Tick Tock
6/5/24
Stepping back in time at Butser Ancient Farm
Butser Ancient Farm is an open air museum in Hampshire. It is like time travelling through important times in British history and shows how people might have been living during the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. There is also a Roman Villa and Anglo Saxon buildings too.
They have built these buildings based on historical evidence of what the buildings would have looked like all those years ago. It is a fantastic place to visit if you are learning about these times in British history. Although not everyone learns about these time periods in key stage 1, we have always chosen to explore them a little bit when learning about the history of castles…to give a bit of background knowledge of what settlements would have looked like before and during the time massive and intimidating stone castles were built!
You can visit there yourself with your family or it would be a great place for a school trip. You can learn more about visiting on the Butser Ancient Farm website.
The Stone Age
The Stone Age was an incredibly long time in human history. At the beginning of this time period people moved around a lot and were hunter gatherers, living in caves and early forms of tents. Later in this time period people became more settled and began farming. The Stone Age building at Butser Farm is an example of the really early types of homes people started to live in near the end of this time period, called the New Stone Age.
It was a rectangular building and the roof went right down to the floor. The homes would have usually been made of wood with a thatched roof, but they would have used whatever was available. Inside it was one big open space and up one end there was an open fire. It was very smoky inside!
All the buildings with a straw thatched roof at Butser Farm didn’t have chimneys (only the Roman Villa did). This was because buildings during all these time periods didn’t have chimneys, even though they had fires inside. The smoke escaped through the straw roof, but this helped preserve the roof and stop it being infested with animals or birds!
Although none of these buildings survived so we could see what they looked like, archaeologists use evidence left in the ground to help work out what they would have looked like, for example holes where wooden posts would have been and the burnt earth showing where open fires called hearths were located.
The Bronze Age
The Bronze Age came after the Stone Age. It was a time when they started using bronze for tools and weapons, instead of stone in the earlier times. During this time people lived in roundhouses and people started to use more than one building to live in, having one to sleep in and an out house to cook in for example.
The roundhouses had walls made from wattle and daub, which is where branches were woven in between wooden posts and then covered with a mixture of straw, mud, clay and even manure. The buildings then had a thatched roof. We know what these buildings probably looked like, and the fact that they would have used more than one building at this time on the evidence left in the ground, for example evidence of where hearths (fires) were and post holes in the ground where the wooden posts would have been placed.
While I was there I saw a Bronze Age casting workshop. They were melting bronze until it was red hot and a liquid and using it to create a knife. It was fascinating and probably my favourite part of my whole day!
The Iron Age
The Iron Age was the next time period, when people started using iron! They had a lot of Iron Age buildings at Butser Farm. These Iron Age buildings were also roundhouses and were very similar to the Bronze Age house. They were designed in the same way, with wooden posts for the walls, covered in wattle and daub and a thatched roof.
These buildings had different purposes, inside the living space there was a fire inside the building called a heath that was always burning. Other roundhouses were used for cooking, storage and for making things for example. We know this from evidence found from archaeologists, just like the Stone and Bronze Age buildings.
An interested fact I learnt at Butser Farm…wattle and daub was thought to contain animal dung / manure. When Butser Farm created some of the round houses they tried to not use it, but the walls quickly started to crack. They discovered that the manure was a vital ingredient to make the walls longer lasting and flexible so they didn’t crack!
Iron Age buildings were often built by hill forts, used to protect a settlement if it was attacked. Just like in the Bronze Age people would have used different buildings for different purposes.
The Romans
The Roman Villa at Butser Farm was the first Roman Villa to be built in 1600 years! Just like the other buildings at the site it was built trying to copy the ways it would have been built by the Romans. It was based on a Roman Villa that was built in this country in Winchester. The rebuilt villa is only part of what would have existed in Roman times, there would have been a courtyard and many other buildings surrounding it too.
One thing that really stood out, apart from it looking so much more advanced than the other buildings around it, was instead of being big open spaces inside like the other buildings, the Roman Villa was separated out into rooms. There were living spaces, bedrooms and corridors which were decorated and looked much more similar to how we live now in comparison to the other buildings. It even had windows and a chimney, unlike all the other wooden buildings.
Anglo Saxon Times
The Anglo Saxons didn’t like the stone buildings left by the Romans and left them to become ruins. Instead they built villages with rectangular wooden buildings and a thatched roof. These buildings went back to having one large open space, which was used for sleeping, eating and living in, instead of the rooms in the Roman Villas. They would have had a hearth inside to cook on and keep the home warm.
In an Anglo Saxon village there would be one larger building called the hall that belonged to the chief, the person in charge. Around the outside of the village a large wooden fence was built to protect the people inside, mainly from wild animals.
Time to Battle!
On the day I was there they had a group demonstrating different battle techniques of the time. They showed everyone how they would have fought, and how they would have tried to protect themselves against attack.
All photos and illustrations in this blog post are Whizzbots Images.
Other images on the site may be Shutterstock, Public Domain or Creative Commons Images, which are credited appropriately.
