An ancient lump of timber
spotted in a quarry in Southern England
leads to a massive archaeological excavation
that reveals a prehistoric village
perfectly preserved in mud and silt.
The site is so extraordinary
it's been called the British Pompeii.
This is the crown jewels in terms of
what it can tell us about past humanities,
the way people lived in this landscape 3,000 years ago.
The village was built at least
1,000 years after Stonehenge was erected.
During this same era in Egypt,
the pyramids were completed,
and the golden era of Akhenaton and Tutankhamen came to an end.
Yet little is known about what life in Europe
was like at this time.
Were villages like this isolated places,
with inhabitants living difficult and primitive lives?
This dig may answer these questions.
So, experts from around the country
will join the team to unlock its secrets.
For me, it's just so amazing to be part of this
and it's exciting.
It's, you know, it's a moment in time
that's been captured.
For the first time ever on a dig
of this scale and complexity,
the team is mapping the entire site
to ensure no evidence is lost.
There's a bowl here, there's a bowl there,
there's a bowl there, there's a collapsed storage vessel just there.
They're using experimental archeology
to investigate what life was really like.
The results have been incredible.
Far from being primitive, it seems the European bronze age
saw the beginnings of industry, wealth, urban living,
international trade, and war.
Yesterday, we found a bronze sword.
But at the heart of this discovery lies a mystery.
This village was wiped out by a sudden catastrophic event.
The fact that that contained their food
suggests that the fire event took them by surprise.
It wasn't planned.
Over the next 10 months,
these archaeologists hope to find out
what really happened to this village.
The evidence they find will shed light
on the roots of European civilization
and the world we live in today.
In a rural, water-logged landscape,
a small village buried for millennia
is slowly being revealed.
It sits on the edge of must farm quarry,
in an area of southeast Britain
known as the fens.
The village buildings were made out of wood,
which normally rots away.
But the site is a boon to archaeologists,
because these wooden remains fell into the marshy fens,
where they remained protected until now.
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, the oxygen's
been taken out of the system.
Artifacts of this quantity and quality
are extremely rare.
The complete surviving structures of roundhouses,
perfectly preserved.
A British Pompeii.
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.
In... in 3-d.
It's one of the best examples in northern Europe
of bronze age people living in small villages,
the beginnings of civilization as we know it.
The fact that we're talking about
circular buildings, that's a good start, isn't it?
The excavation has uncovered a row of roundhouses,
once part of a bigger settlement.
Incredibly, millennia after these buildings collapsed,
the fallen timbers remain in the same spot,
their circular roofs still visible from above.
In front of me is an internal circle
or hexagon of posts,
and then a much broader circle
of about nearly 8 meters.
What defines that... That structure,
gives it the most sort of clarity is that
the spokes of the wheel, I suppose, the... the roof rafters
fanning out from the center,
giving that sense of a roof collapsing down
inside a circular structure.
The contents inside the building
were frozen in time when the roof collapsed.
Must farm promises to be one of the richest discoveries
from the period after Stonehenge.
Mark knight is leading the excavation.
We go up this ramp.
He hopes the site will answer some questions
about Britain in the bronze age
and provide a glimpse into the lives
of the people who lived during this mysterious period.
It's unbelievable, isn't it,
the dream of what you could do
within archeology and the sense
that there's height.
You feel like you have to sort of
dip a head slightly and we'll be
walking into those buildings and things.
Wood expert Mike Bamforth
has a once-in-a-lifetime chance
to investigate the structure
of a complete village.
For a wood specialist, this is about the best site
you could ever imagine to find.
Dr. Karl Harrison has joined the team
to find out how and why the village was destroyed.
The flaming energy that's gonna
come off this when it's lit
is gonna be sufficient to carry the fire up to the roof.
But there is no time to lose.
Now that the wood is exposed to oxygen,
it will begin to decompose.
The team must race to excavate every scrap of evidence.
Understanding what happened to the village
hinges on the fire investigation.
The fire was extensive,
and all the material culture is burnt,
or at least has some sense of that... of that burning.
Was the fire a terrible accident
or a deliberate act of violence?
