Britain's Pompeii: A Village Lost in Time

This is Must Farm in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire...

..an extraordinary site

that is revolutionising what we know about our past.

This landscape was once part of the largest wetland in Britain

and deep down, it is the waterlogged conditions

that have guaranteed the survival

of a prehistoric farmstead for 3,000 years.

It is an exceptional site and I just can't wait to see it.

During the Bronze Age,

this settlement collapsed into the marshy fens

where it was frozen in time,

perfectly preserved until it was discovered by chance

and this major excavation was launched.

This is the crown jewels in terms of what it can tell us

about past humanities

and the way people lived in this landscape 3,000 years ago.

The level of preservation is so extraordinary,

this site has been dubbed Britain's Pompeii.

For the first time,

we can step inside our Bronze Age ancestors' homes

and discover uneaten meals,

pristine farming tools,

beautiful glass jewellery

and the biggest collection

of Bronze Age fabric ever found in Britain -

evidence of the first complete textile-making process.

This excavation is posing new intriguing questions.

How were the houses built?

How did the people survive here?

And was their world peaceful

or violent?

The answers may unlock the mystery of how our ancestors lived.

Over ten months,

the archaeologists are working to unearth evidence which they hope

will help them to solve this puzzle.

But this excavation promises to shed light

not only on this ancient settlement

but also on the very roots of our modern world.

Deep in the marshes of the Cambridgeshire fens,

Must Farm is wedged between the M11 and the edge of a quarry.

'The village was built in the Bronze Age,

'about 1,000 years before the Romans invaded Britain.'

Oh, wow.

This has just sent a shiver down my spine. This is amazing.

I cannot tell you how unusual this is.

Most prehistoric sites, you're looking at the sediment,

the soil and you've got to try and imagine what was there

and it's so rare to get wood preserved.

Look at this. It's all there in situ, intact.

3,000 years old.

I'm blown away by this, I really am.

Just astonishing.

The surviving settlement is made up of five wooden roundhouses,

built closely together.

I want to get down in there and have a look.

'There is so much domestic detail here,

'we'll be able to piece together

'how ancient Britons arranged their homes...

'..from cooking, to storage, to crafts.'

We can see quite clearly

the layout of the settlement from up here.

You can make out the posts

that delineate these roundhouses

and you can see how the roof timbers,

the radiating roof timbers

have fallen down almost in situ.

The Pompeii analogy, it's as if we've got a pristine settlement,

a pristine image of exactly what was going on within a settlement

3,000 years ago, of a series of households,

all of their worldly goods,

um, in 3-D.

There's another house behind there but we've only got a fragment of it.

'For site director Mark Knight,

'this is an unprecedented opportunity to understand

'the intimate lives of our Bronze Age ancestors...'

It's unbelievable, isn't it?

It's beyond any sort of dream of what you can do within archaeology.

'..while wood expert Mike Bamforth has a once-in-a-lifetime chance

'to investigate the structure of a Bronze Age village.'

For a wood specialist, this is about the best site

you could ever imagine to find.

Wood survives in any environment

where microbes and bacteria can't go to work on it.

So in frozen environments,

in very arid environments and in wet environments

where eventually all the oxygen has been taken out of the system.

Excavation is a painstaking task

that can't be rushed.

Every find and piece of wood is carefully cleaned of soil

as the layers are slowly stripped away.

Exposed to the air for the first time in 3,000 years,

the timber will begin to dry out and decay, so it must be kept wet.

The team is discovering near-perfect bowls containing half-eaten food,

giving the impression that the villagers were interrupted

in the middle of a meal.

At the heart of this discovery lies a mystery,

because this village was wiped out by a sudden catastrophic event.

The settlement burned to the ground

and, for some reason, the inhabitants never returned.

It took them by surprise, it wasn't planned.

There's a real sense here that things were all in situ,

that the settlement was going about its daily routine,

hence there's food inside the pots

and things and spoons and stuff like that, so it's caught that.

It's as though whoever lived at Must Farm fled from that place,

leaving all their belongings behind

and those objects were then preserved

almost in situ for three millennia

until the archaeologists arrived in the 21st century.

'At every turn, the archaeologists

'are making ground-breaking discoveries.'

So you can see it's got this kind of ridge

running through the top of it

and it's quite... As you can see, it's quite substantial.

The actual piece of wood itself, it goes... It's running all the way,

all the way underneath,

so who knows how far it goes that way or that way.

It seems to be going that way as well.

This bit is quite weird as well.

I mean, it must be, it's probably a post

like this one but the fact it's kind of connected to this big piece

makes it seems as if it's something different, I don't know.

