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Prehistory
Park
Brow
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1 and 2
Reconstruction of a Park Brow Hut
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Park
Brow was a small farming settlement discovered in the 1920s, before
modern deep ploughing removed much of the evidence of its existence.
Today, little survives to indicate the site of houses and fields
spanning several centuries from the late Bronze Age, through the Iron
Age and on into Roman times. It is now only at certain times of the
year that lighter stripes in the soil after ploughing or darker stripes
in the young crop reveal the position of the embankments (lynchets) at
the edge of the former fields.
Eight
circular Bronze Age huts were excavated, each measuring six to nine
metres (20 to 30 feet) in diameter. The farmers who built these huts
dug into the hillside to provide level chalk floors. The low walls were
made from a wattle of woven, flexible sticks. A daub was applied inside
and out, made from a mix of clay, crushed chalk, flint and grass. Once
the huts were thatched with straw, the farmers had provided themselves
with warm and weather-proof shelters. In fact this method of
construction, wattle and daub, was still used four to five hundred
years ago when many Steyning houses were built. The whitewashed wattle
and daub walls became unfashionable in the 18th century. They were
concealed behind a brick facing but still survive, though hidden, today.
The
Bronze Age huts had hearths in the centre for cooking and heating. The
Park Brow villagers discovered that chalk pits dug inside their houses
provided somewhere cool for storage.
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Diagram
of a storage pit
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The
surrounding land provided for the rest of their needs. Archaeologists
have shown that pigs, goats and oxen were kept for meat, milk and bone to
make small implements, and to labour on the farm. Pots, loom weights and
grinding stones (querns) show that the villagers had a variety of craft
skills. They modelled and fired clay, grew and ground grain for bread
and wove cloth from the wool sheered from their small, horned sheep.
Trade would have provided the bronze axes needed for wood-working as
well as spears for hunting deer and wild boar. These animals lived
locally and their butchered bones were left behind at Park Brow.
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