'All of British prehistory is played out here'

"There's a brick pit, a chip factory, you're on the edge of the industrial estate of Peterborough and yet the quality and quantity of archaeology in that landscape is astonishing," says Mark Knight.

He has been directing the excavations at Must Farm, near Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, since 2004, saying "the deeper we go, the earlier we get".

The quarry is most famous for the discovery of the "best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found", dating back 3,000 years and dubbed Britain's Pompeii.

The finds unearthed over two decades reveal how prehistoric people adapted to a changing landscape thousands of years before the settlement burnt down.

"All of British prehistory is being played out here," said Knight, senior project officer with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

The excavations are part of a long-term project with land owner Forterra, which quarries Oxford clay for bricks.

Archaeologists have excavated about 37 hectares (91 acres) of the landscape so far, ahead of the clay extraction.

Their latest discoveries included animal tracks, the remains of fence posts, preserved trees, pottery sherds and flints.

"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," he said.

The evidence suggests the Neolithic and early Bronze Age people (4,000 to 2,500BC) were not settled farmers, but moved seasonally across the landscape, later adapting to rising sea levels which inundated the area from about 2,400BC.

"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," said Knight.

By the time of the Must Farm settlement, people had learned how to live within a watery world, building about 10 circular wooden houses on stilts above a river.

Knight said: "If we're right in our understanding, it's one of many such settlements. It's not an anomaly — it wassomething that had been done several times before.

"And we found it not because we had some great insight, but because that's where the quarry was."

He likened the landscape to layers of a cake, preserving the evidence 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 included complete river channels, log boats, fish traps and weirs, trackways and boundaries.

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," said Knight.

"Our work within the quarry has now become a reference for sites that are less well preserved."

It was also a reminder that while the flat, arable Fens landscape "feels very two-dimensional, archaeologically, it's definitely three-dimensional", he added.

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