'As the object is uncovered,

'it becomes clear that it IS something different...

'..a find that demonstrates the people living here had access

'to the most sophisticated technology.

'This is the earliest complete wheel ever found in Britain.'

This is the best preserved,

most complete one from this area.

That's all I need to say, really. I mean, it just...

It's just bigger and better than anything else.

And complete. It's the fact it's complete, it's wonderful.

It's so important,

wood expert Maisie Taylor has come to examine it

before it's fully excavated.

It's unbelievably compressed,

so it would've been quite a lot thicker than this originally.

Evidence for the use of wheels in Britain at this time is scarce.

This incredible discovery suggests the team can look forward

to unearthing a wealth of new evidence.

The Must Farm excavation promises to answer one of the big questions

about the Bronze Age -

exactly how connected was Britain to the rest of Europe?

Must Farm sat in a wetland environment,

crisscrossed by waterways that, to our ancestors 3,000 years ago,

formed a vital network for communication and trade.

Water was simply the easiest way to get around in this environment,

the easiest way to transport materials

and to reach out and trade with other communities.

It was water that connected this ancient village

to the rest of the world.

In an earlier test dig,

Mark Knight made another extraordinary discovery

in an ancient riverbed right next to the site -

eight complete pristine logboats.

Wherever you go along this channel,

there are boats and that is a...

If ever there was a testament to the richness

but also to the scale of human activity along this channel,

then that's it for me, I think.

The unprecedented scale of this find

is conclusive evidence that the villagers

were not living isolated lives.

What would happen to us if, in this modern world,

we didn't have the internet?

How connected would we be?

You feel in a way that the logboats and the rivers

was that sort of network, really, that sort of connection.

We know there was some trade between

Britain and Europe at this time.

Hopefully Must Farm can help us understand

how much trading went on

and how far Britain's connections stretched.

'As the team dig deeper into the villagers' homes,

'they notice the fire damage to the wood

'occurs in a strange pattern.'

Karl, this has to be one of my favourite pieces of wood.

You've actually got the structure still intact

with this piece of wood with the sockets in it

and these joints coming through,

these pieces coming through from the other side -

lovely mortise and tenon joints.

They're beautiful.

This is what I would call differential charring, so you've got

some moderate charring, some cracking there of the wood

and some places where there is no charring whatsoever,

no sign of any fire damage whatsoever. This is just...

'Karl is puzzled as to why timbers higher up in the house

'are damaged but those lower down are not.'

-What's that over there?

-This is a wooden bowl.

So it's almost entirely charred but it's right next to another

base plate like this, I think,

that's only just touched,

so I think what you're looking at there

is a difference of height within the structure,

so the bowl has been higher up when it's been sat in life

in the structure. The base plate is sat at a floor level,

like a skirting board and most of the heat within a fire

is going to rise through the structure,

so the bowl has suffered for longer because of that convection heat,

whereas the base plate has been quite protected.

So do you have any idea at the moment, and this is a difficult

question cos there's so much more data to come out of this site,

-but do you have an idea at the moment where this fire might have started?

-No.

'As the fire investigation continues,

'the team realise that the roundhouses

'were constructed in an unusual way.'

If we look at some of the bigger uprights, so this upright here,

there's no signs of any charring on it,

it's directly next to large timber members that have charring.

So that level of protection suggests that that's below flooring,

that our floor is somewhere up here and all of

the damage of the fire is then falling down to this level later on.

'This same feature repeats across the village.'

So we're just sitting here on the edge of roundhouse one and, as we're

peeling the roof timbers away,

we're starting to feel we've got hints of a raised floor structure.

We know the raised floor structure was here because we've got these

long lengths of support posts that haven't been burnt at all.

This is an incredible discovery.

It turns out that the houses were built on stilts over the water

and that's why the posts below were protected from the fire.

No Bronze Age village built in this style

has ever been found in Britain.

We can imagine the floor might be up here and that dam

would actually be underwater.

OK, so what Dan is excavating is the collapsed charred remnants

of a building that was above water that's now below water.

So that's why what you see is not particularly in order,

it's quite chaotic but in that chaos

there's lots of indications or attributes

of what was going on up here,

so we're seeing timbers that are worked and are charred

but we're also seeing these sort of thatchy clumps

and matted-like materials and things, as if we've got the flooring

as well as the thatch above the roof as well,

so he's trying to disassemble that.

While a settlement like this is new for Britain,

you can see something very similar

in mainland Europe.

700 miles away on the shores of Lake Constance in Germany,

a prehistoric lake village

has been painstakingly reconstructed.

