Life and Death on Bronze Age Dartmoor illustrated talk

my name's andy crabb i work for dartmouth national park authority as one of their archaeologists and today we're going to talk about the bronze age and dartmoor is internationally famous for its well-preserved bronze age landscape sites and monuments which we have in abundance and we're going to look at two aspects of life and death on dartmoor as told via two excavations which have taken place in the last 10 or so years from which we've extracted lots more information and increased our understanding about this wonderful period and also if you come and visit dartmoor later in the year hopefully our visitor centers will be open and in particular the new visitor center at postbridge where you'll be able to see our much enlarged and improved bronze age exhibition we're going to look at the depth aspect of bronze age and burial practices and possibly beliefs by looking at the white horse hill kissed barrel excavation which yet which which we undertook in 2011 and then we're going to turn our attention to the more uh profane side of bronze age life by looking at the excavation of the bellevue hut circle which took place due to budget uh limitations from 2008 to 2014. okay uh the first site we're going to look at on the death side of things is the white horse hill kissed uh that's way up on the north wall virtually ranges and our second site to look at the life element of the bronze age is the excavation of the bellevue hot circle in the large forestry plantation right in the middle of dartmoor bellevue very close to a post bridge so let's start with white horse hill as you can see from this aerial shot it's a pretty bleak place traditionally we thought not a lot of archaeology survived up here the nearest site is about a kilometer away which is a burial can take out a pimple right hand corner of the image and that's hanging stone hill can there's a fine well we think it's bronze age ken there in about 2000 or so a local amateur archaeologist called joe turner noticed this peat hack right in the middle of the screen and i hope you can see my laser pointer highlighting the area and then this peat hag in the section the exposed section he discovered this kissed now kissed we knew about on darn war and elsewhere in the southwest of england and elsewhere as a burial chamber these burial chambers are kind of very uniformly built they're granite boxes and the same kiss vein comes from the word uh kiss for chamber and vein which from the cornish word main for stone and they're often parallel boxes with the long axis arranged northwest southeast and of the 200 or so we have on dartmoor at least 95 of those have this alignment it must have been symbolic to the people who are buried in them and the people who built them but we haven't found out why at the moment as you can see this kissed in this cycle that pete had this island the peat which is escaped later extraction is about half metering across and the internal chambers about 40 centimeters deep um and we didn't realize that we were looking at the actual side of the kiss chamber here so we're kind of looking east across the middle of it we thought we were looking down the long axis of the chamber so that let us have a little bit of a surprise later on now the kiss on dartmoor had been the subject of many early antiquarian excavations to them have names like the crock of gold or the money pit so you can understand that people thought they'd go and seek their fortunes by trying to find treasure within them and unfortunately that led to a lot of unrecorded excavations but with the emergence of archaeology in the late 19th century is its own discipline people did start to record what they found or more likely what their work when they had sent up to do the work for them found and it seemed like kiss were pretty barren with the acidic nature of dartmoor soils from all of peat organic remains weren't often surviving so we often found remnants of pottery associated with a star called beaker aware which kind of relates the beginning of the bronze age a period when society was developing metal working cells and developing a more stratified social system also found were flint scrapers flint arrowheads and as the antiquarians called it lots of in-blown organic material and try and remember that phase because uh we did find some of that ourselves and it turned out to be something rather different okay so as you can see from the next slide being located at 600 meters above sea level facing southwest prevailing winds the site was in a very fragile and precarious state after 2000 uh we built that dry stone wall to protect the kids but unfortunately on either side you can see how the wet weather which froze in winter then forward in the in the warmer daylight condition uh caused all this tremendous weathering and erosion great slabs of peat would rapidly be whittled away from this island of pete and on the top that wasn't bad enough sheep and walkers congregating on the top this is one of the highest points on dartmoor were kind of eating in from the top of the hag as well so it's only really a matter of time and only a few bad winters before that kiss was unstable and collapsed so we decided to take a chance to do some excavation and based on the kind of antiquarian reports and the last excavation of the kissed in the 1940s where again not much was found beyond some think tools we weren't