Bronze casting linked to house rebuilds as the settlement shrank

October 10, 2026United KingdomExcavationShare

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Key facts

• The central house was remade six times between roughly 1,100 and 600 BC, about once every 60 to 70 years, each time capping the worn floor with clean sand
• Bronze working occurred only in the central house and only during these remaking events
• At the house's founding, hundreds of clay moulds for swords, spearheads, razors, axes and pins were placed before the doorway; at the next remaking casting happened beside the central fireplace, probably with the roof removed
• A third casting event belongs to the following renewal, after which bronze working ceases as bronze networks faltered toward the Iron Age and flint use rose again
• The southern house was abandoned between about 1,025 and 920 BC; by 995-880 BC the northern building was falling into ruin and broken cooking vessels lay unremoved on the floor of the great house to the south-east
• Between about 930 and 775 BC only the great house remained occupied, with two dogs placed beneath its north-east floor, one stretched across the threshold and one headless directly over the child buried there some three centuries earlier
• Excavators ask whether the dogs were set as ritual protectors for the household, continuing an older practice of placing ancestors in the same ground
• By 735-570 BC the old great house served as a daytime workspace and store for agricultural tools rather than a permanent dwelling

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