Could this surprising connection

be the clue that sheds new light

on prehistoric European immigration to Britain?

We know that in the Bronze Age,

rivers and lakes were thoroughfares transporting people and goods.

That's why many villages around the Alps were built over water.

Now, there are striking similarities

between the lake villages on the Continent

and the newly discovered pile dwellings at Must Farm.

So is it possible that the knowledge of this way of construction and

indeed this way of life came to England from mainland Europe?

There's already evidence that a few individuals

came from the Continent to live in Britain

but we don't know the extent of this immigration.

This important new evidence suggests that 3,000 years ago,

an entire community

may have migrated from mainland Europe to the fens.

So we can imagine the pile dwellers of Switzerland or the Alpine region

or the people that lived on the rivers of Holland

being the very people that came and occupied this space

because it was a space they were already very adept at adapting to

or inhabiting, so they already had the technology,

they didn't invent it because of the change of the environment,

this was their texture.

As the team digs,

more intriguing evidence of powerful European connections

keep turning up.

Tiny, beautifully made glass beads.

Well, this is something really special, Mark, isn't it?

These are gorgeous glass beads from the Bronze Age.

We used the word "exceptional" a lot, I suppose,

in the project and things but these things stand out completely,

don't they? In their delicate nature but also in their colour.

They are such beautiful objects, aren't they?

Lovely colour.

That is just fantastic, isn't it?

Did you have people saying to you, "Are you sure this is Bronze Age?"

-Yes.

-Because it's not later, is it? Is it Iron Age?

-Yes.

When we first started recovering so many beads from this context,

there were sort of raised eyebrows about the fact we were

saying this is a late Bronze Age settlement because beads aren't found in this quantity.

Mark has sent the beads for analysis

to try to pinpoint where they come from.

The indications were straightaway that they were exotic,

they weren't from round here, and

we were given sort of indications that they were central European

and things like that.

And I think that information is being more refined now

and we're now starting to get indications that it's even further afield, sort of thing.

So, sort of Mediterranean and those sorts of areas.

Finds like this are clear evidence

that the villagers imported luxury goods from Europe.

But the archaeologists would like to know how much they traded

and from how far away.

This is the River Po in northern Italy

and close to the ancient course of this river,

archaeologists found a vast prehistoric trading centre,

an emporium dating to the Bronze Age.

Raw materials were imported from across the known world

and worked up into finished objects for export.

It was production and commerce on an industrial scale.

'The site is known as Frattesina.

'Professor Mark Pearce from the University of Nottingham

'has come to interpret some of the incredible finds for me.'

Mark, this is such a wonderful collection of objects from Frattesina.

What do they tell us in terms of the connections of this place?

Amazing. This is a connection that goes from the far end,

the eastern end of the Mediterranean right up into Central Europe.

This is a centre of the world in the Bronze Age. It's exciting.

So should we start with these? What are these little beads?

It's a good way to start.

These are beads that are made out of ostrich egg.

Do you want to grab them?

-Got them there.

-I'll be very careful.

Now, ostrich egg comes to Frattesina

up the Adriatic as a raw material

and it's transformed here into beads.

So it hasn't arrived as a finished object?

No, no, this isn't a place which is bringing in finished objects,

this is a place that's bringing in raw materials and transforming them.

And it is the Bronze Age we're talking about,

so there is evidence of metalworking here.

-Yes, here's a mould for making rings...

-Fantastic.

..and you can see how the copper flows down the groove.

So there would have been another half to this bowl.

-There'd be another half.

-You pour the copper in the top there.

And then you break off each ring and you can see where it's been broken off -

-it's not been finished, this one.

-Yeah, amazing.

'A vast range of raw materials was shipped to Frattesina.

'Amber from the Baltic...

'..ivory from as far away as Asia.

'It's clear that the Must Farm villagers

'weren't alone in their love of exquisite things.'

I think we've come to the most spectacular thing last.

Yes, well, these eye beads and barrel beads are made here in Frattesina.

Frattesina is the major centre of glass-making that we know,

the biggest centre of glass-making that we now in this period.

They are beautiful beads. They're really wonderful.

So it's not just glass working,

it's also glass-making here at Frattesina and here you can see

some ingots of glass in various colours.

This one's really interesting

because can see the shape of the ingot and you can see

where the pincers sank into the semi-molten glass

as the glass worker picked it up.

That's absolutely amazing.

You've got the actual operations of the glass-maker

preserved in this ingot.

That is fantastic, isn't it?

-Preserved a moment in time, that has.

