Their on-line diary effervesces with superlatives -- "truly fantastic pottery," "truly exceptional textiles," "a really unimaginable web site," "the dig of a period."
Typically on prehistoric sites, you're lucky to seek out a couple of pottery shards, a mere hint or shadow of organic remains; typically archaeologists need to contend, need to interpret as best they will.
But this anthropology dig has clad to be utterly, thrillingly totally different.
For the last 10 months -- day by day, week by week -- the excavation has yielded up a wealth of astonishing finds as well as pottery, textiles, metal work and ancient timbers. The dig offers, as web site manager Mark Knight from the Cambridge anthropology Unit place it, "a real snapshot" of a lost world -- a prehistoric settlement from the Bronze Age some 3000 years agone.
The dig is nearly while not precedent the foremost revelatory of its kind in Britain, if not in Europe, and it's already begun to remodel our data of life within the Bronze Age.
The dig has been dole out beneath an oversized rectangular white tent -- a few thousand meters sq.. it is the form of tent you may use for a marriage reception however here it's perked up on the sting of a operating quarry. Far below, an enormous crane is busily extracting clay to create bricks.
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The archaeologists arrived in effect last Sep and, shielded from the wind and rain beneath the tent, they have been forensically excavation away many meters below water level. Interest was 1st aroused in 1999 once a series of wood posts were discovered protruding of the clay. Trial excavations followed in 2004 and 2006 once Bronze Age spearheads and a weapon were found.
All terribly promising however still nobody complete quite what they'd came upon.
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