 Yn ymlaen, i gyd yn gweithio i chi i'r tynnu, gyda'r musfarn. Mae gwybod, mae gwybod drwsgol, mae'n ddallu, mae'r bwysig, mae'n gwneud, mae'n gwneud, mae'n llehau a'r dda i'r 3,000 ysgol, mae'n ddaliadau, mae'n gwneud, mae'n gwneud. Mae'r ddaliadau, mae'n gwneud, mae'n llwyddo, mae'n gwneud, mae'n gwneud, mae'n gwneud. Mae'n gwneud, mae'n gwneud. Felly, os ydych chi'n cerdyn nhw, sy'n bywch ei ddweud o'r llansgat, ac mae'n bywch ei ddweud o'r llansgat. Mae'n mynd i'ch gweithio'r llun, ond mae'r parwysau gyda'r ysgrifennu a'r llansgat o'r ysgrifennu yn ymddangos i gyflwyno yn y pethau. A bod oed ddwych yn ddweud o'r hynny o'r ddweud o'r llansgat o'r llansgat, oed o'r llansgat arno'r llansgat. a'r hunainhau, i wnaeth i fy modd yn y prif datblygu fyrdd ac yn gwybod yna'r unrhyw ysgrifennu'n gwybod yng nghymru, fel y maid Respoli hwnnw o'r ysgrifennu yma. Mae'n rhaid i wnaeth i chi am fforshiftau, a'r hyn o'r perffindig o fforshiftiadau, mae'n methu i gyd yn yr ysgrifennu Cymroedd, ac i gael yma'r brifuio cydnog, of what's been made possible by their contribution towards these projects. My title, tenure and texture, the reason I wanted to use those terms is that I suppose texture might be a bit obvious, I suppose, working in the fends in the sense that there's lots of sediment and it tends to be quite wet, but there's also a sense of preservation, the idea that we get to see things perhaps we wouldn't see on the normal dryland sites and things. But also I think texture in terms of people's interaction with the ecology, what we might call the social ecology, and then tenure which is something really important to me I think in the sense of looking at the conditions under which land was occupied, the durations and temporalities and the scale of things. And I think if nothing else in my presentation I think it's this idea of what are we looking at within this window into the fends and what does it tell us about the rest of fendland and that the implications. But before I really get started I suppose I'd like to just put us into the context of the fends itself and think about it as a landscape and think about it as flatness, it's horizontal as it's this sort of superficiality of this landscape. A landscape without features, a place that's prostrate, it's a sense that the topography is perhaps sometimes mistaken for it being uninteresting in things and the possibility that there might be more to the fends than what meets the eye on the surface. And what I like about it is this, and this is something that sort of Graham Swith sort of talked about when he wrote the book Waterland was the idea that he chose the fends because he saw it as being this sort of ideal non-setting, this ideal flat bare platform onto which to play out a sort of human story, a narrative. He realised as he finished the book was that the fends became a central character, it had depth that had a complexity about it that actually made the human story all the better. And I think it comes across in this painting of the fends is that there is that sense of a sort of brooding depth and I think if anything I've learnt from working in this landscape is that what it lacks in height it makes up for in depth. And it's that depth and that verticality I think is what expresses the archaeology or allows us to articulate British prehistory in ways that we haven't been able to do perhaps on other excavations. And it's not just about the fact that it's wet and it's not just about organic preservation, it's actually about sediment interceding and keeping palences apart and articulating past patterns of occupation. So that's the other thing I think I want to get across in my presentation is that sense of a landscape, the sort of paradox I suppose of the fends is that it's full of things it's just almost impossible to find and how we go about trying to reconcile that paradox. So we can locate ourselves on a map of England and we're a big red blob where the fends we are 100% obscured according to the English landscapes and identities project. We are covered in a thick blanket of peat. It's this sense of a black hole, a sense of a landscape that we know lots about it sort of perimeters, it's ages but very little about it. It's sort of deep thick blanket of peat and silt. So it's trying to sort of think about the scale of that space I suppose and its relationship to the sort of the landscapes around it. But of course it's not really that obscured and it's not really just a blank sort of layer of peat, it's actually, it has a subtlety about it both in terms of its sediment but also in terms of its topography. And this image is a lidar generated image of Finland and it basically it shows relief, it shows topography and it gives colour to that. And what happens is that it starts to give this landscape grain and it starts to give you a sort of sense that there is something more going on than just the sort of flat prostrate sort of space. The other thing that this does for me I think in terms of an image of the Fens is it gives you a sense of the altitude. So you can see that the southern half of the Fens is the same colour as the wash, it's the sense that we're already starting at sea level before we even start sort of excavating into those sediments. And what I want you to focus on in this map is if I go with the cursors you can see there's a little sort of fish shaped island just here with a big blue dot on the end. Well that fish shaped island is the island of Whittlesey and the blue dot are the Whittlesey Brit pits and that's where I've been spending most of my time and that's the sort of aperture on these sort of deep sediments