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Medieval office chairs - Ep 7
678 Plays2 years ago
This month Matilda delved into the fascinating subject of wood, and more specifically talked with archaeologist Christopher Wakefield about the wooden wheels and other finds discovered at the beautifully preserved site of Must Farm. Points discussed include why furniture might have wooden wheels, how wheels developed over time, and the issues of working with wooden finds from prehistory.
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Transcript
Introduction to Tea Break Time Travel Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode seven of Tea Break Time Travel. I'm your host, Matilda Ziebrecht, and today I'm savoring a, well, I was about to say simple, but not really simple, a chai tea latte, which is actually one of the most complicated drinks that I could have made from my tea shelf today.
Christopher Wakefield's Archaeology Journey
00:00:39
Speaker
Joining me on my tea break today is archaeologist Christopher Wakefield, and you are a fellow Brit, so does that mean you're also a fellow tea drinker, or are you more a coffee person? I am sat here with a cup of Yorkshire tea, which is my go-to brand for my Yorkshire heritage, so I feel obligated to enjoy this, but we've got quite hard water where I am at the moment, so I find it's definitely the best tea for that kind of situation.
00:01:05
Speaker
I have to admit, I'm not that good, although, well, I'm not that good at differentiating between the black teas, but I can notice if, for example, I have a cup of one and then someone changes it and I have a second cup, but I don't, I must admit, I don't really notice the difference between all the different black teas in, like, the Yorkshire's, the Tetley's, the English Breakfast, the Earl Grey's, I don't know. Well, prepared for a wave of feedback from listeners, I'm sure, from that mission.
00:01:30
Speaker
Probably, probably. Oh, well, anyway. So, Chris, you are a archaeologist. You have worked in archaeology, the digging side of things. You've worked in archaeological research. You've also now are working in kind of the outreach side of archaeological outreach. But how did you first get involved with archaeology? How did it all start for Chris?
00:01:51
Speaker
Yeah I have a fairly sort of standard archaeological origin story in that I lived in a very historic part of North Yorkshire and what we were doing working our garden we would often come across random archaeological objects typically from the medieval period and as a sort of seven eight-year-old child I thought this was the greatest thing that could ever happen.
00:02:09
Speaker
And despite a lot of local museums being like, we don't care, we don't want to help you find out what any of the things you find are, I just got really hooked on it. And that led to me becoming an archaeologist, despite careers advisors throughout my school saying this is the worst thing you can possibly do, you should be a lawyer.
00:02:28
Speaker
Do you ever regret getting into archaeology?
The Unpredictable World of Archaeology
00:02:31
Speaker
Do you ever have days where you're like, oh, I should have just done it all? Definitely not. Archaeology is one of those jobs where you get up every day and you don't know what's going to happen. Everything is different. And from one week to the next, you could be working on Roman landscape archaeology and then prehistoric flint spreads. It's just such a
00:02:49
Speaker
great opportunity to do different things, meet different people and find out awesome stuff. So I am always banging the drum for people to get into archaeology.
00:02:59
Speaker
Well, and I mean, I guess the only thing, because I have worked outside archaeology as well in between, you know, trying to find jobs, because I guess that's the only problem with archaeology is that if you're trying to find work in it, sometimes it can be quite tricky. But even though something like, I don't know, being a lawyer or something like that, it gives you, you know, a nine till five, you have a set time, you've got a nice long term contract, you've got, you know, good pay and all this kind of stuff. Not that I ever did law, but like, I had jobs that were definitely more
00:03:26
Speaker
permanent but then I don't know after a while you sort of really enjoy the first month or two of having like a steady paycheck and then after a while you're like you know what I just I miss it it's it's not as interesting as you know archaeology yeah I think that's that's definitely true and just
Archaeology: A Detective's Mystery?
00:03:43
Speaker
doing a job where you like every single thing with archaeology, you know, if you're digging a single feature, you're digging a pit, it's trying to find out the story of what that features history is. And to me that constant kind of engagement of working things out and using the information and the skills that you have to actually find out about the period of that feature or the type of archaeology that you're dealing with that I find really stimulating. Whereas I've done experience before in other areas and
00:04:10
Speaker
you know, sitting and doing a sort of day in day out nine to five job I find so dull. No, I agree. It's also like, I always tell people it's sort of like detective work, but you unfortunately never really know the final chapter and who actually did it. You know, it's just, you have to work with what you've got basically. Yeah, spoiler alert for this episode, you're probably not going to find out the proper answer for any of the stuff I'm talking about. What? Why have I invited you on as a guest? I only want people who can give me solid answers of exactly what happened in the past.
00:04:39
Speaker
Cool. So yeah, so no, that's interesting to find out that it's interesting. I always ask people how they first got involved in it because some people it's just indeed something that's always interested them based on their background.
Accessible Career Paths in Archaeology
00:04:49
Speaker
But for I guess a lot of people, it was also like Egyptology or, you know, some people got into it from a very different perspective. My mum kept telling me I was the opposite to you. My mum and my careers advisors were like, I feel like archaeology would be something
00:05:00
Speaker
really good for you. And I was like, no, I don't want to do it. And then at some point, I was like, actually, this is very cool. And I think I want to do it. So I'm always fascinated to hear the different paths that people take to get in into archaeology. And it's also interesting, because so many people ask me at least, you know, how can I become an archaeologist? Like, what can I do to be an archaeologist? I don't know if you also get the same question.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. It's interesting because a lot of the people I speak to, so many people say, oh, I used to want to be an archaeologist when I was a kid. And then I kind of grew out of it. And you're like, wow, you know, drive by on my profession. But yeah, a lot of people do ask that. And I think in the UK, it's really interesting that we're in a space at the moment where it's really easy to become an archaeologist. There's loads and loads of work on at the moment. We've got a real shortage of archaeologists actually.
00:05:47
Speaker
And I think the best way people get involved is by visiting local sites because there are so many projects out there at the moment that involve some community participation and there are lots of training courses that people can go on. So I think really oculogy has been quite discoverable, certainly in the UK landscape. I know that's not always the case globally.
00:06:06
Speaker
But it's a tough profession in terms of actually getting into that role because you typically have to have a degree. But I know a lot of companies are now offering alternative pathways in there with apprenticeships and other schemes. So I think hopefully it'll open that profession up a little bit more to people who want to experience that.
00:06:23
Speaker
That's really cool, indeed, because that is one of the problems, indeed, a lot of the, I mean, you can get, I guess, a lot of the sort of more lower tier jobs without necessarily needing a big qualification, but especially if you want to continue for, I guess, more interesting jobs, you know, and things and higher qualifications, you have to have the higher qualifications already, which requires paying to go to university and having the time to go to university and all this kind of stuff, which can be a little elitist still, I suppose. So it's nice to hear that they're starting other programs.
