Extremely rare Bronze Age wooden tool found in English trench

A wooden spade from the Bronze Age has been unearthed by archaeologists in the UK. It is incredibly rare to find wooden artefacts preserved from so long ago.

The spade offers a glimpse into life during a time when people were increasingly farming crops and living in settled communities.

“It’s quite tangible,” says Ed Treasure at Wessex Archaeology in Salisbury, UK. “It’s quite an immediate connection with the past.”

The spade was found in wetlands near Poole Harbour on the south coast of England, where Wessex Archaeology has been digging for several years. The Moors at Arne Coastal Change Project is working to restore coastal wetlands in the area, and the archaeologists are excavating to ensure that informative artefacts are not inadvertently lost.

The researchers were digging in ring gullies, circular trenches that may have originally surrounded shelters. In one of the ring gullies, they spotted the handle of the spade. “There was almost a moment of disbelief,” says Treasure, who was not there personally. “It was quite immediately apparent that it was a piece of worked wood.” The spade had been carved from a single piece of oak.

The wet conditions meant the shovel was not exposed to oxygen, slowing the decay.

The team has radiocarbon dated the spade to 3400-3500 years ago, using a shard found alongside it. “A very small bit of the spade had become broken off in burial – we used that for dating,” says Treasure. Nearby pottery indicated a similar date. This places the spade’s origins in the Middle Bronze Age.

“It’s quite a big time of change in prehistoric Britain,” says Treasure. People were becoming less nomadic and spending much more time in settled communities, farming a range of cereals and other foods.

However, there is no sign of permanent year-round settlement at the site – unsurprisingly, because it was and is a wetland. “We’re very much thinking this is a seasonal use of this landscape,” says Treasure. People may have brought animals in to graze in the summer, cut peat for fuel or perhaps collected reeds for thatching.

Future studies will try to find out how the spade was made, and what it was used for. “It might have been used to cut peat on the site,” says Treasure. “It may also have been used to dig the ring gully in which it was found.”

Preserved spades from this period are rare. One of the only other examples is the Brynlow shovel, which was found in Cheshire in 1875, rediscovered in the 1950s in a school assembly hall by the fantasy writer Alan Garner and eventually radiocarbon dated to almost 4000 years ago.