that I've been very fortunate to work in. So if we go in a bit closer we can see those blue dots, their colour is basically expressing their depth, they are the biggest holes in Finland and you can see how they cut big chunks out of the island of Whittlesey. You can also see the river Neen in its canalised form cutting across the sediment. But perhaps more importantly in terms of our story is that you can see these sort of dendritic patterns or formal channels and rivers and things that are starting to come to the surface of the Fennan Basin. And it's those rivers that form the context of our investigation. So if we take the colour away and just go on relief and on topography we can see that island again, you can see the big holes of the Brit pits so here are the Brit pits in here. And if we colour that image in we can create the land and we can see how the island of Whittlesey sort of emerges out of the sediment. We can also see, we've got these buildings here are the foreshore of Peterborough, that's Fengate. This is Francis Prize landscapes of prehistoric field systems and this here is known as the flag Fenn Basin. But what this image does is it starts to sort of dissipate this idea of a little embayment on the edge of the Fenns and starts to bring it into the greater Fennan context and things. And we can do that even more by highlighting one of these dendritic channels that goes between the high ground. And this is the Mus Arm Paleo Channel and this is one of many of these rivers that are starting to come to the surface within the Fenns. And over the past three or four years I've been working with students from Birkbeck and we've been going out into farmers fields and tracking this channel across the top of the Fenns in order to take ourselves out of the quarry and think about the context of our site and the sort of greater story of Fennan itself. So if we were to come off of Whittlesey Island and dig a trench and into that sediment we'd see this deposit model. And this is very reminiscent of Grand Clark's Shippey Hill section, this sense of what he called the delicate chronological scale. This is lower peat fen clay upper peat. This is the Mesolithic at the very base, the Neolithic in the lower peat, the early Bronze Age above the fen clay and then the upper silts being the sort of Roman deposits across the top. But what's more important about this image is what's called the pre-Flandrian surface, this gradient that disappears beneath that sediment and gives you this sense of this concave shaped landscape that's filled up over time full of sediment. And what's happening is that the farmers are plowing this landscape and eroding that silt and exposing that peat is that the channels like shocks of lightning are appearing on the surface of this sediment and we're starting to see them very clearly. And you can see the road that sort of traverses across the channel there and these roads are very interesting to drive along because wherever a channel crosses them you get this profile, you get this bump and that double bump that dip in the centre is in effect that's our channel, that's what we've been investigating. And when we take the Birkbeck students out into this landscape, if you go fast enough the students on the back seat bang the heads on the ceiling when you hit the rock. So it's a sense that you're able to actually find earthworks in a landscape that apparently is sort of flat in its topography. So you can see here how where the channel goes under the road the road sinks down into the channel itself. And here with the students you can see I'm stood on the top of the banks of the channel and they're stood inside the dip. So you can see how the topography is subtle but nevertheless it's very informative. And likewise we even get soil marks where we can see the pale seats over side and the dark seats running through the centre. And occasionally when farmers clean out their dikes we're able to jump down inside those ditches and see these channels expressed in the side and look for artefacts and just get some sort of characterisation of these channels. But the problem is that each time we do this these are very narrow apertures. They are thin sort of windows on this vast landscape of deep sediment and things. So it's always a sort of tantalising sort of glimpse but never really that sort of depth that you want to get at. When we're sort of relying on the sediment being brought up and sorting through it with metal detectors and pulling out fragments of beaver skeleton and lamb bones and things like that. And I think in a way this sort of gives you a sort of sense of what we understand about Finland in general. In a sense that this model I put up on the screen of the upland and then the fen basin with this sort of thick wad of sediment in it is that the curve, that sort of S-shaped curve in a way represents the sort of visibility. So you can see why we know lots about the upland and we know quite a bit about the fen edge but we know very little about the depths of the fen and basin itself. And in a way I feel as in my time working in the fen and I've sort of followed that curve. I started up about four metres above sea level and I'm now currently working about four metres below sea level. And on that journey going down that edge is the sense of the sort of realisation or the articulation of this landscape. Now I can put another curve on this image which is the curve of preservation. So this sense that the upland gives you this sort of easy access to the archaeology but it tends to be very poorly preserved. And you can see also why the fen edge has become to characterise