Dear Paul

I am at last able to send you a copy of the report on the wood from your Faddiley axe find.

Because the wood sample had deteriorated through drying out, you will see that positive identification proved difficult, but there is no reason to believe that apple/pear wood is not the correct identification. This wood is, for example, represented amongst the many preserved wood objects from the Bronze Age lake villages in Switzerland (enclosed).

This information will be added to the County Sites and Monuments Record, where it will be available to those studying the Bronze Age in Cheshire and further afield, ft helps build up a picture of life in the Bronze Age.

Thank you again for making this wood available for study.

Yours sincerely

Stephen Penney Curator-Salt Museum

Wood preserved in socket of Late Bronze Age axe

Metal detector find, apparently sealed in a clay deposit. Wood fragment preserved within the socket. This was approximately 3cm long and extremely dry with signs of flaking and in a generally poor state of preservation. It was not possible to cut sections immediately. A piece approximately 0.5cm long was cut from the more rotted end, soaked in water and then frozen. Whilst still frozen transverse, radial and tangential longitudinal sections were cut by hand with a razor blade. These were mounted in water and examined at magnifications of up to x400 under a Leitz Diaplan microscope.

Microscopic characters were described and then compared with data presented in Schweingruber (1978) and with modern reference slides held in the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham.

Results

Transverse section: ring diffuse - single, scattered, regular, medium-sized pores. Thick walled fibre tracheids - amazingly so! Single rays.

Tangential section: single to bi-seriate rays, mostly bi- but rather irregular. Relatively short - 10-17 cells high, mostly low end of this range.

Radial section: Rays more or less all homogeneous. Very fine and occasional spiral thickening. No strong evidence for plates -therefore presumed simple. Patches of pits in ray vessels.

Conclusion

Using these characteristics the most likely identification is therefore Pomoideae: Pyrus/Malus/Crataegus types, (apple/pear/hawthorn). Even with modern material it is not possible to distinguish these and the identification is not considered absolutely secure given the poor state of preservation - the whole sample looks "more uneven/untidy" in section than the modern material.

Any or all of these species are likely to have been growing in southern Cheshire during the Bronze Age, as they still do today. All could therefore have provided usable wood. The generally even-grained nature of the wood makes at least the apple and pear a popular wood for turning and working today. Schweingruber notes that this type was used "for the fabrication of special handles, percussion tools, and spoons".

Reference

Schweingruber, F. H. (1978). Microscopic Wood Anatomy. Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Forestry Research.

Jacqui Huntley

English Heritage North East Regional Advisor in Archaeological Science Department of Archaeology University of Durham

25.V.2000.

Bronze Age Lake Villages in Switzerland

Fiave on Lake Carera has yielded numerous organic artifacts, particularly from the Middle Bronze Age levels. Many objects fell from the houses around the perimeter of the settlement into the waters and soft sediments of the lake below. Some were carbonized, others preserved simply by waterlogging. Willow basketry was found, with patterned weave as at Auvernier, and a tightly-woven conical basketry hat, made of flexible viburnum shoots on a framew ork of split spruce and reed, probably Phragmites (ill. 94). Small cups with a handle were quite common, eight made of maplewood, with one or two each of silver fir, beech, lime and apple-like wood. One of the maplewood cups had been repaired in antiquity, sewn with flexible spruce where the rim had broken (///. 95'). A spruce or silver fir vessel, a narrow cylinder with a separate base, was both sewn together with spruce and mended with it when the container split (///. 96). Beaters, spoons and ladles, spindles and spindle whorls, pins, needles, awls and toggles continue the domestic inventory, all made of wood.

Distinctive hafts for sickles and for axes were recovered, many of them made from beechwood (ill. oj). one complete sickle had a beechwood handle, knobbed at the end and curved to hold a flint blade stuck in with pitch (///. 95). Among the other 'outdoor' objects were a bow and several arrows, a maplewood yoke and a beechwood ard (from separate phases of the settlement). Beechwood mallets and beech and oak wedges probably both served for splitting felled trees and reducing wood to the required size for the manufacture of the diverse objects recovered from Fiave. The presence of some unfinished pieces, cups for example, reinforces the evidence for local manufacture.

This is not the context to discuss the inventories of pots and bronzes from the later Bronze Age sites, except to note that the evidence preserved in peat and lake sediments indicates that both categories of artifact were produced within villages. The Zurich sites of Alpenquai and Wollishofen were both very rich in finished objects, and also in scrap metal, ingots, clay tuyeres and numerous stone moulds. Knives, sickles, axes, spearheads and many different types of decorative pin were produced in quantity. At Auvernier-Nord the distribution of industrial debris indicated that pots were fired right in the thick of the tightly-packed wooden houses, not even in the more open space around the perimeter. No wonder settlements caught fire and burnt down.