<table><caption>Table 5.3 The number of times informants chose ‘our’ special pebbles.</caption><thead><tr><th>Pebble number</th><th>1</th><th>2</th><th>3</th><th>4</th><th>5</th><th>6</th><th>7</th><th>8</th><th>9</th><th>10</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Number of choices</th><td>39</td><td>43</td><td>33</td><td>38</td><td>36</td><td>21</td><td>21</td><td>45</td><td>41</td><td>22</td></tr></tbody></table>

indeed matched our classification. Eighty per cent of the pebbles that we considered special were chosen (see Table 5.3). Only two pebbles from the ‘ordinary’ group were picked out as being more important than our specials: the completely white and the completely black pebbles.

We also wanted to know the criteria guiding the informants’ selection of specials. Each informant gave us his/her reasons for that. Although their answers varied a lot, we could identify some patterns in their choices, and have grouped their answers under 51 different categories. The colour of the pebbles was the most mentioned category (66 per cent of informants mentioned it), followed by their smoothness (52 per cent), patterns (44 per cent), their regular or round shape (34 per cent), the presence of lines or stripes on their surface (34 per cent), their solid blackness or whiteness (34 per cent), and the presence of spots (quartz inclusions) on the surface (26 per cent). Another characteristic that caught the informants’ attention was that the shape or the surface of the pebbles reminded them of something else, such as an egg (24 per cent), a semi-precious stone, jewellery or a gem (four people), the moon or a planet (three people), a heart (three people), a face (two people), a kidney (two people), a pasty (two people), a map, a coral, a whale, a tool, a fish, a cow, a snake, the Super Mario video game, a liquorice ice cream or a dinosaur egg (each of these mentioned just once).

The mineral properties of the pebbles also made them special for some informants: 20 per cent mentioned this characteristic. The fact that a pebble seemed to have been attacked, damaged, had creases or scars caught the attention of 16 per cent of informants. Fourteen per cent mentioned the different or interesting textures of the pebbles. Memories or remembrance of pebbles they had found in the past was also a point that cropped up – five people mentioned it. Prettiness was mentioned five times also. Among the less popular characteristics we have: ‘it could be a piece of decoration’, the marble or onyx effect, and the uniqueness (four responses each); the fact that it has quartz in it (mentioned three times); it looks like metal (two responses), it is humble/simple/natural (two responses). The power of bringing forth emotional responses was mentioned five times: ‘I feel sorry for this pebble’, ‘it is calm’, ‘it is mystical’, ‘it is funny’ and ‘it is disturbing’.
Special pebbles were also regarded as powerful/intense (mentioned twice). Features that were mentioned just once were design; alien; man-made; different sizes; form of a triangle; skipping stone; camouflaged pebble; it is alive: it is sick, and it is perverse.

Choosing specials seemed to be an introspective exercise for most of the informants. Pebbles were looked at individually, not collectively, and it was very interesting to see informants holding and rubbing them as if they owned them. Some informants wanted to take the pebbles home. The way they connected with the specials was quite different from the way they manipulated the pebbles used in the colour tests – they did not show much interest in or care for these pebbles. With the specials, on the other hand, they were invited to talk – not by us, but by the pebbles themselves. For some it seemed to be therapeutic to choose a pebble: they held it with both hands, turned it round, grabbed it to feel its heaviness, looked very carefully at it, ‘felt in love’ with a particular one, ‘felt sorry’ for another one, remembered their past or their mother. One informant licked some pebbles to check their mineral properties.

Another exercise confirmed individuals' preference for pebbles that we have regarded as specials. A group of 35 UCL students on a fieldtrip in February 2012 were taken to Budleigh Salterton beach and asked to pick up one or two pebbles that appealed to them. All but two, who again chose black and white pebbles, picked up special pebbles with multiple veins or mottled colours, confirming the pattern we have found in the tests carried out with the 50 informants. At the very least these tests showed that our classification of special pebbles was not just a personal whim and that there was a high degree of agreement that these were indeed different from ordinary or plain pebbles.

## Colour and its significance in prehistoric cairn building

Owoc (2002, 2004) has observed that for several southwestern cairn sites in the UK, the use of contrasting coloured materials has a significant role to play in understanding cairn construction and meaning. The most striking feature of the pebbles found in the Pebblebeds is their bright and varied colours. From our analysis we have demonstrated that the pebbles in the cairns were not selected or arranged and placed in the layers of the cairn in terms of these colours, that is, by grouping them together to make patterns using pebbles of the same colour. Throughout the different levels of the cairns we consistently find a mixture of pebbles of
different colour, resulting in an architectural structure that was multicoloured throughout from top to bottom and directly reflecting in a mimetic way the natural colours of the Pebblebeds themselves.

None of this suggests, however, that pebble colour was insignificant to the builders of the cairns. Rather the reverse: the colours of the pebbles used to construct them had a mimetic relationship to the landscape out of which they were constructed. The cairns objectify this relationship. This suggests that we need to consider colour and its relationship to the body in a material way rather than in terms of abstract and idealized colour categories (red, brown, etc.) that are effectively dematerialized in our own thought because they remain aloof and separate from the things of which they form a part (Young 2006). In other words, colours require contextualization in terms of both landscapes and things, events and activities. They are part and parcel of all this, primary rather than secondary in significance. Colour is what makes things and landscapes what they are. We cannot describe the colours of a landscape or the colours of a pebble in an abstract way. The redness or the yellowness of a pebble is that of a certain kind of stone, with its shape, textures, qualities, and is different from the redness or yellowness of a flower. It cannot be abstracted from the thing itself (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 323). In other words, colours cannot be separated from that which they colour. Concomitantly, perceiving colour is more than visual perception but relates to all the bodily senses. Colour can be sound or smell or taste or texture: ‘a thing would not have this colour, had it not also this shape, these tactile properties, this resonance, this odour’ (319). As Merleau-Ponty concludes: colour ‘in living perception is a way into a thing ... The Maoris have 3,000 names of colours, not because they perceive a great many, but, on the contrary, because they fail to identify them when they belong to objects structurally different from each other’ (305).

‘A way into a thing’: in the prehistoric world the multicoloured nature of the pebbles would be quite extraordinary, as well as their permanent nature in the landscape. Other colours in that landscape such as the colours of flowers and vegetation were by contrast transient and linked to seasonal change. They did not endure throughout the year or over the centuries. Today our culture is saturated with artificial colour in all aspects of everyday life, in the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the houses we live in, in books, magazines, films and TV. We take colour for granted and in this sense its power and its effects have been anaesthetized. The abundance of colour has diluted our material, bodily relationship to it and its intense spiritual power, the manner in which colour may excite all the senses and not just sight alone. Yet as Taussig (2009) has argued,
colour for us is inherently problematic. It both repulses and attracts. Goethe in his *Theory of Colours* ([1840] 2006), much cited by Taussig, felt it worth noting that 'savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colour; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence' (Goethe [1840] 2006: 30). Vivid colour in contemporary Western culture seems to require containment and display only in appropriate contexts; it both repels and attracts: 'who of you reading this text would even dream of painting the living-room wall bright red or green, or any color than off-white? Then, safe in your whiteness, you can hang a wildly colored picture on the wall, secure in its framed being' (Taussig 2009: 14).

It is a notion of colour as inherently and materially part of doing and acting, possessing magical potency and spiritual power that seems to be most appropriate in interpreting the colours of the pebbles in the cairns and those of the East Devon landscape in general. 'Colour is the most sacred element of visible things', wrote Ruskin. 'Drawing gives shape to all creatures', says Diderot, but 'colour gives them life. Such is the divine breath that animates them' (Ruskin and Diderot cited in Taussig 2009: 254). Taussig, in a richly nuanced account, documents the demise of the power of bodily or visceral colour in the West, with the development of industrial pigments in the mid-nineteenth century. In the process things became effectively stripped of their colour. Colour became dematerialized and disembodied. Only vestiges remain today in the contemporary languages of colour nuances (sky-blue, olive-green, etc.). The names remain substitutes for what has gone, the notion that things have their own colour and that this is a non-transferable part of what they are. Taussig's project and ours is one of re-embodying colour phenomenologically, entertaining the possibility of producing a history of colour through entangling it with the bodies producing, perceiving and using it.

Goethe's comments, stripped of their negative connotations, suggest another prehistoric world of untamed colour, colour as something wild, visceral, stimulating the body, producing powerful effects, linked with ritual and the emotions, inhering in things and the landscape and making them what they are, something dynamic and intimately connected with the bodily practices of everyday and ritual life. Colour as an active hybrid part of things is perfectly suited to emphasize and employ in liminal places, transforming bodies interacting with the flows of colour.
The first point requiring emphasis is the transformational nature of
the colours of the pebbles. When dry most appear to be the same some-
what dull 'greyish' colour. Their colours vanish by being exposed to the
elements and the rolling actions of sea waves or river currents. As any-
body who walks along the beach knows, the colour in pebbles is activated
by water. If it is not raining the most colourful pebbles are those washed
by the waves. The perception of pebbles is quite different depending on
whether they are wet or dry. When we asked 50 informants to categorize
pebbles in terms of different colours (red, yellow, brown, etc.) in their
dry state, most remarked that they were all the same colour. When wet
the pebbles become instantly and spectacularly transformed, glistening
and differentiated into a myriad of different hues; then our informants
found it relatively easy to assign colour categories. So we might ask, in
an empiricist manner, what the 'true' colour of a pebble is: wet or dry,
bathed in sunlight or drenched with rain? The answer would seem to
be that the perception of colour is always conditional in relation to the
context and the situation. There is no true or proper or constant colour
of a pebble. Instead, the constant fluidity of colour transformation is
part of what pebbles are, their essence, their material effects on human
perception.

The essence of a pebble is that it is a transformative, polymorph-
ous coloured entity. Pebbles, collectively and individually, have powerful
sensory effects as a result of their multivalent and changing colours. It
is the vibrancy of their contrasting colours in general that seems to be
important, rather than any artificial modernist categorization in terms
of abstracted colour categories discussed endlessly in the literature (e.g.
Berlin and Kay 1969; Gage 1995, 1999; Jones and McGregor 2002;
Turner 1967). While all other kinds of things, such as tables or beds or
other kinds of rocks, may be regarded as changing somewhat in what-
ever primary colour term is attributed to them according to the condi-
tions of the light or the time of the day or whether they are wet or dry,
pebbles change colour quite dramatically or violently when wet, more so
than the vast majority of other materials and certainly far more than any
other kind of stone. This gives them an especial and magical significance.
The transformation is not slow or continuous but instantaneous. Pebbles
transform, become brilliantly multicoloured, in a flash. They 'lose' their
colours when drying out more slowly. The transformation from brilliant
to dull is more protracted and scarcely perceptible until the change has
already occurred. The effects of the sun are at the expense of the colours
of the pebbles. The magical, transformative and polyvalent colours of the
cairns thus fluctuate or flow and alter according to whether it is wet or
dry, in accordance with the metamorphic powers of water in relation to
the qualities of the stone.

