Making bronze seemed like

MAGIC

People came to Britain from France, Spain and Germany who knew how to melt lumps of stone containing copper and tin to make a metal alloy called bronze. It takes a great deal of skill to cast items in bronze and very few people would have known the secret.  

Bronze was used for making swords and axes, tools for wood-working and personal ornaments. When it was new and clean it shone and gleamed. It reflected the sun and you could even see your own reflection in it. To people used to items made of wood or leather or stone, bronze was a magical substance. 

Bronze was expensive to make and objects made from bronze would have been owned by kings and rich lords. 

However, bronze did not replace the use of stone for making tools. Great skill is needed to make the best flint arrowheads, and this skill was not lost. 

Some of the flints found in the fields near Langar are not Stone Age but date from the Bronze Age.  (See Langar during the Stone Age.)

In 1937 Mr Griffin was the foreman of a gang of workers from the Trent Navigation Company who were dredging gravel from the River Trent.

However, work stopped when the men found a large number of big wooden posts which had been driven 2 metres down into the riverbed. 

When the workers also found metal spears and a human skull at the bottom of the river, Mr Griffin stopped all work and got in touch with the Nottingham archaeology society. The chairman, Mr Hind rushed to Clifton to investigate. 

Mr Hind identified the site as being a 3000 year-old Bronze Age pile settlement. 

When the site was properly examined, archaeologists found hundreds of huge wooden posts. They were one metre apart and had been sharpened at the bottom so that they could be hammered firmly into the ground.  

Over the next few weeks several large bronze spearheads, bronze swords, knives and daggers were found as well as a pottery mortar for grinding food. A crucible containing metal is evidence that bronze was being made here. 

All the finds date from the middle and late Bronze Age 1000 - 500 BC and are now in Nottingham Castle Museum. 

Right: some of the Clifton finds - 

1. Bronze spearhead 21½ inches long (55 cm)

2. Bronze dagger or knife

3 to 6. Bronze spearheads

7.  Crucible for melting metal 10 inches (26cm)

8. A mortar

9. A wooden pile (post) measuring 7 feet 2 inches (215 cm)

A village on stilts

The piles or posts were sunk into the ground along the River Trent for 100 metres and across to the other side of the river. They were the upright supports of wooden platforms on which houses had been built during the Bronze Age.

The Trent has changed its course many times over the years and the houses may have been built on marshy ground by the river rather than in the river itself.

The wooden piles stood above the level of floods; cross beams were then placed over the top of them to make a platform on which the houses were built. The villagers would have been safer here from attack by bears or wolves or their enemies. It was a good place for fishing and hunting and for farming the fertile land on the slopes of the Trent Valley.

Remains of pile villages have also been found in Yorkshire and the Thames valley. However, this site at Nottingham is a particularly good example of a village on stilts. 

This article is based on a report by Mr F Hind, President of Nottingham Natural Science Field Club of the Thoroton Society 1940

We know that there were people living near Langar during the Bronze Age. Their flint tools have been found in fields nearby.

(See Stone Age Langar.)

But no evidence of their houses has been discovered in Langar. Their houses may have looked like this. It is a house built in modern times in Bronze Age style at a museum in Sussex.

We think of archaeologists digging in the ground and hoping to find treasure - and sometimes they do! 

But archaeologists can discover a lot about people in the past from the smallest pieces of evidence. By examining seeds and pollen and insects in the soil, archaeologists can discover which plants grew there thousands of years ago, which plants were grown for food and which animals were kept. 

Evidence in the Vale of Belvoir 

We know that in the Vale of Belvoir during the Bronze Age there were large areas of woodland with trees with such as oak, beech, lime, elm, ash, hazel and alder. However, Bronze Age people were chopping down more and more forest trees to make room for farmland. The discovery of certain types of beetles associated with animal dung shows that cattle, sheep, pigs were being kept. Animal bones show that red deer and fallow deer lived in the woods. 

Bronze Age people also farmed crops including ancient cereals such as emmer and spelt as well as barley and wheat. They gathered crab apples and hazelnuts for food. 

  Click to watch a video about
The Story of Britain - Bronze Age Britain.
Life in Britain seen through the eyes of a Bronze Age family

- from the BBC.

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