Reimagining the past: experiments in construction at Butser Ancient Farm

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.