscape today that we're lucky enough to to be able to spend time in um always sunny as i'm sure you can imagine and see on the screen there and chris flapping his arms around very widely but that's just because the the film was speeded up but you can get a sense of the kind of work we're doing you can see the divers in the water and the beginning of excavation on top um we did carry out an excavation at langevat um the spoil in bags gives you a real sense of the the challenges of working on a small stone island in the middle of a lock which you didn't perhaps we didn't think through before we started um but we've been able to uncover um a lot more evidence by digging um on land and moving forward to last summer and this is very much an ongoing project um and a different site but where we undertook um a months long season of field work um just in july last year and there um in the image you can see um on the right of the screen the stone causeway leading from the nearest edge of the log out to the stone island and you can see very clearly um our terrestrial trench in brown and then hopefully you can see on the left of that underwater um the underwater trench that was essentially an extension of the the on land trench that we we created um so we're digging simultaneously underwater and on land on this site which has been a great experience all around um i'll just give you a quick sequence of um the work that we did um that marks the the very heavy um amount of labour involved including paddling all of that spoil over to the shore in in a similar boat to what you just saw so we took off the vegetation there's our initial trench we undertook quite a lot more work and hopefully you can see that's the end of the the initial phase of our work there's actually a kind of flat area within the middle of the eyelet and actually a cairn-like feature and that we haven't worked out the purpose of yet yet but an interesting feature that we hadn't observed prior to excavation all of that work and all of that soil removed um on the stone phase we uncovered three pieces of work quartz and no protein and you'll have a sense of the kind of material that we got under water already so that was really um puzzling us this summer we couldn't work out why there was so little could it really only have been deposited off the edge of the eyelets until what we did hopefully you can see there is go through the base of the stone architecture when we dug the the trench just there um in in the middle of the site really we fully expected the stones to continue down but they didn't we came straight into some timber and brushwood layers which is very surprising it's like kind of you can see prehistoric versions special real sense of the kind of um brush wood that's being excavated so once we got into those layers we got loads of quartz and pottery um and lots of neolithic material culture associated with the pre-stone phase of the monument with some um seemingly some timber layers underneath talking of which i'm going to take you and remind you of where we are so you can hopefully see the the trench that we've just been looking at there and there's the underwater trench obviously and we're going to go down underwater and have a look what was in that trench um simultaneously as we did we were digging those layers so we're just going down below you can see the metal frames trench and hopefully you can see a load of um quite substantial timbers um underwater in the trench that we've revealed by removing the silts and in that picture it's a lot clearer that central um picture you can see um this substantial essentially um small timber construction um that seems to have predated the stone architecture of of the crannog and you can see up the top there and very clearly the timber is underlying the stones which we've removed in that little rectangle at the top left so that was surprising we were very puzzled about what was going on but once on this very clear image and taken from a drone on a fantastically clear day you can get a sense of where the trench is and the fact that those timbers could well extend essentially where these silts are marking out in a much bigger area underwater beyond the stones of the crown so as with chris and mark's work our own work has also created new knowledge new understandings but more questions which we hope to be able to resolve in the next couple of years there seemed to be um one or even more than one wooden phase prior to the stone granola that wooden architecture extends well beyond the stone island and all of the material culture pretty much that we've excavated on land has been associated with that wooden face so maybe we're thinking we're thinking it's likely that the stones are actually much later in dates and possibly not nearly thick at all in all of the phases the timber and the stone i'm not sure we're any really any closer to understanding um what these sites were what strictly speaking what they could have been used for and hopefully further excavation might reveal architectural features to tell us a bit about that that question so just to finish and give you a sense as i said it's an ongoing project so next summer we're going to be surveying in north your spend becca and southeast you can see in the yellow rectangle to try and find more um neolithic material in association with chronologues in that part of the world not just up in lewis where chris and mark have done their work and then in the summer of 2023 we're going to go back to the site i've just been showing you and hopefully resolving some of those questions but no doubt um raising some more unanswered ones as well um so do um have a look at the website if you'd like to find out more you can see the address up the top there and hopefully we'll be explaining the answers to those questions as we move forward so thank you very much for listening audience and and thank you neil for inviting me to talk about what is some fantastic science i'm very privileged to have worked on well thank you duncan um i feel like we've all been out onto the crannogs with you through those amazing images and film and finds so thank you for taking us on that trip from the comfort of our own comfort of our own homes