the fen because it's a sort of meeting of the two curves. A sense that there's still some visibility but also there is some enhanced preservation. But where I'm working now I feel like I've got the sort of best of both worlds. I'm both deep but I've also got this exaggerated preservation as well. So that's the landscape I want to take you into. So how do I do that? Well here you go. This is Wittlesey brick pit. This is the Musfong quarry. This is this aperture into that deep sediment. And at the base of that you can see the Oxford clays. You can see the Pleistocene gravels. And then you can see a section again that would be familiar with Grand Clark, the lower peat, the fen clay and the upper peat. And you can see various river channels cutting into it. And if you look into the background you can see the chimneys of the power station of where the flag fen causeway meets Peterborough, the mainland. And what's interesting about this image is that the two characters stood at the bottom of this section. One is an archaeologist and one is a geologist. And you know when you're getting deep in archaeology is when you start coming across geologists in the same space. And it's that sense really that we've been given an opportunity within this pit where we're not drowning, where we're not being suffocated, we're not having sections collapsing on our heads. We're actually able to explore these sediments in a way that is just, you know, I can imagine Grand Clark seeing this and just thinking what an opportunity it would be to get to the bottom of the fence in such an easy way. And it's that opportunity afforded by the quarry itself. So what I'm trying to do now is look at a landscape not from the surface down but from the bottom up and actually bring that sediment back in and the history of that sediment. And the knowledge that the sediment commensurate with British prehistory, it is the Holocene. So if we look at the flag fen base and we take all the various investigations that's been going on around the edge of it, including Fengate and Bradley Fen and our excavations down here at Musfarn, we're able to create a contour, a pre-Flandrian surface. And we're able to give that contour a sort of tone. And then we're able then to actually reintroduce that sediment into this landscape. So what we're finding is as we look at the base of all of that peat and silt is that we start off terrestrial and we end up aquatic and it's that's happening over time. So we can reintroduce the sediment and as we do that over time, so we're going from the early Bronze Age to the middle Bronze Age right through to the Iron Age, you can see how the flag fen basin is being created, you can see how Wittlesey becomes an island and you can see how the shoreline of Fengate is created. So this landscape is dynamic and a sense that settlement is being displaced by the introduction of the sediment as well. So that's the context, that's the location of Musfarn and that's its relationship to flag fen. Now I could have come here today and talked about a neolithic landscape made up of oval boroughs and flint scatters and things and a landscape that would look like any other landscape in southern Britain. It's a river valley, it's surrounded by monuments and that's the image that you see on the left hand side. But instead I'm going to be talking about the flag fen basin. So the image on the right hand side, so you can see the sort of little fen embainment, you can see the field systems of Fengate and of Bradley Fen and you can see our paleo channel coming in and going up through Peterborough. And it's that landscape that is the context of the Musfarn timber platform. It's also the context of the flag fen causeway and also of the causeway that we find at Musfarn. And you start to see how this landscape starts to become sort of integrated and then the sort of connections that we have between the different features. So back to our big section. So because we're doing the end of the story, we're looking at the top of the section again, you can see that big dark smile over on the right hand side. This here is our paleo channel. This is our investigations. You can also see there are lots of V cuts underneath those. And it's interesting what happens to rivers in the Fens. At the beginning of our story, we could walk down the edge of the gravel terraces and we could have gone for a swim or used the river valley as our means of transport and things. But as those sediments are introduced into that landscape, the rivers end up becoming detached or dislocated from the land itself. And we end up where basically we're living on the land but the rivers are now separated from us by marshland. And it's that dislocation I think is what's going on at Musfarm itself. People try to reconcile that relationship to the rivers. The river valleys are the conduits, they are the networks, they are the routeways through this landscape. So it's no surprise at this moment in this diagram is when the flag fen causeway and the musfarm causeway and things like that are being constructed. But also you'll see in this smile at the top there, you can see our channel. We've been excavating that channel since 2009 and here it is in its glory, four metres of sediment. It's fresh water, it dates to 1600 BC at the bottom and 100 BC at the top. So it has 1500 years of silt and that silt is forming in a very still sluggish way. There's nothing dynamic about this river channel, it's a canal, it's a linear lake in its formation and things. As we excavate this channel at its base we're finding fishwears dating to about 1600, 1500 BC and they are still