Dartmoor is a large upland area in Devon, southwest England, which includes an extensive agricultural field system. This system of large earthworks is believed to have been begun during the middle Bronze Age between 1400 and 1000 BC. The site is a textbook case of the uses of landscape archaeology, which studies the way people shape and are shaped by their environments.
The fields include several built structures, including farmsteads and earthworks. This system was originally interpreted in the 1970s and 1980s by excavator Andrew Fleming, who believed the enclosures were a deliberately planned land division and therefore evidence of social structure created in the Bronze Age.
More recently, suggestion has been made that the pattern of the enclosures was not planned so much as based on existing land tenure systems predating the Bronze Age. Closer inspection of the heathland using pollen records suggests that Dartmoor heathland was established by direct manipulation of the environment beginning approximately 3630-3370 cal BC. That would make Dartmoor a part of the Neolithic ceremonial landscape. The constructed enclosures are still fairly securely dated to the middle Bronze Age, ca 1000-1400 BC; but it is clear that they reflect an older division of lands.
Dartmoor is now a national parkland with special events open to the public.
Sources
Amesbury, Matthew J., et al. 2008 Bronze Age upland settlement decline in southwest England: testing the climate change hypothesis. Journal of Archaeological Science 35 87-98.
Fyfe, R. M., et al. 2008 Historical context and chronology of Bronze Age land enclosure on Dartmoor, UK. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(8):2250-2261.
Johnston, Robert 2005 Pattern without a plan: Rethinking the Bronze Age coaxial field systems on Dartmoor, southwest England. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 24(1):1-21.
