Preserved in the Peat

an extraordinary Bronze Age burial on Whitehose Hill, Dartmoor, and its wider context

Andy M. Jones

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781785702617
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

Excavation of a Scheduled burial mound on Whitehorse Hill, Dartmoor revealed an unexpected, intact burial deposit of Early Bronze Age date associated with an unparalleled range of artefacts. The cremated remains of a young person had been placed within a bearskin pelt and provided with a basketry container, from which a braided band with tin studs had spilled out. Within the container were beads of shale, amber, clay and tin; two pairs of turned wooden studs and a worked flint flake. A unique item, possibly a sash or band, made from textile and animal skin was found beneath the container. Beneath this, the basal stone of the cist had been covered by a layer purple moor grass which had been collected in summer. Analysis of environmental material from the site has revealed important insights into the pyre material used to burn the body, as well as providing important information about the environment in which the cist was constructed. The unparalleled assemblage of organic objects has yielded insights into a range of materials which have not survived from the earlier Bronze Age elsewhere in southern Britain.

Section 1:
Background

1. Introduction

Andy M. Jones

The background to the project

In July 2011 the Historic Environment Projects team (now Cornwall Archaeological Unit), Cornwall Council, was commissioned by Jane Marchand, Senior Archaeologist at Dartmoor National Park Authority, to undertake the excavation and recording of a cist on Whitehorse Hill in the parish of Lydford, Dartmoor. The site is located in the National Park and is situated within the boundaries of the military’s Okehampton firing range (Fig. 1.1).

The cist was discovered in 1999 and became a Scheduled Monument (National Heritage List Entry 1020871) in 2003. It lay within an area surrounded by peat cuttings and was located on the western edge of a peat mound measuring approximately 12m in diameter and up to 1.5m high which was visibly drying out and shrinking. Continuing efforts were made over a period of eight years to stabilise the monument, and repair works had been grant aided by English Heritage (now Historic England) South West region. As a last ditch attempt to preserve the cist in situ a stone revetment wall was built in front of it to prevent further erosion. However, continuing extreme weather conditions coupled with the exposed hilltop setting of the site resulted in the repairs failing and the peat continuing to dry out. It was therefore feared that the cist was in considerable danger of collapsing over the winter of 2011–12 without an adequate record being made of the site.

The objectives of the project

In light of this imminent threat to the cist, a MoRPHE compliant project design (Historic England 2016) was produced for archaeological excavation and recording. It identified a number of objectives which were specific to the project, including the following:

• To record and excavate the cist so that a record was made of it before it collapsed.

• To recover and date suitable sampled material recovered from inside and around the cist, so that its chronology and context in relation to other excavated sites and the surrounding landscape could be better understood.

• To assess and analyse environmental materials from within and especially adjacent to the cist in order to help establish the environment when the cist was constructed.

• To investigate the peat mound to establish whether the peat had formed naturally or if the mound was a partly-constructed landscape feature.

The project design was submitted to English Heritage in the summer of 2011 who agreed to part-fund excavation of the cist together with the Dartmoor National Park Authority and a number of local funders.

Archaeological investigations of the cist and the mound into which it was set took place during the first week of August 2011, during the summer closure of the army firing range. Given the paucity of artefacts from almost all of Dartmoor’s investigated cists (Worth 1967, 192–97; Butler 1997, 275–277), it was anticipated that very little in the way of artefactual material would be recovered from inside the cist itself. However, contrary to these low expectations, the results from the excavations led to the discovery of a nationally important collection of organic objects and other items associated with an Early Bronze Age cremation. Excavation of the cist revealed that despite the collapse of one of the side stones, there was an intact burial comprised of cremated bone which was associated with organic artefacts.

The contents of the cist were excavated by Helen Williams at the Wiltshire Conservation Service laboratory in Chippenham (Chapter 3), where it was found that sandwiched between two layers of matted plant material were a cremation that had been wrapped within an animal pelt, a basketry container, a braided textile band with tin studs (an armband or bracelet), and a textile and animal-skin object. The basketry container held shale, clay and amber beads from a necklace, together with a tin bead, and two pairs of turned wooden ear studs or labrets and a copperalloy pin were found later in the conservation process. In addition to the finds within the cist, two wooden stakes were recovered from the peat adjacent to the cist which may have been used for marking out the site (Chapter 4).

Figure 1.1: Location map showing the Whitehorse Hill cist and the boundary of Dartmoor National Park.