If it's an accident, we would expect it
to be accident in one place,
and for it to spread across the site.
If it's intentional, then maybe we'll have
multiple fire points.
As a forensic archaeologist,
Harrison also works with police on modern crimes.
He'll be using 21st-century science
to try and solve this ancient mystery.
One of the interesting things about the fire is that
it already points to the fact that it wasn't all-consuming.
We have unburnt material surviving,
we have areas of protection on some burnt timbers
which are otherwise quite well charred.
Early evidence suggests the villagers
were taken by surprise.
The team has discovered bowls of half-eaten meals.
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.
One of the big questions
is whether European bronze age villages like this
were isolated, or if they had contact
with the wider world.
The site sits in a landscape
criss-crossed by a network of waterways.
In an earlier dig, mark knight and his team
made an extraordinary discovery...
8 pristine logboats,
the biggest single collection ever found in Europe.
Suggesting these villagers were travelers.
Wherever you go along this channel, there are boats,
and that is a... is a... If ever there was
a testament to the richness but also the scale of...
Of human activity along this channel,
then that's it's for me.
What would happen to us if, in this modern world,
we didn't have the Internet?
How... how connected would we be?
And you feel in a way that the logboats on the rivers
was that... that sort of network, really,
that sort of connection.
These people used rivers as highways
and boats were their means of transportation.
But what tools did they use to build these boats?
Ryan watts wants to find out.
We're working on building a dugout boat, or a logboat,
which is something that we find in the archeology
all the way from the stone age through to the bronze age,
iron age, and all the way to the medieval period.
It's a very simple type of boat, and as the name suggests,
it's created from a log,
but obviously, it needs lots of shaping and hollowing out.
Watts is testing a variety of different tools
that would've been available at this time.
Over the last couple of years,
I've been working on different ways
of how these boats might have been built,
testing out different methods, different tools.
At the moment, we're using wooden wedges
to remove the vast bulk,
rather than bronze tools,
because wooden wedges can split off
bigger sections and bigger chunks as they go.
It's a lot less labor-intensive.
When the boats were discovered,
it appeared they'd been deliberately sunk
into the riverbed.
Watts has a theory as to how and why.
What you can actually do is remove the transom
out from the back and allow your boat to flood,
and it will sink, and all the examples from must farm
don't... where we have the groove,
we don't actually have the transom,
and you don't... you rarely find the transom.
And what that does is it sinks the boat.
The water can rush in and that will allow it
to preserve, so, the same way that we found it
thousands of years later, they could've done that
just for a year or two.
So, you don't have to make them
every year or every season that you want to.
You get to preserve your boat for much longer.
Like many car owners today,
it seems the villagers took great pride in their boats.
The evidence from must farm is the first
evidence we have for decoration on the outside of logboats.
Before that, they'd just been plain logs,
whereas this is the first time where we have
carvings on the outside.
They're very linear and geometrical,
but they are there.
As to why, there's no real practical reason for them, so,
the only real reason would be, actually,
just to make your boat look pretty
or at least stand out so that you'd know it was yours
if it was in a... in a... A collection of others.
The discovery of the boats
was just the beginning,
and a full excavation is underway.
The team has found evidence suggesting
buildings across Europe were elevated
using similar methods.
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 that we've got hints of
a raised floor structure.
We know the raised floor structure was here
because we've got these long length of support posts
that haven't been burnt at all.
Built on stilts driven into the ground,
these structures were raised above a slow-running
channel of water.
It's the raised floor that protected the posts below
from the fire at must farm.
We can imagine the floor might be up here,
and that Dan would actually be underwater.
OK, so, what Dan's excavating
is the collapsed, charred remnants
of a building that was above water
that's now below water.
While nothing like this bronze age village
has been discovered in Britain before,
villages with similar buildings
have been found in central Europe,
some 800 miles away.
One of these has been reconstructed in Germany
on the shores of lake Constance.
This similarity in construction
could be exciting evidence
of migration from mainland Europe to Britain.
So, we could imagine the pole-dwellers of Switzerland
or the alpine Ridge and all the...
