This was village life in Britain 3,000 years ago

THREE millennia ago, a small, prosperous farming community briefly flourished in the freshwater marshes of eastern England.

The inhabitants lived in a clutch of thatched roundhouses built on wooden stilts above a channel of the River Nene, which empties into the North Sea. They wore clothes of fine flax linen, with pleats and tasselled hems; bartered for glass and amber beads imported from places as far-flung as present-day Iran; drank from delicate clay poppy-head cups; dined on leg of boar and honey-glazed venison, and fed table scraps to their dogs.

Within a year of its construction, this prehistoric idyll met a dramatic end. A catastrophic fire tore through the compound; the buildings collapsed, and the villagers fled, abandoning their garments, tools and weapons.