Cultivation

One of the main goals of the Gardom's Edge project has been to characterise the range of features identified during preliminary survey. This has meant undertaking a wide variety of 'keyhole' excavations on cairns, linear banks and other structures across the moor. This work is crucial to the development of a detailed landscape stratigraphy - a sense of the changing ways in which the land was occupied and ordered over time.

The range of features is remarkable. Small circular or sub-circular cairns are common, as are arcs or short banks of gritstone boulders. Many of these are likely to relate to the clearance of ground for various reasons; for the hand cultivation of soils, for the improvement of pasture or for the construction of buildings. Others were constructed over the remains of the dead or as a part of other rites. There are also more extensive linear banks and at least one 'pound' or enclosure that may be related to the management of stock.

Our work so far demonstrated the inadequacy of an archaeological vocabulary which tends towards the description and division of many features into distinct phases. In many cases, we are dealing with features that were, in one sense, certainly multi-phase, but were also the result of a piecemeal and sporadic process of construction; by-products of the cultivation, tending and routine clearance of land. In certain seasons, this may have amounted to no more than the addition of one stone. In others, new acts of clearance saw the more rapid accumulation of cairns amongst earthfast boulders.

Work so far suggests that many of the cairns are the product of activities such as clearance over considerable periods of time. Many freestanding cairns possess a structure which conveys a sense of duration. In some cases, excavation has revealed a pattern of construction that saw large gritstone slabs and boulders heaped into piles. This probably reflects the first stages of clearance in particular areas and the removal of larger boulders that would have been an impediment to hand cultivation and other activities. In a number of cases, these piles of larger boulders saw the addition of smaller stones, perhaps as a product of ongoing clearance during cultivation.

Cairns can also be capped by larger boulders, perhaps reflecting the opening up of new patches of ground or the bringing of large stones to the surface as a product of soil loss. Leant against existing piles or placed on top, these larger boulders and slabs are often the last phase represented in individual cairns. Linear banks of stone are also common. Although the majority cannot be characterised as walls in the conventional sense, it is likely that many are the product of ongoing clearance along the line of pre-existing hedges, fence lines and perhaps low earthen banks.

Other cairns can display different characteristics. Some do appear to have been established relatively rapidly, and in these cases, we occasionally find hints of a more formal character in the manner of their construction. One example will suffice here (see W on the plan).

1997 saw the excavation of a small cairn built over a pit which was cut into a sandy clay soil derived through erosion from adjacent slopes. The pit was sub-oval in shape, 2.2 metres long, 1.4 metres wide and c. 25 centimetres in depth. Although no artefactual or skeletal material was recovered from the pit fill, parallels elsewhere in the region suggest that this is likely to be a grave pit for an inhumation which has been lost due to the acidic nature of the soils (Barnatt and Collis, 1996). This suggests a date for construction in the Earlier Bronze Age. Soil samples were taken from the fill of this feature for detailed analysis.

The cairn itself appears to have been constructed in two principal stages. The first stage saw the construction of an irregular, sub-square cairn of boulders over the pit. The complete absence of chips, spalls or fractured surfaces on these boulders suggests the considered placing of these stones. Had they been tossed into position, we would expect to see patterns of damage such as those evident on many of the clearance cairns and linear banks investigated in earlier seasons. It might be easy to make too much of this distinction. Yet it may be that the character of this feature hints at the carrying of selected stones and their careful placement over a grave. The relative sizes of stones may also be relevant here.

As noted above, many cairns show a wide range of stone sizes, often alternating between phases of large and small in a single example. Here however, the stones were all of a similar size, again suggesting a measure of formality and selectivity in construction that is absent on many cairns elsewhere on the moor. Although artefact densities were generally very low in this trench, one abraded sherd of prehistoric pottery and a flake of Black Derbyshire chert were recovered on the ground surface beneath the cairn.

Following this phase of activity, there appears to have been an interval of time. How long this interval may have been is difficult to determine. However it was sufficient for soil to be eroded or blown into the interstices of the gritstone boulders, and to lap up over the edges of the cairn. This would be consistent with the continued use of the surrounding area for further cultivation and/or stock management and with consequent erosion.

After this interval, additions were made to the cairn, which by this time had begun to slump into the top of the pit. Boulders were possibly added to the central body of the cairn and certainly to its' edges, creating an irregular kerb and a more polygonal form approximately 4m × 4.5m in diameter.

On the north-western side, these additions took the form of a platform which sat on top of eroded soils. This platform is broadly similar in character to the feature containing a cremation associated with a cairn excavated by Derrick Riley near Barbrook 1 stone circle on Big Moor (Riley 1981) and others at Highlow Bank and Eaglestone Flat, where no burials were found (Barnatt 1991, 1994). In these cases too, the platforms seem to have been additions to pre-existing cairns. In the case of the Gardom's Edge example, the only indication of a possible deposit within the area of the platform was a small group of rounded pebbles placed at its edge.

Detailed interpretation must await the analysis of soil columns and other samples taken from the feature. However, this cairn is clearly different in character to those examined in earlier seasons; a funerary monument that remained a focus for activity, reworked some time after the initial moment of burial had passed. Moreover, the fact that the grave pit cuts into derived soils indicates periods of erosion due to cultivation and/or stock husbandry before the cairn was constructed.

Given the early Bronze Age affinities of the site, this suggests that people were already working the land at this stage. At the very least, this sustains the argument for a long duration to activities in the area, something that we plan to test through radiocarbon dating and possibly optical thermo-luminescence dating of the soils themselves.