Environmental samples were taken from the cist and the mound and these too were found to have preserved a range of organic materials which required further analysis, including pollen, testate amoebae, non pollen palynomorphs, plant macrofossils and charcoal, as well as several deposits of tephra produced by episodes of volcanic activity. Consequently these materials had the potential to answer important questions about environmental conditions at the time the cist was constructed, as well as providing the first evidence for Early Bronze Age economic practices on the moor.

The spectacular – if rather unexpected – results from the project led to the production of a revised project design with newly identified areas and tasks for analyses which were not included within the original scope of the project. The revised project design also had new research goals which were commensurate with the findings from the excavation. The following research objectives were identified:

• To determine the dates for the construction of the cist and the contents found within it.

• To establish how the various organic objects (the braided band, textile and animal-skin object and basketry container) and other objects found in the cist were made.

• To ascertain the ‘biography’ of the objects found inside the cist, to establish whether they were new or old at the time of burial.

• To analyse the pelt, so that the type of animal from which it was made could be identified.

• To ascertain how the cist relates to practices associated with wider funerary and ceremonial monument activity at local, regional and national levels.

• To investigate the development of the peat mound, so that its past prominence in the landscape could be established.

• To ascertain what environmental conditions were around the cist during the Early Bronze Age.

• To identify how animals formed part of the economy of the area and which animals were grazing around the cist.

• To help guide future management of Dartmoor’s historic environment, by considering the potential for further unidentified sites to exist on the moor.

In addition to these identified aims, the analysis process has inevitably thrown up new questions, as for example when the two pairs of wooden ear studs / labrets were discovered and a copper-alloy pin was uncovered within the fur of the pelt. By contrast, the less precise identification of the tephra layers within the peat mound meant that the environmental sequence could not be as tightly dated as had been hoped at the outset of the analysis stage.

Nevertheless, the wealth of material collected from the excavation has enabled a great deal of information to be gained and the key objectives were not only met but in several cases surpassed what was anticipated at the outset. Overall, the results from many of the analyses undertaken as part of this project represent firsts for the study of the British Early Bronze Age and its material culture.

Report structure

In addition to the revision of the project’s aims, in light of the extraordinary information gathered by the project, it was decided to expand the original envisioned excavation report within a journal into a stand-alone publication which would include all the analyses undertaken on the materials from the cist.

This, the resulting monograph, is divided into seven parts with an eighth section of specialist reports at the end. Given the broad spectrum of the finds and environmental material recovered and the potentially diverse audience, it was decided that each chapter would be self-contained with separate bibliographies and acknowledgements so that they can be read as separate papers. They have, however, been arranged by theme, so that they can be read sequentially, and an interpretative overview is given at the end.

This section, the first, outlines the background to the project and its aims. It also describes the setting of the cist and the history of previous recording.

The second section is entitled ‘Deconstructing and reconstructing the cist’. It describes the methods and results from the 2011 excavations, especially with regard to the stratigraphy of the peat mound and the cist, as well as the soil micromorphology. It also includes a chapter on the micro excavation of the contents of the cist in the laboratory at Chippenham, Wiltshire, and lastly a report on the wooden stakes which were recovered from the mound.

The third and fourth sections present analyses of the contents of the cist. The third, ‘Assembling the burial’, contains a range of detailed specialist reports on the cremation itself, the charcoal and textiles found with it and on the matted plant material and pollen from within the cist. The fourth section, ‘personal items with the young adult’, covers the artefacts from the cist, including the copperalloy pin, the flint, the jewellery and the organic artefacts.

The fifth section, ‘The cist and the moor: the environmental setting of the site and its wider landscape context’, provides an overview of the range of analyses which were used to help with providing a wider context for the setting of the cist.

The sixth section is concerned with the radiocarbon dating and modelling of the results. The seventh and final section of discussion, interpretation and conclusions provides a synthesis which draws together the results from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Summary
• Résumé
• Zusammenfassung
• Section 1: Background
• Section 2: Deconstructing and reconstructing the cist
• Section 3: Assembling the burial
• Section 4: Items with the young adult
• Section 5: The cist and the moor: the environmental setting of the site and its wider landscape context
• Section 6: The radiocarbon dating
• Section 7: Discussion, interpretation and conclusions
• Appendix A: Chemical analysis of beads from the Whitehorse Hill cist - Joanna Dunster
• Appendix B: Report on the scanning electron microscope (SEM) examination of the basketry container and other organic artefacts from Whitehorse Hill cist - Caroline Cartwright
• Appendix C: Report on the proteomic analysis of hairs from the basketry container, the braided band and the pelt from the Whitehorse Hill cist - Caroline Solazzo