The people that lived on the... The rivers of... of Holland
being the very people that came and occupied this place,
because it was the space that they were very already
adept at adapting to or to... or inhabiting.
So, they're... they already had the technology.
They didn't invent it because they changed the environment.
This was their texture.
But the question is, was this connection
a two-way street?
The excavation has uncovered
some tiny but important clues...
Glass beads.
Professor Julian Henderson,
from the university of Nottingham,
has been invited here to examine them.
Glass is actually quite a rare find
from the bronze age in England,
and they date to the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.
Therefore, they are extremely important and valuable.
This collection of beads represents
the only collection of this date,
and they were found at must farm.
The villagers were sophisticated enough
to have decorative goods.
They're beautifully colored with either
copper or iron, producing a beautiful turquoise color
or a pale green color.
They had clearly a social value.
They are purely decorative,
but they also can be used as tracers
for links between different parts of the world.
In the bronze age, glass was made
from sand and the ashes of burnt plants.
Analysis can show where its ingredients came from.
The glass from must farm
was made using shrubby plants.
Now, these plants only really grow
in semi-desert environments,
and there weren't any semi-desert environments
in Northwestern or northern Europe
in the ninth and eighth centuries.
It could well be that they came from a distance
of up to 2,000, 2,500 miles away.
It's very likely that they were made
and imported from as far afield as the middle east.
Were the must farm villagers
importing goods from the rest of Europe?
It's possible the glass beads came from as far
as the banks of the Po river,
1,000 miles away in Italy.
Here sat one of the greatest manufacturing hubs
in the prehistoric world... Frattesina.
Frattesina is an industrial trading settlement.
It's in the Mediterranean world.
It's importing raw materials,
and these raw materials are transformed
into manufactured goods at Frattesina,
and then they're re-exported.
The connections go from the Levant,
from Lebanon, Palestine, right to Southern Germany
and northern France.
To meet the demand for decorative items,
a vast range of raw materials were shipped to Frattesina.
These very unassuming little beads
are ostrich eggshell brought from Africa.
We've got unworked pieces as well,
so, we know it's brought here as a raw material
and... and turned into beads.
In addition to this ostrich eggshell,
other raw materials included Amber from the Baltic
and ivory from as far away as Africa or Asia,
all crafted into exquisite things.
We have at Frattesina
not just the biggest number of glass finds
from the later bronze age,
but we also have lots of really interesting evidence
of glassmaking.
And here you can see some ingots of glass
in various colors.
This one's really interesting because you can see
the shape of the ingot, and you can see
where the pincers sank into the semi-molten glass
as the glassworker picked... Picked it up.
That's actually amazing. You've got the actual operations
of the glassmaker preserved in this... this ingot.
These beads could be evidence
of one of the earliest commercial networks,
but in a time before money, what did the people at must farm
have to offer in exchange?
The answer might lie in these bones and bowls of grain.
The team has discovered evidence suggesting
the fertile landscape allowed villagers
to produce more food than they needed.
Were they trading crops and livestock
for items like the glass beads?
During this era, life was transformed
by the discovery of a tough metal alloy... bronze.
Copper and tin could be combined to create
new farming tools that increased production.
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.
Stuff's so well preserved that it comes out of the ground
shiny still, which is pretty amazing.
Bronze tools helped create crop surpluses,
but in an age before clocks and calendars,
how did farmers know when to plant?
Answers to this question can be found in Halle, Germany,
home of the state museum, which houses
an archaeological discovery so extraordinary
it is recognized by UNESCO
as one of the most important finds of the 20th century.
This is the first picture of the real heaven
we had in the world history.
This is the Nebra sky disk.
Made out of bronze, it shows a simple depiction
of the celestial sky.
All the pictures of heaven during the history of man
are mythologized.
This is the pure scientific picture
of a nightly heaven.
The sky disk is the earliest evidence
that prehistoric men understood the movements
of the sun, moon, and stars,
including a cluster of stars known today
as the Pleiades, which were extremely important
for the bronze age farmer.
And the picture's really simple.