and we obviously really look forward to seeing what you find in the next couple of years definitely a project to keep our eyes on so now we're going to travel um further south we're going to come down south again and we're going to move into the later part of the bronze age to an extraordinary site that has been covered around the world and we're going to hand over to its lead excavator mark knight mark and it's over to you thank you neil and thank you very much for the invitation to talk about must farm um and living on water in my presentation i'm going to try and give you sort of three aspects of our project i suppose one is the context of the piledriving settlement one is the conditions of living on water and the third part is is the provisioning of that of that settlement and what that says about the potential of our site and relationship to further discoveries within within the context of finland and the wetlands of east anglia so i'll begin with with context and put a map up of the uk um the map on the left is a obscuration map it basically shows which parts of britain are deeply buried or covered by sediment that make it difficult for sort of surface inspection like aerial photography things and the map on the right is is a close-up of feminine itself and that shows what you can do with with lidar so looking at the sort of micro topography of of that landscape so it goes from being obscured to suddenly into a richly sort of textured landscape and on that image you have a little bit of the north sea at the top that sort of big white blob is the washes coming in and on the right-hand side so the left-hand side of the image you can see the river coming in through peterborough debauching into finland itself there's a little island there with a fishtail with a blue nose that blue nose is the most farm quarry and that's the location of our excavation and the important thing i think about beginning with this slide i suppose is that sense that this is a deeply buried landscape there's a lot of sediment in there and in a way it sort of becomes a another sort of lost world of which we're very fortunate to be the first to sort of properly explore any certain scale so this is a close-up of of that that same area so this is what's known as the flagpole basin so you can see whittlesea island which is the sort of fishtail you can see peterborough on the left which is the big brown globe and then you can see what is the prehistoric course of the riverine coming into the deeper basin and what this image does is it takes away the sediment and shows the paleo topography and that star is the the location of the flag there sorry of the mustang parliament so i work in what's been called a concave-shaped landscape with an exaggerated time transgressive environment which is another word for a negative hydrocare but in fact what it actually means is that it's a big basin that starts off dry and ends up wet and that that succession of sediment of peat and silt happens throughout prehistory so if we wanted to find a site that's contemporary with nikki's style car we'd have to be at the bottom of that story for the neolithic we have to come up a couple of layers and for the roman period we have to be at the very top so there's a sensor of a succession important in that story is is that dry to wet sort of story of changing texture is contemporary with the bronze age so the landscapes of stonehenge would be at the dry end of that spectrum and the landscape that i'm going to be describing today is at the very wet end of that spectrum what's what's also important about this succession is that sense that it's not a day night sort of transformation from dry to wet it's something that happens over time and that that movement from damp to sodden to prone to flood to flooded to drowned is a is a landscape that's occupied i know there are earlier sort of iterations of people trying to engage with with the weapons and and building on there so our site the most von paul dwelling settlement doesn't doesn't arrive in a kind of a void it actually comes from a sort of a history of people building timber edifices within within those sediments so here's a an aerial view of finland um and the first thing you notice is it hypothetically the second thing is that the rich black color of the the surface paint but most importantly from from my perspective it's also you can see it's not just the land that becomes drying but also the rivers and this sort of s shape or signal shape running through in pale is the payload channel of the name and it's the channel that we've been investigating in the context of the baldwin segment we're very lucky that we work in the biggest hole in finland which is the most home quarry where they extract clay to make bricks and what that does is it enables us to to go deep without being underwater and basically explore these deep sediments in a sort of safe environment but also at scale and the great thing about this image is is that the two characters you can see at the bottom basically stood up of a mesolithic buried soil but the feature of our interest is that big dark smile at sort of far end on the on the right hand side of the image which is the most fond paleo channel and in 2009 10 12 11 and 12 we were able to excavate it at scale so we dug over 350 meters of the payload channel um in its entirety and if you look closely at this image you can see these sort of strips of blue plastic which are covering up fish traps and fish wheels and log boats sitting in within that paleo channel and here's just an example of some of the preserved waterlogged artifacts from that sequence and this is a really nice image in that sense that we can see that we were basically digging a channel that was pretty much preserved in its entirety there was no truncation of it we were able to see in articulation fish traps and fish wheels and log boats and metal work all pretty much where it was deposited so here's some of the fish wheels running along its base and one of the 24 fist traps are distributed even along its length and i suppose what i'm trying to show here is is that the payload channel has this this long history of activity it's it's already a busy place long before the