00:06:49
Speaker
And from my experience, you know, I went and got a, you know, I did a lot of volunteering work in archaeology when I was sort of 16, 17 years old, then I went away to university to study
Flexibility and Growth in Archaeology Careers
00:06:59
Speaker
that. And I knew that after that initial degree, I didn't want to kind of go and do a postgraduate degree or anything straight away. I wanted to actually work in the field, get that experience and find out what it was like, get those skills I needed. And then after doing that for sort of seven, eight years, I decided actually, this is a great opportunity to go back
00:07:16
Speaker
And now I know a specialist area that I'm really interested in to go back into. So I think it's quite a flexible profession in terms of, you know, you can kind of spend time learning about what it is that you want and then kind of follow that up and go into more depth if that's something that you're interested in. Or if you just love digging and you just love doing the fieldwork side of things, then there are opportunities to go into more senior positions in those areas as well.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah. And even within research as well, like you say, I mean, there's so many people who say to me, oh, I'm doing my undergrad thesis. Like, do I already need to decide what I want to do for the rest of my like research career? And I mean, I know people who did like rock art for their undergrad and metallurgy for their masters and are now looking at like animal husbandry practices in somewhere for their PhD. So it's a very, like you say, it's a very flexible degree, I guess, or discipline, which is quite nice.
00:08:02
Speaker
So speaking of, so you sort of first got into more the practical side then of archaeology, but now your main research focuses on archaeological outreach, which I personally, obviously, think is a very, very fascinating area. How did that come about? How did you get more into that side of things?
00:08:19
Speaker
So I've always been really passionate about archaeology, and I'm definitely an archaeologist that thinks, what's the point of doing all of the work that we're doing if we're not telling people who aren't archaeologists? Exactly!
Communicating Archaeological Discoveries
00:08:31
Speaker
There is so much great archaeology out there, and so often it is buried inside monographs and publications that are often behind paint walls, and it's not in the format for people to really understand and digest and benefit from.
00:08:47
Speaker
So I have just spent all of my time talking to as many people about archaeology, whether they want to hear it or not. I'll be standing at a bus stop and I'll be like, so have I told you about archaeology? You know, I'll be collecting a pizza and the captive audience there will suddenly hear about the amazement of the Bronze Age and
00:09:04
Speaker
than the Neolithic shift agriculture or whatever there is and I just think that we have to go out there and particularly with all of the different kinds of technologies that we have now whether they're online or digital there are so many great opportunities to actually get this information to people who are interested or maybe people who don't know about this and packaging up that in a
00:09:25
Speaker
more engaging way than burying it in paragraphs talking about environmental conditions or scientific analysis. I think there's great ways of presenting that in a form that is really, really fun and gets some of the really amazing stuff that we used to do in the past known about.
00:09:42
Speaker
Which I mean, and it makes sense, right? Because so many other aspects of our life have developed and have changed. And I always find it really interesting when you see, you know, like a car from 1900 versus a car now, and then you see a school room from 1900 at a school room now and a scientific paper from 1900 and a scientific paper, you know, so certain things, I think, definitely are in need of a bit of a redesign, shall we say.
00:10:05
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, I love archaeology as a discipline, but I think it's got really reliant on like TV programs, and you know, the kind of the formats of archaeology that people are used to.
Beyond TV: Everyday Life in Archaeological Narratives
00:10:17
Speaker
And that's great, you know, they've got brilliant, you can see, they can be really visible, people can watch, you know, programs, and they can reach millions of people. But at the same time, those programs, you've kind of watched one archaeological program, you've kind of seen the format, they have quite a template.
00:10:31
Speaker
And I think it's great that there are different avenues where you can maybe do things that don't involve focusing purely on the discovery of finds or focus purely on the most exciting thing ever. There's so much of archaeology that is about the day in and the day out and understanding how people live their lives.
00:10:46
Speaker
And to me, that's what's really exciting. But it's not necessarily the sexiest thing to put on your TV program, when you can have people, you know, doing a reenactment of sword fighting, or, you know, some kind of really grisly or gruesome thing, or the biggest type of a site ever, you know, sometimes there's an opportunity for that every day. And I think that that's something that I'm really passionate about talking to people with.
00:11:06
Speaker
Yeah, which I mean, and that's also, I mean, why I started this podcast too, right? It's because I agree completely. I think that there's so many interesting things about daily life that also happen in the past and we should be able to talk about them. So the research that you're doing, what, I mean, we just said, you know, what's the biggest, what's the best? What would you say is your most interesting results so far or something that you've kind of noticed or come across that's made you go, huh?
00:11:29
Speaker
So for me, the UK is quite interesting because we do so much archaeology here in the UK in advance of development. So whether that's before houses are built or raids are created. And a lot of that work is done as part of that construction process. And really one of the things about my research is seeing how people in that environment where there's really quite a business focus on that. So it's really great actually having the chance to look at how other people are still finding the time and the space within those kind of quite
00:11:58
Speaker
construction heavy environments to actually share their research and people are doing all sorts of really exciting stuff with social media platforms and creating accessible content and it's just really refreshing to see that people are willing to kind of engage with that and even though it might be difficult and time-consuming to do that or to have difficult conversations with people that might want to prioritise on getting things done and not necessarily sharing that, it's just really fantastic to see that there are a lot of people who are out there trying to do that in different ways.
00:12:26
Speaker
So you do see an improvement coming. It's a mixed field, I think it would be fair to say, but I'm definitely in a positive mood today. My glass is definitely half full rather than half empty. So I think that there are definitely barriers and there are difficulties with that. But some people are doing some really interesting work to do that. And hopefully, when other people see that work and find out more about it, it will kind of give them the ammunition and the impetus to try and do things like that themselves.
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's really fascinating research. I'm really interested to see more results and read up about what you're doing when it's getting towards
The Allure of Prehistory's Uncertainty
00:13:03
Speaker
the end. My standard question to all the guests, as this is, you know, time travel section, if you could travel back in time, where do you think you would go and why?
00:13:13
Speaker
100% prehistory definitely because I love prehistory so much it's fascinating and it exemplifies what I think is great about archaeology in that we don't ever know anything for certain. Everything in archaeology is about building up the most accurate interpretation we can on that evidence so if I had the opportunity I would definitely pick a prehistoric period because
00:13:37
Speaker
you know, there are so many different ideas out there on all sorts of interesting things. But whether I could narrow that down, that would be super difficult, because I would love to go back and see what was going on with cause with enclosures during the Neolithic in Britain. What are these weird monuments? Why they created the way they are? Do they actually match up with any of the ideas that people write so many books and papers on? Or is it something completely left field that we don't know about?
00:14:00
Speaker
or I would love to go back to the Bronze Age and find out what's going on around the deposition of metalwork in watery environments. Again, these opportunities where you've got all of this physical materiality that tells you that it was taking place, but having that chance to actually see something that is beyond
00:14:18
Speaker
the material and actually surrounding the kind of beliefs or the systems around that process. They're the things that are so difficult to understand and interpret. And no matter what people do archaeologically, we're never going to have really good answers for that. And part of why I love it is that ambiguity. You know, there can be so many different viable and
00:14:37
Speaker
really interesting hypotheses that people have come up with. But what we know, and they can change, you know, in five years time, we might have another great interpretation that that someone has come up with that is completely different from anything that's come before it. And that, I know a lot of people really don't like that uncertainty about archaeology. And a lot of people feel that people aren't able to comprehend that there are multiple interpretations or something. But I think if you actually reopen about that process and say, we don't know, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, and then let people make their own minds up about that.