intact, they are there as woven pieces of wood forming these chevron shapes across the channel. In an association with these fishwears we're finding fish traps and in a structure 300 metres of river channel we have 28 of these fish traps dotted along the length of the channel itself and all coming back to radiocarbon dates of 1600, 1500 BC so they're middle bronze age in doubt and they sit in that lower profile of that river channel. In association with those traps we also found nine logboats again within that single stretch of the channel and these boats have a date range from the middle of the bronze age right through to the middle of the iron age. We've got boats made from oak, boats made from lime, complete boats, boats that look like Cambridge pumps and you can see in this image actually you can see the scale of our excavation you can see how our channel is being preserved by the nature of the build of the sediment so there's a real sort of absence here of truncation there's a real sense here of preservation not just of the organic but also of the landscape itself of the spaces that these boats were actually being played out in and there's a real sense I think that when we were excavating this site we weren't necessarily doing what we thought was normal orthodox archaeology there was a sort of feeling that we were actually I don't know this is going to sound a bit strange but a real sense that if we got a bit quicker about what we're doing we'd catch the buggers up it was as if they were just around the bend sort of thing this sort of sense of the articulation the way things appeared to be in situ and this is the middle iron age boat right towards the sort of upper part of the channel and what's great about the channel is is that because it has this chronology or this sediment accretion is that we can put the boats in their sequence so the boat at the bottom here is at the bottom of the channel or the boat at the top is sort of towards the top of the channel so we get a sense here not only are we seeing a sense of articulation about how the channel's used but also we're seeing material culture played out through time same time as the fish traps and the fish ways and the boats we also started finding lots of metalwork so we're getting spears with the wooden shafts still attached to them swords with the pommel still present and swords even with their wooden handles and their wooden scabbards still present so the sword on the right hand side is a late the 10 it's an iron sword and the sword on the left hand side is a leaf shaped sword you can see it's pommel in the box below and just like the boats we can place that metalwork in that same sequence so we have middle bronze age rapids towards the base of the channel and the late the 10 swords towards the top you see what's happening here you feel like it's made very easy for you as an archaeologist in order to try and understand the sort of... I don't know how things are being played out both in space and in time so that's the channel that's what we investigated back in 2009 10, 11 and 12 and you can see that the sort of the arrangement here is the sort of v-shaped ways and the fish traps and the boats and things coming round and I want to focus on the Musfarm timber platform and that red rectangle and a thin stream from that section of the channel and a site that we started excavating just over a year ago and basically give you a sort of sense of what happened in that excavation and our understanding of that site and it's a relationship to the landscape description I've given you so far so this is the quarry and you can see a big white rectangle with a red line around it that's our investigations on the edge of the quarry we put up a big tent basically a big warehouse over the excavation and it really has enabled us to do something very important I think in terms of the excavation of this site which is that we could dig it in its entirety we were able to not worry about covering it and uncovering it and constantly basically stepping over what we just excavated we were able to come into the door each morning and get straight back on with the excavation and it meant that we were able to articulate context and there's a real sense here of a dynamic of a piece of wetland archaeology so this is inside our shed and it gives you a sense of the environment and things, the scaffold going up you can see the wood coming up through the sediment and this is our daily routine so a lot of the time we find ourselves suspended off planks dangling down with sponges and wetting wood and removing silt and things but also the intensity of our sampling and the dealing with the sheer intensity of wooden artefacts and equally at the same time we were taking the sediment out and pushing it through a 4mm mesh this is a shopping trolley I think it's courtesy of Morrison's and you can see we've got a shopping basket there but essentially we were able to push that sediment through and really be quite microscopic about the sort of detail so that sort of circle, that pie chart of artefacts there includes spools of pottery and carlsine bone and fish scales and fish teeth and charcoal and things like that but the predominant thing about the site was this sense of the conjugation the sense that here is a timber structure that got burnt down and this sort of crocodile scaling on the wood was the sort of common theme of the excavation but also of the rest of the material culture but also I suppose the thing that Flavigas did ask and all visitors that came to the site was the sheer sort of intensity but also again the tightening of the timbers themselves and