really expecting much uh worldwide much and where the artifacts to be found now the excavation was undertaken by the cornwall archaeological unit who are neighbours from across the tamar and uh very very experienced working in granite conditions in upland landscapes in the southwest they've also dealt with some bronze age barrels themselves quite recently before 2011 when we decided to excavate and so they were the ideal candidates and the ideal unit to carry out this excavation here you can see i think this is the end of day two almost of the excavation where they've just started to do some uh recording they've removed the overlying peak to reveal the capstone and you can see a lot more of the structure of the kiss you can see how we're sitting into the chamber from that collapsed stone that the parallel sides of the stone chamber are still standing and how it's collapsing on the own weight of that tremendous capstone you'll also notice how the peak section has been cleared up archaeologists have identified different layers of peat they're looking at peach stratigraphy so they can understand the formation processes of the peat and try and work out if the kids originally stood on an early ground surface or it was dug and constructed into a trench on the right hand side you can see these three monolithines and they're inserted to extract peat in a kind of chronological sequence so scientists in the laboratory can extract colon analysis information testate amoeba macro fossils teflon volcanoes all these tremendous things um science and archaeological science can uh apply and extract information from which to our antiquarian and early archaeological forebearers is just different realms of fantasy and i've got to mention that in 2000 we did take some dates from that we did take a peaked core from the other side of the the kiss and the lower feet round about where the pointer is uh located now was about four and a half thousand years old so that makes it kind of late to mid mid to late monolithic late stone age and at the top the peach was around 4 000 to 3 800 years old just on the cusp of the of the bronze age period and pete has a really nasty substance difficult substance to dig if you're an archaeologist because you're looking for patterns of extinctions and in the plastic material like peat which is all the same color almost it's very difficult to see those bounds and changes in contrast you need to look for a cut or a trench where we'll give you some clues about when the kiss was built okay so on the third day and they only had three days to do this excavations artifacts started to emerge and we started to get very excited the first thing which we indicated that there was probably a burial intact within the kiss was a shale disk speed which emerged and then probably a few hours later when they were digging around the back of the kissed off the capstone was lifted we found a hazel steak this hazel steak the later date was region carbon dated and turned out to be three and a half thousand years old and under a microscope it looked like the ends here had been deliberately cut and the tool marks had shown have been sharpened so we've speculated that this may be in a marker post or maybe a support to help hold the kiss together if it was inserted into a kiss to help stop it collapsing so we're getting quite excited and as we excavated the area around the capstone underneath we found this yeah uh it's kind of like jumbled mass of organic material and then we realized well we've hit the jackpot here and what the early antiquarians were describing as material like grass or other glasses which may have browned in and accumulated over the years and rotted away we're thinking well this is a sealed deposit this is probably the real thing this is probably a commotion which makes you wonder about all those early cremations the antiquarians may have and inadvertently discarded well unfortunately this was the last day of the excavation there was no way we could come back as rain was forecast and uh and excavate this and get you another day so we decided to wrap the whole deposit up in cellophane complete on its base slab that granite base slab which the whole deposit was there uh deposited on and to weed it off about three kilometers back the waiting vehicles unfortunately it was oak camps and air days there were no farmers available or commodores they're all fair so no quad bikes could come and rescue us and the deposit then found its way to the wheelchair conservation laboratory in chippenham part of the chicken museum and here they had the luxury of the next four or so months want to take a micro excavation of the kiss of the deposits we've extracted from the kiss it might be just worth noting that the stones themselves when activated that kiss seems to have been deliberately chosen the stones all seem to have a tapering appearance and if they were digging in peat there was hardly likely to be any available stone on the surface available for the builders so it could be likely that part of the ritual of construction kissed they had to select stone from somewhere significant to them and bring it to that location on top of white horse hill to construct the burial chamber now helena wilson of the chippenham lab was confronted with this massive organic materials and after the initial clear up this was what they were presented with they can see this rather compressed heavily pressurized