We had here the 7 stars of the Pleiades
and we have here the moon.
And the conjunction of moon and Pleiades
showed us one special time of the year...
The early march.
The Pleiades are visible
in the northern hemisphere
throughout the winter, and disappear in the spring,
when 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.
To look at the disk is like to look at a modern brain.
But could the must farm villagers
have shared this knowledge?
Recent analysis revealed the disk was made
from imported metal.
We analyzed the copper.
The copper comes from the alps,
from the Mittelbach region near Salzburg.
Then we analyzed 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, there's a mixture of Germany and of England.
Modern science is proving that,
far from being insular communities,
Germany and England had trading connections
that ran deep.
The desire for metal and material goods
forged a system of exchange
that is one of the earliest examples
of modern trade in Europe.
It seems that just like the people living at Frattesina
and around lake Constance,
the villagers recognized that water
was the gateway to Europe,
and they chose to live right on top of it.
They recognized that by
basically moving out onto this wet space
and by sitting themselves on top of the rivers,
they'd take over a landscape that's basically sitting between
the sort of trade and movement of... of materials and things.
It creates... it puts you at the center of things.
It puts you in... in the way, I suppose, of... of that movement,
so, you get some sense of control.
Clues from the site,
together with evidence from across Europe,
have demonstrated that life in Britain
was not as primitive as scholars might have believed.
But disturbing finds suggest that success
had dark consequences for the people of must farm.
To mark their territory,
they built a fence of wooden posts called a palisade
around their village.
There's a lovely ash palisade
running right around the edge of the settlement.
These ash posts standing shoulder to shoulder
with occasional oak posts,
and we don't know how high they stood, but
probably above head height.
And a closer look around the posts
reveals something surprising.
I'm certain that these are the footprints
of the people that were living here.
I'm certain that they are the footprints
of the people building the palisades, so, I think
this is the... this is the trace of the... the inhabitants
of our settlement.
But knight doesn't think their palisade
was just for display.
It was also a vital line of defense.
There is something about the fact that
they're in a landscape where they've detached themselves
from the dry land, where they put a barricade around themselves,
so, there is a sense of an enclosure.
It has that sense of... Of a potential
defensive nature about it.
If these villagers felt threatened,
evidence is emerging that they were
prepared to defend themselves.
So, yesterday, we found a bronze sword.
Normally when we find bronze, it's green and crusted over,
but because of the preservation at the site,
this is sort of the actual bronze color
that we can see here.
And how did you feel when you found it?
Amazing. Ecstatic.
Really excited and really nervous all at the same time.
Swords first appeared during the bronze age,
but scholars aren't sure whether they were a prestige item,
made for show, or designed primarily to kill.
Everything's careful, thought-out process.
It just heats up slowly and then
the bellows just takes it up to the last bit
of around 1,200 degrees.
Neil Burridge is one of the few people
replicating bronze age swords using authentic techniques.
For him, this is a sacred ritual.
It's almost a superstition.
You know, almost kind of doing something that belonged
to the ancient gods.
There's more to it than just an industrial process,
and that's probably why I find it so interesting.
And you're trying to follow a route to something
that happened 3,000 years ago.
So, it's coming out quite nicely, isn't it?
And it's not easy. It is very difficult.
And people say, "oh, you make it look easy," but it's not.
It's very challenging.
I will be very relieved if I get a casting.
Hopefully it's the last step
that will take us to a sword.
Burridge uses an authentic bronze alloy
composed of 12% tin and 88% copper.
Around two pounds of the molten metal
is poured into a cast.
This is a nervous point for me.
The molten part is at the top.
That's not too bad. So, I'm just gonna
top it up a little bit.
It's clear that bronze age swords
took a huge amount of effort to make,
but were they exclusive to elite warriors,
or was this a violent age when everyone had to own one?
It's quite grim, really.
Remember, swords developed on human beings
over hundreds of years,
so, the shape that you see in the later bronze age swords
has taken a grisly route to get there.
You must always remember that.
In "the Iliad," it just talks about
the pitiless bronze, and it's basically
a long list of people, who they are, and how they died,
and it's pretty, you know, quite horrific.
