An archeologist uncovers the remnants of a three-thousand-year-old wooden house near Peterborough, England, earlier this year. Photograph by Peter Nicholls / Reuters

The biggest skies in England loom above the fens, in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Lincolnshire, on the country’s eastern edge. It is a flat landscape, low-lying and damp; much of the ground sits only a few feet above sea level. From Must Farm, the site of an old clay quarry, four miles east of Peterborough, you can see the squat medieval tower of the city’s cathedral, the hulking mass of a brickworks, and a McCain fries factory. Below the everyday noise—the rumble of the roads and the railway, the whine of the dragline excavator pulling up clay, the cry of the occasional seagull—is the sound of pumps, which work nonstop to keep the land drained. Without them, the fields and quarries would be flooded, either from the sea or from the rivers that flow out into the Wash, an estuary that opens onto the North Sea. Twelve thousand years ago, before the Ice Age ended and the water levels rose, the sea was dry land and Britain was a peninsula, a tail attached to the body of Europe. One could walk from the land now occupied by Peterborough across to the spot where Amsterdam now stands.

Britain’s geology tells a slow and phlegmatic story, but its early human history is opaque. Archeologists know that Stonehenge, its best-known prehistoric monument, was begun in the Neolithic Age, around five thousand years ago, but they have failed to divine its exact purpose and meaning, although theories abound. The island’s Bronze Age, which lasted from 2500 to 800 B.C., saw the appearance of farming and field systems, roundhouses and settlements, and tools and weapons forged from bronze. But compared with the same period in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, Bronze Age Britain feels remote and dumb. It produced no great palace cultures, like Knossos or Mycenae; it left its traces in no Homeric epics. Writing did not arrive until the Romans invaded, in the first century A.D.; before that, Britain was the stuff of travellers’ tales. At the turn of the fourth and third century B.C., the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia wrote the first account, now lost, of the curious people who lived at the northwestern edge of the known world. But their lives are obscure to us; the British Museum’s display on the Bronze Age in Britain doesn’t even fill a whole room. There is a Welsh cape made from gold, dating from somewhere between 1900 and 1600 B.C.; there are swords, and bronze cauldrons and clay dishes with incised decorations. On the whole, however, what is conveyed is an impression of absence rather than presence. Much of the material has been gleaned from burial sites. Archeologists “have known more about Bronze Age people in death than in life,” Neil Wilkin, the museum’s curator of Bronze Age Europe, told me.

But, from time to time, the soil pushes up clues, particularly in the fens, where the waterlogged earth creates anaerobic conditions that slow decay. One summer day in 1999, a local archeologist was walking at Must Farm, along the edge of a disused clay pit; at one time it was filled with water, but the water level had dropped enough to reveal some wooden stakes poking out. The Cambridge Archaeological Unit, which operates out of the university, an hour’s drive away, did some exploratory work and found, through radiocarbon dating, that the material dated from about 900 B.C. The site was monitored for several years, until Historic England, a government agency devoted to preserving the country’s heritage, began to press for it to be properly excavated. Last September, with funding from Historic England and the brick-making company Forterra, a team of about a dozen archeologists went to work.

Each day, they are making discoveries that are radically expanding the knowledge of Bronze Age Britain. The site is unparalleled in the U.K. for its wealth of artifacts and the pristine state of their preservation. Three thousand years ago, it was a settlement of wooden roundhouses, but life there ended abruptly: a fire tore through it, and the buildings collapsed, sank into the marshland, and were quickly entombed by silt and mud. “In archeology, very occasionally, there is the feeling that you have turned up just a week too late, that the people who were here have just moved on,” Mark Knight, the archeologist in charge of excavation at Must Farm, told me when I visited for a day in April. “This site has that feeling to it. Normally in Britain, when you dig, three thousand years of history seems manifest in the remains, because the most you tend to find is a few postholes and a potsherd. Here, somehow, the time span feels short. It’s so intact, so three-dimensional.” Inevitably, perhaps, the site has been nicknamed the Pompeii of Peterborough.

Knight is tall, red-bearded, and weather-beaten; his voice is a soft West Country burr. When he shook my hand, I noticed that every line and fingernail had peat and soil worked into it. I asked him how he had gotten into archeology. “I am a product of Margaret Thatcher,” he said. As a young man, he’d worked in engineering, mending car radiators, but in the nineteen-eighties, like many Britons, he lost his job. (The unemployment rate in Britain doubled between 1979 and 1983.) “I was put on a training scheme to get back into work,” he said. “I had a choice between working in parks and on an archeological site. I chose the archeological site. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t even pronounce the word, to be honest with you.” He had been placed on a site in Exeter, in Devon, where the city’s medieval waterfront was being excavated. After a couple of months, “something clicked,” he said. He earned a degree in archeology and, in 1995, moved east to work for the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

We stood on a low rise, and in the dip below us was a white tent about a quarter the size of a football field, erected to cover the archeological site and keep it from drying out in the harsh East Anglian wind. Knight led me down a path toward it. At the top of the slope, marking the present day, were fragments of bricks, rejects from the nearby factory. Farther down, he indicated a dark layer of earth. “This is Iron Age peat,” he said. And a few steps later: “This is where the sea came in, in the early Roman period, the first century A.D.” As we approached the tent, he said, “Now we’re down into the period where we’re excavating, around 900 B.C.—river channels. Can you see the shells of freshwater mussels?” Inside the tent, the excavation was being conducted two metres below the surface; had we been able to continue down another eighteen metres, to the level of the base of the quarry, we would have arrived at the Jurassic, a hundred and forty-five million years earlier.