Britain is filled with historical gems, many sitting silently just beneath the surface waiting to be found.
Must Farm quarry in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, is one such site: a vast stretch of grasslands once home to a highly sophisticated and skilled village of Bronze Age Britons.
At 3,000 years old, it is truly ancient and was only recently fully realised by archaeologists from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU).
An absolute treasure trove of relics and artefacts was found, with many of them and some replicas set to be put on display at Peterborough Museum this weekend.
But what exactly did the team find? And what did Must Farm look like in its heyday? ‘Britain’s Pompeii’ is full of magic. Here, Express.co.uk takes a look at it in full.
Must Farm once consisted of around 10 circular wooden houses, each building complete with flexible doors and constructed from woven panels.
Raised on stilts, an ancient but long-gone river once ran through the village, across marshlands today known as the Fens.
When a raging fire took hold of the town less than a year after it was built, much of it perished. But in a twist of fate, the fire preserved much of the village’s foundations and material goods, each deposited directly into the silt below.
Archaeologists, while digging from 2016 to 2015, discovered that the ancient residents “zoned” the external and internal spaces in their homes, comparable to the rooms we have in houses today.
One roundhouse was found complete with pots and wooden containers, suggesting that its northwestern corner was used specifically for cooking while in its eastern corner, the likes of metal tools appeared to have been stored.
On the other side, in the southeast corner, fine textiles and bundles of fibres were found close to the light of the entranceway, suggesting it was a good place to work on the materials.
The entire collection retrieved by archaeologists was made up of 200 wooden artefacts, more than 150 fibre and textile pieces, 128 pottery vessels and about 90 pieces of metalwork.
Chris Wakefield, an archaeologist, told the BBC that the stackable pots and axes are “a bit like a multi-tool, that you can swap in different axe heads”.
He continued: “I think people have this perception that everyone was struggling to survive, that it was a horrible, nasty time to be alive, and actually looking inside these structures shows they’ve got a very sophisticated level of technology.”
Elsewhere, beats from glass made thousands of miles away in Iran, also shone a light on the small community’s ties to ancient trade routes and far flung places.
The preservation process also revealed some of the trials and tribulations the people of Must Farm themselves were experiencing.
Pieces of recovered human faeces or “coprolites” saw scientists discover the presence of fish tapeworms, the earliest known evidence in Britain.
These can grow up to 10m (32ft) long and live coiled in the intestines.