slab of dark material but within that they were able to carry out a careful excavation bill really significant and remarkably well preserved sequence of organic remains which should take to make this amazing story of the the person who was developed buried within the kiss but before they started excavation they took the lab to the salisbury hospital for a good old x-ray and that really got the uh the taste buds tingling because as they scanned it you could start to see structures uh and jewelry and objects being built within that deposit which suggested that there may be necklaces and jewelry and other artifacts preserved within there and in the left hand picture on that black and white slide image sorry you can see some coiling so it may be actually going to remain an object a container or something preserved in situ so on the careful excavation uh helen and her her colleagues as i said took four months of painstaking work and of that deposit which was about centimeters in depth they carefully quadrated it and then took out spits about one to two cents at a time so they can identify and carefully extract objects and clean them and conserve them so they could be looked at by specialists in the field and we can extract all this information at this photo here this image here is a close-up of what turned out to be a basket container being excavated and you can just make out foreground here some really highly skilled and very beautiful stitching around the lip of the container to make out some coils of woven material as well and objects emerging from the opening of the basket itself this large disc and these smaller circular features as well it was absolutely stunning and after their work and after their careful cleaning revealed this and almost complete like it was made only a few years ago a basket container and on closer analysis the material they used for this was the the line vast from the lime tree now that's the inner bark of a lime which has been carefully processed and threaded in water to make it workable and manual and pliable so it can be bundle coiled to make this tube of coiled material which had two circular disks stitched to it on either end to make a container and the experts think this would have been worn with a cord over like a drum satchel around the side of the body but they weren't prepared because this was this is a unique object for the early bronze age in britain nothing like this has been found before the high level of skillful stitching and which went into this the stitching was used with uh they used cowl hair for this and the cowl hair was carefully selected they used darker cowl hair on the top of the of the the basket to make a lovely decorative feature which was hinted at in that earlier slide and elsewhere on the on the basket uh they deliberately automated darker and lighter hairs to make a checkered pattern as well so a lot of careful thought at the time of going in to making this container excuse me i'm just getting a drink now that container is about 27 centimeters long and about 25 centimeters wide give or take as i say it's unique for britain for the early bronze age and that was pretty great in itself to find this level of preservation but inside we started to find all these beads and other objects which really really increased the excitement levels even more and as these were carefully cleaned up and analyzed we found that we had various different types of materials here and what we're looking at is a composite necklace we had 110 clay beads and when the clay was looked at under a microscope it looked like these clay beads were made locally somewhere over in devon somewhere in the river basin where the uh the gravels have been washed down from the granite of dartmoor because you can tell that by looking at them and the range of the micro minerals within that clay so it's 110 of those and they've been carefully fired we also found well i didn't the archaeologists who had the job of excavating this 82 give or take shale beads beautifully cut and carefully polished and perforated shale beads which we believe came from kim ridge bay and dorset about 80 kilometers away that seems quite a long way that's not a patch compared to the amber beads which we think came from the baltic coast in what is now known as poland or eastern germany there were seven of these beads these again have been worked carefully polished but intriguingly these had some air on them so it may have been that these either came from an earlier necklace or that the necklace had been handed down through the generations they have got worn and torn and they accumulated all the scratches as they do for their life history and passed down to kind of found the heirloom and really exciting we found the remains of a tindy we're talking about the bronze age bronze is an alloy of tim and copper minerals which appear abundantly in the southwest of england if you could find that evidence of prehistoric tin activity it'd be amazing in the bronze age and we think they must have been extracting processing tin and dartmoor there's evidence for that or slight evidence for that down there and also on the granite stair but we haven't found any of that yet on dartmoor mainly because of later workings have probably destroyed those early extraction and processing sites so to find the tin bead was really exceptional i also found the crushed remains of what we think was another one so the uh the