00:15:07
Speaker
I think that's what's really exciting because that is part of making archaeology a more participative process and sharing people's different experiences and seeing how they affect interpretations.
00:15:18
Speaker
I could not agree more. And I also agree so much with what you said in terms of an idea that could be considered like, oh, yeah, this is definitely the most likely solution, could then, years down the line, actually be like, oh, no, never mind, because this new theory has come, and this is actually way more possible and way more likely. And like you say, I think that's hard for some people to accept, to get away from these kind of assumptions and facts or whatever that have been kind of so ingrained in a particular field that then
00:15:45
Speaker
it's difficult to let go of. But I think that that's really important, not just in archaeology, but in life. So I think that it's a really nice metaphor for life as well, really. Yeah, definitely. You know, I think if you're ever having a conversation with an archaeologist, and they're telling you that this 100% happened in the way that they're telling, I'd start to be to quote Wikipedia, citation needed.
00:16:07
Speaker
Exactly. And yeah, the fact that there's multiple possibilities. And yeah, it's always I always like when I'm doing my little reels, and then someone says like, Oh, I'd heard this thing. And you're like, Oh, I haven't heard about that one. But that's also a really cool idea, like that, you know, could be it's just that it's not something that an academic has published about yet necessarily. So I think that's, yeah, it's always good fun.
00:16:28
Speaker
But yeah, very nice prehistory, excellent. And speaking of prehistory, that's kind of where we're going back today, sort of the end stages of prehistory. So we're going to journey back today to around 900 BC, to a settlement in what we now think of as Eastern England, who knows what they would have thought
Must Farm: A Window into the Bronze Age
00:16:44
Speaker
of it then.
00:16:44
Speaker
The sun is sinking low on the horizon, reflecting in the water of the river, and set into this river are multiple wooden houses, balanced above the water on wooden stilts and surrounded by a palisade ring of thick ash posts. One of these round houses is currently lit from the inside, the flickering light illuminating the objects heaped up outside, a stack of pots, some woven mats, and a large wooden wheel. But suddenly,
00:17:08
Speaker
There are yells, crashes, the light increases as crackling fills the air, flames whoosh out into the darkening sky, thundering footsteps and splashes as the inhabitants of the houses rush to safety, watching in horror from the riverbank as the fire engulfs their home. And as the wooden stilts collapse, the fires are extinguished with a loud hiss, filling the air with smoke and steam, and soon it is all over.
00:17:30
Speaker
Selt pulled by the current of the river starts to cover up the sunken objects gradually hiding the pots, the mats, and finally the cracked wooden surface of the wheel.
00:17:39
Speaker
which might be a bit dramatic for a time travel event. But we like to make things big, pull in the crowds. So that's the focus of today's episode. A little bit more indirect is the wooden wheel that we mentioned. And so we'll get into the details of that soon. But first, I always like to have a look at the most asked questions on the internet, courtesy of Google Search, which there were surprisingly few actually about wooden wheels. I thought there would be more. The main one was, how were wooden wheels made?
00:18:08
Speaker
Can you enlighten us at all, Chris? So that's a really great question. Wheels are really interesting because there are so many different aspects to this depending on where you are in the world, from Asia to Europe to the Americas potentially. It's a really interesting topic.
Evolution of Wheel Designs in Ancient Europe
00:18:24
Speaker
Certainly in terms of Europe, wheels start to appear in Europe from around 3,500 BC, but they start off as solid wooden disc wheels to begin with.
00:18:34
Speaker
And it's only over time that they evolve into wheels that are made up of boards that are held together with braces, which is the kind of wheel that we're going to talk about in a little bit more. And then gradually, sort of emerging around 1500 BC in Europe, you start to get smoked wheels, which are, I think, associated with chariots and that kind of technology, horse-drawn vehicles. Okay, so the original ones would have been a lot more solid.
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's what the evidence seemed to suggest. And it's only gradually with time that they become more complex and they evolve to meet more complicated needs for them with faster moving vehicles, things like that. And I'm just thinking, because you mentioned it's made from a solid bit of wood. So I guess that means that it's a very big tree rather than using lots of wooden boards. Is that why we then see the start of wheels being made with boards rather than a single piece of wood? They cut down all the big trees?
00:19:25
Speaker
Yeah, so if you're using boards, that certainly opens up a lot more possibilities in terms of the size of the wheel you can make. So again, you get these this kind of board construction is quite typical, those tripartite wheels that we tend to call them. So they're kind of one of the most common examples and they're the earliest type of wheel that are known for Britain, for example.
00:19:43
Speaker
So again they're sort of constructed from three large boards and then they are sort of pinned together with dowels which connect them together and then on either face of the wheels or the front and the back there's a bracer that's usually secured to help keep all of those boards together and in position and they're secured together with dovetail joints, bracers, one on the front and one on the back and then there are little dowels in between each of the boards that again help secure those together.
00:20:07
Speaker
So that's indeed very complex actually it's not just because I was immediately thinking like oh yeah but then the so the earlier ones would have been much simpler but actually probably they're they're even more complicated because they have so many more parts I guess than than later wheels with the spokes potentially.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting sort of evolution of that technology, and particularly with things like the axle as well. So you've got a, you know, there's a separate component there, which is fixed, and then the axle fit into that. So, you know, definitely, it's, it's really fascinating kind of getting these glimpses. And certainly in Europe, we've got some really good examples where larger vehicles are actually preserved. Typically in Britain, wheels are a very, very rare find, and they're often fragmentary as well. So it's really only on the content that we can actually look at some of these these better examples. But again, they're typically
00:20:53
Speaker
associated with slightly later periods. Interesting. The second question was a very strange one, but I thought I'd include it because it came up a couple of times. Were wooden wheels silent? That's a really interesting question. I'm not quite sure what people are getting at when they're typing that, but it makes me think of something that I find really fascinating actually is that
00:21:14
Speaker
I mentioned that wooden wheels are actually really rare to find in the archaeological record in Britain, but what we do tend to find are the tracks left behind by wheeled vehicles. So this is something that I find really fascinating. So actually when archaeologists are working on different sites, depending on the ground conditions, sometimes the tracks that were made as those wheels went through particularly wet or boggy landscapes are actually preserved.
00:21:36
Speaker
There's a site called Hesterton, one at Welland Bank, there's one at County Farm. There are these stretches of sometimes meters and meters where the wheels from the vehicle would have been left actually preserved, and we can excavate those really carefully. That gives us information on how wide apart the wheels would have been spaced. It gives us ideas of the actual diameter of the wheel thickness themselves. It's not actually an object that you're finding itself, but it's the traces of that object being used that are left behind.
00:22:05
Speaker
kind of picturing those kind of wet and boggy environments that there'll probably be quite a bit of kind of squatching and the sound of those wheels moving through that landscape. But this is a period when we're not having really complicated paved roads and anything like that. These are vehicles that would have been moving through a landscape where roads would have been trackways rather than complicated surfaced roads.
