Online - Thursday 18 April 2024 at 7pm
The best sites in Fenland are buried beneath metres of silt and peat. Giant apertures like the Must Farm Quarry represent the simplest route to their discovery, facilitating safe, water-free access to past landscapes preserved in the deep. Fleets of Bronze Age logboats, fish weirs and traps, early timber causeways, rapiers and swords and the Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement, all made accessible by the biggest hole in Fenland. And yet, the very context of these findings, the Holocene river channels, and sediments, persist far beyond the confines of the quarry, infilling the remainder of the vast fathomless Fenland Basin. We think what we excavate at Must Farm is characteristic of the rest of the fens. The frequency of discovery being indicative of what we would expect to find if we were able relocate our extraordinary aperture across the basin.
Dispatches from beneath the peat fen presents the Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement – its discovery, context, and implication. In the context of later Bronze Age Fenland, a key objective of this presentation is to show that the exceptionally well-preserved pile-dwelling settlement was anything but exceptional!