Warfare was horrific.
Does the discovery of a sword
and a defensive boundary
suggest that the villagers lived under
threat of attack?
Harrison has returned to the site
to see if his forensic investigation
can yield more clues about the burning of the village.
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.
Whether that's hostile or whether that's planned,
we wouldn't be able to say necessarily.
To map the spread of the fire,
he needs to consider how the buildings were constructed.
I think that this particular piece of wood
is a really good example of the way in which
the behavior of fire can help to understand
how this building might have been put together.
So, there are only 3 main ways
in which fire spreads in a building.
It can spread by conduction, so, you can have metal things
that will... that will spread fire.
There's convection, so, fire very early on will...
Will put a lot of energy upwards,
like a buoyant gas into a structure.
And then there's radiation, which is like
standing next to a bonfire or getting rays from the sun
where heat will be transmitted over a medium.
So, the top of this timber has been charred,
except that there are a number of
circular areas that are protected.
So, it looks as if a structure's sat on top of it
and protected it from that radiant heat coming down.
On this side closer to me,
there's then a margin where the burning stops.
So, then we have unburnt timber underneath.
It's protected from the fire because
it's on the outside of the structure,
so, most of the fuel and most of the fire
is on the inside.
Radiation comes in straight lines
and it's fairly well protected, so,
just like a tan line where you put your suntan cream on,
it... it's not burnt in that area.
Drawing all of this evidence together,
Harrison has come to a definitive conclusion
about where the fire started.
So, I believe that the fire starts
inside this structure, so, it doesn't start against it.
Nobody comes along and lights the roof from the outside,
because that would result in quite a different
pattern of burning.
He must determine the extent of the damage
and whether the fire was a tragic accident
or a violent attack.
To help with the investigations,
an experimental roundhouse is being built nearby.
Concentrate so you don't fall off the roof.
This is daub.
The main ingredients are well-rotted manure
and soil and water.
Although smaller and not on water,
the house retains the fundamental features
of the ancient huts.
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
and they're balancing on those principal posts.
It's tied together in a sort of... in a circular
hoops, and these are in place
to help hold the thatch up.
The team will start a fire inside the roundhouse
and record the pattern, heat, and speed of the flames.
Back at the site, there is compelling new evidence
that these villagers were prepared for battle.
I'm sat in roundhouse one,
and within a meter of me, we found a axe.
This one came from about a meter and a half in that direction.
We have one in that quarter and we have one in that quarter.
So, so far, each quadrant of the roundhouse
has produced another axe.
You can see their... their form.
They've got the hole for where the...
The sort of... The handle went in.
They've got a little loop on the side
for tethering it on.
You can also... you might just be able to pick out
some sort of little rib.
They come in threes on the side there,
and then you can also see the casting seam.
So, where the bronze has gone into the Clay mold.
Axes like this could've had a dual role.
Practical tool or dangerous weapon.
But other objects found here primarily served
a more deadly purpose.
So, this is the blade of a...
A leaf-shaped sword.
It's lost its... its sort of hilt and handle.
But again, fits in with the...
The sort of right sort of time and things
for... for this settlement, and was found at the same level
as the... the ash deposit, so, it's part of this,
the contents of our settlement.
But also you can see that it's got these sort of
deep notches running along one side of its blade,
and that might be indicative that... that the object itself
was actually used in conflict or at the very least,
it's... it's hit another metal object,
and it could well be a... a sword or something like that.
It seems that in this settlement,
swords were not just expressions of status.
The villagers used them to fight.
But what did bronze age combat look like?
To answer this question, a study using
professional fighters is taking place.
This starts far apart and 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... it's a very exciting way to fight, certainly.
Dr. Andrea Dolfini is examining
hundreds of British bronze age weapons.
We've seen very similar
on the bronze age swords in that
the... the dent is opened up.
Probably the two blades met
and then swing in that...
In that direction and open the dent.
The weapon itself, because it's so short,
effectively you're using what would...
What you could consider to be a long knife.
Because of that, you have to get in so much...
