Glastonbury Roundhouse M59 - a new start!

From one roundhouse to another! We've moved from our Bronze Age roundhouse straight into the Iron Age!

Project Archaeologist Trevor Creighton explains our next roundhouse project - rebuilding the Iron Age roundhouse based on Glastonbury Lake Village M59.

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A few weeks ago we noticed that our smallest roundhouse was starting to look a little tired and droopy(!). A quick check under its skin of daub revealed why. The posts that held it up had succumbed to a double assault of dry rot and woodworm. It had lasted 12 years which, given that its frame was no more than slim hazel uprights woven through with even slimmer willow withies to form a ‘wattled’ wall, that was a pretty good innings. The little roundhouse was based on one excavated around 1900 on the Avalon Marshes, near Glastonbury. As the name suggests, it is a wet area, and even wetter over 2000 years ago in the Iron Age when the original was built. The industrious inhabitants had built a series of artificial mounds to keep their, and their houses’, feet dry. Our building was based on one of those houses from a mound which the excavators identified as ‘Mound 59’, and so its official name, derived from the ever-poetic terminology of archaeology, was M59. Wow. 

Archaeologists have made estimates for the life of those buildings of around 10 years. Multiplying that by the number of times they were rebuilt – up to 10 – it has been estimated that the settlement on the Marshes lasted somewhere between 100 – 150 years or thereabouts. So, our 12 year old house is in the ballpark, and so it does what experimental buildings should do. That is, help archaeologists better understand the lives of settlements and the people who lived in them. But our next chapter is now beginning – we are not yet finished with this little piece of archaeology and, like the phoenix, M59 mark 2 is rising from the ashes (well, not literally. More the ground). More recent research suggests that oak was perhaps a more likely material for the uprights than hazel, and that willow was scarce. As a result, Mark 2 is getting oak posts and split hazel wattling. Check back in about 10 – 15 years and we will tell you whether or not we need to adjust the figures on the longevity of the Avalon Marshes settlement!

The Bronze Age Blog - Session 16 - the thatch is complete!

Project Archaeologist Trevor gives an update on the latest with the Bronze Age house as the challenging job of thatching is completed!

We’re delighted to be able to report that our Operation Nightingale Bronze Age roundhouse is now all but finished. The crowning glory was the completion of the thatching of the roof this week. The entire team was involved in some way shape or form in the quite long and involved task of putting the conical roof onto our sturdy oak frame and then covering it with a few tons of water reed. 

While it was very much a team effort, special shout-outs have to go to Darren Hammerton, treewright extraordinaire, and Lyle Morgans, Master Thatcher, who helped us get things started on the right foot. Also to John, one of our fantastic Operation Nightingale vet volunteers who took to thatching like a duck to water, and to Barnaby and Sarah, our two semi-resident archaeology students seconded from Bournemouth University for experience and slavery in the cause of experimental archaeology, who have also done sterling work in, on, and around the roof. And no-one will begrudge the biggest ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow’ being sung for Will, Butser’s own Man for all Seasons and all round great guy. Will has wrestled with what has turned out to be a very difficult, at times infuriating (expletives deleted) roof to build and thatch, and has come through scarred but unbeaten. Well done all!

Will Receives a well deserved round of applause at our Bronze Age celebration event (photo Harvey Mills)!

Why, I hear you ask, was the roof so difficult? Well, the main reason was the odd shape of the building. We call it a ‘roundhouse’, because it is an example of a type of structure favoured throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages (and beyond) in Britain and Ireland which were, more or less, round (in another striking example of the razor-sharp intellects native to all archaeologists, they are therefore called ‘roundhouses’). We also call it a roundhouse because it is a lot snappier than calling it an ‘irregular nonagon’, which is, in fact, what it is.

The thatching continued in all weather! Here’s student Barnaby on the roof.

