MELRAND VILLAGE

Melrand is a very well-preserved archaeological site, it has been known since two hundred years, yet it is poor in material. The research and the various investigations developed enabled a better knowledge concerning its rural medieval identity yet still left many questions unanswered as to the modalities of its occupation and its desertion. The choice of opening it to the public in 1985 incited the teams on the site to prepare a visitor’s circuit in order to preserve the emplacement, allowing it to continue to be studied and enhanced. Experimental archaeology was to prove one of the most successful means developed, through the form of evolutive reconstitutions (buildings, materials, gestures)

Bronze Age village discovered in North-West Romania

Details of a wooden structure

BUCHAREST, Nov. 5 -- A village established in the Bronze Age has been recently discovered near Zalau town, northwestern Romania, the official Agerpres news agency reported on Wednesday.

The discovery was made following an archaeological discharge relating to 2 square kilometers in Recea, close to Zalau.

"It is for the fist time in Transylvania, central-western region of Romania, when a village dating back to the Bronze Age is completely examined," said Ioan Bejinariu, the archaeologist of the History and Art Museum in Zalau.

"Only by conducting digging works on large areas of land can one have an overview of a location," said Bejinariu who is in charge of this site. "The village consists of eight houses built in the upper region of a hill on two almost parallel rows. Pits were found near the houses used for supplies' storage," he added.

As many as 124 archaeological sites were found, including houses, graves, supplies' pits or ovens, as well as two human skeletons dating back to several historical periods starting with 1500-1300 B.C. and up to the 3rd and 4th C A.D., Bejinariu informed.

In addition to the location originating in the Bronze Age, a well-preserved pottery kiln was discovered on the Sulduba valley, dating back to the 3rd and 4th C A.D. According to Ioan Bejinariu, the oven confirms the region used to be populated by sedentary people in that period.

Archaeology - ROMANIA

Monthly Update - August 2007

This year, due to the fact that another house was being built in the area, the archaeologists had to do some salvation diggings. A team led by prof. dr. Horea Pop, from Zalau County History and Art Museum was commissioned on the dig. It was the second time we have cooperated with dr. Pop, who is a specialist of the Dacian period.

The team opened a section - 17 meters long and 4 meters wide, oriented S to N - on one of the terraces on the hill. We discovered the first archeological complex at the depth of 2.50 - 2.65 metres. There were three stages of construction and around 14 archeological complexes: pit holes, houses, fire places, ovens and a lot of artifacts.

Most of the pit holes were used for provision storing at the beginning but later on they were not suitable for storing food anymore, so they were transformed into garbage holes. Inside the houses, we found remains of hand-made Dacian pottery, animal bones, ash and burn wood. We also discovered hand and wheel-made Dacian pottery around ovens.

One of the houses we dug out had a surface of around 10 per 9 meters, separated in at least 4 rooms. Three of the rooms had each a fire place. in the forth one The slope of the terrace had destroyed a part of the fourth room, so it's possible that it too had had an oven. One of the walls was so well preserved that we even found some of its wooden structure. Inside of the house we discovere Dacian hand made and wheel made ceramic and also Celtic ceramic from the 1st century B.C.

The most interesting discovery was in room number 4, and it consisted of a small pottery statue of a woman, as shown by the small triangle made in the pubic area. It is the second one discovered in this part of Romania. The figurine has eyes, nose, mouth, 2 arms and 2 small legs. The neck and breasts are missing.

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Celtic Farm - Butser Ancient Farm

Butser Ancient Farm, near Petersfield in Hampshire, England, is a working replica of an Iron Age farmstead where long-term experiments in prehistoric and Roman agriculture, animal husbandry and manufacturing are held to test ideas posited by archaeologists. The period of interest is that from 400 BC to 400 AD.

Butser Ancient Farm was founded in 1972 by experimental archaeologist Peter J Reynolds (6 November 1939 - 26 September 2001), and named after its original site at Butser Hill, a few kilometres from Petersfield. In 1976 a second site was opened at Hillhampton Down about a kilometre away, and in 1989 the original site at Butser Hill was closed down. In 1991 the project moved to Bascomb Copse at Chalton, Hampshire, about 5 km from the original site.

Buildings at the farm include simulated pre-Roman roundhouses and a simulated Roman villa. The Pimperne House was the first full-sized roundhouse to be built at the site, and at the time the largest in western Europe.

An episode of the 2005 BBC Television documentary series What the Ancients Did for Us examining the ideas and inventions of the Ancient Britons was filmed here.

