Artisans of Dartmoor - Book - Page 11
be found in southern Britain. Bronze Age history was
about to be rewritten.
The dig began as normal, with the team gently
moving aside the cist’s granite sides and lid. “No one
was expecting much,” says Lee. But when one of the
slabs was dislodged, someone noticed a bead the size
of a pea roll out.
“That’s when everything changed,” Lee explains.
“As work continued, it became increasingly apparent
that peat, with its unique preservative qualities, had
conserved the entire contents of a prehistoric grave.”
With the weather starting to close in, there was a
sudden panic to protect the contents. As neither the
military nor any local farmers were available to help
transport the cist off the moor, the archaeological
team resorted to covering it in plastic film and pushing
it on a wheelbarrow over a mile of rugged ground back
to their truck. “The load was so heavy that everyone
had to take it in turns every few metres,” says Lee.
It was then transported to a specialist laboratory in
Chippenham for forensic examination. The stray bead,
it transpired, was part of an elaborate necklace made
from clay, shale, and amber traded from the Baltics.
Three months later, the results of the dig started
to be made public: the grave was believed to be
that of a young woman aged 15 to 25, who had
lived between 1600 BC and 1730 BC. She had been
cremated elsewhere and her remains were buried in
the cist with an array of finely crafted grave goods
to accompany her into the afterlife. “Judging by the
quality of the items, she must’ve had a very high social
status,” says Lee.
The artefacts include examples of woodturning,
basketry, clothing, leatherwork, weaving, metalwork
and jewellery – all made from highly perishable
organic materials, including fur, cow hair, nettle and
calfskin. Thanks to the waterlogged peat in which they
had effectively been sealed from the degrading effects
of air, they’d been preserved to a standard never seen
before in southern Britain.
In his book, Preserved in the Peat, Andy Jones,
one of the country’s pre-eminent Bronze Age
archaeologists, details the finds. He explains how the
woman’s remains had been wrapped in an “exceedingly
rare” bear’s pelt which, it’s thought, had been wrapped
and secured with a copper alloy pin. Next to her
ABOVE: This Bronze Age burial
chamber (‘cist’), excavated on
Dartmoor in 2011, contained
the best preserved Bronze Age
organic goods ever found in the
South West. (Photo: Cornwall
Archaeological Unit)
NEXT PAGE: Grave goods included
an intricately sewn lidded basket,
a sash woven from nettle fibre and
decorated with leather fringing, and
a set of wooden beads, which are the
earliest evidence of woodturning
in Britain. (Basket and sash images:
Conservation and Museums Advisory
Service, Wiltshire Council. Image
of wooden beads reproduced with
permission of Oxbow Books)
Origins
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