Neolithic House Project Week 5

As we reach week 5 of our Stone Age house project, and the thatching marches on, Butser Archaeologist Claire Walton reflects on experimental archaeology and what it’s all about!

What the heck is experimental archaeology anyway?

The answer is, the most fun a person can have. Lighting fires and melting stuff, wrestling with goo, weird smells and bits of animal, making and building things like our Neolithic house, all in the name of research. It’s sort of thinking about the past by doing, rather than doing by thinking about the past, if you see what I mean.

The original remit of Butser Ancient Farm was to conduct empirical experimental research, and included Peter Reynolds’ work in constructing Iron Age roundhouses. The Horton house continues this theme of thinking experimentally about architecture and construction techniques, in the immediate term exploring materials, consumption of resources, time and technique. In the long term, we can study the wear and tear on the building, and therefore its lifespan.

I use the word ‘experimental’ loosely. Unless there is a sound methodology, with strict controls and parameters inside which you will conduct your research, the fun I describe above often ought to be classed as ‘experiential archaeology’. Here’s a good explanation for those seeking clarification on the distinctions between experimental and experiential.

The building process has of course provided opportunities to carry out this less formalised, more individualistic ‘experiential’ archaeology. Make no mistake, I worship at the altar of academia, but I also believe experiential archaeology is the cornerstone out of which many good, serious experiments are born. The flintstone-esque bashings which took place at the start of our construction project have proved the instigation for some further, more careful examinations of bone tools and next week’s blog will look at plans for these experiments in more detail. 

And in my final support of the experiential, I think it is important to point out its wider benefits. Society is now beginning to recognise the importance to human health and wellbeing from spending time in the outdoors, doing tasks such as learning creative crafts and skills – things that please the heart as well as the mind. Experiential archaeology is the most fantastic way of doing all those things. It might ultimately be good for the world of archaeology, but it’s also good for the human soul.

Neolithic House Project Week 4

This week the thatch has arrived and we’ve wasted no time in starting this part of the building process. Our Archaeologist Claire Walton has the below update!

As I drove to a meeting on Wednesday, a lorry loaded with thatch passed me going in the opposite direction and my colleague Trevor and I both excitedly yelled “that’s our thatch!!” I knew by the time I had returned to the farm a few hours later, that there would already be thatch on the roof, and I was right. In order to work out what size each ‘bundle’ should be, we had to have a little test drive. (well, that’s what my very enthusiastic boss told me anyway) 

In the absence of archaeological evidence for the roofing material, we have turned to the landscape in which the house was found, and chosen water reed. We’ve got the expertise to work with it, and it provides a reliable, warm, watertight space which is so critical to our school education and events programme. In truth, a house can be thatched with all sorts of things, from straw and reed, to the more unusual heather, sedge grass, turf and even seaweed. 

Water reed can last up to 50 years, so there’s a good chance the life span of the roofing material is actually longer than the timbers of the structure itself! With the production of reed for thatch having shrunk to a very small industry in the UK, most reed is grown in Eastern Europe. We’ve chosen a batch which has been cut by hand, which will give us a much more authentic appearance and will not look too groomed or neat at the ends. 

We estimate something in the region of 80-90 days of thatching ahead of us. I can see an office sweepstake coming on as to whether we get that done ahead of schedule, like the rest of the building. 

Wessex Archaeology have joined us again this week, grabbing the unique opportunity to carry out a technique called photogrammetry, on what is currently still the skeleton of a building. 

This involves taking a huge number of photos which are ultimately stitched together using some techy wizardry, to create an amazing image of the building which can be viewed in 3D from lots of different angles. Apologies to any techy wizards out there, because I’m sure there’s a more sophisticated explanation than that! Personally, I like that it is used not only by archaeologists for mapping of large and complex sites, but it can also apparently be used by meteorologists to measure wind speed of tornadoes in the absence of other data – wow!

Neolithic House Project Week 3

After a brief hiatus over the Christmas break we are cracking on with our Neolithic House build. Here’s an update from our archaeologist Claire Walton about the latest developments…

Despite Mother Nature’s best attempts to thwart us, the construction project has moved on apace, with the structure looking a lot more like a building now. 

We’ve installed the main purlins and the ridge poles which has given us a real sense of the shape of the house. In line with all things Neolithic, we’ve kept it low tech. That means installing these poles without the use of mechanical crane. By jacking it up on a simple scaffold frame and lots of hauling on ropes, we levered our ridge poles into place. Everyone including our office staff were eager to lend a hand. Muscles bulged, eyeballs popped and that was just the bystanders. 

With the ridge on, we can see a quite distinct curve along the roof line. In our case, this feature was the inevitable product of using an A-frame design to construct a building which narrows significantly at one end. The pitch of the roof has to remain the same throughout in order to retain the necessary 45 degrees slope for our thatch. Any shallower and the thatch’s ability to shed water is compromised. The only way to avoid this is to curve the ridge so it comes down to meet the apex of each of the principal A-frames as they gradually reduce in size towards the narrow end. 

After we had finished congratulating ourselves on how brilliant it all looked, it began to dawn on us that you can see this same technique applied in Viking longhouses in particular, ostensibly for structural strengthening purposes. Perhaps our Neolithic house is evidence that this concept may have been utilised much earlier than previously thought?

Reconstructed Viking house in Ale north of Göteborg in Sweden. Photograph: Sven Rosborn (source)

With the ridge in place, we can finally begin to lay on the rafters. And with rafters come the hazel batons which are tied on horizontally, providing the bed onto which our thatch will sit. 

Although we have already tackled some simple carpentry in this project, we are still very reliant on cordage to provide the lashings holding rafters, purlins and batons securely in place. In the Neolithic landscape we’d have been able to source the necessary materials to make cordage by stripping the bark of the Lime tree (Tilia cordata). Soaking or ‘retting’ these stripped fibres in water over a period of weeks, dissolves the pectin and cellular tissues that surround the bast fibre bundles, leaving you with slightly smelly (!) but very useful, flexible fibres. For a range of practical reasons, we have opted mostly for sisal. It’s still a natural, plant fibre but critically it can be obtained in the large quantities required in the middle of winter. 

By next week, we should have installed the porch feature, meaning the skeleton of the building will be complete. Then the monumental task of thatching will begin in earnest. This could last 6 weeks, depending on what the weather throws at us. I wonder if we will last that long?