So much closer, so much more personal.
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.
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... and ultimately is to impose
your will upon your opponent.
The plan is to record and analyze
the marks we have generated today
with the swordfight and compare them
with the marks we see on the bronze age swords,
and in this way, we can learn
a great deal about bronze age fighting.
As the work of modern metalworker Neil Burridge shows,
enormous resources and skill were needed
to make this deadly weapon.
So, you can see that more fragments have broken off.
And you can see the sword casting.
So, it's not bad for a first attempt.
I think the mold parted a little bit more as 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've gone, "no, 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 use something that's 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 the excavations,
they're usually green and corroded and not very attractive,
but probably in the bronze age when the sword is finished,
it looked like this...
Beautifully polished, handle,
decorated blade, and very sharp edges.
And what better way of showing off your prestige
as being the most important person
by having the most fantastic sword.
Back at the dig, the team has made
a new discovery...
A substantial and curious object
left behind by the inhabitants of the village.
So, you can see it's got this kind of Ridge
burrowing through the top of it.
It's quite, you know, as you can see, it's quite substantial.
The actual piece of wood itself goes...
It's running all the way, all the way underneath,
so, who knows how far it goes that way or that way,
and it goes... it seems to be going that way as well.
It's a bit... quite weird as well, this...
I mean, it must be... It's probably a post.
Yeah, like this one, but
the fact it's kind of... Looks like it's kind of
connected to this big piece makes it seem
as if it's something different.
I don't know.
As the archaeologists brush the dirt away,
the excitement grows.
A find of national importance,
it demonstrates these people used the most
sophisticated technology of their time.
This is the only complete bronze age wheel
ever found in Britain.
Main problems are it's unbelievably compressed,
so, it would've been quite a lot thicker than this originally.
Prehistoric wood expert Maisie Taylor
is called on to lend her expertise.
I mean, 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... than anything else,
and complete... The fact that it's complete
is... is wonderful.
Evidence that people used wheels
in Britain at this time has been scarce.
But this find suggests wheels
were an integral part of daily life.
And a new find of a harness fitting
suggests this wheel might have been part
of a horse-drawn cart.
It's an odd object, isn't it, but there is
these sort of holes going through it and things,
this idea that maybe straps and things like that
are running through and things, and it's... it's maybe sitting
as a sort of cheek piece or something like that
on... on the side of a horse.
The wheel and harness fitting indicate
this village was using more advanced
farming techniques than previously thought.
Here is the beginning of modern agriculture in Britain.
But these discoveries pale in comparison
to what the team finds next...
Something so delicate and fragile
it's hard to believe it has survived in the ground
for 3,000 years.
In here, we have the really fine fabric
that I found down there.
It was encased in Clay, so, as I was excavating,
and then that's when I saw the textile folded up there,
but this is just the top of it,
and you can see on these pieces
how finely woven it is.
Fabrics like this have never been found
at a British bronze age site before.
Eager to find out just how special they are,
knight has called in textile expert Dr. Susanna Harris.
It's 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.
Under the microscope,
the sophisticate details of the fabric become clear.
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.
Harris has discovered that the threads
used to make these fabrics
were woven out of natural plant fibers
and were unbelievably delicate.
Using the microscope, she measures the threads
at just 2/10 of a millimeter...
Clear evidence of incredible care
and expert workmanship.
So, I've just drawn a line
that's 5 millimeters long.
So, what I want to do is count those threads.
9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
So, over 5 millimeters, we've got 13 threads.
So, over a centimeter, we'd have 26 threads.
And so, the must farm textiles are really...
They're... they're up there with the other
fine textiles in Europe at this time.
These fabrics are further proof
that the people living here
were more than just surviving.
They had advanced, intricate, material goods.
Just because they look black and brown now
doesn't mean that was 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
and in... in all their glorious textures and colors.
The question is, where did this cloth come from?
Similar fabrics have been found in Germany,
in and around lake Constance,
where other discoveries can help us paint a picture
of domestic European life at the time.
This is a collection from the lake dwellings
here on the... the lake Constance.
Findings from the last 150 years.
