The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 11

Archaeology co-ordinator Trevor gives an update on the Bronze Age build as we begin the major job of thatching our roundhouse! Thanks to Harvey Mills for the great photos of the start of the thatching!

The first day of September was also the first day of thatching on our roundhouse. From here on our structure starts to look like a house. Lyle Morgans, the master Thatcher who has done such fantastic work on many of our buildings, and the subject of recent Butser Plus videos, spent the day introducing our team to the time-honoured craft.

Our roundhouse will be thatched with water reed. It’s a very durable material and one that might well have been available to the Bronze Age residents of Dunch Hill. The river Avon flows quite near the site of the original building and, although there are no reed beds there now, it is very possible that it was a source of reed in prehistory, when both climate and water use were different to the present day.

There is ample evidence in the archaeology of Bronze Age Britain for the use of thatch. Today the most common thatching materials in Southern Britain are long straw or water reed, like ours. However, other materials are suitable for thatching, such as heather and gorse. It is most likely that people used the most readily available resources, which may have seen them use a mixture of materials to cover a single roof.

There are different techniques which can be used to thatch. Our water reed will be tied to horizontal hazel battens that are fixed to the roof rafters at close intervals, from top to bottom. Lyle demonstrated the technique of tying regular bundles of reed – called ‘yelms’ – to the battens. They are secured to the battens and to each other with twine so that they form a continuous, tightly packed band around the entire perimeter of the building. The first row looks a bit like a fringe. As the thatch is tied higher up the roof, the higher yelms overlap those below them, covering the twine that secures the lower thatch to ensure that the roof is waterproof and to minimise the chance of the twine rotting and breaking. 

In a final flourish, the thatch is dressed into neat, even rows as it is tied on using a tool called a leggett. By the end of the day we had not only learned the basics of the magic of thatching  but also some arcane terms – so it was a little like joining the secret society of thatchers! All of we Magician’s Apprentices learned a lot and had another great day. A couple of the team have taken to thatching like ducks to water. John, in particular, is looking like becoming competition for Lyle in the not too distant future, although I think the allure of archaeology will prove too strong. 

With all of this new found expertise and enthusiasm, combined with the experienced guiding hand of Butser’s own Man for All Seasons, Will, we aim to have the thatching finished by early October. Fingers crossed and yelms at the ready.

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To support our Bronze Age Roundhouse project with Operation Nightingale and discover more behind the scenes footage of the build head to at www.butserplus.com where we are releasing weekly video episodes about work and projects at the farm. Thank you!

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Step Together Volunteering

This week we have a guest blog from Elaine Corner, Volunteering Project Manager at Step Together. It’s been great working with the team from Step Together and to have their support in making this project possible. Here, Elaine talks us through the background to Step Together and their involvement in the project.

Step Together is a national charity that provides one to one support to help people who may be excluded from society into volunteering. I have been working for Step Together supporting wounded, injured and sick (WIS) service personnel and Veterans into volunteering for over seven years. For many years we have helped to provide volunteers for Operation Nightingale archaeological digs. When I heard about the idea for Operation Nightingale to join with Butser Ancient Farm to build a Bronze Age Roundhouse based on the findings of the dig at Dunch Hull it seemed like an ideal project to get involved in.

Step Together were able to access funding from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund which enabled the project to become so much more than just building a roundhouse. I then set about finding veterans to take part in the project. Some of them had previously been involved in Operation Nightingale activities, some were already engaging with Step Together and looking for some volunteering. Others came forward when the project was advertised throughout the Forces community as they were interested in finding out more. Covid 19 put paid to the plan we had for interested volunteers to visit Butser in November, but we were able to hold Zoom get togethers to explain more about the project and to help those who were interested in doing research about Bronze Age life. 

We were finally able to get the volunteers onsite for a visit in March and get the build started in April. The funding Step Together secured has enabled us to provide pack lunches for the veterans and assist with travel costs to ensure that no-one was excluded due to cost. The funding also enabled us run workshops about various aspects of Bronze Age life which has really helped the volunteers gain more understanding about how the people lived and the challenges they faced.