things so here's one of the roof fans within the structure but I just want to give you a sense of our recording technique so this is photogrammetry you can see that we're able then to draw the individual timbers which in turn enable us to create this plan so the white box you see is the limit of our excavation and what you see in here is the wood mass so to give you sort of an introduction to this most of the horizontal timbers were charred and we're part of the superstructure and all of the vertical timbers were uncharred but were waterlogged and were part of the foundations of that superstructure and were within the river channel itself the channel basically goes across our image and if we take the wood away we get back to a series of posts and it's this pattern that we're trying to disentangle and understand about the sort of history of the site and you'll notice that there's a sort of band of post going across sort of diagonally across this group going along here and this represents an earlier feature in our site's story and these are giant oak piles driven into the channel regularly spaced they're characterised by the fact that they're either cut into the square or octagonal forms they've lost their bark and their sapwood and they've given us a dendro- chronological felling date of spring 1284 BC so we actually have a causeway going across this part of our site that predates the first alignment at Flagfett and this causeway is characterised by these large oak piles sometimes driven metres into the underlying sediment and each one was characterised also by these handles that were carved on the side you can see them, it's a very common factor on each of these uprights the deposition associated with this causeway or bridge or post alignment going across our channel was perhaps as expected mostly to do with metalwork so this sort of reminiscent of the sort of flagfen story but we were finding middle bronze age rapiers loop spears but also this wonderful coit headed pin going along the sort of south-west inside of the causeway itself and in addition we were also finding these huge timbers that once spanned across the top so the sense of this sort of piece of timber architecture but also what we're recognising is that this thing had collapsed and was covered in sediment before our settlement was constructed so there was a dislocation in that story so back to our plan back to our wood mass we can start to think about the settlement and there's palisade that encloses it and the raised walkway that was sat along its edge and then the identification of individual structures sat within there and when we first started excavating the site I think we sort of felt like because we were digging these sort of pile drawings we thought all of our buildings would be rectangular and shape and things and it came as quite a surprise that they were circular and they were sort of 8 metres in diameter and ever so slightly cliched in the sense that they look like a roundhouse that you dig up on a dryland and things there is this sort of familiarity about their plan so this is structure one or roundhouse one you can see the palisade running down the right hand side of the image and you can see the posts and the fan of the roof rafters sitting in the river settlement and if I highlight the posts you can see that we've got the red line of the palisade with a raised walkway running on the inside and then you've got that outer blue ring of 10 posts and an inner green ring of 6 posts that forms the sort of structure or the foundations of the superstructure of roundhouse one and then in turn we can put the rafters back on and then there's a raised walkway in the background it's a sense here of the sort of articulation this idea that not many of you have found structures but the roof still on and that we were able to take the roof away and what's important about these images is that Ian Tyres is doing the dendrochronology has looked at the tree ring data for the palisade and the oak piles and the oak rafters and so far he's unable to give us an exact date but he's telling us that they were all failed at the same time so here we have a settlement that was built in one go we have a year zero we just don't know when that year zero is but we know that it's a winter sometime in the lake Bronze Age so here's a settlement that's built as one phase the other thing he's telling us about this is that when he looks at the burnt timbers of the roof rafters there's some distortion to the tree rings around the outside and he thinks that if these oak rafters were seasoned that could not have happened so not only does he think the settlement was built in one but he thinks the wood was still green when the settlement got burnt down and oak takes about a year to season so there's a possibility that our settlement went up and within 12 months it was burnt down so here's the palisade and it's in its sort of glory in the sense of ash poles with the bark still on them you can see the tool marks of the cushing of these and a sense of there's a sort of an expediency about them these are hundreds of ash poles someone's been able to collect them similar diameter quickly cut a pencil into them and drive them into the river sills equally the oak posts of the roundhouses you can see they're three metres into the settlement they've still got their bark on them and there's nothing remarkable about these individual uprights they're basically trees with their branches cut off and a point stuck on the end and they're driven into the settlement itself and here's one that you can see is taking it out of the ground the sort of scale