00:22:29
Speaker
Which, because I, indeed, the second that I think of, I don't know, a cart trundling along or anything like this, I admit that I immediately think of more kind of medieval, you know, cobbled streets, and then you have that kind of clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, you know, sound coming through. But of course, that wouldn't have been the case in early prehistory.
00:22:46
Speaker
But then, you know, the actual vehicle itself, a lot of that noise would come probably from that cart, you know, the fact that there's lots of, you know, there's moving parts on this, it had various different components associated with
The Sensory Experience of Archaeology
00:22:56
Speaker
it. If it's being drawn by an animal as well, you're going to have, you know, that. So I think that's a really interesting thing to me that often as archaeologists and when people think of the past, they tend to think of the physicality of it, they don't tend to think about the other senses, so the sounds and the smells, because we don't really have a lot of evidence for that. It's something that's much more difficult to get behind.
00:23:16
Speaker
But actually, prehistory, we've had this really complicated soundscape of activities going on. And I think that that's a really interesting question, making me think about that. Yeah, yeah. And it's also that you just mentioned smells as well. And I'm just thinking, you know, that fantastic smell of the freshly cut wood and everything. And can you imagine like a brand new cart and you're sitting in it and going along and the smell would be really nice.
00:23:37
Speaker
And the smell of the animal that was drawn in that vehicle. That's a big part of this. People's relationships with animals are really interesting in this period. So the idea of having a cart drawn by an ox or something like that, again, that's another element that you don't tend to see that visually. We might have the wheel, but actually that would have been a vehicle that would have been drawn by an animal.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, true. Well, we can go into a bit more. I'll ask you more about that in a bit because otherwise this section will be too long. But the last question, we'll go to the last question, which was very random, but it came up so many times when I basically type in multiple variations of different word orders and things using wooden wheels and see what comes up. And this came up so many times. When were wooden wheels used on furniture? Is this something you're familiar with?
00:24:26
Speaker
I mean, I'm going to probably make myself look really ignorant by saying no. I'm guessing that's got to be some trend in furniture making. It must be, right? It's got to be something like that. Because I have no idea why practically in the past people would have put wheels on furniture. I mean, is it a decorative element when they're talking about wheels? Or are they actually talking about, you know, like a sort of medieval office chair?
00:24:55
Speaker
wheels going along in the bottom. Being wheeled around your dining chamber in your great hall. I mean, maybe that's what they, but then they say wooden wheels. So indeed, it's like, it wasn't even just wheels, it was wooden wheels specifically. I don't know. If anyone who's listening has any ideas what this could have been meant by this question, please do write in and let us know. Because yeah, I was also a bit baffled. I thought maybe, indeed, I was just being ignorant. And you'd be like, yes, the famous wheeled furniture of the late Iron Age. But
00:25:24
Speaker
I mean, speaking as someone who does a lot of prehistory stuff in Britain, we don't tend to have a lot of prehistoric furniture. And the little fragments and things that I know about certainly don't come with attached wheels as far as I know. Yeah. No, I mean, true. Maybe in another country somewhere, it's a classic, typical of a particular cultural group. Anyway, well, anyway, if anyone knows, please do write in.
00:25:49
Speaker
Okay, so we know a little bit more about wheels in general, but perhaps we can expand a little bit on the points we just made. So those of you who have just joined us, we chatted about the different styles of wheel that are made throughout the years and how they developed over time. But also the fact that if you think of something like a wheel, things like sound and smell and all of that kind of things, it comes into play as well. So we already discussed the earliest evidence we have for wheels. I'm afraid I can't remember the date that you said, some 3000?
00:26:17
Speaker
Generally, I think the first solid wooden disc wheels can be seen in Europe around 3,500 BC, and then it moves on to the evolution in the tripartite wheel, which is made up of boards. Spoked wheels tend to emerge around 1,500 BC, and they tend to be associated with things like chariots.
00:26:37
Speaker
Then we also mentioned the fact that the earliest wheels would likely have been used then in collaboration with a cart or something that would have then been pulled by an animal. Is this something that's generally agreed with in the archaeological record as well?
00:26:51
Speaker
Yeah, it seems to be. So kind of carts seem to be a pretty major function for that, the complexity of those, I think, chance to change over time. But interestingly, when you kind of get onto the sort of the evolution of the wheel and the wheel, the tripartite wheel made from the boards, there's a remarkable degree of similarity in those across Europe.
00:27:08
Speaker
So there are kind of minor differences perhaps in size and slightly in the design, but lots of them have this really interesting sort of lunatic set of holes either side of the axle. So there seems to be kind of a bit of a stylistic element to them as well. They're not just purely functional. There seems to be a kind of craft element and a different design that they tend to have. And that seems to be the case in Europe. And then when they make their way over to the Britain as well, when they start to appear here, we have similar examples.
00:27:36
Speaker
Okay, that's really interesting. And it's interesting as well, like you say, that it sort of developed the same way, though, across different ones. So I mean, I guess in some ways, the spoke wheel is more functionally superior to the solid wheel.
00:27:51
Speaker
I am not an expert on wheels, I'm afraid, so I couldn't directly comment on the efficiency of a spoked wheel as opposed to a tripartite one, I'm afraid. It would be really interesting to do experiments with that, no? I don't know how you would do experiments. I guess do lots of different things with the different kinds of wheels and see which ones perform better.
00:28:10
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm sure people have really, you know, I'm sure there's there's loads of information out there, but I'm guessing that the function seems to be pretty different. You know, with a car, you're kind of, you know, you're transiting along, it's transporting material, it's, you know, but when you're starting to get into kind of war chariots, things like that, I'm guessing that speed and that, you know, that element is going to require something that's perhaps a little bit different.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, more manoeuvrable, perhaps. So indeed, so wheels, yeah, different designs for different functions, but also different designs for different cultures, which is very interesting. And I imagine that because they're so specialised, I mean, we talked before about all the different, the dowels and the braces and everything required, even in the sort of earlier form of wheels. So I'm guessing it was likely more of a specialised profession?
00:28:54
Speaker
So this is really interesting, and Must Farm, which is the site I'm probably going to talk about a little bit more, which is this really
Specialization in Bronze Age Crafts
00:29:01
Speaker
interesting site. It's late Bronze Age, dates to pretty much 850 BC. We were very lucky to excavate there between 2015 and 2016, thanks to funding from the landowner for Terra and Historic England, who have funded the excavation post-excavation publication.
00:29:17
Speaker
in that settlement. It's a really interesting period because the late Bronze Ages is kind of where still people are living in small groups, they're living in small settlements, but we don't necessarily tend to see a huge amount of specialisation in terms of professions because people had to have those skills to be able to do things like creating simple pots, doing simple woodwork because that was such a big part of their life in terms of
00:29:40
Speaker
the day-to-day living. But interestingly, some of the material that we're finding at Musk Farm does suggest that there is some specialisation coming in. So some of the pottery, for example, is made to such a very fine degree that it could be made by a single individual who is focused on producing that. And it can be similar with the wheel.