pulse running settlement was actually constructed so here's our paleo channel it's a bit like our landscape in a sense that it's a it's a concave shape that fills up the sediment so it begins at 600 1600 bc and ends at 100 bc so most of the fisheries of his trap are at its base and the log boats occur throughout its succession and our settlement is up in the sort of top third of that sequence the other thing to say about our payload channels is that it's undynamic there's no there's nothing being eroded it's basically it's almost like a linear lake and sediment is forming very slowly and basically preserving things in situ so there's a real sense here of what we find is in its real place so this is the same sediment but this is our excavations in 2015 of the pauldron settlement so the same grey silk that surrounded the boats and the piss traps are covering our architecture you're also getting a sense of our methodology spend a lot of our time laying flat on our chest basically dangling down and digging with our fingertips and this is the site in its entirety so we put a big shed up over the top of the excavation and for practically 12 months this was our home of excavating the settlement so on the right hand side of this image is the southern bank of the channel and on the left hand side is the center of the channel so you're seeing sort of half the settlement or half the channel you're seeing the remains of the track settlement so you can see a line of posts which is a sort of palestine that can close it with settlement and in the center you can see these sort of roof fans of of basically the collapsed structures and this is what it looks like in plan so this big white rectangle an effect is the limit of our excavation and we get this sense of all these collapsed elements of superstructure and the roof vans and also the line of the palisade and the other thing to say about the settlement is is that it was destroyed by fire so majority of the horizontal structural timbers the superstructure were charred whereas the the footings or foundations of the settlement which were the the piles and the uprights were preserved by the watermark so we've got the sort of underwater preserved footprint and then we've got this superstructure that's come down through that with a complication event and in total we found five structures that we were able to identify but undoubtedly there were more that truncated to the north from the former quarry and this is a sort of reconstruction of the whole settlement as we sort of envisage it within the channel so it's a series of circular structures built on stilts with a surrounding palestine built in water but also a river that's actually set within a wetland environment itself so we are completely divorced from land and this is a reconstruction of the sort of elevation so to focus on our sort of reconstruction the great thing is is that in that sort of collapse of those structures if you can imagine a sort of a coffee pot and a and basically the plunger coming down the roof active like that so all the weight of the turf and the fact that play on the roof and these heavy rafters as the settlement burned down it dropped and basically hit the floor into the floor into the bottom of the channel so we ended up with a sort of compressed or conflated version of the original architectural superstructure you can see on this side also one of the piles being driven deep into the riverbed so this is structure one in its entirety as we excavated and if i just sort of highlight that you can see that we've got concentric circles of uprights so in blue and the outer ring and green on the inner ring and then also you can see the red of the palisade the sort of an accompanying walkway to the right hand side of the structure and then if i highlight the roof rafters you can see the configuration of the structure and the thing to say about this is that this is a roundhouse on stilts it's eight meters in diameter and to all intents and purposes is uh there's a replica of all the round houses we find on less world reserve sites on the sort of uplands or terrestrial sites have brought the whole of southern britain now what's different about our structure is obviously that we've still got the architecture present but also we can take the roof off and go inside the buildings themselves so in here you actually get an indication of that preservation so you can see that the robust timbers of the roof rafters but also if you look inside the excavator quarters you can see the much smaller diameter work of the wattle floors and also you can see to the right hand side of the slide all the wood chips of construction and what this slide demonstrates is that there's a conflation here of of construction and when we did the dendrochronology of the of the timbers we found that all of the uprights whether it's the palisade or the round hoses and all of the major timbers that formed the roof rafters and the floor joists were all failed in the same year and our dendrochronologist also told us that when he looked at the detail of the tree room so the wood was green when it caught fire there was a certain distortion about those those growth rings so his suggestion was is that our settlement was built as one and burnt down as one and perhaps within as little as 12 months and that seems to be reflected in that that lack of stratigraphy we just have a single layer basically expressing all of the time of the settlement the other thing to say about the architecture is is that basically there's very little conversion going on most of the wood is in the round if it is converted it tends to be just split and it's it's a sort of very there's a real sort of sense of or particular types of wood being used for different particular types of the architecture so there's a real sense here that this wasn't something that was ad hoc or or sort of off the cuff construction that was something that was well practiced or well-versed so i built the structures now i've given you their contacts within within the feminine environment within the river and things and i want to go a little bit closer at the actual conditions of the settlement the people that were living there what they were experiencing