So, what might this difficulty in building and thatching our irregular roof tell us archaeologically? The obvious answer is that the builders who built the original were dodgy. But, if you tip me upside down and pour cold tea down my nostrils, I will admit that I don’t think that’s the case. For one thing, there were other roundhouses found near ours that were impressively round and symmetrical – so they definitely knew how to craft a circular building (next time we’ll build one of these…). I am inclined to think there was a reason for the fact that some sides are longer than others (yes, sides, it’s a roundhouse with sides. Well, it’s an irregular nonagon with sides). We joked about making individual, custom length sides to accommodate particular pieces of furniture – a sideboard over there, next to the chaise longue on the long wall - that sort of thing. But jokes aside, why not? What I am even more convinced of, though is that – assuming our building did indeed have a roof (and that is always an assumption, as there is only fairly seldom direct evidence for them in prehistoric archaeology) – the Bronze Age builders built a roof in some way different from ours. So, if we DO ever build another irregular roundhouse (that’s a big if and I hope Will doesn’t read this too soon), then it’s a fair bet we will try a different experimental approach to putting a lid on it.

To follow more about our Bronze Age house project you can watch behind-the-scenes documentaries on our online platform Butser Plus whilst supporting our ongoing work.

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Operation Nightingale

In a special guest blog, Richard Osgood, Senior Archaeologist at Defence Infrastructure Organisation and co-founder of Operation Nightingale, reflects on the significance of the Bronze Age build project in the ongoing work of Operation Nightingale.

Operation Nightingale began in 2011 with the mission of trying to improve the lives of Wounded/Injured and Sick (WIS) military personnel and veterans using archaeology. The results, which are measured, have been most encouraging and even for those who are simply looking for some respite from the daily pressures of life there are positive outcomes. The global trials of the Covid pandemic have only served to heighten the challenges for these participants with a particular emphasis on mental-health and wellbeing. And this is where the Bronze Age house has proved invaluable. We were fortunate enough to excavate the location of a roundhouse on Salisbury Plain in between lockdown regimes – outdoors and socially distanced – and this led to discussions with Trevor and Butser on the potential to try to reconstruct these findings at the Ancient Farm. 

Thanks to so many partners  such as South Downs National Park, the Armed Forces Covenant Fund, Breaking Ground Heritage and Step Together – this became a reality. In what always seemed to be sun-drenched days from spring to autumn the team stripped turf, dug holes, shaped timbers, painted murals, smelted copper, cast bronze, carved figures and much more; a job for everyone. In so doing they forged their own bonds and friendships – some are also now guides at the farm, or have gone to University to study archaeology. This has been the Op Nightingale project with greatest longevity and diversity of activities thus far – in perhaps the most trying times too. The feedback from participants has been outstanding and our task now will be to build upon this (wattle and daub or clunch!) framework to maintain the benefits. The project will need maintenance – a real positive – and will also provide hugely important academic data on these structures and the longevity of their experimental walls.

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Photographs by Harvey Mills Photography

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 15 - the celebration!

Bronze Age project co-ordinator Trevor Creighton reflects on our celebration of the (almost!) completion of our Bronze Age roundhouse! We were joined by the volunteers, their families, local supporters and funders alongside Professor Alice Roberts and Drs Phil Harding, Stuart Prior and Rachel Pope to celebrate this fantastic project!

Saturday October 9th was the official launch day for the Operation Nightingale roundhouse and all of the stars turned out for the gala, red carpet (well, green grass) event. Although the building isn’t quite finished yet, we have been planning to hold an event at this time for some months. It seemed an ideal moment to celebrate the project while we still had a good chance of warm, dry weather – and we did, in spades! Rather than an official opening, we held a dedication ceremony to celebrate the achievements of the Operation Nightingale-Butser team. Professor Alice Roberts made the official dedication, ably assisted by Drs Phil Harding and Stuart Prior – all prominent archaeologists on and off the telly! 

Left to Right: Dr Stuart Prior, Maureen Page - Director, Elaine Corner- Step Together Volunteering Manager, Simon Jay - Director, Professor Alice Roberts, Richard Osgood - Operation Nightingale, Dr Phil Harding, Trevor Creighton - Project Coordinator.

The Operation Nightingale Volunteer team

 The roundhouse was looking stunning, made even more so by the decoration of interior walls and the two posts flanking the doorway. Our Creative Developer, Rachel, developed some creative schemes (see what I did there?) of figurative and abstract art inspired by Bronze Age pottery decorations and rock art, applied using pigmented clay wash. The icing on the cake was the completion of thatching the front of the building by our site manager and man for all seasons, Will, who has put an enormous amount of effort into the project from day one (and who, it must be said, rightfully received the biggest round of applause during the ceremony).

Director Maureen Page talks Professor Alice Roberts about the interior of the roundhouse.

