00:00.00 connor Welcome back to episode one zero three of a life and ruins podcast. This is our special episode with Trevor Creighton of Buttzer Farm and we wanted to start this segment off by just you kind of telling us what. Buts there is and and when it began if you don't mind talking about that. Yeah. 00:19.33 Trevor Creighton No, not at all um, buttser began really fifty years ago this year in 1972 and it was set up ah with a grant by the council for british archaeology to study iron age farming techniques. Um, the. Iron age in Britain was a bit under-researched I think so um, the the council for british archaeology were kind of interested in what what level of productivity. Can you return on on ancient species of crop and that that quickly also sort of transitioned into buildings as well. So it became a sort of a small functional farm that looked at at cropping animal husbandry and also did experimental buildings and um, that kind of set the basis for um, ultimately expanding into the educational field um using the archaeology. That we'd learned the buildings that we'd constructed as a kind of public outreach as a way of educating the public about really the prehistory of Britain in particular. So what we do now is mainly what we can concentrate on is making buildings. Um, and. All of our buildings are reconstruction is not a word any experimental archaeologist likes to use but they are buildings that are our best guess really our best assessment on what archaeology in the ground represents in the 3 hree-dimensional form so we'll take. Whatever plan we can find in the archaeology of a building and try and reconstruct it and down here I'm in the south of england um, our ah soil is all chalk. So really, all you get are stains in the ground that tell you. Well, there was a tree put in a hole here and over the last x thousand years the tree kind of rotted away and left this stain in the ground so we've got this posthole in a certain shape these postholes in a certain shape. What can we make of that you know is it a house does it have a roof and use any other clues you can find in the archaeology to think. You know, does it have a roof does it have a doorway was it actually a domestic dwelling or what might it have been so it's kind of like ah you know archaeology is is like doing ah a jigsaw puzzle without the box. We hardly have any of the pieces let alone the picture on the box. But we still try and reconstruct things. Um, and yeah, that's that's our mission. Um, the the reason for doing it really is to to try and I guess you'd say understand the lifeways of people we deal particularly with with Prehistory. We actually do everything from the late stone age the neolithic all way through into the historical period. 03:04.28 Trevor Creighton Um, which is Roman to Anglo -saxon so that's a sort of period of about five Thousand five and a half thousand years and and what we're trying to do is we're trying to get an understanding for example of how long the buildings last. So if we know how long a building lasts. We'll get an idea of a settlement size and. The length of a settlement and therefore we can get an idea of maybe the population of a settlement. Um and all our previous experiments on crops also tell us you know what's what's the resource management of a settlement so we can kind of extrapolate these ideas about how many people are. Are in Britain at any 1 point in time and and what are they doing and what are the houses look like so that's the experimental component and the fact that we've got these really unusual buildings as a result of that means we can do a kind of ah a 3 hree-dimensional, a tangible archaeological education program. And that's now our bread and butter. Um the funding originally fifty years ago ran out so to keep the place viable. We moved into public education and now we have on a good year. Not a covid year but a good year we have about thirty five Thousand Schoolchildren and about 20000 other visitors from the public and and that's really, um, you know that's that's our main source of income. 04:23.92 archpodnet Yeah I mean you mentioned something like ah you know that I want to kind of touch back on how you're reconstructing these buildings based on postholes and that's you know, not just you know, segmented to to architectural archeology right? Like even when we talk about um. 04:24.94 David That's incredible. It's a lot of people. 04:43.45 archpodnet Addol addls or arrows any type of technology where there's some component of ah degradable material like most of you know the paleo indian record here in the United States you're dealing with stone tools. 04:54.42 Trevor Creighton Um, yeah. 04:56.82 archpodnet But those were attached to atladle darts or whatever and we're all we're left with is the material aspects and what you're talking about with those posthos is like you're trying to reconstruct these houses based on their Foundation. You have no idea what the walls are have you guys done like From. Um. You know because's if you look at the webpage buttser ancientchentfarm Co Dot U K You can see beautiful photographs of um, the village that you guys have recreated and they have thatched Roofs now is that thatching based on maybe like pollen analysis that was done of some. Ah, remains at the sites to see like okay at at these in these foundations that you can find residues of some of these possible plants that were used to to patch the roof. So. 05:43.36 Trevor Creighton Um, there. There are a few different clues I suppose and sometimes it's just guesswork. Um I I probably take a step back I think can I tell you where I am because that's that's a little bit of a that's a big part of this story actually so I I live as I said I live in a. Live in a small visit village and it's called Roland's castle and Roland's castle is simultaneously in England Britain and the United Kingdom um this is important to the story say stay with me so the the part that I'll re talk about in the archaeology is Britain. And Britain is a single island which is off the the west coast of Europe it's about it's about it's about the size of North North and South Carolina combined it's about eighty Thousand Square miles within that. There's ah, there's actually 3 separate countries Scotland Wales and England