-Yes, absolutely.

'Experts are developing scientific techniques

'that may soon be able to map

'exactly how Frattesina glass and those beads found at Must Farm

'travelled around Europe.'

More recently there's been an awful lot of really interesting work on

using isotopes and other methods to actually try to understand

where the raw materials for that glass came from,

and that's really at its beginnings.

Sites like Frattesina are fascinating in their own right -

it's amazing to think of people 3,000 years ago

manufacturing all those goods and trading across the known world.

The fact that we've got amber from the Baltic or the North Sea coming

here, ivory from Africa or Asia,

but I'm really intrigued by the glass beads.

Might it be possible to find a signature for a Frattesina bead,

so that if one turns up in another archaeological site,

we'll be able to tell exactly where it came from?

We're starting to map these connections across the ancient world

in a way that's never been possible before.

The Must Farm villagers possessed

not only locally made goods but exotic luxury items.

But this was a world before money,

so what could they have been exchanging in return?

We found this bladed object which we think is a sickle.

It's interesting because you can sort of see it's shiny still,

which is really the unique thing about this site,

that stuff is so well preserved that it comes out the ground shiny,

which is pretty amazing.

This is number six in the number of sickles

that have come out of the site so far

and it's the second from roundhouse one.

Thank you.

So a little hand sickle, still fairly sharp.

-Yeah.

-That's amazing.

And this looks interesting down here, Mark.

Yes, well again, there we go - we've got a socketed axe.

It's one of several that's come out of this roundhouse.

-Oh, wow.

-And you can see, again, like everything else,

it sort of comes out looking like bronze and not green and things.

It's got that real sense of being pristine.

It's heavy. Yeah.

-I think...

-Lovely.

Maybe that's another aspect, another attribute of this excavation,

-is how fresh everything looks.

-Yeah.

You know, that's the fourth of that type to come out of this house,

so that's four from one structure.

Metal started to be used in Britain during the Bronze Age,

so tools that had once been flint

could now be reimagined in this exciting new material.

The incredible quantity of the metal tools found at Must Farm shows that

the villagers farmed on a grand scale.

The discovery of bronze was a technological revolution -

it would transform life in so many ways.

People had been farming since the beginning of the Neolithic,

but the advent of bronze meant better tools,

changes in farming practice and an intensification of agriculture.

Britain never looked back.

The team has also discovered an abundance of animal bones,

alongside the tools for farming and bowls of cereal.

The villagers were herding livestock as well as cultivating crops.

In this fertile environment,

they may well have produced more than enough

and Mark Knight believes that this agricultural surplus

could have been used for trade.

We know that the Bronze Age was marked

by a huge intensification and expansion of agriculture.

But how did the Must Farm villagers

keep track of the seasons and manage their crops?

An intriguing clue can be found in the state of Saxony Anhalt,

central Germany, in the modern city of Halle.

There, in the State Museum is an object so extraordinary

it's recognised by UNESCO

as one of the most important archaeological finds

of the 20th century.

It's known as the Nebra Sky Disc.

The disc was found in 1999

and it's the earliest known depiction of the night sky.

It helps us understand how Bronze Age farmers

knew when the time was right to sow their crops.

This is the first picture

of the real heaven we've had in world history.

Its surface shows a cluster of stars known today as the Pleiades.

It's these stars that were so important to farmers.

The picture is really simple.

We have here the seven stars of the Pleiades

and we have here the moon

and the conjunction of moon and Pleiades

showed us one special time in the year, the early March.

The Pleiades are visible in the northern hemisphere

throughout the winter

and disappear in the spring,

around the time that crops should be sown.

The special thing is not the metalworking,

the special thing is the knowledge

fixed into a really, really simple, convincing picture.

Now, scientific analysis has revealed

that the Nebra Sky Disc was made from metal imported into Germany.

We analysed the copper. The copper comes from the Alps,

from the Mitterberg region near Salzburg.

Then we have analysed the tin.

The tin is coming definitely from Cornwall

and also the analysis of the gold

shows us that it's coming from Cornwall.

So it is a mixture of Germany and of England.

This exciting evidence suggests that the people of Britain and Germany

were linked not only by trade but by sophisticated technological ideas.

Modern scientific techniques like the chemical analysis of metal

are proving just how dynamic and connected Europe was

3,000 years ago.

The demand for metals and for luxury goods led to a system of exchange

that prefigured modern international trade

and these connections would have a profound impact

on the developing culture of Europe.

If water was the gateway to Europe,

it seems our ancestors at Must Farm

were determined to take control of it.

So they are very much stuck out here in the marshes.

They're away from the dry land, they're away from their fields

and their farm animals. Why have they put themselves here?

They recognise that by basically moving out onto this wet space

and by sitting themselves on top of the rivers,

they were able then to get themselves to the North Sea,

get across to the Continent

or get themselves up into Middle England and get themselves over

towards the copper and tin of Wales and Cornwall and things.

Or even if they weren't being that mobile,

the things that were passing through this landscape,

just like they were passing up and down the Thames and the Trent

and all the other major rivers,

they were in between those movements and able to control it.

It's the sense of living near the motorways, I suppose,

the main sort of arteries of life,

rather than plonking themselves on the margins.

The Must Farm dig is providing new answers

to some of the biggest questions about Bronze Age Britain,

and now, inside one of the villagers' homes,

Mark has found something truly ground-breaking.

Evidence of the birth of one of Britain's oldest industries -

cloth making.

We're in roundhouse one

and in amongst all of the sort of burnt material,

we're actually seeing textiles

and we're also seeing plant fibres.

These lovely sort of twists or bundles of processed plant fibres

in preparation for making textiles.

It just looks like a little bundle of raffia, tied round.

Yes, absolutely and you can see things like this made from lime bast

with this little row of knots going across it.

What's lime bast?

Lime bast is the fibres behind the bark of a lime tree

which you can process

and really make quite fine textiles from and things.

I mean, that there could be part of a soft flexible basket,

it could be a mat, it could be a cape. It's really frustrating,

-but wonderful to have it.

-Yes.

'It is incredible that these waterlogged conditions can preserve

'textiles for three millennia.'

The piece to your right there, in close up,

it's very finely woven plant textiles.

I don't know, there's a magnifying glass if that helps.

-It's fabric.

-It is fabric and, to all intents and purposes,

it looks like the stuff that my trousers are made out of,

you know what I mean? It's that sort of finely woven.

Yeah, I feel ashamed to say it, but I think I would have expected

any textiles that these people had in their possession

to be more like sackcloth, to be something fairly crude,

and this is far from crude.

That's absolutely beautiful.

How amazing to think that's a piece of cloth

-that's survived for 3,000 years.

-Absolutely.

Really wonderful.

'Such an extensive array of delicate fabrics

'has never been found on a British Bronze Age settlement before.

'To find out just how important they are,

'Mark is calling in textile expert Dr Susanna Harris.'

It is important to have portable equipment.

You can't always take the finds to your laboratory, so...

you want to have equipment that you can move around.

The microscope reveals the sophisticated techniques

used to produce these ancient textiles.

What we have are these, what we call these passive elements

and the active elements.

This is one of those active elements

and here you see it tucks behind this one

and it comes out again here, you can see it nicely coming out.

Susanna can see that the threads

used to make these fabrics were spun out of natural plant fibres.

Spinning them must have taken incredible skill.

So, I've just drawn a line that's five millimetres long,

so what I want to do is count those threads.

9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

So over five millimetres,

we've got 13 threads,

so over a centimetre we'd have 26 threads,

and so the Must Farm textiles

are really...they're up there

with the other fine textiles in Europe at this time.

They are also very similar to the cloth we make and use today.

Like us, the villagers wanted their clothes and their homes

to look beautiful.

Just because they look black and brown now

doesn't mean that is what they were like in the past

and indeed that's part of our research,

is to try and understand them as they were made in all their glorious

textures and colours.

Eventually, this cloth will tell us a lot more

about Bronze Age lifestyles

but the question now is whether the villagers were making cloth or

importing it from Europe.

In the pile dwellings of Lake Constance in Germany,

textiles similar to those at Must Farm have also been found.

Just like at Must Farm,

some of them appear to be baskets and nets,

while others are much finer.

If there was extensive trading

between villages like these around Europe

then cloth could well have been one of the commodities

that was traded.

But, as work progresses at Must Farm,

the team discovers something never seen before in Britain -

a full set of the tools needed for cloth making.

And there's this rather large object here. What's that?

OK, so the sort of thing that looks a bit like a cricket bat

is known as a cloth beater

and the idea is that this is an object that you are hitting

the flax stems with in order to turn it into plant fibres.

It's actually sitting in a groove

with the plant stems placed across it and then this thing

is being sort of pivoted and pounding down

until you start getting the sorts of fibres

that we were seeing in the bundles inside roundhouse one.

So you've got quite a few stages in terms of production.

As you find one element,

you start to build the broader picture of its production.

So, textiles were perhaps the first thing we started finding

but now we've got things like the cloth beater,

things like the bobbins with the thread wound round them.