00:29:59
Speaker
So, the wheel itself was produced by someone who was definitely highly skilled and the kind of the degree of complexity of things like the dovetail braces that hold the wheel together, show a real knowledge of wood and of the techniques that they would use to make that. So, interestingly, with a kind of maybe a broader level within the settlement and perhaps within the period, that specialisation doesn't come across
00:30:24
Speaker
It's not really clear to see specialisation really obviously across the late Bronze Age at Musfarm, but there are little things here and there, hints that might be beginning to start, where people are focusing on doing certain things and focused on getting the skills specific to those crafts.
00:30:41
Speaker
interesting, which also makes me wonder how the first wheel even came about, because even the first one must have been quite complex.
00:30:56
Speaker
Definitely. It's really interesting. Prehistory is great for this because it's a period where new technologies are emerging all the time. It's fascinating because we tend to think of prehistory as a period and that we've neatly defined as the Iron Age or the Bronze Age.
00:31:15
Speaker
But actually, there's significant chunks of time, you know, there are hundreds of years, thousands of years in some cases. So this kind of evolution is quite a gradual process. But thinking about how quickly those ideas and those concepts can travel, it's something that can happen quite quickly. You know, if someone has experimented and made something that's really interesting and really useful and makes things much easier in your life or gives you new options, then it's easy to see how that idea and that technology can travel quite quickly.
00:31:43
Speaker
No, I don't know. It's something this that particular topic, that idea of kind of how ideas spread and how new things came about. I mean, it's just always been completely fascinating to me how, because like you said, I mean, even the wheel, for example, what we just said, so the first one was, you know, between the design of the first one or the first one that we found, should we say, and the start of kind of spoke to wheels was what, like 1500 years, 2000 years, something like that, which, if you think for
00:32:10
Speaker
back from where we are now is then almost to the, you know, Roman invading Britain. It's that period of time was between the invention of the first wheel, potentially, obviously, we don't know exactly when it invented, and the kind of development of what we would now consider wheels to be. I don't know, it's, yeah, I'm sorry, that was a very, very incoherent ramble, but I just always find it really fascinating, the
00:32:35
Speaker
And, and definitely, and I think that, you know, we're, we're very lucky. A lot of the information I'm talking about today, I should say it's kind of pre-publication. So some of it may be, you know, subject to change a little bit, or perhaps I've got things slightly wrong in the translation, which is totally fine. Right. As we said earlier, everything changes. Nothing is completely right. So, you know,
00:32:51
Speaker
But I'm putting a caveat in there, but we were very fortunate to have two really fantastic wood experts on there. One of whom is Mike Banford and the other one is Iona Robinson-Zeki who have worked with waterlogged wood and prehistoric wood for quite a long time and they really know their stuff. And it's fascinating, you know, speaking to them and reading the stuff that they're doing because
00:33:10
Speaker
Looking at the wood, for example, we know that the wheel from this farm is made from older. And that's a really interesting kind of option because looking back into that, was that something that was deliberately chosen? Or was it something that was available to people? You know, we have to start kind of thinking about these processes of material selection and knowledge. So older is an interesting word. And when you speak to some people, they talk about that it's quite difficult to work with. And they say, Oh, I don't think I would have chosen that.
00:33:39
Speaker
or for various artifact types. But then there's some suggestion that actually Alder is actually quite resistant to rot. And if this is a wheel on a cart that's been used in a very wet environment or waterlogged muddy environments, then was that wood actually chosen because there was a knowledge that Alder is actually quite resistant to that?
00:33:57
Speaker
Or was it simply that there was lots of old trees available and there wasn't really a huge amount of thought press going on into that? But, you know, this is one of the things that we really are interested in. And a lot of the time objects like this come up like a wheel and there's a temptation to think, oh, that's a wheel. Great. But actually, the more you start to think about that, the more questions and queries come up and the more information analysis you can do on those objects, the more kind of lines of inquiry you have as an archaeologist to try and understand
00:34:24
Speaker
more about how the environment was used, how the environment was perceived, and that knowledge that people have. Because if someone is skilled enough as a woodworker to be able to produce an object like this, surely they're actually knowledgeable enough about wood types to select the types of wood that are going to be the best for these particular items. And throughout the kind of assemblage, we see different woods being used for different things.
00:34:47
Speaker
Okay, interesting. And by the way, I should probably say, because I just realised we haven't actually specified.
Unique Uses of Wheels at Must Farm
00:34:53
Speaker
So, the place that we time travelled to was what is currently known as Most Farm, a site located in Eastern England, which is
00:35:02
Speaker
Pretty famous, you've probably heard of it, but just in case you haven't, we will talk about it in a little bit more detail in the next section, but it's a fantastic preservation because it had this fire and then it fell into the water, which meant that so many fantastic objects were beautifully preserved, like a wooden wheel. And was it just the one wheel that was found?
00:35:21
Speaker
So it's really interesting because the site that we're talking about is a series of roundhouses built on stilts over a river channel. So this is a really, really watery environment. Not only is the river itself full of water, but the area around it is very boggy and waterlogged. And we know that from a lot of environmental data. And we actually found definitely two wheels. So we found one, which was, I think, to date, it's the most complete Bronze Age wheel from Britain. Although I've never...
00:35:50
Speaker
Well, actually it's interesting because just about one and a half miles away at Flag Fen, another wheel was found, which is actually slightly older. So we know that, again, in this very watery environment, the Flag Fen basin is very, very waterlogged. It's part of the fens. There are two wheels there. Sorry, there's a wheel there, and we have our wheel at Musk Farm. We have a fragment from another wheel. So in total, there's five artifacts that have been identified as potential cart wheels.
00:36:16
Speaker
Okay, so in the middle of a river. Yeah, so this is the really curious thing. So what on earth were these wheels doing in an, you know, actually inside a structure over one of these river channels? Maybe they were attached to furniture.
00:36:31
Speaker
But you kind of joke about that. But was it the case that this wheel was either being manufactured or repaired in one of these buildings? Or could it have been the case that it was possibly being reused as some kind of secondary function? So as something within these structures, this is part of the interest that we have. And we know that because there was this big fire that you've described already, that we actually know that the wheel was actually in one of these structures because it has a really obvious charring pattern across the surface of that wheel.
00:37:00
Speaker
So it wasn't like it was in the river or next to the settlement. It was actually inside one of these structures when it was burning. So what it was doing there is part of that really interesting question. We don't really have a really good answer about that, but trying to find out more about that process and understand that is definitely something that we're looking into.
00:37:21
Speaker
And I guess, unfortunately, something like wood, I'm trying to think, because obviously I do use or analysis as my main, my main thing. So I'm immediately thinking, Oh, I wonder what kind of, you know, user studies you could do on it. But something like wood is already so difficult to do that on, especially if it's been waterlogged, and then especially if it's been burnt. But are there any plans to do anything like that? Or have there been any examinations like that on these items?
