ABSTRACT
The Somerset Levels lie in the southwest of Britain, a former bay of the Severn estuary. From the 1960s, John Coles has been active in the area, setting up the Somerset Levels Project in 1973, the author being co-director. The Project, funded largely by the Department of the Environment and aided by the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter, has maintained a full-time field archaeologist in the area and taken a multidisciplinary approach to the investigation of the prehistory of the Levels. A longer account of these developments and the Project's methods is given in Coles and Coles 1986. This chapter emphasises on results. To underline the wealth of information available in a wetland context a single structure, the Sweet Track, is examined. The survival of great quantities of prehistoric wood in the Sweet Track has encouraged the development of tree-ring analyses by Morgan. Morgan's tree-ring analyses have revealed differences in the trees used to build the Sweet Track.