I have been responsible for coordinating who is attending each session and ensuring their wellbeing needs were met. Step Together have also been conducting wellbeing surveys throughout the project so we will be able to evidence how the project has benefitted those taking part. It has been fantastic to see new friendships forged and new skills learned. The project has really helped the veterans taking part move forward with their lives and start looking to the future. Once the build is completed, those taking part will be able to continue volunteering at Butser and take their new-found confidence out into the world.

“Volunteering on the project is so therapeutic and relaxing. I have learned so much and met some great people and everyone is so kind. It is an experience like no other!” Jackie, veteran volunteer

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 10

Our Bronze Age Project co-ordinator Trevor gives the latest update on the Bronze Age build as the remainder of the roof rafters are raised and we prepare for the thatching to begin!

Our latest three day assault on the Bronze Age roundhouse was rather like dancing: two steps forward, two steps back.... Happily, this particular form of the Tango ends with four steps forward. 

We had finished the previous building session with the central post and four main rafters in place. Those are the main structural parts of the roof, so you could say that the roof’s main skeleton was in place, ready for us to attach more bones to. Most of those bones are in the form of rafters – long timbers that slope from the top point of the roof, down and outwards until they meet the walls. Together, all of the rafters will make a roof in the shape of a cone that will support the thatch that will keep the inside dry and warm. Conical roofs are a distinctive – and I think quirkily charming – feature of roundhouses. We have six on show in the Iron Age area.

The first thing to be tackled last Wednesday was the question of how to attach the rafters to the roof skeleton so that they would make that nice cone and not fall down (a very important consideration!). We also had to do this safely – given that we were building much of the roof four or five metres off the ground. Answer – scaffolding. Now it wouldn’t be surprising if your first response was that this is ‘cheating’. It was mine. But then I reminded myself that we have no direct knowledge of how Bronze Age roundhouses (or any other prehistoric buildings) were built. Occasionally at Butser we are asked things like ‘how did people get up on a roof?’ Almost certainly, they used something like a ladder. After all, if you can build a house you can build a ladder – so why not some form of scaffolding? In fact, our central post was such a great aid in getting the first phase of the roof up that I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t actually a prop for a scaffold or ladder!  But not steel like ours, I’ll grant you – this the Bronze Age, after all.

I had a certain idea about the way the rafters could be attached at the top of the roof that is a little different to anything in our other roundhouses. The idea came partly from a desire to try something different in the name of experimental archaeology, but also because our rafters are very heavy and I wanted more robust support. The timber we have is larger and heavier than we need, so it was a belt and braces approach. The long and short of it was that, while it works structurally, it made a roof that was going to be nightmarish to thatch. So, one step forward Wednesday morning, one back Wednesday afternoon! 

Thursday and the team created a more conventional (by Butser standards!)  system for building our roof. To the delight of all, this involved cutting some fresh, green hazel from our little thicket and twisting strands together to make a strong, flexible hoop. This is secured to the main rafters near the top of the roof and the remaining rafters are then attached to the hoop (in a roundhouse you can’t get all of the rafters – nearly 20 in our case - to meet at the apex without creating a very messy roof). So, by Wednesday afternoon, one step forward. Actually, I reckon two is a fairer assessment! I should point out that nobody was more delighted about the fresh hazel than the goats, who got all of the leaves that were stripped from the rods – they love fresh hazel!

Friday saw a truly titanic effort to get most of the remaining rafters stripped of their bark and installed (if we leave the bark on it eventually peels off and falls on peoples’ heads. Very annoying.)

I do not have enough praise for the Operation Nightingale team or my colleagues, Sue and Phelim. A few weeks back I made a commitment that, by the first week in September, we would have an ‘RLO’ (roundhouse-like object). We are there two weeks early. A few tweaks and it is on to the thatching. Bring it on!

To support our Bronze Age Roundhouse project with Operation Nightingale and discover more behind the scenes footage of the build head to at www.butserplus.com where we are releasing weekly video episodes about work and projects at the farm. Thank you!

