Artisans of Dartmoor - Book - Page 10
ORIGINS
A collection of skilfully crafted and astonishingly well preserved grave
goods that rewrote Bronze Age history lay undiscovered on Dartmoor for
almost four millennia. These artefacts are where our craft story begins
W
hen Dartmoor’s archaeological team was
dispatched to excavate a Bronze Age burial
chamber on a remote hilltop near Okehampton
in August 2011, hopes of finding grave goods
inside weren’t high.
The moor has the highest concentration of
Bronze Age ruins in the UK – including 5,000 hut
circles, 75 stone rows and 200 burial chambers
(‘cists’) – but over the centuries, cists’ contents
have been ransacked by grave robbers or have
decomposed beyond recognition in the moor’s
highly acidic soil. “Of the 130 cists excavated
on Dartmoor, 30 have contained flints and not
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much else,” explains Lee Bray, Dartmoor National
Park’s archaeologist.
To further reduce the team’s expectations, this
particular cist was on Whitehorse Hill, part of a
military firing range that has, since 1875, undergone
intense shelling. The chance of finding anything
significant in such a context was put at just 5%.
So in 2011, when a modern retaining wall holding
up a peat bed in which the cist had been buried for
about 3,700 years started to collapse, a team was sent
to excavate it. Little did they know that they were
about to discover the earliest and best-preserved
collection of organic Bronze Age grave goods ever to
Origins
