Digging in the Rain: Dartmoor’s Bronze Age Past Unearthed with Rare Roundhouse Excavation

An excavation of one of the thousands of roundhouses dotted across the landscape of Dartmoor has offered a these-days-rare new insight into prehistoric life on the windswept, rainy plain in the southwest of England. Today it’s an inhospitable, if undoubtedly striking place. But back in the Bronze Age, when the climate was much milder, it was a hive of activity, cleared by fire of forestry and turned into pasture and farm lands. Its inhabitants left behind the largest concentration of Bronze Age remains found anywhere in Britain.

As many as 5,000 stone houses, and many more wooden examples which have all but rotted away over the centuries have been found on Dartmoor. Most of them were excavated a century ago, when they used to get unearthed at the rate of around one per day. This new investigation, at the Bellever roundhouse, represents only the second dig of its kind in the area in 20 years.

While the team – from independent professional consultants AC Archaeology – are beaten, battered and drenched daily by the weather, funnily enough it’s Dartmoor’s rotten conditions that they have to thank for prompting the excavation. A huge storm blew down a plantation of conifer trees at Bellever two years ago, upsetting the roundhouses’s granite foundations. Archaeologists reasoned that this was as good an excuse as any to get their macks and wellies on and have a root around, so Dartmoor National Park Authority commissioned AC Archaeology to do a small investigation in October 2008.

It yielded big results – a well-preserved paved granite floor, a mysterious nearby cairn, 30 fragments of bronze-age pottery and a piece of worked timber, which may once have been part of the original structure. “Evidence”, said Andy Crabb, an archaeologist for English Heritage, speaking to The Guardian, “of a whole sequence of occupation and abandonment.” So the AC Archaeology team, supported by £7,500 of funds from the national park and other bodies, are back for another go on a larger scale.

Crabb said that finding any significant remains at all “blew us away,” since the Dartmoor soil usually isn’t so generous. “(It’s) wet, very acidic, so bone, ceramics, organic material gets eaten away,” he added. Up to 69 pieces of pottery – some of it robust and advanced for its time – have now been discovered. The roundhouse, measuring eight metres in diameter, may have been inhabited for as long a period as 200 years, being continually occupied, re-ordered and then deserted in sequence countless times by each new set of residents.

By around 1000 BC the climate had worsened so badly on upper Dartmoor that it was abandoned altogether by its Bronze Age-residents. The archaeologists can undoubtedly sympathise with them – they have to resort to sheltering in project supervisor Simon Hughes’ car when it starts bucketing down. But they’re in no doubt about the value of the dig. “It’s a great project for us,” said Hughes. “It’s a chance to really try to find out what was going on here 3,500 years ago.”

Pictures by AC Archaeology. All rights reserved.
 

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