Flag Fen by Francis Pryor

Author:Francis Pryor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: bronze age fields, bronze age metalwork, bronze age religion, prehistoric farming, prehistoric woodwork, roundhouses, wetland archaeology
Publisher: Francis Pryor

9. Flag Fen: Wood, Wheels and Status

Flag Fen is known internationally because of its wood and timber. Generally speaking this falls into two quite distinct categories: lightweight coppice products, such as wattlework, hurdles and even basketry (I’m thinking here of the fish traps from Must Farm); and heavy-duty items, such as posts and planks, which I’ll discuss in the next section. But there is another, and far rarer group of finds, which one might label fine carpentry and crafts. This group includes axe hafts, bowls, buckets and, perhaps most intricate of all: wheels. Indeed, I’m in little doubt that as early as the later Bronze Age wheels were fashioned by specialist wheelwrights, who possessed detailed knowledge of the different native British trees and their properties.

At Flag Fen the story of this very specialised branch of carpentry begins back in Fengate in 1978, when at the very end of the final season an Iron Age well was discovered. We didn’t know it then, but this well was positioned about 100m from the easterly landfall of the post alignment. We’d discovered prehistoric wells and watering-holes previously, but this one was different because its wattle lining (of woven hazel and willow rods) was held in position by a number of small stakes, which included a split-down piece from a larger wooden object. I suspect it had been split-down in a hurry, using any old wood which happened to have been lying around in the yard. But what made this re-used stake remarkable was a dovetail housing joint, or socket, half-way along its length. It was this piece of wood, and its then unique dovetail joint, which persuaded the now well-known wood specialist Maisie Taylor to continue with the woodworking studies, she had begun as an undergraduate, a few years earlier. At the time, she didn’t know what it had come from, but she did know the dovetail had been very carefully cut. We must now roll the story forward some twenty years to the discovery of part of a wooden tripartite (three-part) wheel at Flag Fen. [14] This wheel was made from three split planks of alder wood which were held together by laths of oak sapwood. The laths were housed in carefully cut dovetail slots, identical in size and profile to the one in the fragment of wood we’d found in the well at Fengate almost twenty years previously. I can’t resist it: the wheel had turned full circle.

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