of it but also the woodworking as well and it's oak and ash just that's the species of the settlement and you can see the sort of intensity of material and the sort of detail that we've got to record so back to our structure so the next thing of articulating it and finding the roof and things is to take the roof off and go inside our roundhouses and see what was inside so that's what we did we took away the roof rafters and as we were doing that we were recognising that timbers themselves were full of information so because this fire event had happened we could see where other timbers were resting against parts of that structure and basically masking them from the fire so you can see on this one there's a series of little dots where there were uprights stuck on this mortise beam but the general sort of deposit that we were investigating was made up of collapsed architecture burnt material culture turfs clay and thatch-like clumps and what's more important I think or more interesting about that also is the sense that there was no depth to this deposit there was a sense that there was a river happening there was this collapse of all this material and then it went back to being a river again so when we first started looking at the section we thought that it was very conflated but now with that information from the dendroponology we understand that that conflation is actually this is real this is a very manifestation of the duration of the settlement it's gone up, it's caught fire and it's come back down again so there's a sort of moment in the channel's history made up of this sort of ash rain and material culture around the outside of the buildings we were finding these sort of formative middens things with animal bones, pot sherds caches of little small round pebbles broken bits of whithing and things and in the majority not affected by the fire so they were already happening before the settlement had burned down and this was giving us some indication about what was actually going on with the settlement itself so the predominant animal bone coming from these sort of formative middens was to our surprise made up of red deer row deer and wild boar on top of that we were also finding cow sheep, pig, dog but what we weren't finding were fen and species there wasn't that sense that we were coming across wild boar and things like that inside the buildings we've got a very different pattern inside the structures we were finding three to six month old lamb skeletons or disarticulated lambs that have been butchered or cleaver down the centre and from our on-site sieving we're also now starting to recognise that we've got carbonised sheep poo we've got basically lamb pellets from inside the structures as well so you start to see the sort of level of detail that's coming out from this and there's a real sense here that inside the structure that things tended to be either complete or in alticulation but outside the structure they were fragmented so there's this sort of contrast between inside and outside of Roundhouse 1 and we've got a horse spine here and we've got the skull of a dog and amongst that inside the structures we're finding complete pots and complete wooden vessels see here these are some of the wooden vessels and we've got over 180 wooden vessels from the site and that goes from everything from buckets to platters to bowls to handles hafs and things like that a real sense and again you can see the burning patterns on those to show that they were once up in the settings themselves and this is a stitched bark sort of platter and you can actually see there's a ceramic pot sort of cutting through where the base fit there and then pots lots of pots and pots of different sizes so we've got everything from that tiny little finger bowl right through to you see this little pedestal cup and these sort of courseware bowls and then including these giant storage vessels, vessels about this sort of size and when we started digging this one we had one big storage vessel we took part of it away and there was a medium size one inside of that and we took that away and there was a small one inside of that so it's that sort of nested sets, this is the John Lewis wedding set sort of caught up in our in our excavation and things and this sense really I suppose you sort of start to realise what's going on here we've got a settlement that's built, it goes up and it comes down quickly and we've got all these complete pots, there's a sort of it's as if there hasn't been time to break things or even there hasn't been time to use things there's a sense here of this sort of we've moved in and we furnished it and again another pot inside a pot so there's a sense of this sort of I don't know the kitchen ways the vessels of the settlement so we've got everything from tiny cups right up to large storage vessels and Matt Brudenell, our pottery specialist is saying the other thing that's really interesting about these vessels is that they're all the same, there's a uniformity of form and there's sense that it may be to use his expression maybe we're looking at the hand of a single potter that's caught within this settlement as well so we've got the sort of full set and then what comes with these pots is their content so in that fire event the food remains inside were being carbonised there's this sense that we've got these sort of crème brûlées in there these toasted tops and things and the pot that I've showed on the top here with the food crust, when we excavated that we found that there was a wooden spoon still stuck in the top so this sort of the various analogies to this site I don't know the