The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 4

Session 4 of our Bronze Age build with Operation Nightingale and Projects Co-ordinator Trevor updates us on the latest progress - featuring turf walls, figurine carving and pottery.

We have been really fortunate in the way our Bronze Age project has unfolded to date. Not only do we have an exceptional team working on the build, we have also had exceptional weather. Session four, on the 9th, 10th and 11th of June, carried on in like fashion. Beautiful, warm (finally) days welcomed our crack team to tackle what was probably our most ambitious three days yet. On the Wednesday and Thursday, half of the crew carried on where we left off the previous session, splitting logs and making lintels. As if that wasn't enough, they also tackled the building the first phase of our earth walls. Working with Butser's other projects co-ordinator, Sue, they built about two metres of earth wall using the turf that was stripped when the site was cleared. The results caused a flurry of excitement, at least among the experimentally-inclined, as very few experimental roundhouses are built with earth walls. That's despite the fact that many archaeologists think that earth walled buildings were common in prehistoric Britain. Unfortunately, as is the way with experimental archaeology, we won't be able to fully test that theory until the building is demolished and we can compare what's left with original archaeology – and hopefully that won't happen any time soon!

The other half of the team immersed themselves in Bronze Age craft activities.

Operation Nightingale stalwart Richard Osgood was on hand to guide his half of the team through the basics of wood carving. The objective was for everyone to create their own version of one of the Roos Carr figures. Roos Carr is a site near Hull where a group of figurines carved from yew were discovered in 1836. They were a bit of a mystery for many years but we now know that they date from around the late Bronze Age. At the risk of sounding like a captive of the modern world's obsession with machine-made 'perfection', I would describe the figures as fairly crudely carved and, if I'm honest, a little scary to look at!

They are actually made from a number of articulated parts. At between 35 – 40 cm, the head, torso and legs are the largest piece of each figurine. Each contains carved sockets, into which are fitted ... let's call them appendages. Some are arms, the others identify most of the figurines as unambiguously male. The figures also have pebbles glued on as eyes, so the team went on a bit of a rock-hunting expedition to source some nice white pebbles and mixed up a brew of pine resin, beeswax and charcoal to give their carvings their ocular necessities. As well as being a fun project, Richard and his crew have created a group of artefacts that we can use to decorate our roundhouse and to illustrate to visitors some of the craft aspects of Bronze Age Britain. Of course, we don't know what the figures were for, not do we know whether or not Bronze Age people decorated their houses. What we do know is that the Bronze Age had a rich material culture – archaeologists have found beautifully crafted objects, from jewellery to weapons. Although organic materials like wood are rare survivors, it's a reasonable bet that it was used for all sorts of things – for spiritual objects, decorative and functional pieces and more. In fact, one of the original Roos Carr figures was taken home by one of the workmen who found it and given to his daughter as a doll to play with – so it might even have been a child's toy in Bronze Age (that figure found its way to the Literary and Philosophical Society and eventually became part of the collections of Hull Museums in 1902 – 80 years later! I would love to know the back story there). The great thing about having objects like the Roos Carr figures (and we will have more arts and crafts to come) is that it allows us to engage visitors in speculation about their use.

Ironically, one of the aspects of archaeology that is most exciting are those bits we don't understand – and that's almost all of it. Through these very human objects we can all engage in a bit of musing about their purpose. They help us engage with the humans who made them in ways that are perhaps even more intimate than structures like houses. We can all speculate about their original purpose – they might have been deeply spiritually significant but, equally, they may have had a much more light-hearted purpose. Your guess really is a good as anyone's and connecting with objects like this makes us all archaeologists! The original Roos Carr figures are now on display in the Hull Museum and, if you can't get to Hull, they are well worth a Google search.

Our Friday session was given over entirely to another Bronze Age craft – pottery. Our very own pottery guy, Phelim McIntyre, was on hand to give a team of 10 enthusiastic potters-in-the-making a prehistoric version of the Great Pottery Throwdown. Well, not quite – the potter's wheel wasn't introduced until more than a thousand years after our roundhouse was built. So it was more a question of the great pottery build up, where lumps, slabs or coils of clay are built into a vessel or some other piece, ready for firing (not to be outdone by the wood carvers, one ambitious potter created a clay Roos Carr figure).

From an archaeological perspective, pots are very important. Because of the happy conjunction of the facts that they can be reliably dated, their styles are often specific to a time and a place and they break very easily, pots (usually just broken bits, but sometimes you get lucky) are a great way to identify the who, what and where of an archaeological dig. Pots that once contained foods can sometimes also be analysed so that we can discover what people ate and drank (beer and cheese, for example).