so from the sort of macroscopic to the microscopic looking at things like the pollen and the chronomates or midges and the algae that we've found within our samples and things everything points to this being basically still water heavily vegetated but basically it is it is wet there's no ambiguity about that at all and that the deposition of our settlement was basically falling into riverside so this the upper part of the slide shows the mass of charred wood and tur and pots and wooden artifacts and things and the last part of the slide shows that 15 centimeters of stratigraphy that represents the entirety of construction occupation and destruction and we were very fortunate in the sense that our river context was so sort of stagnant that things pretty much where they fare was where they stayed so there was a real reflection of basically what was once superstructure and how that plan worked in the in the deposition environment so beneath the footprints of the buildings we were finding hole pots wooden troughs um in relative real distribution and then around the sort of fringes or halos of the structures we were finding these formative middens which was basically the pot shirts butchered animal bones um burnt stones being deposited during the lifetime of the settlement and they call them formative because they are they are one they are very thin and two that there's that relationship again to the wood chips of construction you can see that the bone sits directly on top top of the construction debris so here's a plan rather than showing all of the architecture this is all the material culture and formal remains so you can see that there's a sort of relationship between the distribution of things and the distribution of the footprints of the individual buildings one of the things that we found a lot of um within the settlement were populites poohs basically belonging to different inhabitants of the settlement so on here you can see child land droppings but also on the top right hand side you can see these preserved waterlogged copyrights from from dogs and from humans these things are basically the inhabitants of the structures but excreting over the side of the structures into the into that watering context to join the the pot shirts and the animal birds and the nice thing about this side of the story is is that there's a there's a distribution pattern that has the same sort of assurance or gives us a confidence that we're actually seeing live pattern so inside several structures we found articular articulated lands and next to those we find child land droppings whereas the the dog and human pools basically are occurring outside the structures they're being deported into those into those formative livings there's a real sense here of the way that space was being used but also a sort of sense of hygiene but equally there's this relationship to that watery context and the examination of the sediment beneath the structure showed that there was a lot of poo or fecal matter in amongst that sediment but also within the copyrights themselves we were able to identify um parasites and a lot of those parasites were basically aquatic in origin so they were things like fish tapeworm and there's this indication that basically occupants were eating fish and then defecating into the into the paleo chapel and then catching fish and eating those and this is sort of circulation of the sort of sort of the eternal ecology of the guts of our inhabitants were basically um full of classic parasites and at the same time what's really interesting is that what's absent from that is that there are none of the sort of familiar terrestrial indicators and things so we weren't seeing things like round worm and stuff like that and what our parasite experts are telling us is that if our inhabitants spent any time on land they would have those groundwork so they're not just here seasonally they are full-time occupants of this watery environment so i'm going to finish off i'm giving you a context conditions and to actually move on to provisions and things and i think in the way in a way this is the sort of biggest demonstration about how sort of successful they are in in this context above water and but also there's the sort of implications of our settlement in terms of our understanding of what's going on in lake bronze age elsewhere so back to our distribution of material culture and that's a relationship between pottery and animal bones and the structures and things i'm going to give you a sort of whistle stop tour through some of the things that were coming out in relationship to the to the building so so things like the pottery from tiny little cups to bowls to storage jars and then things like um wooden artifacts so hafted axes almost certainly used in the construction settlement but also during the lifetime of it but also with this little wooden buckets and troughs then obviously the the hatted objects themselves are the bronze network so accents and sickles and razors and spears in addition to that they're all sort of surprised i suppose but a benefit of the sort of benign water environment of the context of our burnt down settlement we're all these charred textiles these are plant fibres so things like um bobbins for spun yarn on them fragments of charred textiles and what was really impressive was that there's 30 of these um plant fiber bundles these are basically in the middle of being processed but they've yet to be spun so all stages of textile production were present within within our structures and then from the sort of mundane or the familiar i suppose um to the exotic so things like amber beads and glass beads and some of the glass beads have an origin in the sort of eastern mediterranean maybe as far as iran and they're being constructed in or sort of being manufactured in the middle of the ninth century bc and our occupants are wearing them as necklaces so to sort of finish off with i suppose is that sense of sort of deposition and the relationship between the the material culture and the and the sort of that year's worth of settlement the animal bone had a the ability to be refitted and we could put bits back together again so whether it's the articulated lands or