THE BRITISH POMPEII. Another archaeological discovery. (And to think that there was a time when I believed that pretty much everything from the distant past had been found). This article on the BBC site (July 14) describes what is being called “the British Pompeii”. Here is an earlier article article about the find. Like Pompeii, the Cambridgeshire site provides a glimpse of life interrupted, preserving information about how people lived thousands of years ago—in this case, from 1000 to 800 BC.
The settlement consisted of five circular houses raised on stilts. Archaeologists think that a fire destroyed the posts, causing the houses to fall into a river where silt helped preserve the contents. The fire apparently interrupted a meal because “charred remains of porridge type foods, emmer wheat and barley grains have been found …sometimes still inside the bowls they were served in.” The people living there made their own high quality textiles. “Some of the woven linen fabrics are made with threads as thin as the diameter of a coarse human hair.” Beads found at the site originally came from the Mediterranean or Middle East.