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Visiting Bodmin Moor you find yourself in a barren, windswept landscape with only a few sheep for company. Dramatic granite outcrops such as Rough Tor enhance the wild beauty of the place, and the proliferation of standing stones, house circles and enclosures doesn't make much sense in such a bleak place. Not surprisingly, antiquarians and early archaeologists were scratching their heads for many years as to why people came to live here in the first place and what kind of society they lived in when they were here.
Ten thousand years ago Bodmin Moor was completely different to today. It was wooded and temperate, and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers roamed at their will up to 10,000 years ago. By the Neolithic era, from about 4,500 to 2,300 BC, people were claiming the terrain for their own, clearing the trees in order to settle and farm the landscape and burying their dead in barrows and cairns.
Ancient communities continued to thrive there right through the Bronze Age. More than 200 settlements have been recorded, with their enclosures and field patterns, but we don't know when exactly all of these were occupied, how they relate to each other or when and why they were deserted.
English Heritage and the Cornwall Historic Environment Service invited Time Team to examine and date some of the major standing monuments in the vicinity of Rough Tor. In a new departure for Time Team, this involved harnessing some of the latest science used in environmental archaeology alongside the Team's usual excavation and investigation techniques.
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.
Stone Age, Bronze Age or Iron Age? Try our quick quiz to see how many of the following you can place in the correct period.
Long barrows and chamber tombs date mainly from which period?
Stone Age
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Round barrows date mainly from which period?
Iron Age
Bronze Age
Stone Age
The heel stone at Stonehenge is a huge piece of natural sandstone, or sarsen, weighing an estimated 35 tons. It marks the position of the midsummer sunrise from the centre of the monument. During which period was it erected?
Stone Age
Bronze Age
Iron Age
At the beginning of which period is evidence of the 'Beaker folk' first found in Britain?
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Stone Age
At the beginning of which period did construction on Britain's largest stone circle, at Avebury, begin?
Iron Age
Stone Age
Bronze Age
In which period are the Druids known to have been influential in British society?
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Stone Age
Answers here.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
Bodmin Moor, An Archaeological Survey (Cornwall Archaeological Unit, The Royal Commission on Historic Monuments and English Heritage, 1994)
Survival of prehistoric and medieval features is extensive on Bodmin Moor. The moor has a wealth of Ancient Monuments, which were surveyed for this 1994 report.
Bodmin Moor's Archaeological Heritage (Cornwall County Council, 2001) £5
A popular booklet introducing the archaeological remains of this nationally important historic landscape.
Bodmin Moor: The human landscape to c1800 by Nicholas Johnson (English Heritage Archaeological Report)
Steady encroachment provided the stimulus for this survey of the archaeological monuments of Bodmin Moor, a previously little-disturbed landscape rich in surviving structural evidence of the many ways in which man settled from the Bronze Age to post-medieval period.
Get this book
Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans by Francis Pryor (Perennial, 2004) paperback £9.99
An authoritative and radical rethinking of the whole of British history before the coming of the Romans, based on remarkable new archaeological finds made over the past 30 years.
Get this book
Prehistoric Britain by Timothy Darvill (Routledge, 1987) paperback £22.99
Timothy Darvill examines the development of human societies in Britain from the earliest times down to the Roman Conquest, as revealed by available archaeological evidence. Special attention is given to six themes which are traced through all phases of prehistory: subsistence, technology, ritual, trade, society and population.
Get this book
British Prehistoric Pottery by Alex Gibson (Tempus, 2002) paperback £12.59
It can be precisely dated, can tell us about the diet, economy and even ritual acts of prehistoric people, and is often richly decorated. As this study and guide to identification shows, pottery can tell us more about prehistoric society than any other artefact.
Get this book
Prehistoric Ritual and Religion edited by Alex Gibson and Derek Simpson (Sutton, 1998) £29.70
By comparing many different monuments in Britain, Ireland and on the continent this book sheds new light on many of the questions about our past. Some new topics are also covered including the use of colour in prehistory.
Get this book
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
Cornwall Historic Environment Service
www.cornwall.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=296
Web pages for the Cornwall Historic Environment Service are accessed through the Cornwall County Council website. There is a variety of information about the service's policies, projects and publications. The service's annual report, Archaeology Alive, which provides detailed accounts of its work, is available for download in pdf format for every year since 1995-1996 here.
Leskernick Project
www.ucl.ac.uk/leskernick/home.htm
Website covering a multidisciplinary landscape project on Bodmin Moor in the late 1990s. The Leskernick Project included the excavation of an exceptionally well preserved Bronze-Age village complex, consisting of 50 houses in two settlement areas on the western and southern sides of Leskernick Hill with associated field walls, compounds, cairns, ceremonial structures and offering places in their wider landscape setting.
For extensive links to other websites organised by subject and period, visit Archaeology websites.
Long barrows and chamber tombs date mainly from which period?
Stone Age
Round barrows date mainly from which period?
Bronze Age
The heel stone at Stonehenge is a huge piece of natural sandstone, or sarsen, weighing an estimated 35 tons. It marks the position of the midsummer sunrise from the centre of the monument. During which period was it erected?
Stone Age
At the beginning of which period is evidence of the 'Beaker folk' first found in Britain?
Bronze Age
At the beginning of which period did construction on Britain's largest stone circle, at Avebury, begin?
Bronze Age
In which period are the Druids known to have been influential in British society?
Iron Age