(CNN) — It’s late summer 2,850 years ago. A fire engulfs a stilt village perched above a boggy, slow-moving river that weaves though the wetlands of eastern England.
The tightly packed roundhouses, built from wood, straw, turf, and clay just nine months earlier, go up in flames.
The inhabitants flee, leaving behind all their belongings, including a wooden spoon in a bowl of half-eaten porridge.
There is no time to rescue the fattened lambs, which are trapped and burnt alive.
The scene is a vivid and poignant snapshot, captured by archaeologists, of a once thriving community in late Bronze Age Britain known as Must Farm, near what’s now the town of Peterborough.
The research team published a two-volume monograph on Wednesday that describes their painstaking $1.4 million (£1.1 million) excavation and analysis of the site in the county of Cambridgeshire.
Described by the experts involved as an “archaeological nirvana,” the site is the only one in Britain that lives up to the “Pompeii premise,” they say, referencing the city forever frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that has yielded unparalleled information about ancient Rome.
“In a typical Bronze Age site, if you’ve got a house, you’ve probably got maybe a dozen post holes in the ground and they’re just dark shadows of where it once stood.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll get a couple of shards of pottery, maybe a pit with a bunch of animal bones.
This was the complete opposite of that process. It was just incredible,” said Chris Wakefield of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at the University of Cambridge, an archaeologist and member of the 55-person team that excavated the site in 2016.
"All the axe marks had been used to shape and sculpt the wood. All of those looked fresh, like they could have been done last week by someone,” Wakefield added.
The remarkably preserved condition of the site and its contents enabled the archaeological team to draw comprehensive new insights into Bronze Age society — findings that could overturn the current understanding of what everyday life was like in Britain during the ninth century BC.
Must Farm domesticity — and a mystery
The site, which dates to eight centuries before Romans arrived in Britain, revealed four roundhouses and a square entranceway structure, which stood approximately 6.5 feet (2 meters) above the riverbed and were surrounded by a 6.5-foot (2-meter) fence of sharpened posts.
The archaeologists believe the settlement was likely twice as big. However, quarrying in the 20th century destroyed any other remains.
Though charred from the fire, the remaining buildings and their contents were extremely well preserved by the oxygen-starved conditions of the fens, or wetlands, and included many wooden and textile items that rarely survive in the archaeological record.
Together, traces of the settlement paint a picture of cozy domesticity and relative plenty.
The researchers unearthed 128 ceramic artifacts — jars, bowls, cups and cookware — and were able to deduce that 64 pots were in use at the time of fire.
The team found some stored pots neatly nested.
Textiles found at the site made from flax linen had a soft, velvety feel with neat seams and hems, although it wasn’t possible to identify individual pieces of clothing.
Wooden artifacts included boxes and bowls carved from willow, alder and maple, 40 bobbins, many with threads still attached, various tools, and 15 wooden buckets.
“One of those buckets … on the bottom of it were loads and loads of cut marks, so we know that people living in that Bronze Age kitchen when they needed an impromptu chopping board, were just flipping that bucket upside down and using that as a chopping surface,” Wakefield said.
“It’s those little moments that build together to give a richer, fuller picture of what was going on.”
The circumstances of the event that brought it all to a halt are still a bit of a mystery.
The researchers believe the fire took place in late summer or early autumn because skeletal remains of the lambs kept by one household showed the animals, typically born in spring, were three months to six months old.
However, what exactly caused the devastating fire remains unclear. The blaze could have been accidental or deliberately started.
The researchers uncovered a stack of spears with shafts over 10 feet (3 meters) long at the site, and many experts think that warfare was common in the time period.
The team worked with a forensic fire investigator but ultimately couldn’t identify a specific “smoking gun” clue pointing to the cause.
“An archaeological site is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. At a typical site you have 10 or 20 pieces out of 500,” Wakefield said.
“Here, we had 250 or 300 pieces and we still couldn’t get the complete picture on how this big fire broke out.”
Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, described both the report and the site “as exceptional.” He wasn’t involved in the research.
“The fire may have been disastrous for the inhabitants but it is a blessing for archaeologists, a unique snapshot of life in the Bronze Age,” he said via email.
Upending ideas about Bronze Age society
The contents across the four preserved houses were “remarkably consistent."
Each one had a tool kit that included sickles, axes, gouges, and handheld razors used to cut hair or cloth.
With almost 538 square feet (50 square meters) of floor space in the largest, each of the dwellings appeared to have distinct activity zones comparable to rooms in a modern home.
“By plotting the positions of all these finds — pots, loomweights, tools, and even sheep droppings, the archaeological team have reconstructed the houses’ internal use of space,” Parker Pearson noted.
“The kitchen area was in the east, the storage and weaving area in the south and southeast with the penning area for lambs, and the sleeping area in the northwest, though we don’t know where the doorway was for each house.”
