Butser Ancient Farm: History from 1973 to 2007 and What Happened After

Butser Ancient Farm was founded as an experimental archaeology project to research prehistoric and Roman agriculture and building techniques, and the archive site butser.org.uk covers its work from 1973 to 2007. The founding director was Dr Peter Reynolds (1939–2001). After his death, the final site he created at Bascomb passed into the hands of Butser Education CIC, which runs it today. The archive itself exists to give students and researchers access to Reynolds' methods and results.

What the project was set up to do

The farm was instituted specifically to research Prehistoric & Roman Agriculture and Building Techniques by experimentation. That purpose shaped everything documented in the archive: it was not a museum of reconstructed buildings for their own sake, but a research programme in which structures, cultivation and processing methods were tested by being built and used.

Peter Reynolds held firm views on what constituted experimental archaeology, and the archive includes a paper summarising those views, alongside a paper outlining the history and development of the farm, its research philosophy and methodology, its use in education, and its relationship to the general public.

How the project developed across the archive period

The archive's own structure shows the project moving through a series of sites and expanding its research scope. The site list includes:

• Little Butser – demonstration site
• Fishbourne
• Wroughton
• Bascomb – the final site created by Peter Reynolds
• Outstations

Alongside the sites, the archive records a wide range of experimental strands, including cereal yields, climate, grain storage, grain dryers, plough zones, carbonised seed, earthworks, and metals. Building experiments are documented through structures such as roundhouses, a Roman villa construct, a turf house, and reconstructions associated with Maiden Castle, Balkesbury, Moel y Gaer, Pimperne, Longbridge Deverill Cowdown and Moel y Gerddi. Fieldwork themes include ploughing, hoeing, sowing, manuring, soil and arable plant communities, with separate monographs for metals, iron and tin.

In the 1990s Reynolds made a list for a seminar of what he called "Golden Nuggets" — an impromptu summary of the main themes of his work and its outcomes. The archive presents this as a synopsis; the full publications and the site itself are described as giving the complete picture of the experiments behind it.

What happened after 2007

The archive period ends in 2007, and the key transition is recorded plainly on the site:

• The final site created by Peter Reynolds at Bascomb is now run by Butser Education CIC.
• The name Butser Ancient Farm and the logo representing a roundhouse are registered trade marks of Christine Shaw.

So the research programme documented in the archive is not the same entity as the visitor-facing operation at Bascomb today. If you are citing the experiments, the archive and its publications are the record of the original project; if you are visiting or contacting the current site, that is Butser Education CIC.

Using the archive as a student or researcher

The site is explicitly intended to let students and researchers access Reynolds' methods and results. Its main sections are:

There is also a contact link for the Archivist, which is the appropriate route for questions about the material itself. For orientation, start with the paper on the history and development of Butser, then the paper on Reynolds' views on experimental archaeology, then the "Golden Nuggets" summary — those three give you the project's intent and its headline results before you go into the individual experiment categories.