ABSTRACT

This book represents an innovative experiment in presenting the results of a large-scale, multidisciplinary archaeological project. The well-known authors and their team examined the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscapes on Bodmin Moor of Southwest England, especially the site of Leskernick. The result is a multivocal, multidisciplinary telling of the stories of Bodmin Moor—both ancient and modern—using a large number of literary genres and academic disciplines. Dialogue, storytelling, poetry, photo essays and museum exhibits all appear in the volume, along with contributions from archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, geologists, and ecologists. The result is a major synthesis of the Bronze Age settlements and ritual sites of the Moor, contextualized within the Bronze Ages of southwestern and central Britain, and a tracing of the changing meaning of this landscape over the past five thousand years. Of obvious interest to those in British prehistory, this is a substantial presentation of a groundbreaking project that will also be of interest to many concerned with the interpretation of social landscapes and the public presentation of archaeology.

part One|62 pages

Introduction

chapter One Two|13 pages

Bodmin Moor

The Living Bedrock

chapter One Three|27 pages

Methodologies

part Two|160 pages

The Present Past

chapter Two Four|29 pages

The Old Sacred Places

chapter Two Five|31 pages

Leskernick

The Southern Settlement

chapter Two Six|18 pages

The Western Settlement

chapter Two Seven|44 pages

Time Goes On

chapter Two Eight|4 pages

The Shrine Stone

chapter Two Nine|25 pages

Nature, Culture, Clitter 1

part Three|104 pages

The Present Past

chapter Three Eleven|36 pages

The Book and the Trowel

Archaeological Practice and Authority at the Leskernick Project

chapter Three Twelve|31 pages

Where Worlds Collide

The Past in the Present at Leskernick

part Four|97 pages

Beyond the Hill

chapter Four Fourteen|33 pages

Other Ways of Telling

The ‘Stoneworld' Exhibition

chapter Four Fifteen|9 pages

Letting Go

A Dialogue

chapter Four Sixteen|29 pages

Movement across the Moor

chapter Four Seventeen|4 pages

Between Moor and Plain

Trethevy Quoit

chapter Four Eighteen|12 pages

Beyond the Moor

chapter Four Nineteen|9 pages

Solution Basins

Libations to the Ancestors