um so it's a really culturally diverse place and it's geographically diverse. It's quite small but very culturally and geographic geographically and geologically diverse. So if in some parts of Britain. Um, you get. Preserved archaeology that's quite sort of substantial. So if you've got good stone. For example, you will get preserved stone buildings and in some cases perhaps as much as 2000 years old um but in my area. It's all chalk with with a bit of flint. Um, so nothing that you can really easily build a durable structure from that's going to last in the archaeology. So yeah, what? what we are left with here is the the really most sparse sort of archaeology about buildings. You can imagine particularly for prehistoric buildings and so. Some periods we deal with you do have better evidence than others. So I'll I'll cite the iron age. For example, we actually started with our focus on the iron age and the iron age in Britain unsurprisingly is the time at which iron starts to appear in the archaeology and it's about 800 bc to. You can actually date it to the coming of the romans which is 43 ad so in that time slice. We'd start to get history towards the end of that and of course history is simply someone wrote it down and the romans blessed them wrote a bit of history and 1 of the things. The Roman tells us is that um the british made. Roundhouses. So again I'm generalising this island of Britain. There are a lot of people here. But in general they made roundhouses. Um tacitus I think it is tells us that the general trend was to use timber that hadn't been um, squared up so in other words timber and around often with bark on it. 08:32.69 Trevor Creighton And 1 of the roman historians says that they had thatched roofs so we get in these very sparse references to Britain in the roman history. Actually you get a clue so we've got that data about prehistoric buildings there when you go back in time say to the bronze age or the neolithic. Um, so I'm right bronze age in Britain is about ah about two and a half thousand bc up to the up to the iron age. So about 800 bc the neolithic is the period before that. So that winds back to about four and a half thousand bc in those periods. Obviously we have. Less information. There's more degradation of the archaeology and no one wrote anything down so you kind of have to make a lot of inferences. You'll sometimes get useful pieces of information in the archaeology. Um, so you might have for example, these roundhouses I'm talking about. They're really typical of the british. Bronze and iron ages and they are as the names suggest round houses. Although actually they're round structures some of them were probably houses some of them did other things but they're very numerous and often they're defined by a series of post holes in in my part of the world these these stains in these dark stains in white chalk. But around those you'll often find a ah sort of ah ditch. That's been dug. So we we think that what that is is ah a kind of drainage ditch so that sort of gives us an idea that you know the the walls are where the postal stains are and this drainage ditch ditch represents the overhang from the roof. Then the other things we can do are yeah look at the pondn record so we'll look at the pollen record to go. Okay, well there's a lot of this species of tree around here this species of tree works well for that and there might be a lot of wetland so there's a lot of perhaps there's a lot of water to read in prehistory so that tells us you know. Because we have this other information about roundhouses from the late iron age. Perhaps they used thatch roofs earlier on as well. So yeah, there ah, there is a little kernel of information even in prehistory but by and large it's it's really a best guess. But yet drawing as much upon the archaeological record as we can to inform it. 10:47.69 archpodnet It of course and you're also drawing on because you mentioned this earlier that that butts are all so butts or ancient farm also tackles. Um the late neolithic as well as the the bronze age so you've gave us dates for the iron age 800 bc to precisely 43 a d How long was the ah the bronze age in Britain. 11:05.66 Trevor Creighton Um, about that one thousand five hundred one thousand seven hundred years but um I think you yeahp that's better right? Got to ah do the mental maths there I've I've got this wrong before. But yeah, it's about one thousand seven hundred years or so. 11:23.80 archpodnet And scotching. 11:24.42 Trevor Creighton So really significant lot of changes coming in at that point in time. Um, Britain's only been settled permanently by humans for um, well for about the last eleven thousand years or so um, it was first inhabited um nine hundred thousand years ago by humans but of course you know ancestor or related species. Not homo sapiens. Um, but for the most of the rest of eight hundred and ninety thousand years um it was covered in ice or there was a lot of ice nearby. So it doesn't appear to have been much human activity at times you know when it warmed up. Um, but yeah permanent settlement here is really quite recent and all. 12:07.60 archpodnet What's the name of the sunken the sunken land masss that used to connect Britain with France doesn't have it has like it Dogger Land Doggger land yeah excellent okay sorry I just one of those things that have always. 