The exterior of the Bronze Age roundhouse - this image clearly shows the diverse approaches to walling - turf on the left and clutch (chalk, hair, straw and water) on the right.

Site supervisor, thatcher, and Bronze Age interpreter Will receives a well deserved round of applause!

With our beautiful roundhouse as the backdrop, Richard and Elaine, from Operation Nightingale and Step Together Volunteering, respectively, joined Maureen and Simon to welcome everyone to the festivities, before Alice’s dedication words and the burial of a rather special pot. Quite often, prehistoric dwellings will have objects buried in or around them that seem to serve no practical purpose, but are too structured or peculiar to have been accidentally buried. The catch-all name for these finds is ‘deposition’. Although we don’t know what the meaning or purpose of such deposits was, the general consensus is that they are a dedication or offering for the home, either at the beginning or end of its useful life. In fact, this sort of practice wasn’t unique to prehistoric buildings, but has been practiced in Britain until very recently. Objects are found under or within medieval buildings, along with marks on timbers and walls, that are known to have been deposited or made to ward off evil and bring good luck. Indeed, it would be very surprising to think that the practice wasn’t still going on even in our contemporary, sceptical Western world.

The Operation Nightingale deposition consisted of objects placed in a simple pot, that had been made using Bronze Age techniques during the pottery workshop some months ago. Each of the Operation Nightingale team placed within it something that had some personal significance. In that way we were saying ‘we were here’ and perhaps that is a meaningful echo of those prehistoric deposits.

Operation Nightingale Volunteers and Alice Roberts with the pot ready for burial.

Operation Nightingale Volunteers and Dr Stuart Prior, Professor Alice Roberts and Project Coordinator Trevor Creighton.

Another special guest on the day was Dr Rachel Pope, Senior Lecturer in European Prehistory at the University of Liverpool, from where she had travelled to join us for the day! Rachel is an authority on roundhouse archaeology and construction and her enthusiasm for our project underscores its archaeological importance, which sits very nicely alongside of its significance as a truly unique wellbeing initiative and a piece of public archaeology for the education and enjoyment of what will be thousands of people in the coming years. I think it’s fair to say that this is unlikely to be the last such project.

The dedication was our opportunity to also thank the many people and organisations who have supported our project along the way. The cost of the materials used in the construction of the building was funded by a generous grant of £8,000 by the South Downs National Park Authority from their Covid-19 Recovery Fund, together with £35,000 for tools, materials and volunteer support which came from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund, thanks to a grant application compiled by Step Together volunteer charity. Step Together were also instrumental in recruiting, and providing assistance to, volunteers to work on the project.  Without this funding the project would simply not have been possible.

Professor Alice Roberts cuts the Roundhouse cake with a Bronze sword!

We would like to warmly thank Alice, Phil, Stuart, and Rachel for making long treks from across the country to be with us and celebrate our project and, in doing so, help us to say a massive thankyou to the heroes of the piece – the Operation Nightingale volunteers/roundhouse builders.

Bronze Age re-enactors bring the Bronze Age house to life.

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The whole Bronze Age building process has been documented on our online platform www.butserplus.com where you can watch step by step how we rebuilt the Bronze Age.

The Farm will be open to visitors during the whole of the October Half term week (23rd to 31st October) which will be the first opportunity to see our Bronze Age Roundhouse in person. We are also putting on a range of talks and Bronze Age themed activities to bring this special period to life at Butser. You can book tickets to visit us here

The Bronze Age Build Blog - Session 14

As we race to the finish line, Project coordinator Sue Webber reflects on how long it really takes to build a roundhouse.

Visitors often ask, “How long does it take to build a roundhouse?” And that’s a hard question to answer because it depends. It depends on how many people are working on the house, what skills they have, what the weather is like and what unexpected challenges they face. But to try to answer that question, let’s say a team of six with some building skills, might take 30 days to complete a roundhouse like our Bronze Age house, using traditional methods. With more people, or more experience it could be quicker but with bad weather and poor materials it could take longer.

But that’s just the build time, behind the actual physical build there are years of preparation to supply the materials that are needed. It’s easy not to consider where the materials to build the house come from. In our society most building materials are available on demand in exchange for money. They don’t come direct from the forest or the field, they come from the builders’ yard or warehouse.

