Archaeologists from the U.K. revealed in mid-August the discovery of a Bronze Age burial chamber in a rather surprising place.
The burial site is believed to be around 3,900 years old and was uncovered in Cut Hill, a remote region of Dartmoor, Devon, according to a press release from the national park. It was first discovered in May before being excavated over the course of three days, revealing preserved wood and a wealth of currently unidentified materials inside a stone-built box designed for the dead.
Cut Hill is ripe with evidence of ancient human activity despite being quite a difficult walk for us modern Homo sapiens, the release noted. The site is technically inside the military firing ranges and was discovered after reports that the chamber — cist — was eroding out of the peat. It was found to be roughly one-meter square and topped with three granite “cap stones.”
Palaoecological analysis reconstructed the environment, revealing “bursts of human activity in specific periods of prehistory that weren’t known about previously.” Wood discovered inside of the cist seemed work, posing the questions: who did this cist belong to, and what was their civilization up to all these millennia ago?
‘Stunning’ Bronze Age burial chamber discovered on the English moor https://t.co/fZdkRaP2UP
— Live Science (@LiveScience) August 21, 2024
Having spent my university career around Dartmoor, I was surprised by this discovery. You don’t have to be a graduate of Plymouth University (the local higher ed’ institution) to know that old stuff is always turning up in strange places in Great Britain. But there’s something about Dartmoor that transcends what modern science can explain. It’s a strange, misty place, filled with ancient lore. (RELATED: Britain’s ‘Pompeii’ Reveals 3,000-Year-Old Devastation Of Ancient Life)
To know something so enormous was lurking just beneath our feet further adds to the mysticism of this place and the people who once called it home. “These weren’t people who were suddenly building burial monuments and reorganising the landscape around them; they were living in a place they were intimately familiar with and knew a lot about,” my old professor, Ralph Fyfe, said in a statement.
LiDAR scanning has already been implemented to produce 3D scans of the vicinity to check for additional structures, et cetera. “As you’d expect for Dartmoor, the team had to contend with some pretty challenging weather – every day was different and they worked in bright sunshine through to thick fog and persistent rain,” the release noted, which makes me wonder why I spent three years of my life being damp as a geography undergrad dealing with these exact conditions.
Oh wait, it’s because fieldwork is awesome. That’s why.
