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so few Neolithic houses have ever been found in England.
    Over the next few weeks, we found traces of another four houses within the trench; we knew we couldn’t rush this and would need more time in future summers to excavate each of them to the highest standard possible. Having spent the best part of two decades excavating prehistoric house floors, Colin and I had developed new methods for studying them. As a student I’d listened to an experimental archaeologist, Peter Reynolds, tell us about his reconstruction of an Iron Age roundhouse. 1 He’d suggested that the evidence in such houses is so minuscule that archaeologists should dig with teaspoons, not trowels and mattocks, in order to understand how they were lived in. I had roared with laughter at the time: This seemed a preposterously obsessive and time-consuming thing to do.
    Years later, though, as I dug my first house floor in the Outer Hebrides, I realized he was very nearly right. I was working with some very talented environmental archaeologists, Helen Smith and Jacqui Mulville, and we worked out that the micro-debris and chemical residues accumulated on the floor during the house’s occupation could tell us a lot about daily domestic tasks and where they were performed—but it was going to be a major job to retrieve the evidence.
    Archaeologists can pick larger finds out of the ground they’re working on—those things easily visible in the soil—but it’s usual practice to use a 10-millimeter sieve on site (about the mesh size of a normal garden sieve) to ensure nothing gets missed. Smaller sieves are pretty useless because the soil clogs the mesh so quickly. To retrieve anything smaller than 10 millimeters in diameter, we need to wet-sieve the soil: to wash it through sieve mesh of various sizes in a system of water tanks. It’s a long and dirty job, as the soil from each context has to be bagged up in sacks, labeled in minute detail, and usually taken away from the excavation site to a wet-sieving team working in an area with an ample water supply. It slows down the excavation process enormously, but the results are worth the effort.

The remains of four Late Neolithic houses are visible in this main trench at Durrington Walls. I am standing outside the doorway of one of the houses in an area of midden (heaps of domestic rubbish).

    In South Uist we’d carefully wet-sieved the entire occupation layer on top of the floor of a Bronze Age house, which was excavated in half-meter squares. Using a mesh size of just two millimeters, we’d retrieved minute fragments of animal bone, potshards, burned plant remains, and broken artifacts, and were able to identify the areas of the house wherecooking and various types of craft-working were carried out. We also took hundreds of small soil samples from the floor, to plot concentrations of chemical elements, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, and many further samples to send to a soil micromorphologist. Micromorphology is a technique of examining sections through the soil under a microscope to establish how the floor layers were formed, of what they were composed, and whether later floors were laid on top of earlier floors.
    The Durrington Walls houses needed us to apply these well-honed techniques once again. We knew we had to sample the whole floor of each house in minute detail. We dreaded doing it—we knew how long it would take and how many sacks of soil we’d have to heave back and forth—but we knew the results would make it worthwhile.
    Unlike the Hebridean house floors of soft peat and sand, the Durrington floor surfaces were comprised of fairly hard chalk plaster. Every time the Neolithic inhabitants had given their house a good sweeping, they’d sent much of the micro-debris of their lives straight out of the door, so it was more difficult for us to reconstruct activity patterns than it had been on the Scottish sites. Nonetheless, the thin ash layer across the floor gave us a moment frozen in time: