A Fresh Interpretation of Bronze Age Dartmoor 2

A Fresh interpretation of Bronze Age Dartmoor. 2


The Bronze Age began 3300BC and continued for 2100 years. This was a vast expanse of time and has been divided into Early, Middle and Late Bronze Ages.. Early Bronze Age lasted 1200 years, Middle 550years and Late 350 years. Huge changes in logistics and infrastructure could have taken place over this time. 2100 years ago the Romans had been in Britain for only 40 years. The changes over that amount of time have been enormous. Systems that were put in place at the beginning of the Bronze Age may well have been abandoned, replaced and forgotten by the end.

Stone circles, stone rows, settlements, hut circles, barrows, cairns, reaves cists and standing stones are all part of the Bronze Age legacy. I suggest that they are all part of an infrastructure put in place by the tin prospectors, traders and workers at various stages in the quest for tin.

Tin for making bronze became a much needed material and was almost as valuable as gold. It had to be located, extracted and delivered to the people who needed it.. This was not easy, and the logistics of the tin trade was full of problems. Trade routes change with time. Initially the people who need a material have to send out prospectors to find that material. Once they have found it, then they have to find workers to extract it. Then the long haul home to the people who use it.

As trade develops, the routes are refined, and the logistics are simplified. Whereas the first traders may have been coming to the source of the tin and returning with unrefined ore, later the ore was refined locally and the tin exported as ingots.

The current archaeological thinking concerning the Bronze Age is unhelpful. The stone circles are thought to have a religious or ceremonial function, the stone rows are thought to have religious ceremonial or processional function perhaps associated with burial ritual. The settlements and hut circles were obviously living quarters, but why were so many people living on Dartmoor is not properly answered. Barrows, and cairns are thought to be simply burial mounds although the evidence for burial in many of them is non existent. Long reaves have been "explained" as boundaries even though a glance at the map will confirm that they make no sense as boundaries.

No proper attempt has been made to link these Bronze Age remains to the tin trade or to show any practical purpose for them. The obvious solutions have been ignored, and religion, ceremonial, processional,funereal and boundary functions have been accepted with no real evidence to back them up.

In the following chapters i will attempt to provide evidence for practical functions for the stone circles,stone rows, settlements, hut circles, barrows, cairns,  reaves and standing stones and show that they were all part of a Bronze Age infrastructure during the various stages of the quest for tin.