The Bronze Age Build blog - Session 9

Butser team member Phelim shares an update from the latest session on the Bronze Age project as the veterans and volunteers carried on the walling job, tried out cordage using Lime Bast and raised the first posts and rafters for the roof!

After the fun and games of the hunting and cooking of the previous session, the last session of the Bronze Age project returned to important work of building the Round House. Life though is never normal at Butser Ancient Farm and Trevor spent most of his day being interviewed and filmed for the BBC’s “Digging for Britain”. This series had followed the excavation at Dunch Hill on Salisbury Plain that had uncovered the house and was eager to follow the reconstruction. While filming has been taking place through out the project so far, this time Butser had the privilege of having a number of people from “Digging for Britain”, including Dr Stuart Prior, Reader in Archaeology at the University of Bristol and one of the presenters of the programme. The general rule is that filming means your task takes at least twice as long as normal so while Trevor was miked up and in front of the camera the rest of the team got on with building the earth and clunch walls.

Thursday promised rain in the afternoon so the morning was taken up bashing chalk to make the clunch for two of the walls. To define clunch, as used at Butser, it is a mix of chalk, water, straw (or other fibre) and sometimes dirt to make a form of concrete. This is sometimes called cob, cobb or clom. (To confuse matters cob, cobb and clom do not need to have chalk added and clunch can refer to large “bricks” of limestone used in building – hence the need to define what we mean at Butser by the term.) As you need to let clunch dry before you build too high, not as much wall was built as we would have liked, but slow and steady wins the race. The other task was taking the bark of the posts that became the central post and the main rafters. As a basic measure the central post had to be approaching 6 metres or about 9 ft 8 inches tall. This of course makes health and safety a priority, especially as the Farm is open to the public. But more of that in a moment…….

The other activity on the Wednesday and Thursday was led by the wonderful Kat. A number of weeks ago Claire had led a team into the woods to harvest the bark from the English Lime or Lynden Tree, with the aim of making Lime Bast. This is rope made from the fibres of the inner bark. The bark was split into two groups, one was put in fresh water and the other put into salt water to see if there was any difference in the quality of bast produce. The process is called retting. Collins English Dictionary defines retting as the “present participle of the verb” ret. Ret is, according to the same dictionary, a transitive verb defined as “to moisten or soak (flax, hemp, jute, etc) to promote bacterial action in order to facilitate separation of the fibres from the woody tissue by beating”. There will be no surprise to anyone who has been down to the Bronze Age area while this retting process was happening that the word ret comes from the same Germanic root as the word rot. You can only imagine what the smell of retting/rotting bark and stagnant water was like. We have been wondering what the water could be used for, but an internet search suggests that the Norse Men, Saxons, Iron Age and Bronze Age Brits, Romans and others, up to the modern day, who regularly made Lime Bast did the retting in moving water meaning that the cellulose gunk that it produces would have been washed away thereby avoiding the smell that retting something in still water produces. By the end of Friday the bast was hanging to dry in various houses ready to be made into cordage and rope.

Friday came, with the promise of more rain. That day also came with excitement as we were going to, drum roll please, put up the central post (as well as do some more wall building). More bark was stripped off poles and by lunch time Holly had arrived and was ready to film the work. Little did we know how things were going to go. 

As the post hole is not exactly central it had been decided to add a couple of bits of wood to act as artificial crotches. Some of us looked at the post chosen and questioned whether it was actually too tall. We were assured it was not, it had been measured and the angle created when the main rafters were put on would be the needed 45 degrees. Carefully the pole was lifted into the hole, and clunch, which sets like concrete when it dries, was poured in to hold it in place. The team then went for a well earned lunch break. We were sat down, enjoying the food provided, when Trevor came in and spoke the dreaded words “I think the post is too tall and we need to take it down and cut some off”. This then came the afternoon activity.

How difficult can it be to take a post out of the ground? With health and safety in mind a lot of discussion went on to decide how to get the post down safely. In the end it was decided to try and lift the pole out. The clunch acted like quicksand and every time people pulled the clunch created a vacuum. This meant that the clunch had to be dug out, the hole widened, and a slight ramp excavated to allow the post to come out. Then it was laid down, the excess cut off and then re-erected. All this was being filmed but how much of the footage will be useable could be an issue as some of the language spoken is not suitable for a family friendly site like Butser Plus. The suggestion was that Holly cuts the sound and either speeds it up with the music from Benny Hill playing in the background or turns the footage to black and white, and adds captions like an old Charlie Chaplain, Harold Lloyd, or Buster Keaton movie.