The second fundamental point is that the cairns also alter in the
constant fluidity of the act of perception itself, in relation to the body
of the observer, foreground and background, the part of the cairn that
is being observed, and from pebble to pebble. In this sense the cairn
becomes a constantly mobile thing in which colour flows from pebble
to pebble and from one part of the cairn surface to another. Built with
layer after layer of pebbles superimposed on one another, archaeological
sections through the cairns reveal a kaleidoscopic depth of transforming
colour in the cairn confined to its outer surface in normal circumstances,
the visible external surface colour concealing the invisible colour of that
which lies beneath. Building a cairn can be conceived as acts of layer-
ing colour upon colour, condensing colour in the process and creating an
architectural form that of course concealed colour beneath the surface
but at the same time sedimented, concentrated, magnified, animated
and trapped it, giving the cairn fabulous power and potency. Colour thus
pervades the cairn, is a fundamental element of its being, volubly concen-
trated in its mass and depth. The amassing of pebbles to build the cairns
was simultaneously an amassing and concentration of colour, layer after
layer, pebble beside pebble. The transformational colours of the cairn
form part of both the visible and the invisible sacred world. Colour both
is of this world, visible on the surface, and is sedimented in the depth of
the cairn lying beneath the surface, part of another world. The cairns in
turn conceal the pebbles on which they were built, geological depths of
superimposed colour, layer upon layer descending beneath the surface
of the land.

The Pebblebed landscape was above all a coloured landscape
when compared with the dull and relatively colourless geologies of the
surrounding hills and ridges of greensand and chert to the north, west
and east. Humanly induced changes to the colours of the vegetation of
the landscape further highlighted the vibrant colours of the cairns. The
formation of heathland on the Pebblebeds transformed its colour. The
dappled greens of a relatively open oak and hazel forest merging into
the denser deciduous forest of the surrounding lowlands were replaced
by gorse, heather and bracken. During most of the year the vegetation
of such a landscape appears bleached, lacking vibrant colour. In win-
ter it is only enlivened in patches by the yellow flowers of the common
or European gorse. In spring and early summer in particular it appears
grey-brown, barren and dead in contrast with the vibrant greens and the
flowers of the surrounding lowland landscape. It is only in late summer
and early autumn that this landscape comes alive with colour, with the purple blooms of heather and the yellow flowers of the shorter Western gorse. Thus throughout much of the year the vibrancy of the colours of the pebbles is effectively highlighted and accentuated through this contrast. The multicoloured pebbles were always there in the landscape.

During the excavations we were constantly spraying the pebbles with water in order to observe their colours. The pebble layers were transformed from dull to brilliant and the effect was magical but within a few minutes was lost. The action of rain has, of course, the same effect. In the prehistoric Pebblebed landscape the exposed cairn surfaces would thus gain and lose their vibrancy on a seasonal and daily basis that could be observed in everyday life.

The rainbow serpent is a mythological creature of immense spiritual power and potency to Australian Aboriginal populations (Radcliffe-Brown 1926; Mountford 1978). As the name suggests it has a vibrant, multicoloured skin. It lives in holes in creeks and comes out or is 'activated' when the rain falls and the desert turns green – a time of renewal and plenty. Its wanderings create the rivers and creeks. It is pre-eminently associated with the cycle of the seasons, water, human social relationships and fertility. It can be a giver of life with protective powers or potentially malevolent. The colours of a rainbow form when the rays of the sun pass through rain, and the serpent is associated with the rainbow in art and numerous mythological stories.

A rainbow is a kind of miracle that activates the sky. Just as the colours of pebbles are inconstant and only activated by water, a rainbow eventually fades and is lost in the sky. Water brings forth the colours of pebbles that are otherwise disguised beneath a pale skin. The notion that a pebble has a skin, an inside and an outside, activated by water, may also have been considered an essential element of their spiritual power and magical potency by prehistoric populations. We cannot of course draw any direct analogies with serpents or rainbows. But the suggestion that we can make is that multicoloured objects such as the Pebblebed heathlands themselves, at a macro scale, and the cairns, at a micro scale, had power and spiritual potency precisely because of their multivalent and changing colours.

The angular gravels found on the ridges and hills surrounding the Pebblebeds look pretty similar whether it is wet or dry and are not significantly different. In comparison, the colours of the pebbles are in a continual state of process and transformation. Young (2005) has discussed the manner in which surface colour changes in the land are indexical of the enormous power that ancestral forces exert from beneath and below
the ground among Aboriginal populations. The surface changes of land
and sky are created by the ancestors who are present inside the land-
scape, present beneath the surface. There is a whole ontology of colour
that is a central part of the way people conceive of the potential in col-
oured things. In particular, highly coloured things and things that change
colour are regarded as energetically charged. The image of fecund land
is one of colourful flux, while a loss of colour is associated with a loss of
vitality and life force. This idea may be linked to Rowland's argument
that an understanding of materiality can be linked to processes of materi-
alization such that some things and some people are more material and
thus powerful than others (Rowlands 2005).

This perspective enables us to understand the deposition of the
mushrooms in the central part of TCA (see Chapter 3) in a new light.
Wild mushrooms (contrasting with the tasteless, uniform cultivated var-
ieties), like pebbles and rainbows, are miraculous. They are activated by
the autumn rains, spring up out of nowhere and appear overnight. They
are spectacular both in terms of their varied forms and their bright col-
ours. No other kind of plant takes on so many forms and has so many col-
ours, from reds to yellows to browns, blues, whites, purples and so forth.
Their caps, like pebbles, are smooth to touch, and like pebbles they may
be round, oval or irregular in form. These direct and material metaphor-
ical analogies between pebbles and mushrooms provide a parsimonious
way of understanding why they should be deposited in the cairn.

To sum up, building the cairns required the gathering together
and the layering of the multicoloured pebbles: they condensed and
amassed and concentrated colour in potent and powerful constructions
that marked rather than monumentalized sacred places and social iden-
tities in the Pebblebed landscape. They accentuated an already sacred
landscape by creating nodes of power within it and tapping into spiritual
powers inherent in the colours of the land itself. Trapped in the cairn
itself, individual special pebbles with their intricate colours and quartz
inclusions may have been considered to be magical stones with an espe-
cial potency.
# Burnt mounds and pebble sculptures

*Christopher Tilley and Karolína Pauknerová*

During the Middle to Later Bronze Age we have evidence of new types of pebble structures: a burnt mound and sculptural forms made out of pebbles occurring on the heathlands. These represent radically different and opposed ways of relating to pebbles. In the burnt mound we see their ritual destruction, while in the pebble sculptures we witness their curation, selection and arrangement into patterns representing people or objects in the Bronze Age world in relation to mortuary rites taking place near to large summit pebble cairns of Early to Middle Bronze Age date.

## Jacob's Well

Jacob's Well is situated at the foot of the western escarpment of the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands (SY 0250 8546). It is the site of a spring, a water pool and bog marked in prehistoric times by a large mound of fire-cracked pebbles. The site was excavated by George Carter during 1938/9. In his archive there are numerous photographs, a plan and line drawing of the mound, a plan of his excavation trench and some reconstruction diagrams. He did not write up the results of the excavations, presumably because they were undertaken just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The mound still exists today, cut through by Carter's excavation trench that he did not back fill. It is situated in a mature pine plantation on flat land 50 m to the east of the B3180 road below the summit of Black Hill, one of the highest points on the Pebblebed heathlands. Immediately to the east, the land rises steeply up the scarp slope, limiting views in this direction to a few hundred metres. To the northeast, Woodbury Castle
is visible on the horizon some 2 km distant. To the northwest, there are
extensive views to the Raddon Hills. To the west and southwest, there are
fine views across the Exe estuary to the Haldon Hills, with the high peaks
of Dartmoor just visible beyond. The ground around the mound is still
very boggy today, especially to the south, and the nearby road is still wet
with the spring water even during dry periods (Figure 6.1).

<figure><img src="image_101.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.1** The location of Jacob's Well just below the western scarp of the heathlands (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
Carter's excavations

The mound, as planned by Carter, is a somewhat irregular oval with a west-east long axis of up to 23 m and a north-south short axis of up to 13 m. The mound is approximately 1.8 m maximum height. The profile is markedly asymmetrical, being considerably higher on the northern side, with what may be an extension on the southern side (Figure 6.2).

Carter's section drawing shows a ditch at the eastern end of the mound. The north, south and western sides were surrounded by what he marks as a pebble 'pavement', which was about 2 m wide. In his section drawing (unfortunately without a scale) he distinguishes three main layers as follows:

1. [uppermost] A thick layer of fire cracked pebbles about 1.2 m thick. This contained much charcoal. Samples sent by Carter to Kew 'from within but on the outer edge of the mound' were identified as being of alder (*Alnus glutinosa* L.)

2. An approximately 0.3-m-thick layer of peat. In a letter addressed to the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, dated 18 August 1939, Carter writes 'the peat stratum was about one foot thick. Just below the surface was a thin layer, very extensive, of well-preserved wood,

<figure><img src="image_102.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.2** Carter's watercolour plan of Jacob's Well showing his excavation trench (Source: Carter archive)</figcaption></figure>
or what appears to be wood. One large piece has an area of about two square feet, and was penetrated, when the mound was built, by a hole, square in plan, with two sides measuring 18" in length. The surface of this exposure is gently corrugated with even ripples. If this was the bark of a tree peeled off, it would have to be a large tree to give the area now visible. It may represent the only portion of a large recumbent log which has not decayed. It may represent, say, thin objects like a shield or two of bark .... The large portion is being preserved in situ pending this examination.' Smaller pieces were identified at Kew Gardens as probably being oak.

3 A 0.3-m-thick pebble floor overlying a 'raft' of pebbles on the surface of the bog. This bottom layer Carter also describes as being 'a great mattress of pebbles allowing water to percolate freely under the mound' (handwritten note) (Figure 6.3).