In prehistory, people needed to manage their own resources. If your community was spending time developing farmland and building houses they would also need to consider how to manage the other resources they would need. If you wanted a good supply of lightweight timber that could be used for fences and walls, you would need to develop some coppiced woodland close to your settlement. Moving materials over distance takes human, or animal, energy so it would be good to manage a woodland that wasn’t too far away. Put simply, if you cut down all the trees close to your community and turn the woods into fields, you will have a long way to walk every time you need wood.

Many types of trees can be coppiced. That’s a technique where young trees are cut back to a low stump which regenerates and new, straight trunks grow back. These stumps are called “stools”. Hazel is an excellent wood to coppice and if you explore the old woodlands in the south of England you can find large hazel stools that can be hundreds of years old. It takes about seven years for a coppiced hazel to grow a trunk that is long enough to be used for wattle fences or walls, so a hazel coppice would probably be cut every seven years. If you need hazel to build your house, which we did, someone would have had to have coppiced a local woodland seven years earlier to ensure the supply was ready when you needed it.

The other materials you need might have been growing for longer, like bigger tree trunks for the roof, or other materials that need to be grown and cut in season, in this case water reeds or wheat stems for the thatch. Perhaps these materials were cut in advance and stored somewhere ready for when they were needed. Perhaps they were traded with other communities.

Other materials could be readily sourced but would need preparation. To make daub for the wattle walls you would need to collect animal poo in advance to mix with soil and straw and water. Perhaps a group of people would dig a large pit to mix it in. Then, it might have been mixed like a traditional grape press by using the feet of the community to make the right consistency. If you wanted to make walls from crushed chalk, you’d need to dig another pit, crush the chalk and mix that too.

So how long does it take to build a Bronze Age house? If we count the time to grow, harvest and prepare the materials needed, it takes years.

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 13

Project Coordinator Trevor Creighton updates us with the latest progress on the Bronze Age house build , and reflects on the community that has been built along the way, as we race towards the finish line!

Our recent build days were September 22nd, 23rd and 24th. The planned completion is early October. Need I say more about what we were doing? Everything, which, in my case, includes a mild dose of panic.

It really was an all hands to the pump three days – fixing battens high on the roof, while below their already fastened companions were having thatch fixed to them in a race to the top. All the variations of technique in our tasting menu of walls were in play – soil mounds, wattling, daubing, finishing a gabion and cob walling were all happening, with the team moving at a blistering pace. Workers moved by at such speed that they registered on my retina as mere blurs, putting me in mind of the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes Cartoons (both of these phenomena serving to highlight my age).

None of this is to suggest that there is any chaos on the building site (except in my febrile mind). Far from it, in fact. Everyone who is involved has acquired and honed a range of new skills. Some people even like to specialise, while others are eager for a new challenge. So the building is now in the hands of craftspeople who are keen to turn up and get on with things, drawing upon their own experience. Frankly, I love it – I get to sit around and talk, point at things and drink tea. I can't speak for Phelim and Sue, of course. I expect they are nose to the grindstone. It's a good thing that the building is near completion. By the time anyone reads this it will almost be too late for me to appear before any disciplinary tribunal, get the sack or be shouted at.

Actually, there is every reason to think that this is the sort of organisational model that the original builders of our roundhouse would have been familiar with. While we know that there were highly skilled craft specialists in the Bronze Age. Metallurgists, bronzesmiths and jewellers are evidenced by the surviving metalwork, but it is surely the case that there were many other areas of specialisation whose makers worked with less durable materials. At a small settlement like Dunch Hill, however, I think that, if we had a TARDIS, we would see a small community or extended family pitching in with greater or lesser areas of expertise and to the best of their abilities. Some will have seen or participated in building other structures and most would almost certainly be familiar with repairing these relatively fragile buildings. And, yes, in this time travelling of my mind's eye I even see a version of me, lying around in the sun and avoiding work at all times. It is even possible that they were a distant ancestor – perhaps laziness is an inherited trait – surely a worthy study for anyone interested in DNA analysis?