The farm is open to the public.


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Courtyard houses

The interior of a courtyard house at Chysauster (Cornwall) with small rooms leading off from the central open area. (J.Dyer)

Plan of the completely excavated site of Walesland Rath, Pembroke, showing circular huts and rectangular structures, not all of which were contemporary. The excavator interpreted some of the buildings close to the bank as a continuous run of huts, but some of these could be interpreted as four-post structures as indicated. (After Wainwright, 1969)

As one moves from central southern England to the west and north, areas begin to display their own regional peculiarities. In western Cornwall and Scilly are about 60 courtyard houses, usually sited on fairly high ground. The best known examples have been excavated at Chysauster and Carn Euny where they occur in groups, but they are more frequently found as isolated farmsteads set amongst fields. A typical house was oval in plan and consisted of a central courtyard, sometimes paved, and almost certainly open to the sky. Around it were ranged four to seven rooms with thatched roofs, the largest opposite the courtyard entrance. This big circular room was often raised above the level of the yard and was most probably the living room. As well as a central hearth it often contained benches and drains. Other rooms may have been used for sleeping, working, storage and perhaps housing animals. The houses were very strongly built with carefully designed granite walls often 2–3 m. (2.2–3.3 yd) thick. A number of the houses had small paddocks or gardens attached, whilst beyond were extensive field systems. Most courtyard houses seem to date from around 200 BC and continue into the Roman period.

Another feature of western Cornwall are underground structures known locally as fogous. Most are found attached to settlements like Chysauster, Halligye and Carn Euny. They vary considerably in size but consist basically of a stone-lined and roofed underground passage. At Chysauster it is very short, but at Carn Euny the passage is 20 m. (22 yd) long with a corbelled stone chamber 4.5 m. (5 yd) in diameter on one side. It is almost certain that these structures were cellars or storage places, where food could be kept at a fairly even temperature. As hiding places they would have been death traps. A radiocarbon date from Carn Euny suggests that some may be as early as the fifth century BC thus predating the courtyard houses, but they continued in use throughout the later Iron Age.

Banked and ditched enclosures known as rounds are another feature of the Cornish and Devon countryside in the late first millennium BC. Essentially agricultural in economy they are difficult to define since they come in many shapes and sizes. Suffice to describe them both as farmsteads and hamlets, surrounded by a non-defensive bank and shallow ditch, and seldom more than a hectare in extent. Each contains a number of huts, usually sited against the inner face of the bank. They fit without difficulty into the pattern of enclosed farmsteads found in the rest of Britain.

Many similar sites also existed in southwest Wales where banks and ditches sometimes make it difficult to decide whether the site is not in fact a very small hillfort, since 50 per cent of Welsh forts enclose less than 0.5 ha. (1.2 acres). One such site, extensively excavated in 1967–8 was Walesland Rath in central Dyfed (fig. 60). Earliest occupation began in the third century BC with a settlement enclosed by a low clay bank and shallow external ditch. The western entrance had limestone walls leading up to a timber gateway. Over the south-east gate was a bridge or tower supported by six massive posts. The inner edge of the bank was lined with a continuous run of roughly rectangular wooden huts, with hard earth floors, occasional paving and indications that some had been used for animal housing. Evidence of grinding grain and metallurgy suggest that most of the buildings were occupied by people. Other circular houses with conical roofs stood inside the enclosures, together with at least one of rectangular shape.

The peripheral buildings at Walesland Rath have been compared with similar structures at Clickhimin broch in Shetland and various Scottish duns, and it is possible that they were a feature of contemporary sites along the Irish Sea coast. One word of caution; some of these buildings at Walesland may be interpreted as four-post granaries.

Glastonbury lake village

Reconstruction of an Iron Age house at the Peat Moors Centre. The house is based on one found at Glastonbury Lake Village.

A reconstruction of the Glastonbury lake village. (Tracey Croft)

The nearby village of Glastonbury was very different, partly because of the waterlogged nature of the site; it was excavated by Arthur Bulleid and Harold St George Gray more than 80 years ago and many otherwise perishable items have been preserved. It was built on an artificial island or crannog composed of tree trunks and brushwood and was completely surrounded by water, making it accessible only by boat. Alder logs, together with some of oak, ash and birch, had been felled on the shores of the lake and brought to the island, where they were laid in layers at right angles. The surface had then been levelled with bracken and peat, rubble and clay. A close-set wooden palisade around the edge of the site enclosed 1.4 ha. (3.5 acres). The posts, sharply pointed with axes, had been driven down into the peaty bed of the lake.

