Bronze Age Wooden Wheel Adds to List of Surprising Finds at Must Farm

At the Must Farm Bronze Age site in England archaeologists have now turned up a wooden wheel to add to other significant finds there, including vitrified food and well-preserved textiles, wooden platters, spears, knives, tools, and jewelry.

Archaeologists were excited about the find at the site, which is the best-preserved homestead of the Bronze Age in Britain.

Three Bronze Age dwellings were burned in a fire and collapsed from their stilts into a river below about 3,000 years ago. Some news reports call the site England’s Pompeii, but it has none of the spectacular stone-hewn architecture and dramatic tableaus frozen by the Italian volcano that erupted in 79 AD. However, researchers have found contents of the houses preserved in “astonishing detail” in the fen (a type of wetland). The houses themselves are among the best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found in Britain.

Excavations at the Must Farm site. (David Rose/The Telegraph)

“This is the site I have been looking for all my life,” archaeologist Francis Pryor told the Guardian. “This was one of the most prosperous parts of Britain at this date. All the attention has gone to sites like Stonehenge, but they were on the periphery. Economically, this was where it was at.”