Some of the objects that have survived
across thousands of years are impossibly delicate and fragile.
We have nets. Thin fibers.
It's a wonderful world of textiles.
Other discoveries suggest a vibrant
and prosperous community.
We have such hooks like these.
We found it along the palisade.
And you can imagine that the young boys
are sitting on the palisade in the afternoon and the evening.
And work with them.
We have sometimes these little cups
and also the big one.
And you can imagine what is the story behind.
This is for little people and the big one for the adults.
Back at must farm,
the team has again found something without precedent
at a British bronze age settlement.
They are now uncovering the tools
that made these exquisite textiles.
This enormous club or... or cricket bat-shaped object
turns out to be a very fine example
of what's known as a... a cloth beater,
and it's one of 3 that come from the site.
So, we're finding them across the settlement.
Their weight and the shape is about trying to
smash stems of flax so that you're
trying to get the plant fibers out
so you can prepare that then for spinning.
The idea is that it sits in a sort of groove
with the plant fibers going across it
and you're just doing this on a sort of regular basis
and sort of smashing it down and things.
From this hefty cloth beater
to a more fragile item,
archaeologists have found a remnant
of the ancient spinning process.
We've got thread wound round a... a sort of
a thin piece of wood, which could well be the spindle,
so, you can imagine them sort of spinning that... that fiber.
So, again, we just see those stages being played out
in the different materials.
And finally, evidence of weaving tools.
Bronze age loom weights.
We've got 3 of these all occurring within...
Within roundhouse one.
And they're just very crudely formed,
sort of pyramid-shaped bits of Clay
that have been fired with a...
With a hole piercing through them.
And that's what adds weight to your... to your threads
that you're then gonna weave through.
So, so, it's just... just another element, really.
So, it's just that sense of completing
the picture, I think.
The must farm villagers were expert clothmakers,
and their simple spinning and weaving tools
were the predecessors of modern textile-making machinery.
This is the first substantial evidence
of the complete textile-making process in Britain.
An incredible glimpse into the villagers' daily lives.
It is so rare, exceptional,
to find the... 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 specialist gonna be in a situation where
I think they're gonna be overwhelmed with that detail.
But why was all of this abandoned?
The half-finished meals suggest that
these people were forced to flee
without any of their things.
Dating some of the timber on site
indicates this catastrophe took place
not long after they moved in.
Everything points to the fact that the settlement
was brand-new when it got burnt down,
and that's now being confirmed by some of the detail
coming out of the analysis of dendrochronology
that suggests that the wood of roundhouse one
might have been green when the building burnt down.
And by any normal standards, oak, you know,
will become seasoned within a year of it being felled.
So, there's a possibility that this settlement
only stood for a year
and then was all burnt down.
Was this a case of unwelcome newcomers
being driven out by rivals
before they even had a chance to settle in?
Dr. Karl Harrison is now ready to set fire
to the reconstructed roundhouse.
He will be able to determine how the fire spread
and how much time the inhabitants had to escape.
I've come with some temperature monitors
and a monitor that will give us an indication
of the amount of radiant heat
that's gonna escape from the building sideways,
so, that should help us understand
how fire might have spread at must farm.
Are the raised timbers gonna burn through completely
or are they gonna char?
Are they gonna be stood up at the end of the burn?
Is it gonna be a smoldering heap?
I really don't understand what's gonna happen next.
I'm really excited to see it.
Harrison starts the burn
where he believes it would've begun
inside the roundhouse.
The flaming energy that's gonna come off this
when it's lit is gonna be sufficient
to carry the fire up to the roof.
He lights a bundle of straw,
not unlike something that could've been found
in one of the original roundhouses.
I think it would develop quite quickly.
I think within 6 to 7 minutes,
we'll start to see some involvement
in the roof space.
30 minutes and I'd expect the roof
to be totally involved and then starting to collapse.
There's a feed of... of ignition up to the roof,
and you can already see the yellowing smoke
that's starting to come out on this side in particular.
The fire takes hold
much faster than he expected.
Wow.
- Like wool. - Ha ha ha!