12:10.67 Trevor Creighton Ah, doggerland. Yeah yeah, yeah, no, that's that's great I mean yeah, Britain for a gain for most of that nine hundred Thousand years Britain was not an island. It was connected to to what we now call mainland europe by ah you know more than a land bridge. It was just part of the land mass. Um, and it wasn't until really it wasn't until after the the very last gasp of the last sort of bit of the ice age the younger dryas. That it became separated so it it appears gradually to have um that that and mass called doggerland doggerland um, gradually started to sink or get inundated um and then probably about eight thousand years ago it seems to have been almost wiped out by a. 12:50.77 David Well. 13:05.16 Trevor Creighton But eight and a half thousand years ago by a tsunami. Um, but what? what? that actually what's important about that is that in um, in this sort of period of permanent settlement is that Britain wasn't always isolated. So what that meant was that even through the mesolithic through the the earliest settlement here which is a hunter-gatherer. So-called phase through to the neolithic that landmass that sort of Britain was getting gradually separated from europe so people never I think never lost the memory they knew Europe was there so you find. Through the mesolithic through the neolithic through the bronze age through the iron age. There is lots of contact. Um with Europe mainland europe so it's not as though Britain is this sort of isolated place. Um out in the ocean unknown to everybody and yeah, there's a surprising amount of contact. Um, between here as far away at least as the mediterranean um, even in the bronze age. 14:03.97 connor So do you use evidence from say these surrounding countries to help you inform? Um, how you reconstruct these buildings. You're not just using evidence from Britain itself because of this obvious connection to mainland europe do you use? um other lines of evidence say from france or from other places like that. 14:27.30 Trevor Creighton Um, generally speaking. No. There's there's a peculiarity in Britain these roundhouses are quite peculiar to Britain and Ireland um during the the bronze age to the iron age and beyond. Um. The best of my knowledge. There are very few roundhouses found in say Northern France none in Northern Germany or Scandinavia so the nearest points to Britain which are Northern France Northern Germany um and through into Scandinavia there are few if any roundhouses there. Um, so that's the strange thing. We know there are cultural connections. But why is this architecture really different over here. Um, is it because we're not looking in the right right places or is it because there is something else culturally going on. Are we. No connected with other areas so you certainly get roundhouses in ah Brittany which is kind of Northern France you get it in Galicia which is Northern Spain you get them in the Mediterranean. So yeah, that kind of um. That vector of communication is a really puzzling one so on the 1 hand yep trade goods we know metals we know objects come in from Northern Europe but these house styles are different which means for our buildings we can't really use a lot of information from. Um, from europe which often has better preserved archaeology particularly on the coastal fringe where you've got a lot of really nice anoxic mud that preserves things. Well we can get a bit out of that. But for our buildings. Not so much so until we get to the late iron age where there seems to be more of a connection so we can get a few. Tips on decoration in the late iron age because there's actually some surviving decoration from from somewhere in France I can't remember exactly where and of course once we get into the roman period then we can get quite a lot of clues and there's a lot more material that survives because a the romans tended to build in in kind of. Stone with mortar and bees are a really good kind of consumers and they made a lot of junk that gets left over so we can find it. But yeah in terms of the prehistoric stuff. Unfortunately there's there's only a limited amount that we can infer about buildings from Northern Europe 16:44.42 archpodnet And kind of just bringing us back to the isolation of of ah of Britain from from Europe. Yeah I mean you can still see um like the cliffs of dover from France like it's still. There's parts of France that you can still see england right? It's through the is that the po la. 16:58.45 Trevor Creighton Um, yeah. 17:02.34 archpodnet Like the shortest distance or is that the longest distance. 17:03.25 Trevor Creighton Ah, yeah, Calais to dover I think is about the shortest different. Yeah yeah, um, yeah, yeah, well, it's. 17:06.86 archpodnet Yeah, excellent. The only reason I know this is like world war 2 knowledge of like trying to fool hitler and where we werere going to land and that's that's the extent of my of my european geography it. World war 2 nerd stop. 17:23.18 Trevor Creighton It's good. Good information from a very unfortunate time. But you know interconnectedness um is really quite surprising because ah one of the great things about Britain as far as people who were making bronze was concerned is it had both copper which is the main ingredient of bronze. And tin which is as an additive of about sort of 8 to 12% it it. Gives you really the best bronze the hardest bronze there are a number of alloys you could describe as bronze or copper alloys but copper and tin is really good and Britain is unusual in having both so it was a sort after location. Um, and it was exporting bronze and 1 of the one of the interesting things was because of chemical signatures in in the sort of ors and in the metals you can get a pretty good idea of where it comes from so Cornwall is ah a county in the far west of Britain and um, it's a really good so supplier of tin. And the chemical signature of Cornish Tin has turned up in places like modern-day Israel as having been exported there about three thousand two hundred years ago um so that's the sort of level of interconnectivity. It's not just straight across the channel which is only it's only about Twenty Twenty two miles across there at the narrow narrowest point to France but we're talking about a journey of many thousands of miles and almost all of it by sea. Probably. 18:48.80 David Um, didn't the greeks or the romans call Britain tinland or ah Britain might mean Tinland or something that. 18:52.40 Trevor Creighton I I think that's right? Yeah I think there is a ah reference to that. Well, that's yeah, well yeah yeah I don't. 19:00.89 David Ah, cool that like blew my mind as a kid I was like cool. 19:06.00 Trevor Creighton The the name britain I think comes from ah I think it's Latin It could be greek term that's pratani. Um, and I'm ah I'm not sure that may mean painted people. But I'm not too sure about that. Um. 19:16.62 David Sounds right? right. 19:18.54 connor I think on that note, um, we'll end this segment here and we will talk more about the next segment doing some more experimental archeology and continuing this conversation about tin and all other things bronze. So ah. This is episode 1 and 3 of a life in ruins podcast.