00:37:43
Speaker
Yeah, so our specialist, Mike Banford, he's had a look at the wheel. And typically you can do kind of use wear analysis because wheels tend to wear in quite distinctive patterns. But some of the issues we have here is that charring pattern, and that charring of the wheel has kind of removed some of that detail. But also the fact that it has been lying in a river channel with the sediments, those sediments have kind of caused compression and slight distortion to the wood. So actually doing more detailed analysis of that
00:38:09
Speaker
with this complexity of the charring and the compression makes more involved analysis of those use-wear patterns very, very difficult. Such a shame. You might not be able to see exactly the way that it has been used, but I can imagine if a wheel has been used for a long time, maybe you'll see that the inner edge is bigger than the outer edge. Is something like that possible to see or is even that still
00:38:37
Speaker
a bit too. So on this particular example, there's nothing that's possible. Because like I say, it's just, this is the thing with Westpharm in particular, it's a fantastic excavation with so much detail and so much resolution that you never normally find from late Bronze Age archaeology. But at the same time, it gives you all of these amazing clues and all these tantalising questions. But also, unfortunately, there's lots of stuff that we can't get
00:39:03
Speaker
and it's so frustrating. We're so close and we're getting so much further than we have done before, but there's still inevitably that limit that you reach where you can only go so far. Are there theories existing or future projects planned to investigate some theories about why indeed these wheels might have been in this very river-based, bog-based community? Or is it still quite open to interpretation?
00:39:29
Speaker
Well, I mean, again, it's just, it's interesting because we've, we've fully excavated the settlement site there
Challenging Assumptions about Bronze Age Settlements
00:39:34
Speaker
at Musk Farm. So we've, we've pretty much dealt with and recorded all of the archaeology that's there. So it's not like we're, you know, if we dug there again, we'd find some more wheels. We've pretty much covered that. But it's just interesting that I mentioned before a little bit about wheel tracks being found. So, you know, elsewhere in the fence on one occasion, some wheel tracks have been found on a site. Then at Flag Fen, there was another wheel there. So
00:39:57
Speaker
you know, we know that they're definitely being used in this landscape. But it's really interesting that, you know, if you look to this on paper, you've got a really watery environment that's very, very boggy, you know, people using boats. So elsewhere at Musk Farm, we found nine prehistoric log boats. So we know that those river channels are being used, you know, to get around that landscape. But it's interesting that, you know, also other vehicles are being used clearly, because we're finding the wheels that are associated with with that kind of transport.
00:40:27
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. I wonder if it's someone who's just, you know, come in and been like, well, back home, we use carts. So I'm going to keep using carts and all of the natives of Musk Farm are thinking, all right, yeah, sure, go ahead.
00:40:39
Speaker
Well, I think it's fascinating because clearly they were really useful and they performed pretty well. People wouldn't have been doing it and we wouldn't find this evidence for them if they weren't a really valuable and important part of those kind of communities. So it's just really interesting to us that
00:40:57
Speaker
when you find sites like this that have much more complete assemblages owing to the fantastic preservation that we've got, that you start to find things that you wouldn't necessarily expect. And that's the unexpected nature of archaeology that you think you can know almost everything there is to know about settlement types of a certain period.
00:41:13
Speaker
then something will pop up and throw a spanner in the works and be like, oh, actually, there are these aspects. Because the site itself on this farm, the vast majority of roundhouses from the late Bronze Age, they're terrestrial. They're built on a dry land surface. But yet here we've got this settlement that's popped up that's built on stilts. And it's the only one of this date that's been found in Britain.
00:41:34
Speaker
There are examples in Europe that are very similar, but then bam, all of a sudden this one pops up. So again, this is part of the real excitement about this particular site and also archaeology in general, that you're always finding new things.
00:41:46
Speaker
Also seeing as we have now been talking about must farm and the kind of interest surrounding that particular site in a little bit more detail, I mean Chris we introduced you and your background a little bit more in the first section of the episode but you have indeed worked at the fantastically preserved must farm so I think it would be remiss of us not to talk more about that site and also as you mentioned there's a lot of other really interesting wooden objects that have been discovered there
00:42:11
Speaker
So can you give
Preservation of Organic Materials at Must Farm
00:42:12
Speaker
some examples? What other kinds of things have been found that are particularly interesting or different to what we know of from other sites, perhaps? Yeah, definitely. I mean, in total, we did an evaluation in 2006, and then that was expanded into a bigger excavation between 2015 and 2016. And we found I think just under 200 wooden artifacts, all from the late Bronze Age. Wow.
00:42:35
Speaker
So the majority of them from the actual duration of the settlement around 850 BC. So typically when you find any normal Bronze Age sites in the UK, you will find very, very ephemeral evidence, particularly if the settlement is moved on, you get some fragments of pottery, you get some animal bone, you get some post holes, things like that. But here we have the
00:42:57
Speaker
incredible fortune of finding an environment which had a huge fire which caused a lot of that wood and material to kind of have a a charring pattern on the outside of it and that charring almost acted like a bit of a shield to protect that from from decay and then a lot of that material then became waterlogged as it dropped into that river channel and was buried by some really fantastic sediments that covered it. So we have
00:43:19
Speaker
almost ideal preservation conditions for organic material. And that includes wood, but also some things like coprolites and textiles as well. And within that wooden assemblage, we had, you know, a really interesting range of different objects. So we have things like the wheel, we've had fragments of boat. Elsewhere in the channel, we have full log boats, which are currently being preserved at Flag Fen.
00:43:45
Speaker
But we also have lots and lots of other smaller objects. So we had 40 bobbins, so little small pieces of wood around which textile had been wrapped and stored, which, you know, they're incredible. They'll fit into the palm of your hand. A couple of centimetres in size. They're just the most delicate and beautiful objects. We've got containers so they can range from, we had one of the most finely finished wooden artifacts that was probably also the product of a specialist woodworker was a little box.
00:44:15
Speaker
So really, really tiny objects, which had beautiful sort of recessed style decorations on it. So we'll probably have had a lid that would have fitted into the top of it. One of the first things that people ask me is what was inside the box and it was empty. So I can't tell you what it would have been used for.
00:44:30
Speaker
but again, a really beautiful little object, but also things like bucket bases, wooden buckets, which I think we had about 15 of those, something like that. We had troughs that would probably have been used for food storage and food preparation. We had chopping boards as well, which still had the actual individual chopping marks where people had been preparing things on them. And these are things that are pretty much 3000 years old, and they give you this real connection when you're finding them and looking at them.
00:44:57
Speaker
And again, some of the bucket bases, you know, they would have been used as a bucket, but we've looking at them, people would have probably turned them upside down and on the base of those use them as kind of an impromptu chopping board for processing stuff. So you just get these really nice moments of kind of glimpses into activities that were actually going on, little moments in time that have been captured.
00:45:16
Speaker
I should say as well, we did just briefly mention it, but for those listening in who are not archaeologists or have no archaeological knowledge in terms of fieldwork, basically, organic objects such as wooden objects very, very rarely survive in the archaeological record. They survive if it's freezing cold. For example, where I work up in the Arctic, they didn't have wood, but
00:45:39
Speaker
if they did, that would be nicely preserved. We do find some pieces. Very arid environments also often have quite nice wood preservation, so quite often in deserts you would also find some wood, and in waterlogged conditions. So that's why we're getting so excited about this must farm. And in terms of, for example, the excavation, because obviously it's dumped in the water, it was nicely charred, which already gave it that protection
00:46:02
Speaker
dumped in the water which gave it even more protection, kept there for thousands of years and then is suddenly exposed to the environment. What happens logistically in terms of the excavation of these kinds of objects as an archaeologist?
