The Project

The Gardom's Edge project was run jointly by the Archaeology Service of Peak District National Park Authority and the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at the University of Sheffield. It was a public project, with a workforce comprising students from the University's Landscape Archaeology MA and volunteers from the region. Twelve local schools were also involved on a regular basis.

Our basic aim was to write a biography of the landscape around Gardom's Edge, following the ways in which people have inhabited the area from prehistory through to the present day. This project concentrated on the prehistoric end of the sequence.

Our work at Gardom's Edge was concerned with issues that dominate current debate on social and economic life in later prehistory:

• How was the use of the uplands scheduled into cycles of movement and activity between the Neolithic and the Iron Age?

• What conditions prompted the settlement of the moors, and when did these changes occur?

• How did people's attitudes towards the land alter with these changes?

• What does the evidence tell us about the ways in which relations within and between communities were sustained and changed over time?

These questions prompt others. Questions about the particular manner in which people lived across areas like Gardom's Edge; their understandings of the land, the past, and their relations with others. The list of questions is endless and there is much that we will never know. However, through survey, excavation, the collection of ancient pollen and the analysis of the soil itself, we are slowly building up a picture of how the use of this land may have changed between 5,000BC and 2,000BC.

Much of the field work conducted by the project to date has employed: