1. Drawing a Bronze Age House
Education Pack
Drawing a Bronze Age House
The Inside
This activity will help pupils create their own reconstruction drawing of the inside of one of the houses found at the recent archaeological excavations of a Bronze Age village in Cambridgeshire. It is designed to be used with the other suggested classroom activities on: especially the ‘Types of artefacts found’ which could be used to add more evidence for more able pupils to work with. More information about the excavations can also be found at

2. What is a reconstruction drawing?
Imagination
Blue sky
Straight smoke
Fence
(Palisade)
Roundhouse
made of wood
Turf roof
Built over
water
Explain to pupils that archaeologists create reconstruction drawings of sites and landscapes to help people understand what the results of their excavations mean. It can be hard to decode archaeological sites, so they interpret the evidence to create a drawing of what it might have looked like.
Looking at evidence from elements of the houses at Must Farm it’s possible to make ‘educated guesses’ as to what the houses originally looked like by looking at where the supporting posts were and what the walls and roof would have been made from. These ‘educated guesses’ are often called ‘interpretations’.
Some parts of this drawing are based on evidence but other parts are based on decisions made by the person drawing it – called an illustrator. For example they have chosen to make the sky blue and have the smoke is going straight up, making it a sunny day with no wind. This makes the picture feel calm and the still reflections in the water add to this.
Pupils must now look at the evidence for themselves and use their own imaginations to create their interpretation of what the INSIDE of the roundhouses might have looked like. The following slides provide the evidence they need to do this
Evidence

3. Evidence
Every house had some evidence of spinning and weaving taking place
Spindle whorl
Loom weight
Fabric
(textile)
Every house had some evidence of spinning and weaving taking place. Textiles, loom weights and spindle whorls were found on site showing that spinning and weaving took place there.

4. A modern ‘drop spindle’ with a wooden spindle whorl
Loom weight
These photographs show how the spindle whorls and loom weights would have been used to make the fabric that was found.
A modern ‘drop spindle’
with a wooden spindle whorl
A reconstruction of a loom
with weights holding the threads tight

5. Evidence Every house had some evidence of food storage and preparation
Pot
Wooden
platter
Pot
Pot
Every house had some evidence of food storage. Find out more about the pottery:
Pot
Pot

6. Food remains found inside the pot, including grains
Some of the pots still had food left in them when the houses burnt down. This included grains such as wheat and barley. Barley is still included in my recipes today, such as Scotch Broth or as a kind of porridge. Find out more about what the people at Must Farm ate here:

7. Evidence Every house had some evidence of animal bones
Where the houses collapsed during the fire that burnt them down, archaeologists found the articulated (jointed together) bones of both lambs and calves. This means the bones were from animals that were most likely alive, not ‘butchered’ joints of meat, which would just leave some of the animals bones, but not all of them. Overwhelmingly, these animal bones are domestic and dry land in character (lambs and calves). This trend would not be unusual in a more typical Late Bronze Age site on the dry land, but here in the watery environment of Must Farm, it is very interesting. Were the animals living around the raised houses?

8. Evidence Inside the houses there was a pattern
to where different things were found
Inside the houses there was a pattern to where different things were found. This made archaeologists think the houses were arranged into areas - a bit like we have rooms for different activities today.

9. Evidence Where was the door?
Where do you think
the people slept?
One mystery is the location of the door. Most Bronze Age roundhouses have a doorway that can be clearly seen by a gap in the arrangement of posts. At Must Farm it’s not at all clear where the doorway would have been and archaeologists are looking carefully at the location of all of the artefacts to see if the pattern of finds helps them to decide this. At other Bronze Age settlements a concentration of rubbish has been found near to the entrance. Most prehistoric houses have an entrance in the southeast or eastern section. If this was the case at Must Farm it would make the lightest part of the house the area where spinning, weaving and clothes making took place. Looking at this pupils might also like to suggest where they think people would have slept within the roundhouse and why there is no evidence for it.

10. Have a go at drawing the inside of a Bronze Age house.
Remember:
The houses were round.
The walls were made of woven wood and were held up by big posts.
The floors were made of bundles of thin twigs.
There would have been a fire inside so it might have been smoky.
People would have been cooking, spinning and weaving.
There were no electric lights so it might have been quite dark.
To make this activity more challenging you can find other resources at: especially the ‘Types of artefacts found’ PPT, which could be used to add more evidence for more able pupils to work with.