Five Wooden Wells Up to 2,700 Years Old Found Near Southampton
Archaeologists found five waterlogged wooden wells at a spring in Hampshire, one dated to 719-396 BC. How they were built, dated and kept from rotting.
Archaeologists digging ahead of a new water pipeline in Hampshire, England, have found five wooden wells at a natural spring north of Southampton, and the oldest are about 2,700 years old. Radiocarbon dating of one structure gave a date between 719 and 396 BC, which puts it in the Early Iron Age, according to UCL, as reported by HeritageDaily.
The spring seems to have supplied local people with water for centuries. Pottery found in and around the wells shows it was still in use in the later Roman period, so researchers can compare how people built wells at a single spot across several hundred years.
Oak trunks sunk upright into pits
The team from UCL Archaeology South-East, which carried out the dig on the route of the pipeline between Otterbourne and Southampton, thinks four of the wells date from the Iron Age. Their builders hollowed out oak trunks and set them vertically into pits. The largest is roughly 70 centimetres across.
The wells were not identical. A ring of wooden stakes reinforced one of them. Another was repaired while people were still using it: a broken section was propped up with the wooden blade of a shovel.
Excavation lead Rachael Geoghegan called it “rare and exciting to find wooden structures from this period.” Wood usually rots away, but the wet ground around the spring kept oxygen out and stopped decay. She said the timbers are preserved well enough that axe marks are visible on some of them.
A Roman well built a different way
The fifth well belongs to the Roman period, and its builders took another approach. They dug a shallow rectangular pit and lined it with timber planks and stakes instead of using a hollow trunk. Early examination points to oak again as the main wood. The mix of large timbers and thin roundwood stakes shows the builders cut both mature trees and saplings, and some of the bigger pieces look like they were reused from something else.
Waterlogged wood that has sat in oxygen-poor soil for centuries can fall apart once exposed, so the team stabilised the timbers before lifting them. The Iron Age trunks came out as intact as possible. For the Roman well, archaeologists recorded the structure in detail to separate the different phases of its timber construction.
Why it matters
Wooden structures from the Iron Age rarely survive in Britain, and finding Iron Age and Roman wells side by side at one water source is unusual. Waterlogged wood specialist Hannah Street said the wells show how construction and water management changed from the Iron Age into the Roman period. The site also shows that this spring stayed in use through major cultural and technological shifts in the region.
Only one well has a radiocarbon date so far. The Iron Age age of the other three rests on the archaeologists’ current interpretation, and the Roman well has no precise construction date yet.
What researchers are doing next
The timbers are now kept in tanks of water so they do not deteriorate while specialists study tool marks, joints and other clues to how they were made. The team is also analysing artefacts, soil samples, pollen and preserved plant remains to rebuild a picture of the surrounding landscape and work out how people used the site.
Researchers are attempting dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, on timbers from the Roman well. By comparing the surviving ring sequences, they hope to pin down when it was built more precisely.
Source: HeritageDaily
