What they found

Time Team's investigations on Bodmin Moor focused on two sites in the shadow of Rough Tor. One was a 500-metre long stone cairn, running on an east-west alignment pointing towards the tor. The other was a concentration of circular structures, believed to be Bronze-Age roundhouses, and other features all comprising a likely Bronze-Age village.

The cairn
Phil Harding excavated a section across the cairn, where a track was driven right through it during the military use of the land during the second world war. The excavation revealed a quite sophisticated construction method, with two retaining walls made up of larger stones on either side of the cairn containing a rubble infill in the middle. Other stones were laid up against these walls to provide buttressing and there was evidence of a stone 'pavement' alongside the cairn.

The excavation also revealed that the turf had been stripped from the original ground surface when the cairn was built, possibly as some form of ritual 'cleansing' of the land. The removed turfs were probably placed on top of the cairn to complete what would have been a dramatic feature on the landscape. Although there were no finds to confirm the date, the construction methods placed the monument firmly in the Neolithic period.

The village
Time Team dug three trenches on the site of the likely Bronze-Age settlement. Each of them involved the excavation of circular stone remains. Two had been excavated previously in the 1950s in digs led by Dorothy Dudley; one had not been dug before.

Each structure was positively identified as a habitation – classic prehistoric roundhouses – rather than stores or cattle enclosures, by the presence of an hearth. It had been hoped that the charcoal residues would allow for carbon dating evidence but none of the samples produced clear dates. Nonetheless, the discovery of the same kind of local pottery in each trench, dating from about 1500 BC, revealed that the roundhouses were in use at around the same time, confirming that this was indeed a Bronze-Age village.

Environmental archaeology
In a new departure for Time Team, environmental archaeologists Emma Tethowe and Ben Gearey were set up with a mini-laboratory at the nearby farmhouse for the duration of the dig. They were kept busy carrying out various scientific tests on environmental samples to see what these could tell us about the landscape in antiquity.

Pollen analysis showed that the site was still quite heavily forested with oak and hazel woodland into the Bronze Age. The presence of dung beetles, meanwhile, revealed that large herbivores have been grazing here for at least 5,000 years. Phosphate analysis indicated a large amount of human and animal activity around the roundhouses, as would be expected, but very little in the vicinity of the cairn, suggesting that this was a sterile area, kept clear of animals.

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