jewelry the prehistoric jewelry specialist who looked at this and it was carefully excavated and the positions of all these beads were carefully uh plotted and worked out and the runs they occurred and were carefully analyzed think the jury made the necklace or he may have looked something like this a tin bead in the center the amber beads on either side then the clay beads and then the shale beads these aren't all 210 beads these are just to give a flavor of how that necklace may have been strung together and we think the necklace was about 50 centimeters in length maybe sorry 58 centimeters in length and the beads accommodated about 50 centimeters of that total uh length for the necklace three other types of composite necklace have been found in the southwest as well often they contain shale beads sometimes jets from whitby and sometimes amber and i think this is the first one to have tin within it as well now the eagle up oh and the other thing we think this necklace was strung with sinew and blue sinew there was nothing to suggest there was a metallic thread or metallic wire used to string these that would have left the chemical signature which we would have picked up in the laboratory now just go back one slide because the eagle eyed of you would have noticed a wooden stud appeared and we wondered what they were and in the end four of those turned up and these are the actual wooden studs covered up so about nearly 4 000 years old this turns a woodworked timber which uh turned out to be spin wood which occurs locally on dartmoor and this had been turned on the lathe and tall marks on there from a chisel probably a bit of flint used to make those patterns we had four together two small pair two one small pair and one larger pair and we think these were used for facial augmentation there's no studs or ear studs or possibly lip studs as well so you can imagine impressive visual appearance wearer that these would have had now we're going to fight we also found another bit of jewellery as well and this is showing up on the kind of color microscopic of x-ray from the tardis museum uh which was taken by mary davis and this is done with a spectrometer which shows each of these yellow clusters is in fact a tin bead and we think this is either an arm band or a bracelet it's about 27 centimeters long and you can see a large kind of lozenge at the ends which turned out to be the seed pod of maybe a sunflower or an honesty plant as used as a fastener the other one's been lost on the other end it looks like some type of deep sea creature but we've got 35 surviving tin beads and if you look carefully you can see they have a dumbbell pattern when it was cleaned up here's a photograph of it you can just see that that's how i look like after some conservation works have gone on and when it was finally carried up and clean you can see the high level of care which you've gone making this amazing object it's amazing uh what that bracelet uh it consists of 12 or 11 sorry or 22 cow hairs which we think came from the cow's tail stick carefully together woven around these teeth when the replicas were made the expert who had a look at this took them forever it took them weeks to try and get this done so that just and these were pretty it is a pretty good jeweler in their own right so it just shows you the level of craftsmanship which was required to make something like this and the brilliant eyesight and nimble things which were required and this has led some people to think this may have been made by a child or a young person when you put this and the necklace together the replicas being worn by our model you get what's described by the uh prehistoric specialist on jewelry as a prehistoric supernatural power dressing a really good bit of bling you can see how the tin once it's burnished really stands out catches the eye tim is identity is a really valuable commodity uh valuable resource who have power to exploit that and extract the material and trade with it whoever they were had great contacts with other traders who could bring in the amber from far away from across northern europe and had contacts to get the valuable shale beads from dorset as well it doesn't just look good as well we think they may have had protective or healing qualities tin has a kind of charge associated to it has electrode magnetic properties as does uh amber as well and there's also a lot of folklore about being protective and then healing so these you can see how easy it is to think that these this jewelry also had a supernatural quality as well it's having that wealth statement about it as well absolutely incredible the appearance of this being worn coupled with those ear and knows the barrettes and stunts must have been quite something but still the fines kept coming underneath the basketry we found an animal belt and this is it cleaned up a pretty good animal fur but the experts really struggled to find what type of animal they're wrong amongst all the fur we found the copper pin you can see a picture of it there in the bottom left corner and we think this was a fastener because we've been wrapped around and within this animal pur fur this animal pelt was wrapping around the actual cremated bones the person was buried in the kiss on closer analysis it was revealed that this animal belt actually came from the trump of a bear so we think well obviously bears are walking around the landscape at this time but again this important object being taken out of society and putting their burial they've had maybe they're helping you some of the qualities of the bear the prophets of the bear being associated with this person now none of the skins survived from the arrow that's all rotted away just the first survive but for you is that from the excavation and the way the survival of the pelt which remains but the uh the skin the animal pelt had been deliberately placed to enclose the bones and that been significant to have that skin on skin contact with the person who dyed bones and this is what for me that gets really interesting the study of these bones what survived the cremation fire was about 700 grams of burnt cremated material and from that little amount of evidence the bone expert was able to extrapolate but uh because just down here if yeah these roots did the two fruits were not exposed and i believe one of these bones may have been what's called a medical clavicle that hasn't fused the bone expert was able to put a tensive date for this individual was between 50 25 years old given the gracile nature of these bones as well especially the clavicle bone there and the type of jewelry we're getting we can't say for certain it seems very likely that the individual we have here as a young and female uh it seems like even associated with female burials well with male burials just tend to get more kind of referred to as weapons surviving in that burial deposit amongst the bones we found bits of wood charcoal as well from the human funeral pyre and it looks like the burial so that the cremation took place on an oak pyre which was primed with hazel staves to get the fire going and it probably burned at a temperature for 650 degrees which left very little because the combustion was so high there's about very very little charcoal left but from that charcoal even though there's a very little surviving the wood expert believes that there was some uh some worked oak maybe a staff or maybe some type of carved object left or cremated as part of the uh the ritual okay so i hope i haven't blasted you all with facts but it just keeps coming i'm afraid for the organic remains because underneath the animal we found another unique object a multi-composite textile animal skin type of garment we think it is not much survived but this object was obviously of such importance either personal or had of course spiritual connotations or ceremonial connotations that was placed in burials the fundamental thinking which went in the burial deposit first we've got here is on the left hand side a woven textville panel which is actually fibers and that's been stitched again using cowl hair to some animal skin with that decoration of some beautiful animal skin triangles making that nice fringe on the right hand side there with some seam uh binding separating the two as far as i'm aware this is the only type of this type of object which has ever been found certainly in britain as well it's just amazing to think this has all survived probably because that deposit sealed by the peak growth from the later period which hopefully kept out the oxygen so there were the objects we have found what about the other remains as well the micro remains from the pollen and the fungal spores well but careful analysis of that degraded material which surrounded that deposit turned out to be purple for us which is probably gathered locally from and that kind of tells us more at the time and that suggests along with the podium which was found in there the dartmoor was just coming out of a really wet period unbelievable i know and the just starting to dry out from blanket bog to a mirey type environment where purple more grass has just become established looking at the electron microscopes and the which they used they're able to identify pollen on top of the deposits from the flower called meadow suites and it's likely because the abundance of pollen which survived on top of the deposit there was an actual floral tribute placed on the cremation deposit isn't that incredible and that was some meadow sweet and mellow sweet blooms kind of this time of year august july august september so it's very likely this deposit was done this time of year towards the end of the summer and in the top left there you can see a scientist and the scientist extracted a lot more information as well and from the fungal spores they retrieved from their sample tins and samples they realized this was in a grazed landscape this at the time their animal was crazing it and fungi growing on they left its spores which are blown off and they got into the kiss and we also know there's woodland nearby probably hazel woodland may have been managed that's where hazel steaks would have come from with oak stands as well we're just starting to get into a world where grazing is starting to play a lot of prominence on dartmoor we'll explore that at the next site so we're able to tell a nice little story here of how someone with high connections probably of high status who had accumulated all this wealth and resources throughout their lifetime was subject to this in ceremonial cremation this special uh important place in the landscape where their remains and their jewellery were kept to one side as their body was burnt the bones were coated up and then they were carefully turned into a kiss in this special pile of dark so it just makes you think how many other kiss might be out there