The final task of the day was the raising of the four main rafters. These were rested on the crutches and then connected to the lintels with timber locks. The next stage will be lashing the rafters together at the top, connecting them properly to the lintels, and putting a “collar” on to rest the remainder of the lintels on. Due to the fact that we have not connected the lintels properly we are currently not able to let members of the public down to the Bronze Age house, we don’t expect them to move but it is better to be safe and not risk someone getting hurt. It is nice though that people can actually see something that is starting to look house like rather than a wooden copy of Stone Henge.

To support our Bronze Age Roundhouse project with Operation Nightingale and discover more behind the scenes footage of the build head to at www.butserplus.com where we are releasing weekly video episodes about work and projects at the farm. Thank you!

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 7

Butser team member Phelim shares an update from the latest session on the Bronze Age project as the veterans and volunteers took part in a couple of exciting workshops all about hunting and cooking to better understand our Bronze Age ancestors!

Normal Service Will Resume Shortly…

When the volunteers from Operation Nightingale came for the next stage of the project it was not for the usual two days of building and one workshop. Instead they were treated to a two day workshop on Bronze Age skills, but the jury is still out as to whether they would be able to survive in the Bronze Age.

Sat under a gazebo to protect the participants from the direct heat of the sun, Wednesday found the veterans making spears out of bones. Mainly using flint they gamely carved away before whittling a piece of wood to make the shaft. Then came the fun part – throwing spears.

As anyone who has tried throwing the javelin at school will know it is not that easy to get a long pointed object to go in a straight line. Those of us watching proceedings were therefore relieved to discover that the first part of the throwing were rubber headed. Using these the volunteers had the chance to get used to throwing in a straight line, well a straightish line. From here Tom, who was running the workshop, got them used to trying to aim at a target. As part of this Will, one of the Butser staff who has a passion for weapons as a Roman re-enactor, gamely produced one of his shields to hide behind for them to throw the rubber spears at a live target. Seeing the lack of skill Will very sensibly got out the way when the spears with metal heads came out. After various attempts to hit a hazel hoop the bone spears came out for them try. Thankfully only one broke, mainly because the hole was very thin.

Thankfully the veterans didn’t have to hunt for the next day’s workshop as Caroline had provided all the ingredients. Cooking in the Bronze Age uses a lot of stones, either to help boil liquid or as hot plates for flat bread. Using these, a large metal pot and other appropriate tools the veterans cooked a lovely meal of stew with roasted pork. They also made cheese, butter and bread. Sadly, due to being a coeliac, I was unable to join them in their feast but I am assured that all enjoyed it. 

Sadly we also said goodbye to Claire who had helped not only get the project off the ground, but also put in so much effort to enable the project to happen over the days when the volunteers were on site. Thankfully she plans to visit to make sure we are doing things properly. While no building work was actually done normal service will resume at the next session, well it will if we can work out what normal actually is.

Finally,  big thank you has to be given to Tom and Caroline for running the two workshops, and to Elaine Corner (from one of our partner groups Step Together) for the use of the photographs.

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 6

‘Dial M for Mud’ - Butser Projects Co-ordinator Sue Webber explains the detective work involved in solving the mystery of the Bronze Age roundhouse walls, giving the rationale behind our varied approaches to the wall construction.

After many discussions, some late at night, some early in morning the consensus was that the Bronze Age house could have had mud walls. Then we had to decide what type of mud walls they would be. But before we go on there let’s recap a little on the archaeology.

The excavation at Dunch Hill that we are basing this building on gave us post holes – where they are in relation to one another, the diameter of the posts and the depth. That gave us the layout for the building. What we don’t have is any indication of the materials that the walls were built from. This detective mystery leaves us few clues, Dr Watson. The material evidence may have been robbed, rubbed out or rained away. 

