How did they survive winter in the Bronze Age?

The Bronze Age in Britain started around 3,000 BCE after the Copper Age, a short 500-year period of the country’s first metal age. The discovery of how to make bronze gave people huge advantages over their previous Stone Age technologies and everything became easier and more efficient, but that’s not to say life wasn’t still very hard. Winter for anyone living in an ancient time would be a challenge, but the Bronze Age was the first time people had the means to produce warmer homes and better cooking and preserving methods than their Stone Age ancestors.

Surviving winter in the bronze age came down to three things, food, shelter, and clothing.

(The classic roundhouse was very common during the Bronze Age and the central firepit provided maximum heat dispersion)

What did people eat during a Bronze Age winter?

There would be two main items that could be found in every home in a bronze age village, and they were dried meat and dried fat. Salted goods weren’t common inland as mining salt was hard work and salt mines weren’t exactly common in Britain, leaving the only practical choice being to dry goods. Dried fat can last for years if it’s sown up in an animal’s skin, and dried meats mixed with fat will easily last a few winter months.

Here are a few of the foods that people of bronze age Britain are believed to have eaten through the winter months based on archaeological finds. It should be noted that no one knows their full diets for sure as there was no written language until several hundred years after the bronze age ended, so records of food simply don’t exist.

Grains:

The two types of wheat that were in Britain during the bronze age were Emmer and Einkorn, and barley was also known to have been grown as seeds have been found from settlement digs around the country. Corn isn’t native to the UK and wasn’t introduced until much later, and oats were much more work to process than barley or wheat and weren’t introduced until the very late bronze age. Grain is one of the easiest things to dry and as long as it doesn’t get wet it can last for several years in the right storage conditions.

Vegetables:

The only vegetables known to have been produced in bronze-age Britain are peas, chickpeas, lentils, and bitter vetch, which is a type of bean that will make you sick if you eat it raw. Evidence of these crops has been uncovered at archaeological sites but that’s not to say they didn’t grow more, we just don’t know about it.

Carrots, onions, cabbage, and leeks are amongst some of the earliest recorded vegetables grown in Britain and are likely to have been utilized by our ancestors, but again there’s no evidence since these plants quickly rot into nothing. Out of all these crops, the only ones capable of lasting the whole winter would be peas, beans, and lentils since they can be dried and will last for months if done so properly.

Meats:

Pigs, cows, chickens, and goats have been raised since the early bronze age and their bones have been found at many ancient sites. Hunting would still have been a major food source and finding meat wouldn’t really be a problem, it’s making it last for the whole winter that’s the issue. Since they farmed their own animals they could butcher them mid-winter and provide a fresh source of meat they wouldn’t need to try and preserve, but it was always wise to do so.

To preserve meat long term without salt the only option would be to dry it. Stockfish is a product that can take weeks to make and involves hanging a fish up in direct sunlight until every drop of moisture has been removed. Stockfish can last for months and only need to be soaked to make it edible, but dried pork and beef would only safely last for a couple of weeks before they started to turn bad. The answer round this was animal fats which would be melted and poured over meats to stop the air from getting to them, sort of like an early version of Pemmican. Dried strips of fat would last for months and provide a much-needed calorie and fat boost, something needed during the cold weather.

What were Bronze Age homes like?

Thatching was something that became very popular across the British Isles during the Bronze Age. With their new longer-lasting bronze tools now capable of cutting and shaping wood and allowing the introduction of the classic Celtic roundhouse. Farming also started to become popular during the Bronze Age and the growing populations started to settle in permanent locations and the nomadic lifestyle became unsustainable with so many people to support.

Without the need to build a new place to live every time the local animal herds migrated, people started to create bigger homes. The roundhouse was not only a practical and easy-to-build design, but the central firepit allowed for maximum heat dispersion from the fire and was much more effective than a fireplace. This age also saw the small enclosed villages that shared a single surrounding wall that the homes would be built into.

Clothing and warmth

With such a small population across the entire British Isles, the vast majority of the land would have been wilderness, and finding firewood was never a problem. With the abundance of wood available, Bronze Age people didn’t bother to mine coal but were known to produce charcoal, but mostly for their metal smelting instead of fuel for the firepit.

Clothing saw its first major change during the Bronze Age with the availability of linen. This age saw the first large-scale farms and people grew flax to spin its fibers into linen, a replacement for the only other option of leather. Not only was linen more flexible and could be grown in any quantity, but could also be sown into any thickness and also partially waterproofed by coating the outer layer in something called slack wax, which was a mixture of wax and oil.

The increase in farming during the Bronze Age also led to an increase in wool, which was made into blankets and outer jackets. One of the problems they had in the earlier years of working with wool was treating it, and their products would have been made in a very basic manner, leading to very itchy and uncomfortable clothing best suited for layers not making contact with the skin.