Our knowledge of domestic living arrangements in the prehistoric period has come a long way in the last 100 years or so. It seems quite incredible to think that, prior to Gerhard Bersu’s excavations of the Iron Age roundhouse at Little Woodbury in the 1930s, the widely held view was that Britain’s pre-Roman inhabitants lived in pits. This myth was finally dispelled by Peter Reynolds (1939-2001), the stalwart pioneer of early experimental archaeology and first director of Butser Ancient Farm, who briefly occupied a pit if only to prove that damp, smoke, and lack of light rendered the space completely uninhabitable. The pits, it transpires, were used for food storage and rubbish disposal. But this was not the end of his quest to establish what the lives and homes of our ancestors might have been like. With the term ‘experimental archaeology’ having been coined in the 1960s to describe efforts to understand ancient artefacts by actually working with them, Reynolds’ investigations continued at Butser Ancient Farm – and 50 years later, staff at the site are still tackling that question by constructing experimental buildings based faithfully on archaeological evidence.
During these projects, modern materials are eschewed in favour of well-recognised, more traditional ones such as earth-fast wooden posts, wattle and daub, clunch, water reed, and straw. We have to run a continual and constant programme of maintenance, doing battle with the elements to keep our buildings safe, sound, and watertight, and occasionally we suffer casualties as a consequence of extreme weather, as was the case in late 2019 when we found ourselves peering disconsolately through the drizzle at a huge crack in the daub wall of one of our Neolithic structures. A thorough post-mortem revealed that gale-force winds had forced what was a very lightweight, somewhat aged building to twist on its axis, causing the daub to be ‘popped’ off the wattle framework underneath. This bout of inclement weather had sounded the death knell for our Neolithic friend. But mourning for our condemned structure was quickly supplanted by the thrilling realisation that ‘what comes down at Butser must go back up’.
A brief was drawn up to ensure a new structure satisfied all the prerequisites of our site. It was a bit of a challenge to find the ‘Goldilocks house’: one that was just the right size to fit in the available space, could accommodate a large school group or a public event, was based on evidence local to Hampshire, was interesting archaeologically, and which posed questions we would aim to answer through an experimental construction process. I am sure Gareth Chaffey of Wessex Archaeology was as surprised as we were when it transpired that a house his team had excavated in 2012 (see CA 292) fitted this rather demanding brief. Excavations at Kingsmead Quarry, Horton, in Berkshire, had proved exceptional, revealing some of the most significant evidence for domesticity yet found from the early Neolithic period (4000-3300 BC) in England. Who knew the prehistoric inhabitants of Berkshire could be so obliging?