Pompeii or the Fens and things you can see where some of those stories come from in terms of what we're finding and Biowark are currently looking at the lipids and the organic residues within these pots and trying to get up the actual sort of the food remains themselves so we're getting household inventories but we're also we're getting a sense here I think of what was on the menu and things like that and in that spread we're also finding saddle querns and what's interesting is that the saddle querns appear to be sort of one or two per household so and I quite like this in a sense that the saddle querns almost give us a sort of balance to the material culture because if we started finding 20 saddle querns per roundhouse we'd stop being suspicious about the sort of quantities but because we're getting sort of one or two per house it makes you wonder that maybe there's surprising amounts of pots and things and maybe it's not great numbers maybe this is typical of what's happening within a later Bronze Age roundhouse and this is one of these flint saddle querns from inside structure one you can see it shattered basically it's caught on the fire it's hit the water and it's exploded and you can see we've got beads as well coming out of the structure so this is a the orange bead in the centre is a amber bead there's a jet bead in the background there's a stone bead in the foreground then it's surrounded by these sort of green and black glass beads I think there's a collection here of 22 some sort of composite necklace was in the northeastern quadrant of structure one you can see the amber bead here you can see how it has also been affected by the fire and then you can see the glass beads from the same group and Julian Henderson and Andrew Talon looking at the position of these, the sort of chemical make-up and things are saying that they're made from plantash and the suggestion is that they're actually coming from the Mediterranean and they are 9th century in date so they're in currency these aren't curated items these are things that are part of the sort of the world or contemporary with our world and then perhaps most spectacularly is the sense that in terms of the carbonised meat sort of organic preservation is the textile range so these are bobbins of spunfred wound around them you can see one in close up here we have 22 of these across the excavation they're occurring in most of the most of the structures little balls of spunfred I'll just give you some sort of and this is what I was saying earlier about the idea of texture I suppose in terms of our excavation sort of knotted bags and then this very finely woven cloth and in fact consistently across our textiles they're all plant fibres they're all being made from flats and nettles and line bars and things like that and there's this weft twining as well and perhaps just to sort of must form sort of keeps giving you these sort of surprises and things these are plant fibres that have not been spun they've been aligned and they've been put into bundles and we've got I think it's sort of like 17 of these or within structure one so there's sense that there's actual textile production going on within the structures as well and loom weights and spindle wiles and what looks like the sort of earliest evidence of cricket bats in the United Kingdom these are cloth beaters again from I think once from structure one and then adding to that sort of sense of the sort of outside the structures of things is the wooden wheel the tripod wheel and what's nice is that we've got fragments of a second wheel near Barley so the sense that we've got two wheels so rather than it just being a spare the sort of sense that maybe that we've got some sort of cart or something and what's nice about this object also I think is it starts to sort of summarise a lot of else of what's going on when there's settlement in the sense that there's this sort of conundrum here living in a river in the Fens and yet we have a settlement that's made up of terrestrial trees animals we're getting barley and wheat and then here we've got wheels and things so this sort of link between our settlement and the adjacent land I mean maybe I should just shut up and just press the button and give you slides really but what I'm trying to do is I'm not trying to show off I'm trying to give you a sense of intensity I think the sheer quantity of stuff that's coming out of these structures so lots of tools a lot of gadgets this is a billow and that ratio of sort of 60% tools 24% weapons and things and most of the households containing at least 10 metalwork items the majority of the tools or the largest proportion were axes and a lot of these things were also still hafted so you can see we've got a hafted spear and a gouge and two axes we also find a wooden bucket that had the remnants of a sort of scrap whore so this is where most of the weapons came from so broken up swords and spears and things caught within with wind in the bucket and then a wooden haft without a metal tool and then a hafted axe but there's not burnt and this was found almost like a foundation deposit underneath Roundhouse 1 pre-confligation so to come to the end really I suppose it's just a sense that this is the beginning I suppose of our interrogation or scrutiny of these patterns of material culture in a sense that we have a Roundhouse that has this sort of patterns of deposits so the pots tend to be in the north-eastern quarter the metalwork on the eastern edge and the textiles in the south-eastern quarter and this seems to be repeated across each of our structures the sense here of routine or common practice