Carter excavated one trench which was about 12 m long and 2 m wide. This extended north from the southern edge, cutting through the centre of the mound (Figure 6.4 and Figure 6.5). Beyond the paved mound perimeter he discovered a geometric arrangement of pebbles that he interpreted as resembling somewhat a human face. Just to the north of this was an unburnt area of clay. This was approximately rectangular in shape and measured 90 cm × 1 m. On it he recovered a large unusually shaped and flaked pebble. It is 15 cm long and parts of the water-worn and smooth external surface of the pebble occur on its bottom and on a small area of the flaked top. The pebble had been struck to remove the flakes at the pointed end. All surfaces are

<figure><img src="image_103.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.3** Carter's section drawing of Jacob's Well (Source: Carter archive)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_104.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.4** Plan of Carter’s trench through Jacob’s Well based on his drawings and notes (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_105.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.5** Carter's photograph of his trench through the mound looking north. Remains of clay 'altar' in foreground, remains of oak post *in situ* marked by trowel. Stone mattress or platform under mound: background (Source: Carter archive)</figcaption></figure>
fire-cracked, indicating that it was subjected to burning after being
flaked. It may have been used as a hammer stone for flaking other peb-
bles, which would, as these are quartzites, produce distinctive orange
sparks. Because of its find context, Carter interpreted it as an 'idol'
or magic stone. It was found together with much charcoal and three
pebble flakes, with distinctive white quartz veins, all from the same
pebble (Figure 6.6 and Figure 6.7). The four corners of the clay area
were marked by sharpened and pointed oak stakes the basal parts of
which were preserved in the bog water (Figure 6.8). Carter refers to
this as being an altar. Under it there was a flint flake. Just over a metre
to the north of it he found the remains of what may have been a divid-
ing wall or, alternatively, a small cairn of pebbles. Four metres to the
north of this structure he recovered the decaying remains of a wooden
post or pillar, originally perhaps up to 3 m long. This lay along the
north-south axis of the bottom of his trench (see Figure 6.4). Next to
it was the post hole about 0.4 m deep with wooden remains in situ.
The wood was identified as being oak, probably *Quercus robur* L., the
common English species (letter from Catherine Hill, then Director of
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, dated 6 September 1939). Carter
estimated that the post was not less than 6 inches (15 cm) in diameter.

<figure><img src="image_106.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.6** The flaked ‘idol’ or magic stone found at the base of the mound by Carter (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_107.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.7** The flaked pebble: line drawing (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_108.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.8** The four oak stakes recovered by Carter at the corners of the 'altar'. The two to the right have been radiocarbon dated (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
Beside it, on the western side, there was a 'nest of blue stones'. These
are unusual and rare quartzite blue-grey pebbles recognized by
Carter as having symbolic significance (see discussion of blue stones
in Chapters 2, 4 and 5). At the northern end of the trench he found
a cut water channel leading away from a well or basin. The well was
about 30 cm in diameter and 30 cm in depth. It had a birch bark sur-
round and was cut into peat. From it a water channel or runnel, its
centre marked by blue stones, ran away towards the northeast under
the mound. There were no other finds of flint and no pottery in the
excavation trench.

Carter's interpretations

Carter mentions Jacob's Well in one of his numerous unpublished man-
uscripts, *To Rome from the East: A Study in Comparative Religion*. He
writes:

The mound proper was apparently the scene for centuries of cer-
emonial fire (or steam) raising, since it could only have been con-
structed by a gradual process involving the bringing of pebbles, the
making of a localized fire, the dowsing of the fire by water. Thus
the stones became cracked and the fine charcoal washed down into
the crevices. The ceremonial rites were performed for so long a
period that ultimately well and altar were covered by debris – but
local residents still go here to ‘wish’. In the bottom or peat layer
were found the broken remains of a beam of wood originally about
10/12 feet long. Of which the purpose can only be surmised. Here
we seem to have the locale of rain-making magic, of which remark-
able literary expression will be found in the Celtic tale of the Lady
of the Fountain.

(undated MS: 88–9)

Carter's reconstruction diagram of the 'altar' shows the four oak stakes
supporting a roofed structure over it (Figure 6.9).

Carter firmly believed that the mound was of Iron Age date, in
common with the mounds and pebble platforms that he had excavated
earlier on Woodbury and Aylesbeare Commons (Carter 1936, 1938).
Radiocarbon dating of two of the oak stakes has shown that one stake is
of Early Bronze Age date and the second is Middle Bronze Age (see dis-
cussion below and Table 6.1).
<figure><img src="image_109.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.9** Carter's reconstruction diagram of the wooden shrine. Redrawn by Wayne Bennett</figcaption></figure>

<table><caption>**Table 6.1** Radiocarbon dates for Jacob's Well.</caption><thead><tr><td>Material dated</td><td>Radiocarbon age</td><td>Beta Analytic Florida no.</td><td>Calibrated date range, 95 per cent probability</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Trench - oak stake - wooden shrine</td><td>3410±40 BP</td><td>BETA 257337</td><td>1870 to 1850 and 1780 to 1620</td></tr><tr><td>Trench - oak stake - wooden shrine</td><td>3250 ±40 BP</td><td>BETA 257336</td><td>1620 to 1440 BC</td></tr><tr><td>Mound spit 14 - alder - charcoal</td><td>3210±30 BP</td><td>BETA 298040</td><td>1510 to 1410 BC</td></tr><tr><td>Mound spit 7 - alder - charcoal</td><td>3100±30 BP</td><td>BETA 298039</td><td>1420 to 1300 BC</td></tr></tbody></table>

Carter records the small bog beside it still being used as a wishing well by locals in 1938 at the time of his excavations, as it was, no doubt, in his childhood: 'people came to drop offerings in the then open hole in the swamp about two or three feet from the aboriginal well' (Carter unpublished note). Today Jacob's Well is forgotten and unvisited. The
only person who knows and remembers the site is Mrs Priscilla Hull,
George Carter's daughter, who took part in his excavations.

On the basis of Carter's excavation there appear to be four main
components of the shrine: (1) a spring source defined and lined by birch
bark with a runnel carrying water away; (2) an oak totem pole; (3) a
raised structure supported by four oak stakes, with offering stones, per-
haps roofed; (4) geometric (?) arrangements of pebbles and blue stones.
This was covered, in the passage of time, as a result of repeated ceremo-
nies at this sacred location, by a large oval mound of fire cracked pebbles
containing much alder charcoal.

The 2010 excavations

The aim of new excavations undertaken in 2010 was to measure and
document the state of the mound and cut a small section into the body of
the mound, record further information about its structure and purpose
and obtain further material for dating and environmental analysis. The
wall of Carter's trench was cleaned and then a 1-m-square trench in the
centre of the mound on the western side of Carter's north-south central
trench was excavated (see Figure 6.10 and Figure 6.11). After cleaning
the side of the trench, on the top a humic orangey-brown layer was vis-
ible and then down through the whole profile a layer of cracked pebbles
and charcoal with no obvious stratigraphy. This rested on an underlying
peat layer. Since it was apparent that there was no discernible stratigra-
phy within the burnt mound deposits we decided to excavate by 10 cm
spits until reaching the basal peaty layer. One immediate question was
where Carter had deposited the spoil from his trench. This proved to be
in two places: (a) immediately outside the mound on the southern side
and (b) on top of the mound itself, thus considerably increasing its height
and altering its profile from an oval flat-topped mound to a much more
rounded shape.

The material from each 10 cm spit, including Carter's spoil, was
excavated into buckets and weighed. It was then dry-sieved using a 1
mm mesh and charcoal samples were taken for analysis. It was then wet-
sieved and the fire-cracked pebble fragments were weighed separately. A
2 kg random sample of the broken fire-cracked pebbles from each 10 cm
spit was individually measured (maximum length), weighed and exam-
ined for the presence of the cortex (smooth outer surface of the pebble)
and this was recorded. The purpose of this was to enable us to distinguish
whether any changes in the composition of the material were apparent
<figure><img src="image_110.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.10** Jacob's Well: sketch plan of the mound and its surroundings (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_111.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.11** Jacob's Well: general plan of the mound (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

from the top to the bottom of the burnt mound (e.g. more or less charcoal and sooty deposits, or whether there might be proportionally more larger pebble fragments present at various depths through the burnt mound or a higher or lower degree of fragmentation of the pebbles).

After removing the top orangey-brown layer (context 1), five levels with cracked pebbles were excavated (context 2). This was the spoil from Carter's excavations, and in spits 5 and 6 two green glass shards, one a neck fragment with a bullet stopper, of a type typical of the 1930s, were found. Beneath the spoil another layer appeared similar to the top layer (context 3). Underneath this spits 6–14 consisted of undisturbed cracked pebbles and charcoal (context 4). The top of spit 6 is thus the highest level of the original mound. The undisturbed burnt mound deposits below were thus 90 cm in depth, overlaying the 'peat layer' that was 17 cm in depth (following Carter's description of the site) (context 5) (see Figure 6.12). Below this, large pebbles occurred in a natural grey clayey matrix. At the junction of spit 14 and the peat layer pieces of wood started to appear. This was collected for analysis and plotted (Figure 6.13).
<figure><img src="image_112.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.12** Jacob's Well: section (left side, back, right side)</figcaption></figure>

context 1: vegetation cover, topsoil – orangey-brown material with roots

context 2: levels 1–5, cracked pebbles in dark black, humic, soil, interpreted as Carter’s spoil heap

context 3: buried mound vegetation at the time of Carter’s excavation: orangey-brown material with roots

context 4: levels 6–14, cracked pebbles in dark black, humic, plastic soil

context 5: – peat level (Source: author)

We had chosen to locate our section where there were no pine trees or tree stumps visible on the upper mound surface. However, an old and heavily rotten pine tree stump that must have been growing on the top of the mound in Carter's day emerged as we excavated down through his spoil into the underlying undisturbed deposits. The spoil had concealed it on the mound surface. Analysis of the wood material found in the basal peaty layer by Dana Challinor showed that it was heavily decomposed pine root wood, the roots of the tree stump discovered in the section. No artefact finds were recorded from the trench, and only a very few small quartz pebbles were found intact. The rest were very highly fragmented.

Within the peat horizon beneath the burnt mound three distinctive layers could be distinguished:

3–5 cm: light-brown peaty layer, possibly burned;

5–7 cm: an irregular sinuous black band with a distinctive smell of tar of a kind that is usually found under charcoal kilns. During burning with only small amounts of air, liquid tar soaks into basal layers, in our case into the basal peat layer, and at this depth formed a distinctive band.

7–17cm: a dark brown peaty layer (Figure 6.12).

There were no artefacts in this peaty basal layer. The sequence of contexts 4 and 5 were taken as a monolith sample and a separate sample was taken of the tar layer (for the position of samples see Figure 6.12).
<figure><img src="image_113.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.13** Jacob's Well: square 1, planned position of substantial pebbles (black) and pieces of wood (numbered) in the peat level (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

The results of pollen analysis undertaken by Rob Batchelor of the peaty deposits beneath the burnt mound show that common alder dominated the wetland environment, prior to the formation of the burnt mound, with an understory consisting of hazel, willow, ivy and holly. Grasses and sedges dominated the ground (see Batchelor, Appendix 12 and discussion in Chapter 8).

## Dating

Table 6.1 gives the radiocarbon dates for Jacob's Well. The top of the burnt mound deposits below Carter's spoil is dated to 1300–1400 cal. BC and the bottom 1400–1500 cal. BC, so the burnt mound took approximately 100 years (or three to four generations) to accumulate. The dating of the oak stakes that Carter had found in the basal peaty layer under the mound provided older but different dates. The difference between
the two dates can be explained by the fact that oak are long-lived trees
and even dates from the same tree might differ. These stakes were chem-
ically preserved by Carter and were analysed by Dana Challinor, who
suggests that they were of large mature trunk wood. Whether or not this
was heart wood could not be ascertained because of the nature of the
chemical impregnation. The stakes had a minimum of 30 rings.

