A 3,000-year-old wooden wheel dating from the Bronze Age was excavated in an England, pre-historic town, reported by the BBC. The wheel is the best-preserved artifact of its kind according to archaeologists in an ancient town that collapsed into a river.
The wheel measures roughly 3 feet in diameter with its hub still in place, and was unearthed during a dig at a Must Farm site located in Peterborough. The find was released by Historic England, a heritage organization that is partly sponsoring the excavation.
“This remarkable but fragile wooden wheel is the earliest complete example ever found in Britain,” Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said in a statement, and added that the discovery adds insight into the technological sophistication of our ancestors that dwelled in the region 3,000 years ago.
Must Farm was discovered in 1999, classified as “Peterborough’s Pompeii.” Like Pompeii, the site has been well-preserved with ornate murals and graffiti art. It was a former river society comprised of circular wooden houses built above a defunct River Nene channel. A fire, however, destroyed the river-town plunging into the sandy river where it’s been preserved until recently.
Excavators also dug up rare items not typically found in archeological records, such as a a wooden platter, wooden utensils, and clothing made from the fiber of lime trees; and even jars housing the remains of food, perhaps abandoned when the fire broke out, the researchers said. Archaeologists partially excavated the site in 2006 but is currently under a more complex eight-month undertaking costing $1.58 million.
Other antiquities recovered pointing to our ancestor’s sophistication include eight Bronze Age boats lifted from the same river in 2011, which suggest that Must Farm inhabitants traveled to and had connections to the dry land beyond the river.