Butser Ancient Farm is an experimental and public archaeology site nestled in Hampshire’s South Downs, about 20km north of Portsmouth. Today it is home to an array of reconstructed buildings representing a wide span of human history, but its genesis came about thanks to a decision by the Council for British Archaeology (CBA), in 1970, to allocate funds for the study of the British Iron Age, with an emphasis on experimental investigations of agriculture. Two years later, Dr Peter Reynolds was appointed as Butser’s first director – a logical choice because of his prior experimental work with both prehistoric cereals and the experimental construction of some modest roundhouses based on Iron Age archaeology – and he immediately began the development of the Farm’s original location, on Little Butser, a spur of Butser Hill.
In these early years, Peter – alongside fellow archaeologists, students, and a growing coterie of enthusiastic and able volunteers – initiated a series of cereal trials and a programme of animal husbandry, each geared towards the study of Iron Age foodways and the use of animals as primary resources and a means of traction. The team also began work on a reconstructed roundhouse, something that Peter spearheaded with the same rigorous approach that he applied to all of his experimental work. To put this work into context, archaeology in Britain at this time, at least at an academic level, was increasingly enmeshed within the Processualist world of the New Archaeology. The past was considered accessible through the rigorous application of science, and Peter’s particular formulation of experimental archaeology was in tune with this zeitgeist. Experimental archaeology was, for him, an aspect of experimental science, and testing hypotheses in a methodical and repeatable format was key. As Peter himself put it:
Hypothesis implies a deduced or reasoned conclusion which can be further subjected to test or trial to confirm or deny that conclusion. The method of testing is called an experiment… The experiment, therefore, is not an exercise imagined or concocted by the experimenter. It is quite specific to a particular hypothesis.