Pots are so important in the Bronze Age that whole cultures have been named after them! The most famous in Britain are the 'Beaker People'. Their beaker shaped pots appear at the same time as bronze, so the Beaker People are really important to our story. Actually, it's rather more complex than that – arguments rage about whether or not the Beaker People were actually a group of people at all (to paraphrase the well-known archaeologist Francis Pryor, invaders armed with pots) or more a movement of ideas, which saw the spread of new cultural ways and technologies. Or a bit of both. Still, I won't let archaeological theory get in the way of a good story here. In our next session, Phelim and the team are going to fire the pots in a very Bronze Age pit firing (more to come). Makers were aghast when Phelim pointed out that, in the absence of a modern, temperature-controlled kiln, failure rates can be as high as 80%. This led to a frantic surge in an effort to make sure that the 20% was still a good collection. I guess the only comment I can make is 'well done potters'.

By the end of day three we had almost all of the lintels complete and fitted to their posts, 2 metres of turf wall completed, a number of Roos Carr figures ready to entertain and beguile our visitors with and an entire Beaker army of pots. Is there no stopping the Operation Nightingale team???

Amazing aerial shot of the Bronze Age build through a fish-eye lens by Harvey Mills.

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The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 3

As we march ahead with our Bronze Age roundhouse construction, Projects Co-ordinator Trevor Creighton updates us on the latest progress on the build. The posts are in the ground, the lintels are going up and we even try a spot of bronze casting.

Our third Operation Nightingale roundhouse building sessions took place over the 19th and 20th of May. The team picked up from where we left off last time with more timber working. Our roundhouse will have a post and lintel frame to support the roof. Post and lintel constructions have vertical posts secured in postholes in the ground. The lintels are horizontal beams, which are jointed to the tops of, and span the gap between, adjacent posts. For a good example of a post and lintel structure look no further than the massive central ‘trilithons’ of Stone Henge!

The posts had already been completed during the previous session, so work began on the lintels. Treewright Darren was again on hand to instruct and supervise the splitting - or ‘cleaving’ - of lengths of oak trunks, which then had bark and some soft sapwood stripped to leave a neat plank. The plank is cut to the length required and holes are chiselled into them near each end, at the precise distance to allow them to drop over the tusk tenons on the top of each post (see the previous blog for a description of making the tusk tenons). Once all of the posts are joined in this way we will have a circle of posts and lintels ready to take the weight of a thatched roof.

You might be wondering how we know that the original was built this way. The answer is surprisingly simple – we don’t! As with almost any archaeology, virtually everything that was is gone. We have to make imaginative leaps from what is left to try and understand what was there. What the Operation Nightingale team found in the original excavation was a series of postholes set around in a circle. Archaeologists are very familiar with roundhouses. They were the dominant form of domestic building in Britain and Ireland from the late Stone Age all the way through until, in some places, the Roman period, in others well beyond. As an interesting aside, there is little or no evidence for roundhouses in northern Europe (at least, north of Brittany) during this period. I wonder why and I’m open to your suggestions!

So, if you find a circle of posts when excavating in Britain you have probably uncovered a roundhouse. That helps us with our first leap of faith – if it was a roundhouse it probably had a roof, walls and a doorway. Beyond that, there is little to go on. In later blogs we’ll look at a number of the other assumptions we are making about our building. Somewhat paradoxically, some of those assumptions are informed by what is not in the archaeology!

But, sticking to the present, given that we have evidence for a circle of upright posts, the simplest assumption is that they supported lintels which, in turn, supported the roof.

By the end of the Friday several of the lintels had been completed, the circle of posts installed in the ground and some of the lintels fixed to the tusk tenons. The walls are around 1.2m high, with a slightly higher doorway to make it a little easier to enter. We are all set up now to finish the remaining lintels and should have the entire post and lintel frame complete at the end of the next session of building. You might be wondering why, in a roundhouse that’s only about 6.5 metres across, we have chosen to build such low walls? Well, that’s one of those things we have determined from what is not in the archaeology. The official term is ‘assumption’ but you might prefer ‘guess’. In any event, I’ll leave that discussion for another day.

On the Friday, the 21st we took time out from our busy building schedule to have a look at another aspect of the Bronze Age – bronze casting. Following on neatly from our previous workshop, where we explored the alchemy of smelting bronze from ores of copper and tin, this week we were joined by James Clift, who demonstrated the art of casting. James does many casting workshops at Butser and he is the perfect person to initiate our team into the mysteries of bronze work. James has an air of the wizard about him, an air reinforced when the golden, molten metal that emerges from his furnace is transformed into a smouldering axe to be plucked from its mould and doused in a boiling, steaming cauldron of water. Thanks to James for a fantastic workshop, which delivered four axe heads. Those axes are replicas of the same original from which our working bronze age axes were cast. So now we have the complete biography of a Bronze Age axe – from raw ores to finished product. Now it’s time to get back to those tools and crack on with the next phase of the build.

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 2

Our Bronze Age Roundhouse build, in partnership with Operation Nightingale, is taking place in fortnightly chunks, when the veterans and volunteers descend on the farm for three days of hard work, ancient skills and team bonding on our beautiful farm. Projects Co-ordinator Trevor Creighton describes the progress during our second Bronze Age building session - featuring Bronze Age carpentry and Bronze smelting!

