December at the Farm

We’ve almost reached the end of another eventful and successful year at Butser Ancient Farm, and site staff are now winding down for the festive season with a touch of annual maintenance, painting walls, waxing floors and consuming mince pies. The animals are not loving the wet, muggy weather we’ve been having, and everyone’s hoping the new year will bring crisp, frosty days with bright sunshine.Around the farm we have been attempting to combat the mud that has arisen from excess daily drizzle. The goats have been given a wooden platform in their goat-shack to help keep them away from the sludge, and the sheep have been split into three separate paddocks to ensure they all have enough to graze on. We’ve also been particularly excited by a new nocturnal visitor. A barn owl has been eating in our Saxon and Stone Age houses, and we’ve been dissecting pellets kindly left for us each morning! It’s not a good time to be a vole…This afternoon we will be celebrating the winter solstice in two ways; from 2-3pm we will be exploring Saturnalia, also known as the ‘Roman Christmas’. The holiday was held to worship the deity Saturn, and was usually accompanied by sacrifices, a public banquet and carnival atmosphere in which social norms were inverted and masters waited on the tables of their servants!After Saturnalia we will be welcoming children to our Tales of Winter Magic storytelling event, with famed storyteller Red Phoenix. Families can join us around the fire for hot chocolate while listening to festive tales in the Little Woodbury roundhouse. We still have some spaces available for this event, so if you fancy coming along at 3.30pm then please do!In other news, one of the farm directors Simon Jay received a rather good Christmas present last Friday, as he and his wife Chloe welcomed baby Meredith Emily into the world. She’ll be daubing walls and building villas before she can say ‘the Saxons are coming!’The farm will reopen on Monday 11th January when we will once again be teaching hoards of local schoolchildren about prehistoric Britain and our delicious ancestry. In the meantime, all the staff at Butser Ancient Farm wish our visitors a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Delving into the Deep

Last week, Butser’s experimental archaeologist Ryan Watts visited the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, for a glimpse into new and exciting techniques used in marine archaeology. He met with Dr Sarah Rich and two other experts from the National Maritime Trust to put mesolithic wood samples through an imaging system known as Reflexive Transformation Imaging (RTI).The best way to imagine the process is like looking for an engraving on a wedding ring. The camera takes lots of flash photographs at different angles to pick up tiny marks on the surface, and this is put through bespoke software to make a 3D image. You can then move this 3D image around to check for things like tool marks, incisions and flaws.The wood samples used in this process were from a site called Bouldnor Cliff, a submerged mesolithic settlement site off the Isle of Wight. Over the summer Ryan and Sarah used different mesolithic tools on wood to give a sample set to put through the RTI imaging. When comparing with these modern samples, the prehistoric woodworking samples showed a scale of technology that wasn’t seen for another 2,000 years in Britain. An exciting discovery!One example of this technology is tangentially splitting the wood, which is something we haven’t seen until much later on in human history. If we can identify this for certain, it could possibly be evidence for the building of a logboat – this might be the earliest logboat in the country! Watch this space…