its actual meat joints so sort of hind quarters of wild boar and red deer and similarly we could do the same with the portrait so we could look at all the pottery that was deposited within the mids and return it back to its original structures so the refitting exercise allowed us to turn pot shirts into whole vessels and then to locate them with individual buildings within the settlement and it was those pathways that we used also to return the meat joints as well but from that we were able to create these sort of inventories or household sort of sets within within the settlement itself and as i start to go through those materials you'll see that there's a real sense here of patent so we had the metal work the wooden vessels the buckets the troughs the spindle whirls and loom weights the crown stones seed caches the necklaces and then finally the lambs and the land droppings you get a sense of each structure having a very similar pattern of materials but also this sort of right hand sidedness of of the space themselves or some difference between the living spaces and maybe the sleeping space and from that we're able to create sort of inventories so each one of these cons is a single structure and within that you can see the presence of everyone's got an axe or a gauge or a sickle or a pots and things so a real sense here of of the living a sandwich basically within within individual structures so this is the must farm pal dwelling i've given you in in its watery context there's no there's no ambiguity about that they are living on water and there's a real sense that they were well provided and there's a real sense here that they have a connection with dry land in terms of some of the things they're eating but they are pretty much their their foundation their footprint is is in that watery context if we go inside structure one and have this look at this reconstruction by judith adobe the sort of sense of the sort of busyness or the cutter of of that space but remind ourselves that we're not living in a roundhouse on land but they're above water on those sort of springing floors and things and i think there's a real sort of ambition here that they they don't expect that the place is about to be burnt down these are people wanting to be living here for the for the future and this in a way alongside that sort of well-versed architecture suggests that this is one of many of these types of supplements out in the out of the deep bends and we were lucky enough to find one of them so i finished with a sort of a slide of of that story i suppose of of that negative hydrogen that that time transgressive landscape whereas perhaps at the beginning of our story where people are trying to get across those wet spaces by building causeways but by the end of our story they're basically living on a river and they're occupying those those wet spaces so it goes back i suppose what neil said at the beginning a sense of connectivity so as the rivers become sort of dislocated people actually move on to those onto those networks so that they could remain connected to that broader network and with that i'll say thank you very much well thank you so much mark for taking us into what what you poetically described as a lost world and i think we'll all agree that it's also an incredibly rich world we we saw how this period is not just about stone and metal and bone but you showed us how it's also about wood and pottery and all the all the objects that surrounded people how rich their lives were we often don't see that in archaeological sites so thank you for that window into a really remarkable archaeological site um and and a window into what it was like to live on water um three thousand years ago so so thank you and really to to draw the three sites together um i wonder if we could if i could ask our three speakers to to think a little bit about a attention an opposition that's been evident throughout the three papers and that's that's one of um really the the ritual and perhaps ceremonial and religious ideas which archaeologists love of course and that might um influence why people want you to either live or work or put objects into watery locations versus some of the more practical down-to-earth reasons why it would be useful and economically beneficial to live near this amazing resource of of wetland or watery landscapes so i wonder if i could start um at the beginning with our first presenter um nikki and ask her if she has has any thoughts on that tension between the the ritual and the in the everyday in star car thank you neil yes i i mean i think it's it is really interesting to think about this and uh you know and some of the things that you're uncovering you know we were interested in questions about what animals were available in the landscape what animals did people eat and use their bones for tools and things like that and building up a picture of the environment but we were also faced with these artifacts which clearly aren't just you know absolutely uh necessary for survival but you know they're the head dresses and the pendant clearly people are making things which um have other aspects other aspects to their lives and uh as archaeologists we often talk about ritual but i think some of these things were probably very much intertwined into everyday life and we're certainly faced with difficulties when trying to interpret something like clark's area that big jam-packed area of bone and abdomen wood and so on with the at the front that's in the pendant in there you know is this is this just a midden where people are dumping things or is this some kind of ritual um activity where people have placed these things purposefully in the water perhaps over a very very short period of time and these are these are the questions that we face all the time when we're excavating amazing sites like this you know what does what do those sorts of things actually mean you know what what do they represent uh for the people in you know carrying out those activities thank you thank you for that insight and i wonder if we could go to duncan now he's already told us about um a kind of excalibur moment with the part which gives certainly gives it a a ritual ceremonial sends to the deposits