“All of British prehistory is played out here”: Must Farm quarry reveals a 3,000-year story of adaptation
WHITTLESEY, England — There is a brick pit, a chip factory and the edge of Peterborough’s industrial estate within sight, yet the archaeology beneath this Cambridgeshire landscape is extraordinary in both quality and quantity.
That is how Mark Knight, who has directed excavations at Must Farm near Whittlesey since 2004, describes a quarry that has become one of Britain’s most important prehistoric sites. “The deeper we go, the earlier we get,” he said.
The quarry is best known for the discovery of what researchers call the best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found: a 3,000-year-old settlement dubbed Britain’s Pompeii. But two decades of digging have revealed something broader than a single dramatic ruin. They show prehistoric people adapting to a changing landscape thousands of years before the settlement burned down.
“All of British prehistory is being played out here,” said Knight, senior project officer with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.
More than Britain’s Pompeii
Recent finds include pieces of pottery made by the Beaker people, who migrated from central Europe to the British Isles about 4,400 years ago.
The excavations are part of a long-term project with landowner Forterra, which quarries Oxford clay for bricks. Archaeologists have excavated about 37 hectares (91 acres) of the landscape so far, working ahead of clay extraction.
Their latest discoveries included animal tracks, the remains of fence posts, preserved trees, pottery sherds and flints.
A world of farmers and hunters
“We’ve got domestic species, cows and pigs and sheep, but equally, there’s auroch [a huge wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle], boar and deer — so it’s not a fully domesticated world, it’s a world where there’s still a bit of hunting going on,” Knight said.
The evidence suggests Neolithic and early Bronze Age people, from about 4,000 to 2,500 BC, were not settled farmers but moved seasonally across the landscape. Later, they adapted to rising sea levels that inundated the area from about 2,400 BC.
“When the sea comes in, that changes the whole environment and it stays like that for about 200 years, then the fresh water comes back and peat starts forming on top of that,” Knight said.
Life on stilts in a watery world
By the time of the Must Farm settlement, people had learned how to live within a watery world. They built about 10 circular wooden houses on stilts above a river.
“If we’re right in our understanding, it’s one of many such settlements. It’s not an anomaly — it was something that had been done several times before,” Knight said. “And we found it not because we had some great insight, but because that’s where the quarry was.”
Preserved animal tracks found last winter were probably left behind by cattle, herded by early farmers to fresh pasture.
Knight likened the landscape to layers of a cake, with evidence preserved in separate layers of peat, marine silt and then more peat.
“You get to see them undisturbed, unlike when you dig in normal landscapes where the Roman archaeology cuts through the Iron Age archaeology, which cuts through the Bronze Age archaeology — it’s all a big jumble,” he said.
Finds have included complete river channels, log boats, fish traps and weirs, trackways and boundaries.
A reference for prehistoric Britain
The many discoveries have provided a window on how people lived and worked across Britain.
“If you’re studying metalwork in the River Thames, you’ll reference the metalwork that was found at Must Farm and how it’s found in a domestic context,” Knight said. “Our work within the quarry has now become a reference for sites that are less well preserved.”
He added that while the flat, arable Fens landscape “feels very two-dimensional, archaeologically, it’s definitely three-dimensional.”
The scale of the excavation is enormous, and Knight said Forterra quarry staff actively help with the work. The project’s importance extends beyond Must Farm itself: its deep, layered deposits offer an unusually undisturbed record of how communities responded to environmental change over millennia. That record has made the site a benchmark for interpreting prehistoric remains elsewhere, especially where later settlement, farming or development has mixed or damaged the evidence.
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Cambridge Archaeological Unit