Not all the items were of practical use, such as 49 glass beads plus others made of amber.
Archaeologists also unearthed a woman’s skull, smooth from touch, possibly a keepsake of a lost loved one.
Some of the items the researchers found will go on display starting April 27 in an exhibition titled “Introducing Must Farm: A Bronze Age Settlement” at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery.
Lab analysis of biological remains revealed the types of food the community once consumed.
A pottery bowl imprinted with the finger marks of its maker held a final meal — a wheat grain porridge mixed with animal fat.
Chemical analyses of the bowls and jars showed traces of honey along with deer, suggesting the people who used the dishes might have enjoyed honey-glazed venison.
Ancient excrement found in waste piles below where the houses would have stood showed that the community kept dogs that fed on scraps from their owners’ meals.
And human fossilized poop, or coprolites, showed that at least some inhabitants suffered from intestinal worms.
The waste piles, or middens, were one line of evidence that showed how long the site was occupied, with a thin layer of refuse suggesting the settlement was built nine months to a year before it went up in flames.
"Two other factors supported that line of reasoning," Wakefield said.
“The second was that a lot of the wood that was used in the construction was unseasoned, it was still effectively green, it hadn’t been long in position,” he said.
“The third one is that we have a lack of the kind of insects and animals that are associated with human habitation."
"It wouldn’t be long before beetles would worm (in) … but there’s no evidence of any of that in any of the 18,000 plus timbers.”
The fact that the site, with its rich and varied contents, was in use for only a year upended the team’s preconceived “visions of everyday life” in the ninth century BC.
It may suggest that Bronze Age societies were perhaps less hierarchical than traditionally thought, according to the 1,608-page report.
“We are seeing here not the accumulation of a lifetime, but just a year’s worth of materials,” the authors noted in the report.
“It suggests that artefacts such as bronze tools and glass beads were more common than we often imagine and that their availability may not in fact have been restricted.”
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question: what is a tory?? i saw you post about it and i've been hearing it around but i have no idea what it means. sorry if i sound dumb or ignorant or something but like i'm just genuinely confused
You're not dumb or ignorant, don't worry! I sometimes forget that only Britain is saddled with the specific Tory curse.
'Tory' refers to a member of the Conservative party, which is the right wing political party who are currently in power in the UK, much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone who isn't a white man who went to Eton and has £4mil hidden in an offshore account in Jersey. They're a really lovely bunch of people, whose primary goals are pretty much making themselves richer, making their friends richer, making poor people poorer, looking down at poor people for being poor, letting poor people freeze or starve to death in winter, blaming immigrants, demonising asylum seekers, demonising queer people, demonising poor people, killing disabled people, dismantling the healthcare system, evading tax, helping their friends to evade tax, and profiting enormously from all of the above due to their own financial interests.
As an example, during the peak of the Covid pandemic, one Tory peer (Michelle Mone) profited by £29m by recommending that the government enter a contract for a specific private company to supply the UK's PPE, and then funneling the money into her own account. She was found out eventually, and after a public furore the government agreed to investigate it, but she's absolutely not the only one who did similar things during the pandemic. Plenty of other MPs lobbied for companies that they had financial interests in to get these contracts.
More broadly, 'Tory' is essentially shorthand in the UK for anyone with right wing beliefs and a degree of privilege, especially financial, whether or not they're actually a member of the party. You do get poor and working class Tories, which is a bit like having anti-vegetarian pigs, but Tory ideology at its core favours and protects the elite. It's just that most right wing people vote Tory, regardless of their own class, because the Tory party has convinced them that immigrants are the reason they're poor, and not the fact that the Tory party itself is stealing from them and profiting from their poverty.
I always think that the neatest depiction of the Tory party is when David Cameron, who was the Prime Minister before Brexit, announced a string of austerity measures - essentially cuts to public spending which left the vast majority of the public struggling to access necessary services, including healthcare and income support - at a white tie banquet, where everyone was drinking out of gold goblets.
I guess what I'm saying is that 'Tory' and 'sewage-filled pustule on the arsehole of Britain' are essentially synonymous.
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Daily update post:
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a message from Yahya Sinwar (the Hamas leader inside Gaza) was passed to Hamas leaders who live outside of it, and the essence of that is not to worry, because Sinwar believes they have Israel exactly where they want it. In other words, when Hamas is estimated by Israel to have at least 12,000 of its terrorists killed, and despite the fact that they could stop the death of Gazans by releasing the Israeli hostages and surrendering, Sinwar doesn't see any issues with where the war is at. I think the most important part is this: "According to the report, Sinwar also told the Hamas officials that the terror group is prepared for Israel’s expected operation in Rafah, the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city, and is relying on the high civilian death toll reported by the Hamas-run health ministry to cause enough global outcry that Israel is forced to withdraw" (my emphasis). At what point do people realize that they are serving the interests of Hamas' mass murderers, kidnappers and rapists?