Actually, I would say that we have actually gone beyond just being a 'team' and formed something approaching a community. We share a single objective of completing a roundhouse – a satisfying goal in itself. But no-one secretes themselves away at lunch time, desperate to escape. In fact, we are often visited by other Butser staff who are keen to share in the lunchtime banter. That is a hard thing to test – when does a team become a community? But it is something I think I have felt before, on our recently completed Horton 2 Neolithic building. Whatever you want to call it, it's a great thing and long may it last. Now that we have such a great little group I hope that we can go on to do more projects. All we need do now is give people some tools and materials, point them at a bare patch of earth, give a rough description of what we need built and the job is a good as done. As it happens, we need a new Iron Age roundhouse, as one of our old faithfuls had to be demolished recently. It had succumbed to the ravages of woodworm and age. That, by the way, is not a 'fault' with the building, but an experimental result – it provides us with important data about the lifespan of buildings, which is one of the most important reasons we build them. In fact, the most valuable data often comes from a building's demolition!

So for our next building we already have the construction crew, we just need the resources. And on that note, resource management was something that was vital in prehistory, just as it is now. The Bronze Age wasn't a time of foraging for what you could get, but managing the world around you to ensure you could get what you need. That is a great jumping off point for the next blog!

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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 - Session 12

Project Coordinator Sue Webber gives the latest update on the Bronze Age roundhouse project as the volunteers get stuck in to the very satisfying job of daubing!

Daub therapy

While the thatching progresses, we also continue to work on the walls beneath. Daub is the material that goes on to wattle to make wind-proof roundhouse walls. It’s the school children’s favourite recipe of mud, water, straw and animal poo! Once mixed together it makes a sticky substance that can be smeared over wattled walls and into twiggy cracks and cavities.

Daub needs protection from the rain if it is to dry, so we needed to wait for the thatching to start before we could daub the walls under the thatch. We’re not daubing all the walls in this house because we are testing a variety of wall types and materials.

Our daubers soon discovered the delights of smearing daub on wattle walls. They enjoyed the work so much that it became a slow, social process that we named “daub therapy”. You can sit and talk while you daub and you gradually watch while your work covers the wall, giving a sense of achievement and satisfaction. It’s hands-on work at a human pace that probably felt the same 3000 years ago when the Bronze Age builders were working.

Our experimental walling choices have already started to give us results about what works, and what doesn’t. We built some lightweight wattle walls and banked turf against one and loose soil against another two. The turf wall is consolidating well with a good variety of plants growing there already. The smaller soil-banked wall is doing fine but its wider brother started to bow inwards from the pressure of the soil banked up against it.

We can see that this would soon be a problem with the weight of the soil forcing the wattle inwards, so we decided to remove the soil, release the pressure and see what we could do to re-consolidate the wattle. Once the pressure was off the wattle, we were able to straighten it up and support it with some extra uprights that slotted into holes in the lintel above the wall and into holes in the ground that we then packed with flint chips and earth. This has made a great improvement and the wall will now support the weight of the soil banked up against it once more. Just to be safe we have also added two more large uprights at either end of the wattle wall to lock it in place. While we have now strayed a little from the archaeology on this wall section, we have learnt some valuable lessons.

Lightweight wattle walls won’t support a soil bank if they are wide and if they are not firmly anchored. Because we followed the original excavation on the positions of the post holes we couldn’t make the distance between the posts narrower. So, this means that either this wasn’t a banked soil against wattle wall, or if it was, the wattle would need to be securely anchored to support the weight of the soil.

As our work continues, we’ll get more information on which of our experimental wall-types work and which aren’t so successful. It’s only by building these different walls that we can get a real understanding of the options available to Bronze Age builders.

Equinox Boat Burn

Wishing you all a very happy Autumn Equinox, the official start of Autumn!

The autumnal months at the farm are always particularly beautiful as the rising smoke from our Roundhouse fires mixes with the mist rolling down the hills, the distant calls of the rutting deers echoing across the farm.

This year to celebrate the Autumn Equinox we organised a special Equinox Boat Burn event with the Saxons from Herigeas Hundas and the Vikings from Wuffa, accompanied by music from Seidrblot and the Pentacle Drummers and Storytelling from DD Storyteller with special guest Viking expert Dr Cat Jarman. After two years without a proper Beltain celebration it felt very special to be hosting a spectacular burning event once again!

Many thanks to everyone who joined us at the weekend and helped to make the event special and celebrate the Equinox in style!

Click here to listen to a podcast episode from Shine Radio recorded at the event.

Below are a few fantastic photos from the event, many thanks to the photographers for capturing and sharing the images of this special occasion.

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Photography by Harvey Mills: (harveymills.com)

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Photography by Eleanor Sopwith: