Ten thousand years ago, Bodmin Moor was completely different to the barren, windswept landscape of 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 4500 to 2300 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.
Watch now on 4oD