Oh, well over 1,000.
As the flames grew,
panic must have spread throughout the settlement
as the villagers ran for their lives.
The heat that we can feel here
is all radiant heat, that's spreading naturally,
so, this is what's gonna be striking the other buildings
in our bronze age settlement.
I really hope that some of this doesn't burn
so that it falls down...
yeah, absolutely.
If it all burns away, then,
then we won't have have any sort of archeology left.
So, I really hope that some of this roof structure
comes down intact.
So, that has been quick. How long...
Do you know what time we started the fire?
I think that that's...
That can only be 10 minutes, really.
Probably not more than that at all.
At must farm, we know we can see
4 or roundhouses in the ground,
and we know about half the settlement's missing,
so, perhaps 8 to 10 roundhouses,
and they could've gone up really quickly.
Yes. If you coordinated their lighting, absolutely.
The roundhouses at the must farm site
were built very close to each other.
With the wind blowing in the right direction,
fire could've spread from one house to another.
And that... that wide, flat landscape
with big skies, the spectacle
of the... the pall of smoke and the flames.
- It was pouring up. - It was this huge.
It'd be really visible in the landscape.
If it was torched by an enemy,
the site of this burning village
would've been a stark warning.
The weight of evidence seems to point
toward a sudden and violent attack.
For knight, the most compelling fact
is that these people never returned to their village.
There is also that sense that
once the thing had burnt down, there's no real indication
that they ever came back.
So, there is also that sort of feeling that...
That the... the force that drove them away
might've been more than the fire.
It might've actually been someone else who'd
set that fire that didn't want these people in this landscape.
And further evidence is emerging
that these people must have been warriors as well as farmers.
A number of well-preserved bronze spearheads
have been unearthed.
And it's interesting that they're all carried
along the inside of the palisade.
So, in your mind's eye, what you start doing is
you've got people stood there with their Spears
sort of keeping guard and things like that.
So, who knows, but 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 smoldering remains have been left overnight,
and they're looking for more clues
that can tell them not only how the settlement burned
but how it was built.
Do you think it's still gonna be warm or...
It might be warm in places.
There's quite a depth of... of thatch left there, isn't it?
The walls have really held up very well, haven't they?
We could put a roof back on.
It might smell a bit smoky, but
there's... there's char that's settled on them,
but they're not damaged at all.
So, it means that the roof's fallen in,
which is very different to what we've seen at must farm,
where the roof has come down.
Yeah, so... making me think a lot about the walls.
So, actually, the daub's protecting
the wood inside, isn't it,
so, it's become burned.
No, we could chip that off
and that will be as it was
yesterday morning.
Over the next few months,
Harrison will continue to investigate
the fire that destroyed must farm.
But one thing is indisputable.
Once the village burned down,
it was the end of this ancient community.
The excavation has shed new light
on life in Europe after Stonehenge.
People began to live closer together in settlements,
an early precursor to the development of modern cities.
And their world extended far beyond their village.
Their need for raw materials
and the desire for material goods
drove people across rivers and seas
to forge a new system of international trade
that would link an entire continent.
Their world was far from primitive.
Ideas and technology were shared and spread.
But it was also far from peaceful.
As Europe became wealthy,
it seems to have become more violent.
In fact, by shedding light on the mysterious bronze age,
this village has revealed the roots
of the global community we live in today.
Soon, the team must finish their work here,
but there is still so much more to discover.
The more you dig, the more questions that come up,
the more detail comes out.
Every moment another object comes up
with a new story sort of thing, so,
we are in the... in the throes of completion.
But in the knowledge that a lot of the materials here
will go on to another stage, so, they will be under microscope,
so, they will be in laboratories,
they will be sliced and examined and measured
and... and if anything, the story that you've been given
so far today will be enriched.
There will be color, there will be
texture that will come out that will transform
elements of our story as well.
What's left of this bronze age village
will be buried beneath the earth once more
when the land is returned to its owners.
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 beginnings of civilization as we know it.
This is the crown jewels
in terms of what it can tell us about
past humanities and about the way
people lived in this landscape 3,000 years ago.