The second session of our Operation Nightingale project took place on Thursday and Friday, the 6th and 7th of May, and Sunday the 9th of May. The first two days was spent preparing the timber posts that will form the uprights that will support the roof of our building.

Treewright Darren Hammerton was on hand to teach Operation Nightingale team members timber working skills required to fashion oak trunks into structural posts. A treewright is essentially a carpenter who works with traditional building tools, such as axes, chisels and augers, to dress and create joints in wood. Darren and a team of volunteers built Butser's first Saxon house, which was completed in 2016. Darren is now in the process of completing our second Saxon building and took time out of his work to pass some of his vast knowledge on to the team. Everyone involved benefited from and enjoyed learning from Darren. The results of the two days clearly show how much the students gained from the master. In the space of those two days all nine structural posts were prepared, ready to be inserted into the postholes dug during our previous session.

The preparation of the posts involved stripping bark, fashioning tusk tenons and charring the base of each post in an open fire. Stripping bark and the outermost layer of wood from the posts reduces the likelihood of rot by removing the most susceptible material. Charring the bottom couple of feet of each post further increases the durability of the timber, which is particularly important for that portion of the post that is going to be permanently below ground level, where in the damp soil environment timber is most prone to rot and decay. The tusk tenons are fashioned on the other end of the posts and they form the points to which the lintels - horizontal timbers which will carry the rafters - will be secured. Tusk tenons are square pegs that secure timbers with a corresponding hole, called a mortise, made in them. They were made by carefully removing most of the top of the posts with axes to create a square 'tusk', which remains part of the post itself and is comprised of the strong central heartwood. The final finishing of the tenons is done with chisels. Some of this work was done with modern steel tools, some was done using reproductions of Bronze Age originals. The bronze axes were all cast by bronzesmith James Clift and they are based on an original excavated somewhere near Petersfield, not too far from Butser. This type of axe - called a palstave axe - also dates to around the time of our building, so they are appropriate to our experimental build. The comparisons were interesting. Bronze is not as hard as steel and requires more frequent sharpening. Another significant difference is that bronze axes used are much smaller and lighter than the steel axes, which is typical of Bronze Age axes in general. This means that they don't have the same impact on the timber when they strike it. What's more, the way that bronze axes of the type we were using are attached to the handles is not as secure as a modern factory made axe. These factors made the bronze axes slower to work with and more prone to breakage of the handles. Nevertheless, the team found the bronze axes and chisels to be effective tools and as they gained experience they were able to hone their working methods to better suit the rather idiosyncratic Bronze Age tools – in particular the axes – and further enhance their effectiveness. By the end of the second day all posts had been finished to what was, given the relative inexperience of our team, a high standard. Darren was very complementary and, I think, even a little surprised with the speed with which everyone had acquired their new-found timber-working skills!

From the outset, it's been an objective of the Operation Nightingale project to not only create a roundhouse but also to allow people to get a greater understanding of the Bronze Age in general and, in particular, of the technologies and the material culture of the Bronze Age in Britain. What I personally find so intriguing about the Bronze Age is the way it sits tantalizingly close to our vision. When we speak of Bronze Age Britain we are speaking about pre-history, but that's not the case the world over. The pyramids are colossal monuments from the Bronze Age, which means that all of the hieroglyphs that we associate with ancient Egypt herald the beginnings of history, as do the cuneiform texts from Sumeria. And, to the extent it can be thought of as history, the exploits of Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus and Hector during the Battle of Troy chronicled by Homer took place in the Bronze Age. As it happens, the people of Classical Greece – the Athenians, the Spartans, the Corinthians and their fellow Greeks - regarded the Trojan Wars as real, historical events and believe they took place nearly 1000 years before their own time – in the 13th or 12th centuries BCE. As it happens, that's about the same time as our farmers on Salisbury Plain were building our roundhouse.

So the Bronze Age is, in so many ways, the time at which the prehistoric begins to transmute into the historic. But the greatest transmutation of the Bronze Age is surely that which converted raw ores into bronze – mining stone and converting it into a completely new material, utterly unlike the rocks from which it is born. Everyone wants to know who and how the discovery was made. I don't know, but I'm happy to think of it somewhat in the realms of magic and alchemy! Queue our resident alchemist – Fergus Milton. Fergus refers to himself as a 'hair shirt metallurgist'. By that he means no shortcuts, no concessions to modernity. He digs a hole, lines it with clay and makes his furnace, heated by charcoal and powered up to the 1200 degrees plus needed to smelt the ores by goatskin bellows and lots of arm pumping. On the Sunday, Fergus recruited a platoon of fresh (and not so fresh) arms to power his bellows. Brilliant green, copper-rich malachite ore – the material that is more commonly seen polished in lamp bases and jewellery – was pulverised by pestle and mortar, put into a high-fired pottery crucible and heated in those bellows-powered furnaces until the impurities were vaporised and little globs of shining, golden copper remained. Not, in this case, to create new tools, but as great little souvenirs and rewards for a great three days.

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