If we take the middle date of the stakes, 1620 cal. BC, as the
date for the structure Carter found in the basal peat layer there was a
100-year hiatus between the construction of the shrine in the bog and
the accumulation of the rest of the mound of fire-cracked pebbles. So
there were in all probability, though it is impossible to be definitive about
this, two main phases of human activity at Jacob's Well: (1) an Early to
Middle Bronze Age phase in which a shrine was built on the site; (2) a
later Middle Bronze Age phase during which the pebbles were cracked
and the burnt mound deposits accumulated.

Analysis of the burnt mound deposits

The archaeological analysis of the excavated material from the 10 cm
spits shows that there is a substantial difference between Carter's spoil
and the undisturbed burnt mound deposits beneath. In the spoil the per-
centage of pebbles was considerably lower, varying between 53 per cent
and 65 per cent of the total (mean frequency 59 per cent). In the other
undisturbed spits the pebble frequency was much higher, up to 81 per
cent (mean frequency 73 per cent). The proportion of pebbles in rela-
tion to ash and charcoal did not differ substantially between the 10 cm
excavation units and there was no discernible trend apparent within the
burnt mound, such as the proportion of pebbles increasing or decreasing
with depth (Table 6.2).

The total weight of pebbles from each 10 cm excavation unit was
up to 145 kg. The size of the crushed pebbles was assessed by weighing
and measuring the maximum length of the fragments in a 2 kg random
sample from each excavation unit. The vast majority of the fragments
throughout weighed 50 g or less (83–99 per cent). In all the spits only
one or two fragments weighed more than 150 g. The percentage of
larger fragments measuring 4 cm or more in length was low in the
undisturbed spits, varying between 5 and 10 per cent. Larger frag-
ments were more common in Carter's spoil and, interestingly, in the
two basal levels of the burnt mound where they made up between 18
and 25 per cent of the pebbles. This seems to indicate that the intensity
<table><caption>Table 6.2 Total weight of material (pebbles, soil, ash and charcoal) from 10 cm excavation spit, total weight of pebbles from the spit and percentage of pebbles by weight.</caption><thead><tr><td>10 cm spit</td><td>Total weight kg</td><td>Pebbles kg</td><td>Percentage pebbles</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>-</td><td>65.9</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>54.8</td><td>32.8</td><td>60</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>66.3</td><td>43.2</td><td>65</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>82.1</td><td>47.9</td><td>58</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>93.8</td><td>49.4</td><td>53</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>107.1</td><td>62.3</td><td>58</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>121.2</td><td>81.3</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>109.6</td><td>81.3</td><td>74</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>144.3</td><td>101.7</td><td>70</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>164.8</td><td>119.1</td><td>72</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>131.6</td><td>98.2</td><td>75</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>128.6</td><td>96.2</td><td>75</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>178.3</td><td>145.0</td><td>81</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>116.0</td><td>81.7</td><td>70</td></tr></tbody></table>

Note: Spit 1: top surface uneven so only pebbles weighed.

of fire cracking of the material increased after an initial stage and then remained more or less constant throughout the period of use of the mound (Table 6.3).

The pebbles destroyed at Jacob's Well were relatively small in size, no more than 10–15 cm in length and originally weighing 500 g or less, or about the same size as the majority from cairns excavated on Colaton Raleigh Common, some 4 km distant to the northeast. The closest possible source of the pebbles would be the bottom of the western escarpment of the Pebblebed heathlands, only a short distance from the eastern edge of the mound, but some might have been brought from much further afield.

Throughout Carter's spoil and the undisturbed spits the number of complete or whole pebbles was fewer than 20. These were recovered from only a few of the 14 10-cm-deep excavation spits. This minuscule frequency may be compared with up to 200 or more pebble fragments from each 2 kg sample. The unbroken pebbles were all very small and
<table><caption>**Table 6.3** The maximum length of the fire-cracked pebbles by excavation spit, based on a 2 kg random sample of the pebbles from each.</caption><thead><tr><th>Spit</th><th>0-2 cm</th><th>2.1-3 cm</th><th>3.1-4 cm</th><th>&gt; 4 cm</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>22</td><td>33</td><td>24</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>6</td><td>27</td><td>32</td><td>35</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>25</td><td>38</td><td>27</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>24</td><td>43</td><td>21</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>38</td><td>36</td><td>15</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>60</td><td>29</td><td>7</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>42</td><td>35</td><td>17</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>45</td><td>26</td><td>16</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>46</td><td>33</td><td>12</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>67</td><td>20</td><td>7</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>51</td><td>31</td><td>11</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>51</td><td>28</td><td>11</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>25</td><td>36</td><td>14</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>33</td><td>27</td><td>21</td><td>18</td></tr></tbody></table>

quite unremarkable quartz pebbles that had survived the fire and appear to be of no other significance.

Each pebble fragment from the samples was examined to see if any of the cortex or smooth outer surface of the pebble remained. The frequency of the fragments on which the cortex was present varied between 38 per cent and 61 per cent (mean 48 per cent). The spits with the highest frequencies (58 per cent and 61 per cent) occurred just above those making up the basal level of the mound, where interestingly enough the proportion of pebble fragments greater in length than 4 cm was considerably smaller (Table 6.3 and Table 6.4).

It should be noted that the presence of an area of remaining cortex on most of the pebbles was by no means obvious and could be detected only by close examination of each fragment. The intention was clearly to utterly destroy the pebbles. The quartzite pebbles of the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands are extremely hard material and difficult to fragment and break. The degree of attrition of the material at Jacob's Well is therefore quite extraordinary. The fire-cracking process reduced the pebbles to an irregular and jagged gravel resembling railway ballast or
<table><caption>Table 6.4 Frequencies of whole pebbles and pebbles with some area of the outer cortex remaining and percentage of these among the total number of pebbles analysed per excavation unit. Figures based on a 2 kg random sample of pebbles/unit.</caption><thead><tr><td>Spit</td><td>Whole pebbles</td><td>Pebbles with cortex</td><td>Cortex pebble percentage</td><td>Total pebbles</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>55</td><td>38.2</td><td>144</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>59</td><td>49.2</td><td>120</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>80</td><td>39.8</td><td>201</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>80</td><td>44.2</td><td>181</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>11</td><td>80</td><td>64.0</td><td>125</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>0</td><td>83</td><td>42.3</td><td>196</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>0</td><td>78</td><td>39.6</td><td>197</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>59</td><td>37.6</td><td>157</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>0</td><td>65</td><td>51.6</td><td>126</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>0</td><td>108</td><td>47.6</td><td>227</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>0</td><td>86</td><td>61.4</td><td>140</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>0</td><td>93</td><td>58.9</td><td>158</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>0</td><td>46</td><td>52.3</td><td>88</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>0</td><td>50</td><td>50.5</td><td>99</td></tr></tbody></table>

any kind of crushed stone. In the process the pebbles became unrecognizable as pebbles. Not only did they lose their individual shapes and smoothness but also their colours (Figure 6.14). The fire-cracked material is almost all a uniform dull grey colour even when washed to remove the soot covering their surfaces and blackening them to such an extent that they resembled pieces of charcoal. Sometimes when wet-sieving the pebbles we initially misrecognized some very small fragments as charcoal and vice versa.

An analysis of the narrow band of the material that we identified as being tar in the peaty layer below the burnt mound was undertaken by Vladimír Machovič of the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague. He reports that ‘the infrared spectre was measured with a FTIR spectrometer Nicolet 7600 with DTGS detector, and ray diffraction KBr. Measurement parameters: number of spectre accumulation 64, resolution 2 cm⁻¹. Conclusion: Analysed material is composed of an
<figure><img src="image_114.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.14** Sample of washed fire-cracked and crushed pebbles from Jacob's Well (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

extractable share (of chloroform-ethanol), which comes evidently from low-temperature wood pyrolysis.'

This result suggests that the fire-cracked pebbles from Jacob's Well were burnt *in situ* rather than elsewhere and then carried to the site. The tar layer in the peat under Jacob's Well is the result of repeated actions, the residues of fire with small amounts of air. It could not have formed as a result of material being burnt elsewhere and then subsequently transported to the site. A notable feature of the Jacob's Well deposits is that all the charcoal fragments recovered were small – 1 cm or less in size – and there was surprisingly little ash. Jiří Woitsch (Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences), a forest industries expert, commented to us that in charcoal kilns tar layers are characteristic beneath the kiln when used repeatedly and where there is not much permeable bedrock, as is the case at Jacob's Well. Tar bands are usually found under charcoal kilns and they are formed by liquid components that soak into the ground during the process of pyrolysis. The process was repeated over a period of 100 years. In charcoal kilns there is almost no ash, sometimes none at all (Jiří Woitsch, personal communication). The absence of large pieces of charcoal at Jacob's Well could suggest that it was collected and taken away. One potential use for this material could have been in the smelting of metals elsewhere.

The results discussed here need to be put into context of the charcoal analysis and the results of experiments that were undertaken to crack the pebbles by fire. According to the charcoal analysis:
The fuel used in heating the fire-cracked stones from the burnt mound deposits at Jacob's Well was drawn from locally available woodland, dominated by alder. A variety of other taxa were also utilised, apparently with little change over the 100 years that the deposits accumulated. It is suggested that charcoal, rather than wood, for fuel may have been used but whether this was a reasonable use of resources rather depends on the purpose of the stone-heating activity.

(Challinor, Appendix 13)

It is interesting to note that alder wood burns with an intense heat and produces some of the very best charcoal; it was preferentially used in the production of gunpowder (Gale and Cutler 2000).

Four experiments were undertaken by us burning pebbles in order to investigate the conditions that resulted in the fire-cracked material excavated at Jacob's Well. In the first two we experimented with heating quartzite pebbles in an open bonfire for one and a half hours and then throwing them into running water. The pebbles cracked, but only into two halves, and on some only small pieces of the external cortex broke off. In the third experiment we heated the pebble, took it out of the fire, laid it on a flat stone and then broke it easily into bits with another pebble. In the last experiment we put the pebbles on a bed of gravel to simulate the situation in the mound. The pebble was heated and then easily broken on the gravel bed with another pebble. In all cases we learnt that the colour of pebbles was lost when the stones are heated for one hour or more in an open fire.

From the stratigraphy of the mound and results of the charcoal analysis, tar band spectrometry and the fire heating experiments with the pebbles we can make some further remarks about the possible process of the construction of the mound. Experiments showed that pebbles could easily be broken on a bed of previously fire-cracked pebbles. From the charcoal analysis we know that local wood was used, collected in the vicinity of the mound. Our interpretation is that people brought pebbles to the site and burnt them in a slow-burning open fire with little air. After at least one hour, because this is the minimum time needed for a pebble to lose its colour, they might have removed the burning wood and broken the hot pebbles with other pebbles used as hammer stones. Because of the presence of the tar band beneath the mound it is evident that a fire was present on the site.

