Archaeologists cleaning excess mud from a Bronze Age spade
Wessex Archaeology
A wooden spade Bronze Age archaeologists have found it in the United Kingdom. It is very rare to find wooden objects that have been stored for a long time.
Laia offers a glimpse into life at a time when people increasingly farmed and lived in settled communities.
“It’s quite tangible,” he says Ed Treasure At Wessex Archaeology, Salisbury, UK. “It’s an instant connection to the past.”
The spade was found in wetlands near the port of Poole on the south coast of England, where Wessex Archeology has been digging for several years. The The Coastal Modification Project of the Moors he is working restoration of coastal wetlands in the area, and archaeologists are excavating so that informational artifacts are not inadvertently lost.
The researchers were digging into the rings, the circular trenches that may have originally surrounded the shelters. In one of the rings, they saw the handle of the spade. “It was almost unbelievable,” says Altxorra, who was not there in person. “It was immediately apparent that it was a carved piece of wood.” The spade was carved from a single piece of oak.
The moist conditions meant the blade was not exposed to oxygen, slowing decay.
The team radiocarbon dated the spade to 3400-3500 years ago, using a fragment found nearby. “A small part of the spade broke off during the burial, which we used for dating,” says Treasure. Nearby pottery indicated a similar date. This places the origin of the spade in the Middle Bronze Age.
“It’s a big time of change in prehistoric Britain,” says Treasure. People became less and less nomadic and spent much more time in settlements, cultivating cereals and other foodstuffs.
However, there are no signs of permanent settlement throughout the year in that area, which is not surprising, since it was and still is a wetland. “We’re thinking a lot about the seasonal use of this landscape,” Treasure says. People may have brought animals to graze in the summer, cut peat for fuel or perhaps collected reeds for thatch.
Future studies will try to find out how the spade was made and what it was used for. “That site could have been used to cut peat,” Treasure says. “It was also found to have been used to pierce the ring cannula.”
Preserved spades from this period are rare. One of the only other examples is the Brynlow blade, which is It was discovered in Cheshire in 1875rediscover in the 1950s In fantasy writer Alan Garner’s school assembly hall and finally radiocarbon dated to almost 4000 years ago.
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