The recent discoveries  of extraordinarily well-preserved 3,000-year-old homes at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire have highlighted the sophistication of domestic life towards the end of the Bronze Age, around 900 BC. But the Bronze Age was a long period, beginning some 1300 years earlier when life was very different to that of the inhabitants of Must Farm.

Here we look at how technology and ways of life in England developed during the preceding millennium.

Written by Dr. Jonathan Last, Landscape Strategy Manager, Historic England.

2000 BC: Ritual Landscapes

Reconstruction by Judith Dobie of the timber circle at Holme-next-the-Sea.

The Early Bronze Age was a landscape of monuments; the roundhouses, enclosures and fields that typified the time of Must Farm were yet to appear.  The most familiar sites from the period were round barrows, but there was also a range of other small circular monuments that were constructed from wood, stone…