We have already commented on the similarity of the fire-cracked pebbles to charcoal and this is worth conceptualizing further. The process
of pebble destruction can perhaps be understood as a transformative
process, turning stone into charcoal, itself the product of another trans-
formative process involving the burning of wood. Once wood is burnt
and only charcoal remains, the type of tree from which the wood came is
no longer recognizable. All charcoal looks the same, except, of course, in
the microscope of the environmental scientist. The fire rituals at Jacob's
Well can be understood as producing an end product in which both wood
and stone became symbolically reduced to a state of sameness in which
the different qualities of both substances became erased. The fire ritu-
als consumed and transformed both wood and stone into a blackened
material resembling neither of them. The heat from the pebbles when
cooled by bog water would produce steam rising up from the mound as
a cloud of vapour, to ultimately disappear into the heavens above. Thus
substances that were solid and material (wood and stone) became ulti-
mately transformed into the immaterial, an essence.

Parallels

This is one of only two or possibly three or four burnt mounds recently
recorded in Devon (Gent 2007; Hart et al. 2014: 10). The closest parallel
to the Jacob's Well mound is the site of Burlescombe, near Tiverton, some
25 km north of the Pebblebed heathlands, where two Middle Bronze
Age burnt mounds with timber-lined troughs and associated pits have
recently been excavated (Gent 2007). One of these was 4 m in diameter
and up to 0.3 m thick, with two layers of heat-shattered pebbles, gravel
and charcoal. The other was 14.5 m long, 6 m wide and 1 m deep. No arte-
facts were found in these mounds (Gent 2007: 37). These mounds, like
Jacob's Well, were both associated with a spring, fire and burning, had
wooden structures and were constructed from pebbles from the Budleigh
Salterton Pebblebeds. The calibrated dates of the oak stakes found under-
neath Jacob's Well overlap with the two dates from Burlescombe, but are
earlier. One small burnt mound at Burlescombe was dated to 1720–1490
cal. BC to 1330–1340 cal. BC, with an estimated 10–170 years of use.
The other larger mound was dated to 1530–1380 cal. BC to 1420–1250
cal. BC, with an estimated use of 60 years. The dates of this are approxi-
mately the same as those obtained for Jacob's Well.

There are significant differences between the Jacob's Well and the
Burlescombe mounds. The landscape locations, Burlescombe on the
western edge of a broad shallow coombe and Jacob's Well at the foot
of a steep scarp edge, are very different. Jacob's Well is a much larger
mound than either of those at Burlescombe and seemingly associated with a significantly larger bog and water pool. The structures Carter recorded, apart from the possible presence of a trough, have no parallels at Burlescombe.

It is not possible to compare the fire-cracked pebbles at Jacob's Well with those at Burlescombe or at Hayes Farm Clyst Honiton since at neither site do they seem to have been measured or analysed so one could compare, for example, the state of attrition of the pebbles.

Burnt mounds of fire-cracked stones in Britain and Ireland have a long temporal span dating back to the Neolithic. A few are associated with Beaker pottery but most radiocarbon-dated sites show that they were formed during the Middle to Later Bronze Age. They are particularly common in Scotland and southwest Wales, and Devon is on the extreme western edge of their overall distribution (Buckley 1990). Better excavated examples are associated with wooden troughs, as at Burlescombe and Jacob's Well, or stone-lined pits with the joints sealed with clay, and sometimes small internal structures or buildings. The association with water – small streams, springs and bogs – is normal. Interpretations include the heating of stones to boil water linked with cooking meat, but very few animal bones have been found in these mounds. Barfield and Hodder (1987) argue instead that the creation of large amounts of steam is more likely, so they may be understood as saunas or steam baths, perhaps like North American Indian sweat lodges linked to acts of purification and ritual cleansing. Gent's functionalist interpretation suggests that the Burlescombe mounds may have been used for some 'form of industrial activity, such as the production of textiles' (Gent 2007: 43). Brown et al. suggest a similar function for cleaning and dyeing wool or plant fibres and for hide cleaning and tanning for Irish burnt mounds (Brown et al. 2016). This seems very unlikely at Jacob's Well.

The character of the material – burnt pebbles – is unique, as is the extreme attrition that this material has been subjected to. The presence of the tar layer is unusual. Jacob's Well is thus not just another example of a burnt mound to be understood in the same manner as those found elsewhere. Kaliff, in his discussion of burnt mounds from Östergötland, eastern mid-Sweden, has called into question the standard functional interpretations in which the presence of fire-cracked stones is regarded as simply being the residue of other activities, either functional or ritual (e.g. steam raising, cremation, cooking): 'we ought to ask ourselves why we find it difficult to accept the burning of stone as a deliberate ritual element, whereas we have no problems accepting
the same when it comes to the burning of the human body' (Kaliff 2007: 121). His argument is that the stone was burnt for ritual reasons as part of a deliberate process analogous with the manner in which a dead body is fragmented and disintegrated during cremation. This is a cogent and important argument but Kaliff does not take it further by discussing the material properties of the stones found in the Swedish burnt mounds, transformed by a combination of fire and water. In relation to Jacob's Well a much stronger argument can be made in this respect.

Reflecting on the ritual destruction of the pebbles at Jacob's Well we can draw clear parallels with the destruction of metalwork in the Middle and Late Bronze Age, often deposited in bogs (see e.g. Bradley 1990, 2000), and practices of cremation taking place elsewhere at the same time, reducing the body to the self-same fragments of bone through a fire ritual. Just as the individual pebbles at Jacob's Well lost their individuality of form, their self-identity, so did the corpse and the bones of the body. Pebbles and people are being treated in exactly the same way and both pebbles and people, when considered collectively, are at once the same and different. Furthermore the burning and crushing of pebbles needs to be considered and understood in relation to other contemporary and earlier practices taking place on the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands. The construction of pebble cairns (see Chapters 3–5) and pebble platforms elsewhere (see below) involved the collection and curation of pebbles in high places, dry, exposed to the heavens. At Jacob's Well the mound of fire-cracked pebbles covered an earlier water shrine with a wooden structure, situated in a bog and venerating a natural spring at the base of the escarpment of the Pebblebeds. Afterwards the place was abandoned.

The major constitutive qualities of the pebbles, their smoothness and their bright colours, were destroyed by the fire rituals and the systematic crushing of the pebbles. First, the fire metaphorically drained the colours of the pebbles; second, their smooth and rounded forms were reduced to jagged and angular fragments by hammer blows. Table 6.5 shows a set of structural contrasts between Jacob's Well and the pebble cairns.

We might regard the cairns as a celebration of the pebbles and their qualities. At Jacob's Well these are being systematically destroyed through acts of violence. If accumulating pebbles in cairns symbolized the wealth and power of the local community as argued in Chapter 7, then their destruction can be regarded as a ritual killing akin to practices such as the Potlatch ceremonies of
<table><caption>Table 6.5 Contrasts between Jacob's Well and Bronze Age pebble cairns.</caption><thead><tr><td>Jacob's Well</td><td>Pebble cairns</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Oval mound</td><td>Round cairn</td></tr><tr><td>Bog (wet)</td><td>Heathland (dry)</td></tr><tr><td>Low, below escarpment</td><td>Elevated on hilltop</td></tr><tr><td>Restricted views</td><td>Panoramic views</td></tr><tr><td>Views to setting sun in west</td><td>Views to rising sun in east</td></tr><tr><td>Fragmented stone</td><td>Curated pebbles</td></tr><tr><td>Grey and dull material</td><td>Brightly coloured</td></tr><tr><td>Jagged</td><td>Smooth</td></tr><tr><td>Jumbled deposits</td><td>Carefully placed</td></tr><tr><td>Dark</td><td>Light</td></tr><tr><td>Transformation</td><td>Curation</td></tr></tbody></table>

the northwest-coast American Indians in which wealth was ritually destroyed as part of a process of acquiring power and prestige (Boas 1966; Jonaitis 1991; Graeber 2001: 188–208).

## Pebble sculptures on Aylesbeare Common

During the summer of 1937 George Carter and his small excavation team, which included his three daughters, Priscilla, Ruth and Mary, carried out a series of excavations of ‘pebbled mounds’ on the summit area of Aylesbeare Common, forming the northern part of the heathlands. These low and discreet features had been discovered following swaling (fire burning) of the area in 1936. Carter excavated, or part-excavated, six low mounds up to 20 cm high which he described as resembling a ‘keyhole’ in plan. They consisted of a small rectangular mound about 3 m long attached to, in some cases, a circular platform about 5 m in diameter. Excavation of the rectangular mounds revealed elaborate pebble platforms beneath of an entirely different shape. Two of them were in the shape of double-bladed ceremonial axes, tapering inwards at the centre and widening out at the ends but in a somewhat asymmetrical fashion. The other five platforms excavated by Carter were roughly trapezoidal in form, one short end of the pebble platform being significantly longer than the other (Figures 6.15–6.17).
<figure><img src="image_115.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.15** Aylesbeare platform no. 1 during excavation, 1937
(Source: Carter archive)</figcaption></figure>

The structures that Carter excavated were found on sloping ground dropping away to the north and the east down to a large amphitheatre-shaped bog below the hill summit, about 200 m to the northeast of the massive Early Bronze Age summit cairn. In this same general area
<figure><img src="image_116.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.16** Aylesbeare no. 2 (Source: Carter archive)</figcaption></figure>

of Aylesbeare Common but 200 m or more distant (Figure 6.18), lower down the slope and much closer to the bog, General Simcoe had set up a temporary encampment for his troops around 1799 at the time of the Napoleonic wars, when there was a threat of a French invasion (see Chapter 11).

Carter maintained that the pebble platforms that he had excavated were prehistoric, of Iron Age date, and could be understood as part of a sacrificial cult (Carter 1938). But given a lack of any artefacts associated with them and the absence of the technique of radiocarbon dating there was no possibility of dating them. For over 70 years no archaeological investigations have been made on Aylesbeare Common and Carter's work and the spectacular finds he made have been almost entirely forgotten. Some have assumed that the pebble platforms he discovered might be of Napoleonic date, too, and constructed by General Simcoe's troops, since they lack any direct parallels in either prehistoric Britain or Europe.
<figure><img src="image_117.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.17** Aylesbeare no. 5 (Source: Carter archive)</figcaption></figure>

However, they also lack any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century parallels and there is no evidence of any activity by Simcoe's troops in the area where they are found (see Chapter 11).