Absolutely beautiful. Look at that.

That's a wonderful, wonderful tiny object

with it looks like a piece of wood...

-Yes.

-..and then the thread wound around it.

-Yeah.

Things like the loom weights that also turned up in roundhouse one.

And like the textiles, they've also suffered from the fire event,

so you can see they've been burnt as well,

they're covered in soot and things.

You can see they're this wonderful pyramid shape.

That is just fantastic. What's it made of?

So it's just clay that's just been sort of shaped

and then pierced and then crudely fired.

We knew that some cloth was made in Britain at this time

but we've never before discovered

the complete technological process,

all the way from harvest to manufacture to end product.

It is so rare, exceptional,

to find the whole sort of range of sort of equipment in terms

of their production, right from the plant stems themselves right through

to garments and things.

Our textile specialists will be in a situation where they're going

to be overwhelmed with that detail.

Even at this early stage,

the team thinks that the villagers were making cloth on a large scale.

It's such an intimate glimpse into our ancestors' daily lives.

You can imagine them using this technology

every day in their own homes.

But why were in these homes,

along with all those valuable tools, abandoned?

The answer to that mystery could be found in the charred timbers

of the roundhouses.

Forensic archaeologist Dr Karl Harrison

is working to discover how the fire spread

and whether it was an accident or started deliberately.

We're getting very similar charring patterns that you might

expect within a model structure and if that's the case,

then we can make use of fire investigation techniques

that we might normally associate with crime scenes, fire scenes,

to work out hopefully where it started

or how it spread through the building. That might tell us more

about how the building is put together in the first place.

So you're applying what you know about how a building

would burn today and applying that to a structure 3,000 years ago?

Yeah, that's the idea. I'm not a fire investigator,

I'm a forensic archaeologist,

but the main area of interest that I have is in adapting those techniques

to the archaeological record and where we have an opportunity

where the preservation is so good,

it's so unusual in a British environment

to actually work with timbers like this,

then we can really start to use those techniques to their utmost.

After such an extensive initial examination,

Karl is now focusing down on where and how the fire might have started.

I think as we investigate further

and we understand how the fire developed,

we'll know a little bit more then about whether

what we're looking at is a fire that ignites and begins

and develops in this structure and then spreads across to the other,

or whether we've got two separate fires that both start

within the structures, in which case that suggests much more

that there's an intentional desire to burn.

If it's an accident,

we'd expect there to be an accident in one place

and for it to spread across the site.

If it's intentional then maybe we'll have multiple fire points.

The archaeologists also want to discover how fast the fire spread

and how long the villagers had to escape.

The next stage in the fire investigation

is the construction of an experimental roundhouse.

The reed, the water reed is definitely in the archaeology,

and the hazel rods are as well.

You've got to concentrate so you don't fall off the roof.

Once it's complete, Karl and his team will set it alight,

and track the intensity and pattern of the flames.

This experimental roundhouse retains the fundamental features

of the Must Farm houses.

All the key structural elements are here.

There's a ring of supporting posts

and the principal rafters are coming down from the roof apex,

balancing on those principal posts.

It's tied together in sort of circular hoops, purlins.

These are in place to help hold the thatch up.

If the fire was deliberate, then what was the reason behind it?

As the team dig deeper,

they're beginning to believe

that there was a darker side to life here.

They're discovering that the inhabitants built a fence around their village.

There's an ash palisade running right around the edge of the settlement.

These ash posts standing shoulder to shoulder with occasional oak posts.

We don't know how high they stood, but probably above head height.

Mark Knight suspects that this fence wasn't just for show.

There is something about the fact that they're in a landscape

where they've detached themselves from the dry land,

they've put a barricade around themselves,

so there is a sense of enclosure.

It has the sense of a potential defensive nature about it.

We don't know much about how Bronze Age villages like this

might have defended themselves.

If the fence was needed for protection,

the team would hope to find further evidence...

..so this find is intriguing.

Yesterday we found a bronze sword.

Normally when we find bronze it's green and crusted over

but because of the excellent preservation at the site,

this is sort of like the actual bronze colour that you can see here.

The discovery is immediately exciting

because it's in the Bronze Age that swords first appear.

But what we don't know is whether swords

were primarily prestige items,

commissioned by an elite to show off their wealth,

or regularly used as weapons.

The sheer number of swords found around Must Farm

forms really important evidence,

which might help the team to answer this big question.

We pick this thing up. That sharpness of the edge.

I think you should feel that edge, actually,

cos it just feels like it's just been made.

-Ooh. Yeah.

