Britain’s oldest wheel
3,000-year-old leftover from Bronze Age found at our own ‘Pompeii’
THE richness of its archaeological treasures has already led to it being called the ‘Pompeii of the Fens’.
Now another important find has been unearthed at a Bronze Age site in Cambridgeshire – Britain’s oldest intact wheel.
The 3,000-year-old wooden wheel shows that Ancient Britons, who were known to use rivers for transport, were also finding innovative ways to move across land.
Around three feet in diameter and possibly made of oak and alder, it would have been the last word in sophistication at the time, archaeologists said. It may well have belonged to a cart that was pulled either by humans or a horse.
It also poses a puzzle, however – it was found in wetland by a river, where canoes would have been a more obvious mode of transport.
‘Burnt to the ground in an arson attack’
Unearthed a week ago, the wheel, complete with hub and part of an axle, is still buried in the mud and dates to between 1100 and 800 BC.
It is the latest remarkable find at a quarry pit at Must Farm, in Peterborough, a former brickworks.
So far the remains have been found of five or six Bronze Age roundhouses that had been built on wooden stilts above a side channel of the river Nene.
Historians think the settlement may have been burnt to the ground in what could have been an arson attack.
The timbers are well preserved by being charred by the fire, and then sinking into the river mud.
Over the years the site became a clay quarry pit for a brickworks which later flooded.
A sword and a rapier were found at the site in 1969, but little else was spotted until 2009. When the water level fell, a timber beam was spotted poking from the mud.
Excavations found some of the items were abandoned during the fire – hence the comparison to Pompeii in Italy, which was preserved after being buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesu- vius in AD 79. The oldest wheel in the world, approximately 5,150 years old, was found 12 miles south of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in 2002.
The new British find is by far the oldest complete wheel in the country, although there may have been a fragment of a slightly older wheel, dating from 1300 BC, found at nearby Flag Fen.
Mark Knight, of Cambridge University’s archaeology unit, said of the new find: ‘Previously in the UK if we could point to a wheel we only had one panel.
‘This is complete and appears to have its axle inside its hub; it’s a wheel made of planks of wood braced together with a reinforced hub in the centre. It’s the most complete, oldest, largest wheel found in the UK.’ He added: ‘It might be odd to have a wheel in wetland by a river, for something that would get you round on dry land, but it demonstrates the “schizophrenia” this site is giving to us.
‘The trees they are felling to make their buildings are from terrestrial woodland, everything about them is terrestrial – even though they are living in this wetland environment.’
Mr Knight said the wheel may have been used on a cart on nearby Whittlesea Island or the foreshore of Peterborough, but added: ‘The wheel may have been a status symbol. Carts may well have been something to show off in as you rode around.’ Iona Robinson Zeki, a researcher, said someone in the settlement could have made or repaired wheels, or it could have been a form of decoration.
Mr Knight said of the site in general: ‘Everything, including the wheel, has been burnt. There is a real sense of pristineness to the structures because the fire shortened the life of the settlement.
‘We are getting a real sense of what happened in a few hours, which is the Pompeii analogy, that clarity of detail. There’s something very evocative about this scenario about this settlement burning down.’