how many other sites are waiting discovering okay so that was more of a whistle stop tour of we'll move on now to look at the life side of the talk with the excavation of the hot circle of bellevue right in the middle of dark war in the bellevue plantation and this is the site last summer after we finished the excavations and put the sights of bed as it were and you can see a hut circle here's the outer wall the entrance way and it's a beast it's about 12 meters in diameter with normal length about meters as well and it's now in a very open landscape the trees around it have all been failed so if we go back to 1990 you can see there's a very different story you can see how once upon a time when the plantation was uh sown the trees were actually put right across the hot circle and it wasn't until the 1970s that these trees on the hot circle were actually taken down as part of the archaeological management plan but these spruce trees are allowed to grow and unfortunately in 2007 there was a huge storm which upended all those trees and the root plates were such they impacted onto our hot circle disturbing the wall and some of the roots themselves went in through the doorway and ripped up the interior of the hot circle so this provided us with an opportunity to see what actually survived that earlier reforestation and also you'll undertake a dig of a dartmoor hot circle because very few have been done using modern techniques and rather like what we've just been talking about to white wall with the appliance and scientific approaches in a more methodological approach to archaeological excavation so we can extract information and so i'm going to talk you through the excavation how we encountered the various phases of the heart circle dig so after we stripped off the peat we came down to the wall tumble and you can see here the hot circle wall itself and after about three and a half thousand years of abandonment so that granite material has slumped into the interior along closer analysis and the observation whilst we're undertaking this work it's not just the simple case of it being abandoned we actually found that on top of this wall tumble a structure had been built and the photo doesn't really do this justice but there is a square can here okay and that's built on top of the tumble so here's a picture of the uh abandonment cairn as we called it which was built on top of the wall tumble so someone had come back or a group of people had come back and they built this to mark this site even though it probably fallen out of your use maybe hundreds of years before and leave within the can this rubbing stone which is constructed sorry which is uh used uh the material used to make this robbing stone is sandstone and we've had a little experts had a look at it and they're pretty convinced it was probably used for rubbing animal hides and preparing them uh for making clothes out of so really intriguing how this story of this can carried on and was still significant even though after it had long ceased to be lifted so as we removed all that tumble we came down to the paved floor area and here you can see just by the entrance where you need to reinforce that heavily used area with people and maybe animals coming in out this beautifully laid pavement and it was really well laid it's like a professional firm had come in and done it carefully measured and uh we lifted the stone that took a uh quite a quite a few hours to lift that heavy stone and that's when we started to get into this accumulation layer and the other slides still moving forward great okay so i think this is where we almost got to and throughout the interior of the hot circle we found all the way around the outer edges this dark silty gray greasy material which had a lot of poetry and 154 shirts of travista wear pottery which as i mentioned contained clay or some of it does which has come from the lizard peninsula and was that the clay being exported or the pottery vessels themselves being exported it had a very distinctive pattern as well and i think this is where i got to on this slide the pottery when we mapped it out watered it all that occurred on the western and southern sides of the hot circle and it seemed he deliberately laid down with the inner surface facing upwards now we think that may have been a deliberate kind of closing down activity and the phase of activity of the hot circle came to an end perhaps it stopped being lived in and it became an animal pen and they needed to reinforce the entrance way with paving slabs who who can really tell at the moment but what's interesting is the distribution of that portrait it also corresponds with the light coming in with the entrance from the southwest so that would have been the part of that circle which would have seen most would have received in most daylight during the day and that is common for most of dartmoor's hot circles where the doorway is just off centre of south as we removed the accumulation deposit so we started to get into structural elements and that is very unclear if these hot these holes you can see were sealed by that accumulation layer or it was just really difficult to identify the lines and distinctions uh digging on granite is really difficult their different actual variation color of the gravels and the soils and the granite itself which makes people identify features which are natural and vice versa it can be very tricky as we remove that