there is is that how you see some of these deposits in the neolithic duncan as as religious or or ritual offerings yeah it's a really interesting topic to explore for uh for ins because i think over the course of our project we've sort of swung around between these different um understandings of these sites and i started off we started off going out there thinking they were much more likely to be more towards the domestic side and the more work we've carried out on them the more puzzled we've been about what's going on and so to swung slightly slightly in the direction of um the more ceremonial role for these sites and intriguingly you know now we've got this timber and stone phases i wonder whether potentially that the site might even transform its usage and that in itself indicates that perhaps our own terms of understanding things as as functional or ceremonial is not adequate to understand the way in which prehistoric people thought about their world and about their the locations in which they which they occupied um so it's an ongoing challenge um we'll see that's that's that's great and i wonder if that's a neat segue to to mark because with musk farm with that incredibly rich site you almost wonder we're interested in an archaeology like or a pre-history of a type that we've never seen before in this country where it's so rich that that tendency that i certainly suffer from to want to see religious or special meaning perhaps mark is it fair to say that the richness of your of the site must farm is is such that you you almost you're surrounded by everyday life you don't need to compartmentalize this sort of social religious and every day is is that taking it too far no not at all i think i think it it's funny isn't it because when we when we first started excavating site and there was this understanding that this sort of material intensity that was present there was that sort of temptation to see the sight as as exceptional and therefore it had to be it was it was too much for it to be i don't know a domestic sight it had to be something special and and therefore um it sort of it sort of left the context and became this sort of you know story of some grand gesture some theater some display or something like that and yet and yet the more we escalated it the more we're able to articulate the sort of relationship between the architecture and its sort of familiarity the roundhouses and things and and also the sort of the deposition and the the coherency of the material culture these sort of sets of cups and bowls and and jars and things and network and stuff like that there was a real sense there of what i mean the familiar i suppose it felt like a living space that we might be able to occupy and things so there was that there was that i suppose and i suppose the other side of our story was always that we were very fortunate to be able to dig this river in a in a very sort of structured way and actually to see things in relationship to each other whereas more often what happens to rivers is that the the bronze age content is brought up in a dredged dredger it's brought up in a bucket it's a it's machine that sort of thing and there's a sense we just see the objects in isolation and because of that sort of history of network and and rivers and human beings and things there was this sort of straightforward sort of relationship between network equals watery deposition and therefore it's about the sort of ritual aspect of life so i feel like in a way that maybe our of circumstance our methodology has sort of swung us towards this sort of mundane this sort of familiar sort of world and things maybe maybe i'm in danger of missing out on some of them all sort of i don't know it's a terrible side of deposition well it's certainly a great counterbalance to have and and i think we can all agree that the sites we've seen that the rich survival of organics means that these are sites that provide one of the most important windows into the the time before during and after what we call the work the world of stone engine in the exhibition so i'm really grateful for for giving us giving us those insights and before we uh go to the q a and answer questions from you and it it's time now to say and thank you and goodbye to professor nikki milner who has a previous appointment that she's got to attend but i just want to say on on behalf of the british museum thank you to nikki for a wonderful presentation on on the finds and worked on star car and so thank you nikki and look forward to seeing you soon thank you so much and yes sorry i have to go it's been amazing to hear about these other incredible sites and to enjoy the q a thank you very much okay great well um nikki's left us now but we have a number of questions from the audience this evening to ask to duncan and to mark so if i can start with some questions to to duncan garrow um james james selwood has asked what was the law water level like around the crannies that you excavated during the neolithic period was it much the same as it is today that is a very good question and one that we're actually needing to answer ourselves um which hopefully we will be able to do as we analyze the lock bed sediments and things like that as um through time over the next couple of years but at the moment at the moment we don't exactly know um but um we have a sense that it's roughly the same as today one of the things you can actually gauge it by is the fact that the stone causeway is slightly under the surface of the water at the moment so you should suspect that the lock was a bit lower but perhaps not loads lower basically but yeah it's a great question and something we need to resolve ourselves great um thanks duncan and then another question to you from jenny keaney um she's asked are there any is there evidence of fires i suppose of hearths or of any type of fire being being lit on the chronic sites that you've excavated yeah also a very very good and pertinent question um so on both of the ones that we've dug we have had um evidence of burning which dates to the middle bronze age so around about 1400 bc so a couple of thousand years after the sites were first constructed um potentially um in approximate association with