If it was robbed, then good building material may well have been re-used in the best Bronze Age recycling practice and taken away for another structure.

Later ploughing may have rubbed out the evidence of wall structure and materials, leaving no trace for the archaeological Holmes.

The third R, rain, means that our friend, the weather may have played a part dissolving material and returning it to the earth.

So, Dr Watson, what next?

What materials would have been available to Bronze Age builders on Salisbury Plain? The soil is a thin layer over chalk. There was evidence of some woodland, pasture and crop fields. What they didn’t have locally was building stone (except for the Stonehenge sarcens of course), or deep turf to play with.

Modern-built Iron Age roundhouses at Butser and elsewhere are often constructed with wattle and daub walls. These are usually hazel or willow woven wattles covered in daub made with the childrens’ favourite recipe – mud, straw, water and POO! Wattle and daub is a possibility for this house, although there are no small postholes to show evidence of wattle uprights. Are you keeping up Watson?

Certainly Holmes, the butler in the library?

Here at Butser we want to try something different, because we know about wattle and daub but we don’t have as much experience of mud walls.

The options that seemed plausible included turf walls, cobb walls or earth walls. And since they all had their motivation and opportunity it was hard to pin one down as the culprit.

So, instead of a single perpetrator we decided to try them all and find out which was guilty, sorry, the best option.

Turf walls, are generally made where there is deep soil that can be cut into thick turfs, and sometimes interlayered with stone. The Salisbury Plain turf, and the Butser turf, is thin but we saved what we took when we cleared the site and built it into a sloping wall with a wide base, against a light wattle structure inside.

Cobb walls, are often built with boots (some sort of foundation) and a bonnet (a covering roof). We had a clunch or cobb-walled building at Butser which proved to be very durable and took strong men with sledgehammers to bring it down. The underlying chalk on the site gave us a good reason to try making cobb with broken up chalk, water and straw. 

Earth walls, are another option, so again we made a light-weight wattle structure to pile earth against.

Making the building with a variety of techniques and materials means that we will have a better understanding of the options Bronze Age builders might have had. As the build progresses we will see how these walls perform and later in the building’s life will have even more information about their durability. And one day, many years in the future, we will see what these walls leave behind.

So, clear as mud Watson?

Building the Earth Wall against a wattle support

The Turf Wall

The Cob Wall

To support our Bronze Age Roundhouse project with Operation Nightingale and discover more behind the scenes footage of the build head to at www.butserplus.com where we are releasing weekly video episodes about work and projects at the farm. Thank you!

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 5

Projects Co-ordinator Trevor Creighton gives an update on the latest progress on our Bronze Age build, featuring Lime tree cutting to make fibre for cordage and pottery pit firing.

Our most recent Operation Nightingale activities, 23rd – 25th June, have been many and varied. Wednesday was spent in the woods of darkest Hampshire gathering lime. Not the little green things that add delicate sharpness to a nice Thai meal, but the Common European Lime tree (Tilia x europaea is it’s anything but common botanical name). In fact, it’s a bit unfair to call it common at all, because Lime is useful in somewhat uncommon ways. In our case, Claire, our staff archaeologist, led a stout crew into the forbidding wilderness to gather lime so it could be stripped of its bast. Bast is a layer of soft material directly beneath the bark. It is very fibrous and those fibres make the perfect basis for cordage.

Cordage is made with any number of fibres. In essence, the fibres are stripped from the source – in our case lime bast, but brambles, nettles and all sorts of plants have good fibres for making cordage – then twisted by hand into a twine. The cordage can be used in its own right – nettle can be made into very fine and delicate thread for weaving, for example. Individual strands of cordage can also be combined and twisted to make rope. And it was the search for rope-making materials that led our intrepid team to sally forth, returning like conquering Bronze Age foragers with raw materials. (Thanks to Jackie Crutchfield for the photos from the Lime processing in the woods)

Lime bast needs some process and making cordage needs some up-skilling so on the Friday the lime – rope project began. But I am getting ahead of myself. If you read our last blog you will know that an Operation Nightingale team made a whole swag of pots a couple of weeks back, under the careful scrutiny of the man I now like to call the ‘Pot Meister’, Butser stalwart Phelim. Two weeks is a good amount of time to let fresh made pots dry out nice and gently, ready to be fired. Wet posts have an irritating habit of exploding, so those same potters were able to take their now dry creations, put them in a specially dug hole in the ground, set a fire and create some ceramic masterpieces.