In September 2009 the East Devon Pebblebeds Project undertook a field survey following swaling by the RSPB of the general area where the mounds Carter excavated were found, and undertook a small series of excavations on Aylesbeare Common in order to attempt to locate pebble platforms of the same kind, but without success, although remains of Napoleonic date were discovered. Small areas of the heath were also cut of vegetation in the spring of 2010 in areas where Carter had found his platforms, but nothing came to light (he left no precise plan of their location). It seems likely that the platforms Carter excavated are now destroyed, probably during extensive military use of the area in the Second World War.
<figure><img src="image_118.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.18** Aylesbeare Common summit area looking northwest. The summit cairn with path curving around it is in the foreground to the left. The topsoil-scraped area where one of the natural test pebble samples was excavated is the white patch in the middle of the picture. To the right of it is the amphitheatre-shaped bog. The pebble platforms are located to the left of the white track running away into the distance beyond the summit barrow (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

During 1996 the RSPB had undertaken topsoil-scraping opera-
tions in a different area of the Aylesbeare summit: about 200 m to the
northwest of the summit barrow. A series of damaged pebble structures
were uncovered and partly cleaned, and two were almost intact. These
were subsequently covered over again with soil and their positions
marked with small wooden posts. One of the best-preserved structures
was uncovered in March 2010 by Toby Taylor of the RSPB and excav-
vated during September by the project team. This structure had been
covered with a blue plastic sheet and with redeposited topsoil, presum-
ably from the immediate surroundings. This redeposited soil surrounds
the platform today and it has no associated archaeological contexts or features. If any existed they may have been removed by the topsoil-scraping operations. The subsequent year two further structures were relocated by the RSPB in the dense heath vegetation of heather and gorse and excavated.

The 2010 and 2011 excavations revealed three spectacular pebble structures very similar to those reported by Carter (Figures 6.19–6.21). One was trapezoidal in form but with ‘horns’ or extensions at the shorter end. This is a unique feature of this particular platform. None of those recorded by Carter seems to have had ‘horns’ or extensions at the narrower end. Another platform was in the shape of a double-bladed axe and the third, more damaged example resembles an ox-hide. There were no traces of a rectangular covering mound or attached low circular platforms. If these did exist they had been removed by the earlier topsoil-scraping operations. All these structures were found on gently north-sloping ground, as were Carter’s. It appears from one of his photographs that the attached circular platform was down-slope of the pebble structure. The long axis of all three platforms was NE–SW, matching Carter’s description, and they were similar in size. Carter reported that the six structures he recorded were close together and parallel to each

<figure><img src="image_119.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.19** The trapezoidal platform with horns (scale: 1 m)
(Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_120.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.20** The double-axe platform (scale: 1 m) (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

other, about 6 m apart (Carter 1938: 94). Those excavated by the project team were between 60 and 75 m apart, and located at various positions on the hill slope, the trapezoidal-shaped platform being highest up the slope and furthest to the west and the ox-hide-shaped platform lowest down the slope and furthest to the east (Figure 6.22).
<figure><img src="image_121.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.21** The ox-hide platform (scale: 1 m) (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

**The trapezoidal platform with ‘horns’ (SY 05327 90208) (Figure 6.19 and Figure 6.23)**

The platform is made up of 1,337 multicoloured pebbles. It is 2.8 m long, 1.6 m wide at the broader end and 0.8 m wide at the narrower end. It is oriented NNE-SSW with two projecting ‘horns’ at the narrow NNE end. The southern part is level, the northern end with the extensions dips below the ground surface. Larger pebbles are used to define the edges of the platform. There are many broken pebbles used on the flat southern end but very few in the dipping northern end. The pebbles are set either with their thin edge uppermost or with their broad face uppermost. It was apparent from the section (see below) that the pebbles here had been set vertically rather than horizontally so that only the top of the pebble was visible and the bulk buried.

The pebbles are bright and multicoloured throughout the platform and there is no evidence for selective colour choice or arrangements of differently coloured pebbles. The platform was partially damaged on the western side towards the narrower end, where pebbles were missing. This might have occurred during the topsoil scraping or it could be earlier. There were also some recent fractures on some of the pebbles elsewhere on the western side.
<figure><img src="image_122.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.22** The locations of the Aylesbeare platforms and Bronze Age summit cairns and the pebble test samples. Platforms A–C trapezoidal, axe, ox-hide; summit cairns D and E (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_123.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.23** Plan of the trapezoidal platform (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_124.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.24** Sections through the three platforms. (A): trapezoidal platform (N–S profile); (B): the ox-hide platform (E–W profile); (C): the double-axe platform (E–W profile) (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

Larger pebbles, placed horizontally, make up the edges. A small section 24 cm wide and 60 cm long was cut into the platform in an area that had already been extensively damaged. The rest of the structure was left intact. The section revealed that the pebbles inside were laid, like teeth, with their long axis placed vertically, thus providing maximum stability. They are of a fairly uniform size, between 5 and 15 cm long (Figure 6.24). The section provided evidence of the manner in which the platform had been constructed. Clay was mixed with reddish sand, forming a kind of cement that was laid on the grey natural soil surface and the pebbles were embedded in it end-on, with only the top showing. The difference in the colours was apparent when excavating the section and small lenses of the orange material are visible in the photographs of the section. Forty-one small charcoal samples (and possible charcoal) were recovered from a secure context in the buried palaeosoil under the pebble platform and from the orange material in which the pebbles were embedded when being laid. This charcoal was in the orange mixture and does not indicate any fire under the platform. These were analysed by Dana Challinor. Six fragments were of *Ulex/Cytisus* (gorse) roundwood, two of birch (*Betulaceae*) and the rest indeterminate or sediment. One of the gorse samples from the clay matrix in which the pebbles were
embedded gave an AMS date of 790±30 BP; cal. AD 1210 to 1280 (BETA 291085). One sample of birch charcoal from the junction of the palaeosoil and the clay matrix in which the pebbles were buried gave an AMS date of 3120±40 BP; 1460 to 1310 cal. BC (BETA 291086). Another, also of birch charcoal from the palaeosoil beneath the platform, gave an AMS date of 3010±40 BP; 1390 to 1120 cal. BC (BETA 288899), that is, both of later Middle Bronze Age date. There were no finds in the section.

**The double axe (AB11-2) (SY 05402 90186) (Figure 6.20 and Figure 6.25)**

The platform has the shape of a double axe. The long axis of the platform is generally oriented north-south (NNW-SSE), exactly the same as the ox-hide-shaped platform and very similar to that of the trapezoidal shape. The south-oriented blade is nicely curved, while the northern one is wider and flat. The long axis measures 3.77 m and it is 2.28 m wide in the northern end and 1.82 m in the southern, while the narrowest width in the centre is 1.12 m. It is composed of 1,234 pebbles. In the platform we discovered deliberate patterning – there is an elevated stripe of pebbles in the middle of the narrowest part symbolizing the presence of a haft. The top of this elevated stripe is about 2 cm higher than the rest of the platform. It consists of four lines of pebbles, which are all arranged so that their narrow oval side is turned upwards and set along the long axis of the platform (see Figure 6.25).

The vegetation cover of gorse and heather, which was about 150 cm high, was removed and the surface soil deposited on the structure by the RSPB to protect it in 1996. The thickness of the layer was between 15 cm to 25 cm. Under the deposited soil a piece of blue plastic was found – laid down by the RSPB to protect the structure. The plastic film covered the central part of the structure, uncovered during machine scraping of the area.

At the southern end of the structure five pieces of blue slate were found. Their context is insecure, as they might have been brought with the redeposited soil.

The structure was very well preserved: only minor damage was visible in the southeast part, northeast part and on the elevated stripe. The central part was probably hit by the machine and the damage on the edges could have been caused by roots of vegetation. A 20-cm-wide section was excavated across the middle of the structure. This revealed that the pebbles had been set with their long axis placed vertically. All
<figure><img src="image_125.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.25** Plan of the double-axe platform. The raised pebbles forming the haft of the axe are shaded (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
pebbles were numbered and planned and their positions reconstructed in subsequent restoration. All the removed pebbles were colour coded, weighed and measured. Then the loose soil – residues from vegetation cover between the pebbles – was removed and the clay matrix in which the pebbles were set was excavated in millimetres, using small trowels. In the mix eight fragments of charcoal were found. Only two proved suitable for dating, an indeterminate twig and an indeterminate piece of round wood. One of these provided an AMS date of 750±30BP; cal. AD 1220–80 (Beta 308027). The mixture in which pebbles were set was very tough, strongly cemented. It had a red-brown colour and it was distinctly different from the natural ground surface. The mixture in which the pebbles were embedded was, compared to the other two excavated platforms, the most uniform, without any lenses of differently coloured components. It was hardened like cement and was composed of brown clay and red sandy soil. In it there were a few very small pebbles up to 2 cm in size (fewer than eight in the 10 cm³ excavated). The mixture was laid on the natural surface and in the centre it was 12 cm thick.

**The ox-hide platform (AB11-1) (SY 05455 90155) (Figure 6.21 and Figure 6.26)**

This platform has a trapezoidal shape to which substantial rounded extensions are connected at the southern end. The result is that the platform has four corners and thus resembles an ox hide. It is composed of 1,844 pebbles. Some patterning in the placement of pebbles was recognizable at the southern end of the platform. There were pebbles arranged into two parallel lines going along the long axis of the platform, and in the extensions pebbles were arranged into curved lines, thus emphasizing the overall morphology (see Figure 6.21). The long axis of the platform measures 4.92 m. Its southern end with the extensions is 3.03 m long. The narrow part (about 1.5 m from the southern end) is 1.4 m wide and from that point the trapezoid opens out and if it was not destroyed in the western corner it would be about 4 m wide.

This is the largest of the three structures we excavated. During topsoil removal one piece of unworked flint was found; however, its provenience is uncertain. The southern part of the platform is very well preserved; however, the northeastern side was substantially damaged, probably by the topsoil-scraping operations. We cut a section across the middle of the structure 20 cm wide in an east-west direction. Pebbles in the section were numbered and planned. Excavation of the section was
<figure><img src="image_126.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6.26 Plan of the ox-hide platform (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
the same as for the double axe. Twenty-seven small flakes of charcoal found in the section were collected and plotted. Two of these samples, both of *Ulex/Cytisus* roundwood proved suitable for dating. One of these provided an AMS date of 240±30BP; cal. AD 1640–70 and 1780–1800 (Beta 308028). The matrix in which the pebbles were set was far less uniform compared to the double axe. The general colour of the mix was red-brown; however, there were occasional lenses of grey colour. The pebbles were set in a clay material that was 12 cm thick in the centre and it was laid on the natural surface, again with the pebbles set with their long axis placed vertically. There was a clear distinction between the mix and the natural surface, which was of grey-brown colour.

