Perfectly preserved bronze age wheel unearthed in Cambridgeshire | Hacker News Reader

Perfectly preserved bronze age wheel unearthed in Cambridgeshire

theguardian.com

29 pointsdiodorus9 comments

>> In the fire, possibly started by a cooking blaze that got disastrously out of control

>> A skull... possibly originally casually buried in the river bank just outside the door of the larger house

>> The wheel... may originally have been hanging on a wall.

>> the people of this settlement lived on and in the water and were rich enough to all but ignore the abundant food a few feet away... Instead the bones and food traces reveal that they were eating quantities of lamb, along with pork, beef and venison, and various grains.

What is with the overabundance of conjecture with no evidence to back up such claims? Whose first impression of a settlement burned to the ground is that it was likely caused by an out of control cooking fire? Why speculate about a wheel hanging from a wall? A skull is assumed to have come from a burial? The lack of fish bones implies they ate no fish?

I'm curious how much of this comes from the archeologists versus the writers of the article. When I hear "settlement fire" and "skull", I imagine an assault on the settlement involving an intentionally set fire. But I wouldn't publish my baseless speculations in an attempt to fluff the number of words in an article.

The site is at Must Hill Quarry. Previous finds include pots containing meals that were apparently abandoned when the fire started.

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-35280290

> What is with the overabundance of conjecture with no evidence to back up such claims?

Welcome to archeology.

Haha, I suppose that's true. There will always be the few tidbits where there is enough evidence to make factual statements about what is found at a site. The rest is going to be speculation; some of it based on educated guesses, and some of it pure imagination.

I can understand the wonder and excitement that comes with imagining how the pieces fit together. Everyone likes to dig (pun!) their teeth into a mystery. If an article is going to contain more than the proven facts, I just wish they'd lay out multiple possible scenarios rather than a single "it was probably this one convoluted option".

Then again... as long as they explicitly label all the conjecture with "maybe/possibly/probably", they're at least not being outright misleading - which leaves room for each person to wring their own brain for other options. I guess I want the people who know the most about these things to lay out more reasonable possibilities for me, instead of making me put in the effort to imagine it all for myself. :D

If the skull has no signs of exposure to fire(recall there were teeth to examine), then there's a good chance the person didn't die in the fire that burned everything else around it.

Interesting definition of perfect preservation. Also, I have a nit here. Why do these types of articles show like 1 shot with the actual object (typically out of focus and in the background)?

Finding organic material preserved after 3000 years is incredibly rare. Even many types of stone don't stand up well for that long. For example, a headstone made out of limestone can be unreadable after just a century or two in a wet climate.

I agree that articles like this usually suck for pictures. But in this case the video attached actually provides a great summary and a good deal of close ups.

Ahh. I avoided the video due to the custom player. Typically, those are more trouble than they are worth.

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