Phelim had warned at the making stage that the failure rate for this sort of Bronze Age style earth-firing can be as high as 80%. As it turned out, the success rate was about 95% - that’s a model display of under-promising and over-delivering and it delighted everyone. And that’s what earned Phelim his new sobriquet – Pot Meister (notwithstanding his expertise, Phelim was the most relieved person after the fired pots were revealed). Now we have a series of hand-crafted pots, reflecting the some of the pottery of the Bronze Age. (Thanks to Phelim McIntyre and Rachel Willis for the photos of the pottery firing and results)

Back to Friday again. Before it can be stripped into the fibres we want for cordage, the lime bast must be soaked in water – a process called retting (in effect, rotting), which allows the fibrous parts to be stripped from the bast. We are doing a little experiment with this process. One lot of bast now sits in a bath of plain water, the other in a bath of salt water. In a few weeks we will see if one or the other works better. Once the rather goopy strips of bast were in the water (it’s a bit slimy to handle but a number of us seemed to have nice soft hands afterwards!) the team split in two – one group getting on with the building, the other learning how to make cordage.

Spinning guru (nothing to do with Whirling Dervishes) Kat was on hand to give expert guidance. As we couldn’t yet use the lime bast, Kat had gathered a number of other suitable materials, including nettle and rhubarb. Many a cordage maker found this a very meditative activity and had produced some beautiful lengths by the day’s end. (Thanks agin to Jackie Crutchfield for the photos from the cordage session)

So do we know whether people in Bronze Age Britain used cordage? We certainly do! Although organic materials are generally poorly preserved in prehistoric archaeology – especially in the acid soils in our part of the world - there are sometimes rare and wonderful survivors. And there is no better example of Bronze Age fibres than those from Must Farm. Actually, the Must Farm examples are spun fibre, rather than cordage. But we do have plenty of evidence for prehistoric cordage. I use the example of Must Farm because the work – which is in essence twisted plant fibres, just like cordage – is of such breathtakingly exquisite quality. It is a demonstration of the sophistication of the use of fibres in the Bronze Age and I would urge anyone to have a look at it.

Must Farm is an astonishingly well preserved site from the Late Bronze Age (around 1000 – 800 BCE, only a little later than our building, from about 1200). It was a small settlement built over the water on stilts in what is now the Cambridgeshire Fens. I saw some examples of the textiles and many other things in Peterborough Museum some years ago and was bowled over. If you have read this far but aren’t familiar with Must Farm then you will almost certainly be interested in the checking it out. www.mustfarm.com is a brilliant site, with lots of snippets of information, dig diaries, and great pictures.

On the subject of snippets of information, a documentary was made in 2016 called ‘Britain’s Pompeii’. It was hosted by Professor Alice Roberts and dealt with the short life and rapid demise of the Must Farm settlement. The whole place seems to have been burned down within about a year of its construction. To give some idea of how quickly a roundhouse might burn, they burned a roundhouse. That very roundhouse was built here at Butser by David Freeman. Butser is surely the most filmed experimental archaeological site in Britain. As a random example, and one close to my heart, the farm (at its original site just north of where we are now) was featured in the Dr Who episode ‘Mysterious Planet’. While in the area the crew also zoomed down to Portsmouth and filmed Daleks at the IBM building. Sadly, no Daleks at Butser, but then rough ground was always the fly in the ointment for the Daleks’ otherwise flawless plans for conquering the universe.

That’s probably enough digression for one blog. We are doing more wall building soon and making bold plans for the roof. But I’ll leave that for another day.

To support our Bronze Age project and discover more about the process through behind the scenes documentaries, support our new online platform www.butserplus.com where we are documenting the entire progress from start to finish.

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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