A few days ago, I wrote about the attempt to allow aid trucks into northern Gaza directly from Israel, instead of bringing it to the south, and waiting for Gaza-based elements to deliver it to the north. This means an escort of Israeli soldiers is accompanying the trucks. This is the route the aid trucks cross:
Today, these aid trucks were stormed by a huge crowd, and according to the IDF, many people died from pushing and trampling (at the link you can see aerial video footage of the stampede), not an unheard of phenomenon when a huge herd of people all rush in at the same time. On top of that, some Gazans were also advancing at the soldiers securing the aid trucks. The soldiers felt undr threat, and they opened fire at those charging at them, but according to their estimate, this accounts for only 10 of the dead. Still, you can count on the anti-Israel crowd to adopt a narrative that, immediately and without investigation, calls this a massacre and blames every single death on Israel, not on Hamas, which started the war that made even aid supply into a dangerous and complicated situation.
Here's a reminder that even in the middle of the war, when no one is paying attention to it, Israel continues to demolish illegal homes built by Jews. But you're never gonna hear about it, not even during more normal times, because it doesn't fit the anti-Israel narrative, so anti-Israel sources will only ever tell you about it, when Israeli demolishes illegal homes built by Arabs.
As threats to British Members of Parliament (MPs) are rising due to threats from the anti-Israel crowd, the UK has allocated bodyguards to some of them, along with 31 million pounds designated for the security of British democracy. If some of the most powerful people in Britain are that scared, what do you think Jews there are going through? Indeed, today we heard that 72 million pounds are meant to help secure Jewish centers and institutions in the UK. The problem is that until the root of the problem will be tackled, this is just taking care of the symptoms, instead of curing the disease.
Israeli security forces have stopped two Palestinian cousins, one 17 years old and the other 29 years old, from carrying out an independent terrorist attack. I refer to such attacks as independent in order to point out that they're not a part of some greater plot, unlike every single terrorist attack on Oct 7, which were all interconnected, and rocket attacks since, which are launched as a part of the war that Hamas started waging against Israel. However, some of these attacks ARE connected to Hamas. Apparently, these two cousins contacted Hamas in Gaza to get help in committing their intended crime.
This is 59 years old Michel Nissenbaum.
He made alyiah on his own from Brazil when he was 13 years old. Friends say that coming to Israel saved him. He worked in hi-tech, as well as a tour guide, and volunteered with Bedouin kids. Here he is with one such group:
On Oct 7, Michel heard that the Re'im IDF base was under attack from Hamas terrorists. Knowing that his granddaughter was there, visiting her dad, Michel decided to go there and get her out. While he was making his way to the base, he stopped responding to messages. His granddaughter was rescued from the place hours later, but Michel himself had disappeared. He's believed to be kidnapped in Gaza, but his family is scared, because he wasn't spotted in any of the pics or vids released by Hamas.
(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)
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1997
The Canadian government, with British complicity, admitted more than 2,000 members of a notorious Ukrainian Waffen-SS division in 1950, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has charged.
In a related case, the CBS news program "60 Minutes" reported that about 1,000 SS men and Nazi collaborators, mainly from the Baltic states, moved to Canada about the same time.
And the German public broadcasting network reported that 50,000 war criminals receive "victim pensions" from the German government. German sources say 1,882 are Canadian residents.
Almost all the suspected war criminals and collaborators have lived openly under their own names in Canada for 47 years.[...]
Littman, who has been researching Nazis in Canada since 1980, said the 14th Volunteer Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, aka the Galicia Division, largely comprised Ukrainians who served with Nazi police battalions and death squads.
The surviving 9,000 division members surrendered to the British at war's end, and were taken to England.
In 1950, Britain appealed to Commonwealth countries to admit them. Canada agreed to take 2,000, after being assured that their backgrounds had been checked and that they were cleared of complicity in war crimes.
But according to recently released British documents and interviews with officials who conducted the investigations, they were not screened, partly because none of the interrogators spoke their language, Littman said.[...]
The 2,000 settled in major Canadian cities. About half are still alive.
One way of getting into postwar Canada "was by showing the SS tattoo," Canadian historian Irving Abella told "60 Minutes" interviewer Mike Wallace. "This proved that you were an anti-Communist."[...]
the German TV program "Panorama" reported last week that 50,000 war criminals and members of army units who participated in atrocities were receiving monthly bonus pensions, ranging from hundreds to thousands.
The so-called "victim pensions" are added to the pensions of those who suffered World War II-linked disabilities, or to their dependents.
Although a 1950 German law excludes war criminals living abroad from getting such pensions, the law is apparently not enforced in Canada or the United States.
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, has charged that some 3,300 Germans living in the United States receive the pensions.
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