across the individual Roundhouses and also a sense of the architecture so we've got things like redeposited turfs and lumps of clay that have come from the adjacent dryland you'll see here some of those lumps of clay these are basically BC horizons from the sort of Fenged shoreline lumps of sort of burnt fatch or bedding the causeways and then potential candidates for these sort of lightly woven floors and walls, these sort of sprung surfaces and then these unusual sort of diagonal posts sat beneath the floors forming these sort of arches and things which perhaps was basically supporting raised floors so we think we excavated this in profile so the uprights the collapsed roof rafters the pots, the clays, the sediments and things and we think that maybe that once upon a time it looked something like this that these were stilted Roundhouses built above the watercourse and that burnt down the problem we've got I suppose is that we've got two stories at the moment we've got one which is the Institute of Middens and the uprights, the unburnt side of the site and the other is this sort of ash rain sitting up here and what we're trying to do now is is to bring those two things back together again and recreate that articulation of our site we also think that we've got about half the site the quarry was first being extracted back in the late sixties and we think we've basically lost the other side of the channel so we've got five structures again within the palisade enclosure and maybe it looks something like this in elevation so we've got a bit of a contradiction here I suppose in a sense that we've got a wetland environment, we're in a river in the Fens but we've got to all intents and purposes a dryland economy, these people their world is made up of oak and ash and of deer and boar and things like that and it's quite interesting in a sense that the story was within the Fens that you moved out into the Fenerg or into the Fens because you wanted to exploit that environment for all of its resources and things and these guys seem to be not about that at all, there's a different world going on here and also this sense of the duration of our settlement so our year's era, let's say January the winter of, I don't know our understanding is from the dental information is that we're pushing our world into the ninth century BC so sometime after 900 but before 1800 BC was the time of our settlement and it's that idea that because we've got three to six month old lambs at an articulation but also we've got unshed antlers still attached to the skulls of red deers that perhaps within the window of the seasoned oak maybe this site's being burnt down in September October of whatever year that was we're hoping that if Dendro doesn't answer the question that free radio carbon dating we should get within on a sort of wiggle matching within 30 years of the actual date of the settlement itself so I've given you a story I suppose of two timber structures one was a causeway which was about basically linking a piece of dryland to another piece of dryland it was about that guessing around the edge of the flagfen basin and the second was about people that were basically purposefully building their structures on a river in the fence but at the same time had a strong time to adjacent dryland they were still farmers and there was still that sort of terrestrial personality about their world and things it sort of brings into the idea of the sort of sense of the sort of European data the idea of the sort of lake dwellings where they talk in their landscapes about the sort of the Swiss lake villages as the lake starts to rise people leave those landscapes and move up onto the higher ground and become farmers they leave that sort of lakeland economy and things whereas in our world it seems to be that we've got farmers in the middle Bronze Age living up on the dryland and as the waters are rising they're actually going out and living on these rivers of terrestrial character so it's that sense I think it's really that they are tied to these waterways these are their conduits, these are their networks these are the spaces that they want to occupy what I find interesting is that we didn't go and excavate the site because we knew it was there we had some great insight in terms of our research we went there because there happened to be a large hole in that part of the landscape so either we are the luckiest archaeologists ever or what we're actually demonstrating is that this channel is like this elsewhere along its length and that what we are actually seeing is pattern on a much bigger scale and that's the implication so I might be guilty sometimes of trying to sort of, I don't know play down the sort of the importance of the settlement or I don't know, accentuate its sort of mundaneness and things but I'm I don't know determined I suppose that I don't want my swarm to become some sort of anomaly of preservation and for it to actually be about its context and about its story within the landscape itself and what it might tell us about the rest of Finland and what might happen if you can take away four or five metres of settlement what you might find within that landscape so I'll leave you with an image of the Finland Basin and all those ever dendritic channels and all that possibility and the hope that maybe we can get Forterra to pick up their brick pit and start moving it around the landscape or something like that and the fact that the quarry takes so many years to advance that I live long enough to see the next, I don't know, 20 years of that settlement being exposed so on that I'll say thank you very much