00:46:18
Speaker
So yeah, definitely one of the key things is as soon as that object is exposed, the best thing you can do is to keep it waterlogged because the minute that that starts to dry out, it starts to decay and you'll potentially lose really valuable and important information about that. So one of the things when we were excavating it, we were spraying the entire area with water. We actually were very lucky to actually have a sort of covered environment over the top of it to help keep everything really moist and keep those moisture levels really high.
00:46:45
Speaker
and as soon as it's in a position to be lifted and taken out then that will go into conservation where over time various things will be done to change that and replace those waters with other materials like resins and things like that to stabilize that so that object can be preserved and shown in museums or in kind of everyday environments.
00:47:04
Speaker
Interesting, okay. Yeah, because I can imagine, I remember when we were excavating from the Arctic, and if we found, we did find one or two wooden things now that I'm thinking about it, and indeed we had to wrap them immediately in moss and try and, you know, put them straight in a sealed bag to try and keep the moisture levels, basically. But I can imagine if you're finding hundreds of wooden objects, that must have been, I mean, amazing, but also quite stressful, I can imagine.
00:47:27
Speaker
I mean, it's fascinating, you know, everything that was coming out in total, you know, if we imagine we're not just finding the wooden objects themselves, we're finding all of the architecture associated with that settlement and those houses. So parts of the, you know, the construction of the site, so the posts that have been driven into the river channel, the actual roof, you know, parts that made the roof. We even were finding all of the individual wood chips that have been preserved from the construction of the settlement.
00:47:52
Speaker
So I can't give you an exact number now, but it was something like 6,000 plus pieces of wood that we recorded over the excavation. And again, that's everything down from the smallest wood chips up to these huge timbers, some of which were meters long.
00:48:10
Speaker
And excavating that dense cluster of material was so difficult. We actually had to create scaffold frames because we couldn't walk over any of the excavation area for fear of damaging any of the waterlogged material or any of those very fragile objects.
Excavation Challenges at Must Farm
00:48:24
Speaker
So we effectively created an entire platform that we had to kind of lie on, then lean down and gradually excavate the sediments off and excavate and record all of those different artifacts. So it's a very, very complex process that was pretty physically demanding.
00:48:37
Speaker
I mean, can you use a trowel or do you have to use a specialized tool?
00:48:41
Speaker
So absolutely, you can't use any metal objects because if you imagine these are very, very, it's effectively waterlogged wood. So they're very, very soft in a lot of cases, these artifacts. So you actually have to use other wooden tools to be able to work with them. And even so, you have to do them incredibly carefully. So we often use things like wooden clay sculpting tools because they're quite, they're not too sharp. They're quite general. So you can gradually remove a lot of that sediment away.
00:49:07
Speaker
But it's a very, very painstaking process and something that requires the excavation team that worked on it were phenomenally skilled. They're archaeologists with a lot of experience, but even so, within that, having that ability to work with what Lockwood is something that is really valuable. So the whole excavation team did a fantastic job throughout it and we were really lucky to have a really good experience team to work with that.
00:49:32
Speaker
And I'm just really curious now. I haven't done loads and loads of field work, so I'm not experienced at all. But I'm just curious because what I think of is you try to remove as much of the dirt as possible, and then you get to something, and then you're like, oh, cool. And then you go into more detail. If it's such a compacted site, what do I want to say? Not compacted if there's so much stuff at the site, basically. And so many layers and all this kind of thing, I guess you can't just be like, oh, well, this is clearly just a big section of dirt. Let's just get rid of it.
00:50:00
Speaker
can imagine you have to go down at millimetre layers, or is that something that I'm just making up? It's really interesting. There are lots of various different ways to excavate. In the UK, we tend to try and do it by context. We call it single-context recording. Elsewhere, people sometimes do a technique called spitting, where you arbitrarily select a depth that you're going to remove, and then you go down and record it in each of those layers.
00:50:25
Speaker
I thought that's not a way to keep it waterlogged, it's just constantly spitting at these sites. No, no, it's not. Okay, sorry, go ahead. But we were quite lucky in the way that the site actually formed. So the actual process of that destruction created really distinct layers for us. So when these buildings on stilts burnt, one of the first things that would have happened is the floors of the structures would have burnt out and that content dropped down into the water.
00:50:51
Speaker
And then as the remainder of those structures then kind of were charred and collapsed, that created effectively a capping layer that went over the top of everything. So you effectively have like the kind of destruction deposit and then you have a lot of the material kind of underneath that.
00:51:07
Speaker
So we divided the site up into different sections to make sure we were, you know, so for example, some of the buildings, we would dig those in quadrants to help inform the excavation of the other parts of that building and the site, if that makes sense. But as we went down through those layers, we did it effectively by the sequences that happened. So the kind of destruction material that effectively landed on top of everything was carefully recorded and taken away. And then the material, so the kind of contents of those structures
00:51:35
Speaker
were forming a distinct layer beneath that. And then interestingly, underneath that layer was the kind of early occupation of the site. So that predated the fire. So the kind of, we call them middens, although they were kind of middens that were still being formed, because one of the interesting things we could probably talk about is that the site was very, very short
Theories Behind the Must Farm Fire
00:51:54
Speaker
lived. It probably only lasted around six months after it was built to before it was destroyed in the fire. Okay. Oh, that must have been so disheartening.
00:52:03
Speaker
Well, I mean, that raises interesting questions about the nature of the fire, because this is a big event that we've talked a lot about in creating the preservation conditions and bringing the life site to the end. But the big question is, why did this fire happen? And that's something that through all of the analysis and the data that we've gathered, we're hoping to try and get a closer to. But it's whether or not you think that the fire could have been accidental or whether or not it was intentional. Oh, by the wheel maker.
00:52:31
Speaker
you're not using my wheels, you're just using both all the time. It's a real curious event because if you think that this was an accident, which is quite, it's a big accident for a fire to happen and destroy an entire settlement, each of those buildings burned.
00:52:49
Speaker
So, this is a really interesting thing. Maybe it's an ultimate deposition in water. We were just talking about Bronze Age water depositions, right? Maybe this is the ultimate watery deposition. It could be, but why live in it for six months if this was something that was constructed perhaps for some kind of votive offering or something like that?
00:53:10
Speaker
There's so many questions associated with this. A lot of people are really keen to maybe think that it was some kind of really violent martial attack that people swept in, burnt the whole settlement down. But if that was the case, we don't have any human remains from the site. So there's no evidence that people were killed during this fire.
00:53:28
Speaker
there's so many different options and interpretations that we're throwing around and we're interested in. So interesting. Well, okay. We mustn't go into too much detail because we're going to do a special bonus segment on Must Farm. So for those of you, that was a little teaser. If you're interested in learning more, check out the bonus segment after this episode. So let us return to Wood. You already mentioned that there were a lot of bobbins found at the site. Is that the most common object or is there another object that's sort of more commonly found on site?