## Comparison with Carter's excavations

Carter, in his report on the pebble structures that he excavated, states that the circular platform that was part of his Aylesbeare no. 1 structure had a saucer-shaped pit below it with a maximum depth of 90 cm extending all the way to the perimeter, and that there were traces of 'prolonged fires' (Carter 1938: 91). He also suggested that there was a lower pebble platform beneath the pebble structure itself and again traces of fire with much ash but no charcoal. He recovered some flint flakes underneath the top (axe-shaped) platform. Carter's lower platform appears to be entirely natural. The details of the excavations provided report the presence of 'ash' under his Aylesbeare no. 9. In our sections of the three platforms we excavated there was no evidence of *in situ* preserved fire or detectable ash residues although the areas excavated were small so as to minimize disturbance to the pebble structures. Carter does not mention the type of material in which the pebbles were embedded. He reports that his Aylesbeare no. 5 and no. 8 had a belt of large pebbles across the narrower part (Carter 1938: 94). These observations match the raised band of pebbles we observed across the double-axe structure.

## The character of the pebbles

Plans of the three platforms show their very different morphologies and states of preservation (Figure 6.23, Figure 6.25 and Figure 6.26). They differ in size from west to east across the area in which they were discovered, the smallest being to the west and the largest to the east. All the pebbles removed from the sections were weighed and measured. The size and
<table><caption>Table 6.6 Pebble lengths from the three platforms.</caption><thead><tr><th>Platform</th><th>0–5 cm<br>(percentage)</th><th>5.1–15 cm<br>(percentage)</th><th>Over 15 cm<br>(percentage)</th><th>N</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Trapezoidal</td><td>3</td><td>97</td><td>0</td><td>57</td></tr><tr><td>Double axe</td><td>0</td><td>100</td><td>0</td><td>49</td></tr><tr><td>Ox hide</td><td>2</td><td>94</td><td>4</td><td>105</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>Table 6.7 Pebble weights from the three platforms.</caption><thead><tr><th>Platform</th><th>0–250 g<br>(percentage)</th><th>251–500 g<br>(percentage)</th><th>501 g or more<br>(percentage)</th><th>N</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Trapezoidal</td><td>68</td><td>30</td><td>2</td><td>57</td></tr><tr><td>Double axe</td><td>8</td><td>55</td><td>37</td><td>49</td></tr><tr><td>Ox hide</td><td>18</td><td>29</td><td>54</td><td>105</td></tr></tbody></table>

weight of the pebbles used to construct them also differ consistently, with the smallest pebbles being used to construct the smallest platform and the largest being found in the biggest platform (Table 6.6 and Table 6.7). In all cases the vast majority of the pebbles were either oval in shape or somewhat irregular in form. The percentage of broken pebbles used to construct the platforms also differs: 44 and 45 per cent of those on the trapezoidal and ox-hide sections were broken, 18 per cent of those in the double axe. In most cases the broken end of the pebble was placed downwards with the top end uppermost to give a uniform appearance.

These different characteristics of the pebbles used to construct the three platforms suggest deliberate selection of pebbles of a different but fairly uniform size for each in advance of their construction. Test samples of all surface pebbles from two 1-m-square topsoil-scraped areas where pebbles were exposed to the northeast (SY 05603 90278) and east (SY 06019 89823) of the platforms were analysed (Table 6.8 and Table 6.9). The weights of the majority of the pebbles from the northeast test square are broadly similar to those in the trapezoidal platform but differ substantially from those in the other two. Otherwise both the pebble weights and lengths differ substantially between the platforms and the test squares, again suggesting deliberate selection of pebbles in terms of weight and size.

All the pebbles on the surface of the three platforms were coded according to basic colour categories (grey, yellow, brown, red, black, blue and white (quartz)). The frequencies did not differ significantly from those found in the test samples from the natural, so there was
<table><caption>Table 6.8 Pebble weights from the natural in two 1-m test squares.</caption><thead><tr><th>1 m test<br>square</th><th>0–250 g<br>(percentage)</th><th>251–500 g<br>(percentage)</th><th>501 g or more<br>(percentage)</th><th>N</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Northeast</td><td>68</td><td>15</td><td>17</td><td>59</td></tr><tr><td>East</td><td>90</td><td>9</td><td>1</td><td>119</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>Table 6.9 Pebble lengths from the natural in two 1-m test squares.</caption><thead><tr><th>1 m test<br>square</th><th>0–5 cm<br>(percentage)</th><th>5.1–15 cm<br>(percentage)</th><th>Over 15 cm<br>(percentage)</th><th>N</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Northeast</td><td>36</td><td>62</td><td>2</td><td>59</td></tr><tr><td>East</td><td>72</td><td>27</td><td>1</td><td>119</td></tr></tbody></table>

no differential selection of pebbles according to colour to construct the platforms. Pebbles of different colour were not used in different parts of the platforms; they are multicoloured, mimicking the colours of the pebbles found across the Pebblebed landscape as a whole, as is the case for the pebble cairns discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. It seems highly likely that pebbles of the right size were collected in the vicinity of the structures themselves, most probably those exposed at the surface, although the use of small and shallow quarry pits that would leave no trace cannot be ruled out. This might be the significance of the saucer-shaped pit Carter describes as underlying the circular platform attached to the rectangular mound overlying his Aylesbeare no. 1 axe-shaped pebble structure.

We further classified the pebbles from the sections according to whether they had ‘special’ characteristics such as unusual mottled and variable colours or striking quartz veins or inclusions. This was not really feasible to undertake for the surface of the platforms themselves since most of the surface area of the pebbles was buried. These special pebbles made up 28 per cent of the pebbles in the ox-hide platform section and 33 per cent of those in the double-axe platform, whereas those from the sample test squares were 0.9 per cent and 5.3 per cent. This striking difference suggests that there was differential selection of pebbles for inclusion in the structures not only in terms of size but also in terms of intrinsic qualities of the pebbles themselves: the often intricate patterns and colours of their surfaces, a form of inalienable local wealth as discussed above in Chapter 5 and in Chapter 7.
## Dating and soil micromorphology

The five AMS radiocarbon dates from the three platforms provided strikingly different results. Two are of later Middle Bronze Age date, two are from the Middle Ages and one from the late eighteenth century. All the structures are highly likely to have been constructed at about the same time and therefore the validity of some of these dates needs questioning. The birch samples from the trapezoidal-shaped platform with horns are derived from charcoal in the buried palaeosoil beneath the platform and at the junction of this and the clay matrix in which the pebbles were embedded. The other three samples from the trapezoidal, axe-shaped and ox-hide-shaped structures derive from two gorse and one indeterminate fragment of charcoal recovered from the clay matrix in which the pebbles are set. Soil micromorphological analysis of the double-axe- and ox-hide-shaped structures has shown extensive bioturbation and mixing of deposits, with palynological data being moved down through the profile and possibly up through the profile by mesofaunal agents as well (Banerjea, Appendix 14).

There are three different C14 date ranges from the platforms. We understand the first two – the Middle Bronze Age dates – as the positive result and the three later dates as contaminated samples. From the soil micromorphology analyses carried out on the ox-hide and double-axe platforms we know that both the matrix in which pebbles are set and the buried old land surface are strongly bioturbated, which automatically puts all dating attempts into question. The Bronze Age dates and the three other dates come from contrasting environments – in the first two cases the dated charcoal comes from a woodland plant, whereas the three later dates are from heathland plants. The heathland has been repeatedly burnt, thus it is no surprise that the charcoal from these burning episodes has percolated down deep into the structure as a result of bioturbation. The charcoal from the birch samples that we interpret as the positive result represents for us a residue of a fire that was carried out to clear the area before the clay matrix was laid and that is why it was preserved at the junction of the two.

In case of the Aylesbeare platforms there is always room for questioning the dating – but in cases with strong bioturbation there is no way forward other than to use a cumulative argument. There are three strong reasons why we consider the Bronze Age date as the correct one: (1) the position of the charcoal samples; (2) the right type of woodland plant for the period; and (3) the morphology of the dated platforms typical of a common repertoire of forms in the Bronze Age discussed below. There is no evidence for any similar structures made out of pebbles anywhere in
the area of the East Devon Pebblebeds. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
century there was widespread use of pebbles to pave farmyards, church
interiors, paths and roads, build walls and provide foundation stones for
houses built out of wattle and daub, but ‘ornamental’ structures of the
form and character that we excavated are simply not known either for
this or the earlier medieval period (see Chapter 13).

The shapes and locations of these structures themselves immediately
suggest that they are of Bronze Age date. We know that cairns constructed
out of pebbles dating to the Early Bronze Age were built across the heath-
lands, including the two nearby summit cairns on Aylesbeare Common less
than 200 m distant from the platforms. The Bronze Age people had consider-
able skill in building pebble monuments in the landscape and exerted much
effort in this regard. The short distance between the structures that we exca-
vated and those discovered by Carter, all located slightly downslope and in
the immediate vicinity of the massive summit cairns, suggests a direct link
between these two very different types of monument. The summit cairns are
visible from all three platforms. The long axis of all three of the platforms is
oriented towards Hembury, with its Early Neolithic causewayed enclosure,
a monument that we might expect to have had a generalized ancestral sig-
nificance during the Bronze Age (see Chapter 1). Bronze Age pebble cairns
at Manor Farm are visible a few kilometres to the north. One of the ‘horns’
of the trapezoidal platform points in the direction of the Raddon Hills, with
another Neolithic causewayed enclosure, the other in the direction of East
Hill and the rising sun around midsummer. From all of them the dramatic
equinoxal sunrise, framed by the Sidmouth gap between the East Hill and
Peak Hill ridges, is fully visible (see Figure 1.15b) They might form part of a
ceremonial complex connected with the summit cairns and ceremonial and
mortuary rites taking place here as discussed below. The platforms are of a
size that can comfortably accommodate a body on top of them and one possi-
bility is that they might have been used as temporary resting places for bodies
prior to cremation or as excarnation platforms, but any contextual evidence
for this, for example the stake holes of a palisade fence surrounding them, is
now lost.

Parallels and analogies

The shape of the pebble platform with its two ‘horns’ is most striking and
it might be broadly understood as being anthropomorphic. Trapezoidal
shapes have been repeatedly interpreted as a body or as an anthropo-
morphic shape in the archaeological literature. To mention a few
<figure><img src="image_127.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.27** Double axes and images of objects with horns, trapezoidal and double-axe figures interpreted as anthropomorphic: engraving of a horned god on a boat with rowers from Bohuslän (Briard 1997: 168); seal impression from the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age from Mochlos in Crete (Furmánek et al. 1991: 263); silicone impression of LM II-III seal from Knossos (Haysom 2010: 40); gold double axe with incised decoration from the Arkalochori Cave from seventeenth to sixteenth century BC, Archaeological Museum of Heraklion (http://nam.culture.gr/portal/page/portal/deam/virtual_exhibitions/AMH);</figcaption></figure>
examples: a golden pendant from Romanian Cucuteni culture, phase A-B (i.e. final phase of the Age of Copper in Romania) (Dumitrescu et al. 1983: fig. 13); Portuguese schist plaques (Lillios 2002, 2004; Thomas 2009) (cf. Figure 6.27: 10), a Bronze Age pendant from Ukraine, whose upper part resembles horns (Berezanskaya 1982: 175) (Figure 6.27: 9), a clay statuette from Romania (Bader 1978: 186) and a bronze pendant from Tállya, Hungary (Mozsolics 1985: 402).