Within the enclosure were about 80 buildings, which were certainly not all contemporary, and only a few were major dwelling houses. A number of attempts have been made to reinterpret the old excavation report, and the writer is inclined to accept some of the views of the late Professor E.K.Tratman (1970), who considered that the village had passed through two distinct periods of occupation. At first square or rectangular houses were built, supported above the ground on oak piles. The builders were fine carpenters and all the wood was carefully jointed and the houses were skillfully constructed with walls of daubed hurdle work. After a period of abandonment, the artificial island was constructed around the ruins of the old houses, which were replaced by new circular buildings between 5.5 and 8.5 m. (6–9.3 yd) in diameter. They had walls of wattle and daub, floors of clay, some with central hearths and ovens, and reed-thatched roofs. The excavators observed the huts as low mounds, created by the build-up of as many as ten successive clay floors. Eight houses had wooden floorboards.

The most recent study of Glastonbury, by Bryony and John Coles, speculates that the village may have been occupied for 300 to 400 years into the first century AD. They suggest that as well as a series of dwelling houses, the village contained specialized areas for working wood and bone, bronze and iron objects and pottery manufacture. Most weaving and basketry probably took place in individual houses. Because the site was waterlogged numerous wooden objects have survived, including bowls and tubs turned on a pole lathe, containers and baskets, a ladder and a stout door a metre high. Turned axle boxes and wheel spokes belonged to chariots or carts pulled by pony-sized horses which wore iron snaffle bits and bronze terret rings, as well as old-fashioned bone and antler cheek pieces in a late Bronze Age style. The wooden handles of many iron tools such as sickles and saws, knives and billhooks can still be seen in Taunton Museum, together with weaving equipment and loom weights, local glass beads and fine pottery with beautiful flowing linear patterns.

Glastonbury also produced two iron currency bars; these were long iron bars resembling swords with rounded tips. Caesar referred to them in the mid-first century BC as one of three types of currency in use in Britain at that time, the others being coins of bronze and gold. Rotary handmills or querns were replacing the earlier saddle querns and were used to grind mixtures of wheat, barley and oats, some of which were combined with honey to make bread and small cakes or buns. Wild berries, acorns, parsnips, peas and dwarf broad beans were gathered. Meat in the form of mutton and lamb was most common, followed by beef and pork and perhaps horse flesh. This was supplemented with wild birds, including the pelican, and freshwater and sea fish. Perhaps indicating the inhabitants’ relaxations were finds of bone and antler dice and dice-boxes.

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OPEN VILLAGES

Bronze Age House at Flag Fen, Cambridgeshire

Iron Age House at Flag Fen

1300BC, the people in the area built a massive kilometer-long row of posts which runs across the wetland and reaches dry land on either side. Towards the centre, the posts run across a man made timber platform of about a hectare in area. This site was the focus of many religious rites. It may also have served as a defensive barrier and route across the marsh. At Flag Fen, Cambridgeshire.

Scattered amongst the developed hillforts, but more often spreading over eastern England where forts are scarce, a series of settlements which we can best call open villages (some known since about 800 BC) now began to proliferate. An expanding population may have led to overcrowding in single farmsteads and the growth of nucleated clusters of houses in which the occupants could diversify their talents, for instance as metalsmiths, weavers, potters and carpenters, as well as farm and general labourers. Unenclosed round houses with streets and paddocks formed extensive groups which were usually located on the lower lying ground, and seemed to favour the river gravels.

Francis Pryor’s excavations of the Cat’s Water site on the extreme edge of the Fens at Fengate near Peterborough (Cambs) show that it dates from between 400 and 100 BC, and revealed more than 50 circular buildings. Clearly they were not all contemporary, nor were they all used for habitation. It was suggested that not more than a dozen would have been in use at any one time, perhaps occupied by a total of 25 to 30 people together with their animals. In general the houses were placed around the outside of the settlements, whilst the animals were penned in fenced and ditched enclosures in the centre. The site was divided up by numerous drainage ditches, made necessary by the high water-table so close to the Fens. Wild animals, fish and waterfowl supplemented the meat from cattle and sheep which the village produced. There was much evidence for pasture and meadow land around Fengate but cereal cultivation was poorly re-prepresented. Four post granaries were absent and the subsoil was too waterlogged for storage pits. A crucible with tin traces in it suggests that some metallurgy was practised at Cat’s Water.