the stone phase of the one the main site i showed you um i suspect you're maybe asking it about whether it's to do with cremation i'm not sure um or perhaps just general living and and we don't know because bone doesn't survive so um which is a little bit frustrating but they are doing burning but in later phases of the science use the slightly mysterious phases that i didn't go into detail in because of that mysteriousness but good and a third question to you before i move on to mark duncan um from anthony reddington he's asked is there any dating that you've been able to get from the woods that you were showing in your presentation and what's that what's that told you yeah um so also a great question and um the answer is yes um and as it happens um literally yesterday we got a another set of radio carbon dates back from the material we were excavating in the summer um and in short um the the the that all of the crowds that we've been able to date appear to have been built and used in a pretty narrow window of about a century from about 3500 3400 bc um wood gives you great radiocarbon dating and and this again is something that we'll be working more on over the next couple of years as we dig more but also as we um understand things and and have questions that we want to answer through that dating but yeah great thank you thank you duncan um mark we've got um questions for you as well um lloyd clements has asked about the comparison between sites like moss farm and those um lake dwellings that um we know of from continental europe from switzerland and germany and places like that are they the same sort of thing or the big differences between them i suppose the the first difference we can make is that that our architecture is is round circular whereas the sort of continental equivalence the majority of the architecture there is is rectangular so i think in a way when we first exploited our site we half expected it to be made up of rectangular structures and it turned out to be that sort of ubiquitous roundhouse so that's a major difference and i suppose one other thing to say is that the late dwellings of central europe are famous for their deep stratigraphy their their time scales this sense of lamination and deposition and things and trying to break that down whereas our site has that that single layer that that sort of one years worth of deposition yeah thanks mark um and then there's a question about um this is from sally uh wilkins she's asked about the reasons for the abandonment of um moss farmer i think perhaps we might expand in on that in terms of the the burning episode what do we what do you know about it what's the latest thinking on the burning of the houses um i suppose the one thing is that it's comprehensive and two it has a it has a focus or perhaps even two focuses in its beginning so it feels like it's um it feels like there's something deliberate about it now when we say that you know that could be the occupants burning down their own settlement as some sort of end gesture it could be people who basically have chased the occupants out and burnt the settlement down but it is comprehensive and there's that real sense of that everything's left behind so there's there's a there's an immediacy about that as well i think so i suppose in a way it's it's down to to the interpreter to come up with a sort of choice of which of those scenarios fits best with the story but what's what is evident is that the the occupants themselves weren't present at the time of the fire we don't have any charred human remains to go with with the rest of the rich arrangement of materials great and we're short we're running out of time and there's so many great questions and i'm going to cut to the next question which is from dorian gray who asks about why people chose to live on water given the challenges of of that and i think that that's probably a good question for you mark what are the pros and cons in in a short answer well i think it i think it goes back to something you said right at the very beginning which is this sort of connectivity is that in the friends if you want to be near the water sorry near the rivers you need to live on the water because they get so dislocated from land so it's that sort of connection being maintained i think great that's that's that's very succinct thank you and then a question about the pottery from muss farm do we know where it's coming from are the imports is it locally made um that's a question from niels nielsen the patrology says that they're locally made so and the other thing to say about them very quickly is that it appears to be very few hands in their manufactures almost as if it's one potter that's produced all of those all those vessels super thank you very much so we're down to the last um minute or so and i think what's probably it's probably good to wrap up there and thank everyone for the questions i know there were questions for nikki um and unfortunately she couldn't couldn't be with us to answer them i really recommend her her research um publications very comprehensive and many answers in those in those books that are freely available and but it's just sort of for me to say that the next event is on the 7th of april at 5 30 uk time the same time as this evening's lecture and it's even seminar and it's called connections across britain and ireland during the age of stonehenge and that's a wonderful panel of seren griffith nick card and josh pollard and they'll be looking at neolithic connections across britain and ireland during the the time of stonehenge and then finally just to say that the exhibition the world of stonehenge is is open now and it's going to be open until the 17th of july so i really hope and some of you can can come and see the exhibition as well and i'll just end by thanking um both duncan garrow um and mark mark knight for their contributions this evening and to all of you for your for your questions and and for for for being with us this evening so thank you very much and have a lovely evening thank you do [Music] you

Channel: British Museum Events

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Length: 75min 22sec (4522 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022