WHITTLESEY, England — No one knows why a catastrophic fire tore through the small settlement that rose by a river channel, incinerating the homes of several families and sending burning timbers crashing into the marsh below. It might have been an accident, an attack by enemies or even some sort of ritual.

Yet answers are emerging, piece by piece, some 3,000 years later.

The Must Farm archaeological site here in Cambridgeshire is considered so rich that it has been compared to Pompeii, the Roman town buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

Must Farm does not look like a picturesque ruin, much less a farm. It occupies raw, muddy terrain with wind turbines and smokestacks towering in the distance. And the bright yellow vests worn by the people involved in the excavation make it look like a construction site.

But its treasures beckon. From the soggy earth, a charred wooden bowl and a ceramic vessel protruded last week, close to the backbone of a cow, presumably butchered for meat. A few feet away, the unmistakable shape of a human skull jutted from the murky sediment in which it had been encased since the Bronze Age.