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.