-It's just super sharp.

I don't really want to run my fingers on that, actually,

-for fear of cutting them.

-Yeah.

And are these actual notches from use along the sides, here?

Yeah, I don't know. They're really delicate, aren't they?

So I didn't know.

I mean, they're less evident than, for example, what's on this blade.

So, we've got a break

but equally we've got these deep, deep notches.

You can see the little burrs going back, where something just hit it

and that might be indicative that the object itself

was actually used in conflict.

So, is this the evidence we're looking for

that Bronze Age swords were not just luxury goods

but needed as weapons in everyday life?

And the fact that you've got swords like this here at the settlement,

does that suggest that they were fairly ubiquitous,

that they're not being carried by,

you know, a small, elite group of warriors,

but that actually you would expect, perhaps,

most men to be carrying a sword?

You know, people talk about them as being disposable

but I don't know if that's quite the case but there does seem to be

a lot of these weapons in this environment.

Presumably this does speak of

a certain level of violence in this society.

It's strange, isn't it? We get ourselves into sort of a twist

in our interpretation as archaeologists.

We start talking about the sort of weapons being symbolic and things,

the idea that they don't represent warfare,

they were status symbols, that sort of thing,

and we get so far down that route,

the actual idea that they were ever weapons seems to sort of disappear, sort of thing.

And yet, you felt the edge of that, you could see how they are made.

They are...they are weapons.

They are there for... They're not for hunting, they are for killing.

To give us a better understanding of how our ancestors made swords,

swordsmith Neil Burridge is going to try to make one

using original Bronze Age technology.

This is a nervous point for me.

The mould is parted at the top but that's not too bad.

So I'm just going to top it up a little bit.

But hopefully...

Very skilled.

I'm probably the most experienced

person in Europe at this

and I'd say I scratch a one on the Bronze Age scale of ten.

So it is very difficult.

Just one sword takes nearly a kilo of precious bronze.

Neil's experimental work shows our ancestors

poured massive resources into making them,

whether for prestige or for battle.

So you can see there, the mould fragments have broken off

and you can see the sword casting.

So it's not bad for a first attempt.

I think the mould parted a little bit more than I expected,

so it's increased the width of the sword.

So it's, in Bronze Age terms, it's a bit heavy.

They would have gone, "Nah, I don't fancy that one."

It's a case of working the surface down on the blade

to bring it up to something like this.

So they would work on it, polishing.

They'd use something that is locally available.

The next, most important stage,

is forging the edges down to a thin wafer.

This is very skilled and it's done with anvils and hammers.

When we find them in excavations,

they're usually green and corroded and not very attractive.

But probably in the Bronze Age when a sword was finished,

it looked like this.

Beautifully polished, handle,

decorated blade, and very sharp edges.

The notches on the swords found at Must Farm

are being fed into an ambitious new study

to analyse Bronze Age fighting techniques,

run by Newcastle University.

This starts far apart then immediately moves close.

There's not really much in between.

You're either unable to reach him,

or you're both literally face-to-face.

And it's a very exciting way to fight, certainly.

Dr Andrea Dolfini is studying

hundreds of British Bronze Age weapons.

The problem I'm trying to address is,

we know these weapons would have been used for fighting, for combat,

for raiding in the Bronze Age,

but we don't know exactly how.

The weapon itself, because it's so short,

effectively you're using what you could consider to be a long knife.

Because of that you have to get in so much closer,

so much more personal.

The marks left on the swords as they clash

help Andrea to build an accurate picture of Bronze Age battle.

We've seen very similar on Bronze Age swords in that the dent

is opened up. Probably the two blades met and then swing...

in that direction, and open the dent.

It's a very brutal, very visceral pursuit

but it requires a degree of intelligence

and so it's all about learning to read your opponent

and really, ultimately, it is to impose your will upon your opponent.

It does now appear that the Must Farm villagers

were warriors as well as farmers.

The team is unearthing lots of well preserved spearheads.

And it's interesting that they're all carrying along the inside of the palisade.

So in your mind's eye, what you start doing is...

You've got people stood there with spears, keeping guard,

and things like that. So who knows? It reminds us that this world

wasn't necessarily one of just baskets and pots and roundhouses

but also was a world where you felt it necessary

to have a sword and a spear.

The evidence from Must Farm suggests that, 3,000 years ago,

Britain could have been a violent place.

So is it likely that the fire that destroyed the village

was started deliberately?

Forensic archaeologist Karl Harrison has been building

a picture of what happened when the village caught fire.

He's now being joined by wood expert Mike Bamforth.