The construction of a bypass at Little Waltham (Essex) revealed part of an open village settlement. Fifteen circular houses were uncovered dating from about 250 BC. Assuming that the unexcavated area was equally densely occupied, we can estimate a total of 30 to 35 houses. They stood on slightly raised ground above the river Chelmer, and each averaged 12.5 m. (13.7 yd) in diameter. The hut walls were made of wattle and daub panels supported by substantial timbers 0.20 to 0.35 m. (0.22–0.38 yd) thick which stood in deep wall trenches. An inner ring of posts to support the roofs was inferred from the great span of the rafters which would have needed internal support. There were no storage pits at Little Waltham, probably due to the poor soil conditions. Instead 8 four-post granaries were traced and more than 30 two-post drying racks. Bones of cattle, horses, pigs and sheep suggest that a mixed agricultural economy was practised. Pottery bowls of local manufacture were found in large quantities, together with everted-rim and footring bowls transported from the Mucking- Chadwell area of the Thames estuary.

At Mucking, also in Essex, the sites of more than 100 round houses have been uncovered in rescue excavations which are still largely unpublished. Little remained of the actual houses, but the circular drainage gullies that caught the water as it fell from the roofs were clearly visible. Some of the houses were in small garden-like compounds, but most were free-standing. Pits and post holes were common on the site, but were difficult to interpret as they ranged in date from the Bronze Age through to the Anglo-Saxon period.

On the south side of Bredon Hill beneath the hillforts of Bredon and Conderton Camp lies Beckford (Hereford and Worcs), an extensive village of houses and enclosures dating from 250–50 BC and covering several hectares. The enclosures seem to have been non-defensive, their ditches most probably for drainage. Each may have been individually owned. Inside were houses marked by rings of stakes and doorposts, cobbled yards, four-poster granaries and grain storage pits 0.5–1.0 m. (0.55–1.1 yd) deep and 1.0–2.0 m. (1–1–2.2 yd) in diameter. Examination of bones from the site shows that cattle and sheep were the main animals kept, but pigs, dogs and horses were also present. Under one of the cobbled yards a bundle of ten spit-shaped iron ‘currency bars’ was found.

On the north-eastern side of Winchester aerial photography revealed an enclosure on Winnall Down. Excavation has shown that it had a long history beginning in the neolithic period and continuing until medieval times. In the late Bronze Age four possible post-built round houses with west-facing porches were constructed. Later a Dshaped enclosure ditch surrounding half a dozen round houses, 24 storage pits and 19 four-post structures was dated by radiocarbon to the sixth century BC. By the second century BC the ditch had silted up and an open village of 10 round houses had been built over it, together with a large rectangular structure that may have been a sheep-fold, and a group of 80 storage pits to the east, along with some 16 four-posters. Eighteen burials were associated with the village, 12 of them children or infants. They had mostly been buried in crouched positions in quarry hollows and storage pits. The only adult male burial was also the only one with grave goods—a shale bracelet and a bronze thumb ring. The economy of the village seems to have been based like the others on mixed farming, which consisted of rearing sheep, cattle, pigs and horses, and growing sixrow hulled barley and wheat (sown in the autumn) together with beans and peas. The pottery used on the site consisted mainly of saucepan pots common throughout central southern England by the third century BC. Pieces of briquettage vessels, probably used for transporting salt, were also found.

As with the hillforts of the mid-first century BC there is little in the layout of the villages to suggest that they housed a hierarchy; every one seems to have been more or less equal. Currency bars and salt containers are seen by some as symbols of exchange. Perhaps villages could also be exchange centres? In Somerset the marsh villages of Glastonbury and Meare produced a range of semi-exotic goods. Meare Village West stood on the edge of a raised bog [less distance to throw witches]. Its houses had clay floors but very flimsy superstructures suggesting that they might only have been tents. The village was occupied only in the summer when its residents concentrated on the production of a wide range of specialist crafts, including glass beads, loom weights and antler combs. Among the many other materials used in the village were iron, tin and lead, shale, bone, wood and wool. Bryony Coles, one of the excavators of Meare, finds the situation of such a prosperous village in such a wet marginal location puzzling— but perhaps it was deliberate. She suggests that Meare may have been a market centre, a meeting-place, or seasonal fair on the periphery of a number of adjoining communities, sited in a neutral ‘no-man’s-land’ position, rather than a private hillfort: a clever expedient for keeping the peace. For a flourishing rural economy such exchange centres would be essential, and if she is right many more must remain to be identified.