accumulation he said we started to reveal about 50 or 60 stakeholders i think it was 57 all the way around the perimeter and that hadn't been picked up before in the dartmouth circle often we think of these structures as very crude quite rude structures that slightly there may be the lining separating that external stonework internal stonework that would have been seen a waffling dog structure would have helped provide another layer of insulation as well and within a lot of these stakeholders were vertically set bits of pottery as well probably to help hold the stakes up and often the stakes were into cutting the whole printed cutting they had to invert a new state where rotted away these were the clearest pattern we could find there are many other internal stakeholders as well which were very hard to identify a pattern they could relate to internal subdivisions within the structure or maybe supports for equipment and stand storage that type of thing this is a picture of the english heritage scientist who was called out because we found some preserved wood that black smudge there was in fact preserved wood about three and a half thousand years old it was too valuable too fragile to lift and takes laboratory unfortunately but the scientist here managed to have a look at it through one of our hand lenses i'm pretty certain it was oak and may have come from this woodland and it's tempting to think and form part of the structure of that inner lining you can see its association with all the stakeholds here is what the 11 post holes for this roof supports which i'll talk about in a minute now one thing we didn't find inclusive evidence for was any form of half or cooking area but we did find this is a profile of a rather odd shaped hole which you can profile here had a concave bottom and we know from other excavations on dartmoor and elsewhere but they're often these things called cooking holes set up next to halves where stone was heated on the half and then placed in these holes inside a pottery vessel which had been set within that hole and so to cook the food heat up heat up and and next door to this post hole this obviously a very strange postal was an area of possibly heat heat-affected clay so it's tempting to think that's where the heart may have been however maybe there wasn't a half here maybe this hot circle was too valuable to risk having a fire within and we'll talk about that a little bit in another slide so this is a shuffle of the the hot circle at the end of the excavation all the cut features have been revealed and you can see highlighted with the the yellow hats uh nine large post holes forming a ring for the roof support posts and they would have held up a very substantial fast roof complete with joists coming down running off a ring frame and resting onto the stone uh walling and we're looking straight towards the entrance way which have been bashed by the uh the upturned tree you can see in the background we can also see some of the other cut features and post holes which may have related set other internal structures which we haven't found further evidence for or may have represented earlier posts which needed a replacement at a later date and at the front here in the distance you can see two posts for the door as well it seems like there are some large door posts just set within from the door jet the stone jams for the entranceway so quite a lot going on here these were well built well thought out carefully arranged and organized spaces in the post holes in the nine postals we found lots of charcoal which we sampled and it was only last year we managed to find your resources to get all that dating so without charcoal dated with carbon 14 dating and this has turned out to be one of the probably the best dated hot circle in the southwest and uh we've got 16 radio carbon dates now and it seems very likely uh but the hot circle was being occupied from about 1600 bcs nearly three and a half thousand years ago to about 1200 bc so probably about 400 years and then it was abandoned uh and from the analysis of all the pollen and all the other plant remains it seems that the landscape around is very heavily grazed we've been improved grassland with heather close by and woodland was in the area but not on the scale as it was during the white horse hill burial which if you remember was probably about 500 years before this hot circle was built or mainly been occupied in uh so woodland had retreated and was being managed uh i'm just trying to get across on this talk how we often look at the bronze age as a very slow inorganic world whereas anything but it's only the granite remains in the banks of the enclosures and the parallel reef system the huts and the stone circles and the stone roads which has obviously survived but just imagine all the wooden things all the the organic remains as well which would have brought color uh to that world as well well the hedges for example think of a foreign example which has rotted away maybe totem poles associated with the ritual monuments as well uh the scope in the clothing uh the ornaments for the body everything the containers for everyday use uh it's very it's these two explorations have really brought color i find to dartmoor's archaeology

Channel: Dartmoor National Park

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Id: WESqWI6QTc8

Length: 43min 17sec (2597 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020