They're going to set fire to the reconstructed roundhouse

to see exactly how the flames might have behaved.

I've come with some temperature monitors

and a monitor that will give us an indication

of the amount of radiant heat

that's going to escape from the building sideways.

That should help us understand how fire might have spread at Must Farm.

And, Mike, what are you hoping to get out of this experiment?

I think how much of the house is standing at the end.

Something we don't understand at Must Farm

is if the house went up in flames

and then came crashing down as part of the fire

or if it burnt and was still partially standing

and then later on it's collapsed and fallen down.

It's going to be amazing.

'Karl believes that the fire started inside a house,

'so that's what he's recreating.'

The flaming energy that's going to come off this when it's lit

is going to be sufficient to carry fire up to the roof.

'In discovering how fast the fire spread,

'Karl can also build a picture

'of how long the villagers had to escape.'

How long do you think this fire is going to last?

Will it go up quickly or are we going to be here all night?

I think it will develop quite quickly.

I think within 6-7 minutes,

we'll start to see some involvement in the roof space.

30 minutes and I'd expect the roof to the totally involved,

and then starting to collapse.

There's the speed of ignition up to the roof.

And you can already see the yellowing smoke that's coming out

on this side in particular.

The fire takes hold much faster than Karl expected.

-That's so quick.

-Yeah.

Scary.

Wow.

-That's a lot...

-Quite warm!

The heat that we can feel here

is all radiant heat, spreading laterally.

So this is what's going to be striking the other buildings

in our Bronze Age settlement.

'With houses so close together,

'the whole village would've gone up incredibly fast.'

You can see the roundhouse shape is making it a cyclone.

-Cold air being drawn in...

-I can see embers,

spiralling round inside there.

'You can imagine panic sweeping through the settlement,

'the villagers running in terror,

'forced to leave their precious homes behind.'

It's suddenly got really hot. The roof's fallen in completely, Karl.

That has been quick. Do you know what time we started the fire?

I think that can only be ten minutes, really.

Yeah, it's not been long, has it?

'As the whole village went up, it must have been a terrifying sight.'

And that wide, flat landscape with big skies,

the spectacle of the pall of smoke and flames.

It's just pouring off, this huge quantity of smoke.

It'd be really visible in the landscape.

'If this village was torched by an enemy

'then it was a stark and dramatic statement of power.'

The weight of evidence does seem to point towards a violent attack.

Most compelling is the fact that these people never returned

to resettle their village or to reclaim their precious belongings.

Once the thing had burned down,

there's no real indication they ever came back.

So there is also that feeling that the force that drove them away

might have been more than the fire,

it might have actually been someone else who'd set that fire

that didn't want these people in this landscape.

The settlement at Must Farm shows us that, 3,000 years ago,

there were people who were living comfortably well-off lives

that we can still recognise today.

They were materially wealthy.

They had objects which they had made themselves with great care,

and they had objects which were exotic,

that had arrived with them

through those complex Bronze Age exchange networks.

But because they were settled in the landscape

and because they had this material wealth, they had more to lose.

So perhaps it's not surprising that during the Bronze Age,

we see an upsurge in violence and conflict.

The excavation at Must Farm has vastly expanded our knowledge

of Bronze Age Britain

and taken us closer than ever before to the people who lived there.

We've discovered the Must Farm villagers

had the creative and practical skills to make fine textiles

that rivalled anything found across Europe,

using tools that are at the root of modern industry.

What they couldn't make, they could acquire,

because this village was connected to exchange routes

that stretched across Europe and beyond.

3,000 years ago,

our ancestors used technology and complex scientific ideas

to transform their world.

After the team finishes their work,

what's left of the village will be buried once again.

But this isn't the end of the Must Farm adventure.

The more intensive our excavation programme becomes,

the more we're seeing. The more you dig, the more questions come up,

the more detail comes out.

Every moment, another object comes out with a new story.

So we're in the throes of completion,

but in the knowledge that a lot of the materials here

will go on to another stage.

They'll be under microscopes, they'll be in laboratories,

they will be sliced and examined and measured

and, if anything,

the story you've been given so far today will be enriched.

There will be colour, there will be texture that will come out and

transform elements of our story as well.

This is the crown jewels in terms

of what it will tell us about past humanities

and about the way people lived in this landscape, 3,000 years ago.

The story of Must Farm has only really just begun to be told

and there'll be a huge amount of work left to do

after the excavation has finished.

It will take years of study and analysis

before Must Farm reveals all of its secrets

but it's already changing our ideas

about the place of Britain in Bronze Age Europe,

and the foundations of our modern world.