00:53:56
Speaker
So that's a good question, what the most common wooden type of artifact was found. So we had 59 hafts and handles. So they can be things like hafts of axes. One of the most spectacular finds we were lucky enough to find was a fully hafted axe, socket axe, which again, that predated the actual fire of the settlement, we think was probably deposited after the construction underneath one of the round houses as potentially a place deposit or an intentional deposit.
00:54:25
Speaker
So that was really fantastic seeing a lot of these materials.
00:54:29
Speaker
Which I also find, because this is something, I'm curious in your opinion on this, because I remember chatting to someone and they were like, oh, but it's always so funny because there's these beautifully made, you know, flint axe heads or all of
Complexity of Bronze Age Tools
00:54:41
Speaker
this kind of stuff. But then the wooden handle is just boring. And I was like, what do you mean? And in so many museums and things, it used to be that, you know, if they provided the handle to go with these flint axes, for example, it would just be like a warped branch and it wouldn't be anything that's
00:54:56
Speaker
that's cleverly made, but so I can imagine it must farm their proper handles. Are they also beautifully made? Are they just rough bits of wood?
00:55:11
Speaker
They're found from prehistory. They're not a particularly common find, but they're not really unusual. There are quite a few known examples from Britain and certainly from Europe. What tends to be associated with them is people finding side branches from trees that have roughly the right angle that would have been ideal for using with a socketed axe.
00:55:31
Speaker
But the complete axe I was mentioning is actually made of two parts. So there's the main kind of handle of the heft itself. And then the head of it actually has a socket in where you can actually slot in the axe head itself to a separate piece of wood. So it's in two different stages. So there's the potential idea that that handle removes the need to find a side branch of the correct angle.
00:55:55
Speaker
because if you wanted to use a different axe head at a different angle or using an axe instead of an axe, for example, you could just pull out that head, stick another one in with the correct angle of wood in, and then secure it, and then go about doing your business. Then if you wanted to switch back, you could swap the axe head in, kind of like one of the screwdrivers you get now that has something different. You can slot in a different head depending on whether you need a Phillips head or a flat head. That's amazing.
00:56:21
Speaker
again, things like this popping up that are really, really interesting. The axe head itself is made from field maple, which is quite an interesting wood.
00:56:33
Speaker
No, the actual socket axe itself is bronze, but that fits into a piece of wood, and then that piece of wood fits into the actual heft of the axe itself. Oh wow, a maple. Yeah, a field maple. Really interesting. Beautiful. Which again, is something that little insight, like you were saying, we wouldn't have if it wasn't this beautifully preserved site. I mean, so many wooden objects are lost at archaeological sites, so who knows how many other
00:57:01
Speaker
incredible tools with interchangeable heads. All of these sort of things are happening across the UK, across Europe, across the world, but we just don't find them in the archaeological record. Yeah, we socketed bronze axe heads are one of the most visually recognizable components of the Bronze Age period.
00:57:20
Speaker
they were only a part of the original artifact. And again, when you think about the percentage of that artifact they would have constituted, the actual handle and the half itself are much bigger. And we just typically never ever find that unless we're very fortunate with preservation conditions.
00:57:35
Speaker
It's really interesting, mentioning another bucket that we found. We found a wooden bucket, and within that bucket, there were loads of pieces of broken metal. So we know, again, speaking about little moments that you can get glimpses of, people were obviously gathering together waste metal ready to recycle it and to melt it down and create new objects. And again, finding those gathered within a wooden bucket is such an unusual thing that you're seeing and kind of shows that these wooden objects really relate to other artifact types and were used in different ways.
00:58:04
Speaker
Yeah, true, because I suppose that's also something that I guess happens quite, can happen quite often, or at least did used to happen was that, you know, there'd be one amazing artifact that was found, and that artifact was kind of lifted up above all others and gone, oh, wow, look at this fantastic thing. And you know, this was exciting. But indeed, all of the artifacts, I mean, if you think even just of yourself around the house, there's so many different things that are used together in different ways as well, which is, I suppose, something that is not always considered when looking at
00:58:33
Speaker
sites that have limited preservation or do not have all the artifacts there that would have been used. Definitely. And that's another interesting facet of Musfarm is that we don't have everything by all means. There are things that we don't have at the site. We've got a remarkable degree of preservation in terms of textiles, words,
00:58:53
Speaker
some environmental evidence, pottery, which contains food contents and residues. We've got this huge set of stuff, but there's still a lot of material that we don't see. So we don't see animal skins, for example, which we've got plenty of evidence of animal bone and things like that from their diet. But there are various things that don't really necessarily survive owing to the pH conditions, so the acidity or the alkaline nature of the water.
00:59:17
Speaker
So this is very much not a complete vision of the Bronze Age. It's still fragmentary. And then the nature of the fire, a lot of those materials have survived. But again, a significant amount of them probably have been completely destroyed in that fire. And we don't necessarily know what hasn't survived necessarily because it's not there. So the way I like to kind of think about it is it feels like we've got a Lego set that someone has taken away an unknown number of pieces. And we don't have the picture on the box or the instructions to work with.
00:59:47
Speaker
So it's this kind of process where we're trying to almost reverse engineer what happened, but only from an incomplete evidence. And part of our challenge really is to try and understand what we do have and work out what's missing, which to be honest is a really interesting process.
01:00:05
Speaker
especially because a lot of the time things might be missing that we didn't even consider because they're not something that we use anymore, or they're not something that we consider as being important, but would have been essential if prehistoric people or something like that. A hundred percent. We're finding a lot of things that must farm that people
01:00:22
Speaker
wouldn't necessarily have associated all their objects that are unusual and undoubtedly there would have been more there that we don't necessarily have that evidence for and we were very very lucky to have these really interesting set of preservation conditions that meant we could see a lot.
01:00:40
Speaker
But, you know, imagine if you had conditions that meant that all of it had survived, or, you know, much more of it had survived. And that's always that challenge for archaeology, that probably somewhere in the future, someone will find a more complete, more preserved Bronze Age site. And it'll be really interesting to see how that relates to what we have and how that relates to normal Bronze Age sites on dry land contexts.
01:01:06
Speaker
There's so much hidden still, like you say, as well within archaeology. It's such a very interesting topic. However, I think we're coming to the end of our tea break. We should probably head back to the present day and go back to work. Thank you so, so much for joining me today, Chris, and talking about all this stuff. It's a pleasure.
01:01:27
Speaker
And if anyone wants to find out more about Chris's research work on outreach or about wheels or wooden objects or must farm, you can check the show notes on the podcast homepage. And if you're a member of the archaeology podcast network, you can also access a very special bonus segment where Chris will chat more about the site of must farm and may even give some juicy behind the scenes information you never know.
01:01:51
Speaker
If you're not a member, you can easily join through the APN website, also linked in the show notes, to get access to ad-free episodes, as well as all kinds of bonus material, and even you get some physical swag, very nice t-shirts, magnets, et cetera. So do definitely check that out. It's a very nice community. But yeah, apart from that, thank you again, Chris. And that's all for now. See you next time.
01:02:13
Speaker
I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Trouble.
01:02:25
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.