In the Bronze Age the symbolism of horns, double axes and trap ezoids (axes) are intertwined. General analogies can be drawn with an extensive repertoire of anthropomorphic designs in various media found elsewhere in Europe: with Bronze Age rock art motifs in Scandinavia, Copper Age schist plaque figurines from Portugal and anthropomor phic designs on pottery, bronzes and pendants from the central and eastern European Copper and Bronze Age, some of which we discuss further below.

## Horns

Anthropomorphic figures with horns occur in many parts of Europe dur ing the Bronze Age. A bronze head from Fogtdarp in southern Sweden with horns and a double axe between them directly resembles representa tions of a Minoan ox head with horns and a double axe between the horns (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 330). There are further parallels between images in Swedish rock art and those found elsewhere: the famous engraving of a horned god on a boat with rowers from Bohuslän (Briard

caption for Figure 6.27 continued form for an anthropomorphic pendant from Žichlice, Plzeň-sever region, Czech Republic, Nynice culture, Late Bronze Age (Jiráň 2008: colour supplement 4); female figure (a goddess) decoration on a square vessel, Hungary, Bronze Age (Kalicz 1970: b/w supplement, plates 28–9); a vase from Rákospalota, Budapest XV, Hungary with super-elevated handles resembling horns, Middle Bronze Age (Mozsolics 1967: 111); vase with two ram heads decorating the handles from the Middle Bronze Age shrine in Romanian Sărata Monteoru (Dumitrescu et al. 1983: plate XII); trapezoidal (anthropomorphic) pendant from Ilichevka, Ukraine, Bronze Age (Berezanskaja 1982: 175); trapezoidal (anthropomorphic) schist plaque from Portugal, Age of Copper (http://research2.its.uiowa.edu/ iberian/view.php?cat_num=14)
1997: 168) (Figure 6.27: 1), which has similarities with seal impressions from Mochlos (Furmánek et al. 1991: 263) (Figure 6.27: 2) and Knossos (Haysom 2010: 40) (Figure 6.27: 3) in Crete, but also in France at Mont Bégo (Briard 1997: 100, 132, 168) or in a form of a pendant from Ukrainian site of Ilichevka (Berezanskaja 1982: 175) (Figure 6.28: 9). These examples represent a group of horned figures with a head. There are also examples of headless horned anthropomorphs, such as a horned figure from Mont Bégo (Briard 1997: 132) with rather direct similarities to the platform from Aylesbeare Common, together with figures of horned headless lure players from Kalleby, Tanum Bohuslän (Westholm et al. 1964: plate 1).

Anthropomorphic figures with horns appear in various other artefacts. The shapes of horns can be discerned in the stylized form of pot and vase handles. Some very early examples of this can be found in the Late Copper Age Řivnáč culture in the Czech Republic (Pleiner and Rybová 1978: b/w plate 20, p. 255). A similar shape of elevated handles appeared also in the Middle and Late Bronze Age of Romania in the Vatina culture, with the most remarkable examples from Sárata Monteoru (Dumitrescu et al. 1983: plate XII) (Figure 6.26: 8) and from Hungary (Bóna 1975: table 112; Mozsolics 1967: 111 (Figure 6.27: 7). Handles with horns lower down pottery vessels also appear in the Otomani culture (Bader 1978: 170). Representations of what are indisputably bull horns that occur on pottery vessels as handles are commonplace from the Middle Bronze Age Terramare settlements of the Po valley, northern Italy (Brea et al. 1997).

Bronze and more rarely golden pendants are the most numerous category of artefacts discussed here. Their typology has been precisely elaborated (e.g. seven types of heart-like pendants are distinguished in Hänsel 1968: 115–18). The pendants we refer to have various shapes: that of a heart, lyre, moon, funnel (cast) or triangle (made from metal plates). Regardless of the chronology and the traditional typology, nine pendant types are shaped like horns (cf. examples in Figure 6.27) and these are commonplace during the Bronze Age throughout much of Europe.

Horns can also form part of a pendant, for example the case of the pendant from Včelince, Slovakia (Figure 6.28: 1) (type Nagyhángos), which has, because of the shape of its horns, parallels to the seal mentioned above from Crete (Furmánek et al. 1991: 263) (Figure 6.28: 2). Alternatively a whole pendant can have the shape of horns (Figure 6.28: 2–9). Horns can have a very simple form as pendants, for example those from Dunaújváros, Hungary (Bóna 1975: 55) (Figure 6.28: 4), from
<figure><img src="image_128.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.28** Pendants with horns from middle and eastern Europe: pendant from Včelince, Slovakia, type Nagyhángos (Furmánek et al. 1991: 263); moon-shaped decorated pendant from Slovakia, fifteenth century BC (Furmánek 1979: 35); pendant with double horns, Rétzkörberencs, Hungary (Mozsolics 1985: 431); simple form of pendant, Dunaújváros, Hungary (Bóna 1975: 55); lyre-shaped pendant, Blučina (Salaš 2005 a: 292 and 2005b: 67); heart-shaped pendant from Včelince, Slovakia, culture of southeast Urnfields (Furmánek et al. 1991: 158–9); pendant from Koszidec, Hungary (Briard 1997: 50); ribbed pendant from Kisterenye, Hungary (Mozsolics 1973: 292); pendant from Szomód, Hungary (Mozsolics 1967: 229); golden pendant with three horns at the end from the Big Ipatovo kurgan in Stavropol region, Russia (Korenevskij et al. 2007: 189)</figcaption></figure>
Koszidec, Hungary (Briard 1997: 50) (Figure 6.28: 7) and Szomód, Hungary (Mozsolics 1967: 229) (Figure 6.28: 9). More elaborated is a lyre-shaped pendant (Figure 6.28: 5) from Blučina, Czech Republic (Salaš 2005a: 292). Horns can be also duplicated (see Figure 6.28: 2 and Figure 6.28: 3). The former is a moon-shaped decorated pendant from Slovakia from the fifteenth century BC (Furmánek 1979: 35), the latter comes from Rétkörberencs, Hungary (Mozsolics 1985: 431). Special types of precious artefacts can also be included into the category of the horn-shaped pendant, for example a golden pendant with three horns at the end (Figure 6.28: 10) from the Big Ipatovo kurgan in Stavropol region, Russia (Korenevskij et al. 2007: 189).

## The double axe

The double axe is best-known from Crete (Figure 6.27: 4). Bronze double axes appear throughout the Bronze Age in eastern Europe (e.g. Romania, see Bader 1978: 217; Ukraine, see Berezanskaja 1986: 107 or Balaguri 1990: 98; Slovakia, see Furmánek et al. 1991: b/w supplement 30 or Furmánek 1979: 26–7; Hungary, see Bóna 1975: table 153 or Mozsolics 1967: 211; Czech Republic, see Stuchlík 2006: 183–4). These and finds in Western Europe (Hawkes 1940; Piggott 1953; Harding 1975: 190ff.) have often been cited as evidence of direct contact with the Mediterranean since there are no local antecedents.

The meaning of the double axe has been of great interest from the beginning of Cretan archaeology until today (see e.g. Haysom 2010). On rings and seals the double axe is carried by women. As Burkert puts it: ‘The axe is never connected with a male figure, instead it is associated with a female figure, probably a goddess ... an instrument and a sign of her power’ (Burkert [1977] 1985: 38) (see Figure 6.27: 3).

There is a direct connection between the horns and the double axe on Crete in the Minoan period, where the double axe is often found as a votive offering and as a cult object between the so called horns of consecration (Pendlebury [1939] 1979: 274), which Arthur Evans understood as ‘the original type [of horns and which] is, a kind of impost or base terminating at the ends in two horn-like excrescences’ (Evans in *Journal of Hellenic Studies*, 21, p. 135 *et seq.*, quoted in Mackenzie [1917] 2008: 287). According to some, ‘the double axe is a symbol of power ..., and, in sublime stylization, the cult of horns, recall the overpowering of the bull’ (Burkert [1977] 1985: 38). Double axes and
horns also appear together in architecture – fragments from a cist in the Thirteenth Magazine in the Knossos palace (MM IIIb period) show a building with columns into which double-axes are placed between the columns. On the roof the sacred horns appear (Pendlebury [1939] 1979: 156). Gimbutas understands the double axe as an emblem of the ‘Great Goddess’, and describes the pillar shrine in the palace at Knossos as follows: ‘here the raised central column is fitted into a socket of bull’s horns, below which is the ideogram of the Great Goddess’ (Gimbutas 1974: 80). In a small shrine from LM III period, found by Sir Arthur Evans in the palace of Knossos, Gimbutas comments that ‘a higher platform with pebbled floor and plastered front, two pairs of horns of consecration ... were set up. Leaning again one of them was a double-axe of steatite with duplicated blades. Each of the horns had a central socket which was meant to receive the shaft of the double axe’ (Gimbutas 1974: 75 and 78).

The shape of the double axe is sometimes associated with a body, or more specifically, a female body. Such bodies can be found as a pottery decoration in Hungary and Romania (Kalicz 1970: b/w supplement, plates 28–9 and Dumitrescu et al. 1983:fig. 13), or in a form of clay statuettes from the Balkans (Letica 1973: tables 1, 2 and 7). Other types of clay statuettes with a double-axe shape have been found in Ukraine and Romania (Dumitrescu et al. 1983: plate XII and Balaguri 1990: 128). Finally, bronze pendants in shapes resembling the double axe have also been interpreted as anthropomorphic (e.g. Furmánek et al. 1991: 121; Salaš 2005b: 276; Jiráň 2008: 223 and colour supplement 4). We illustrate two examples from central Europe: a mould for an anthropomorphic pendant from Žichlice, Czech Republic (Nynice culture, Late Bronze Age (Jiráň 2008: colour supplement 4)) and a much earlier example of decoration in the shape of double axe: a female figure on a square vessel from Hungary (Kalicz 1970: b/w supplement, plates 28–9) (see Figure 6.28: 5 and Figure 6.28: 6).

## The ox hide

It is well known that ox hides formed an important and standard part of burial rites in Bronze Age Scandinavia, with the best-preserved examples being reported from Denmark. These barrows with pronounced iron pans and exceptional preservation, from the middle and south of Jutland and Schleswig in northern Germany, are dated to the
Middle Bronze Age (1380–1330 BC) and are discussed at length by Glob (1974). To mention a few examples, in the huge barrow at Borum Eshøj three oak coffins contained an elderly man between 50 and 60, an elderly woman and a young man: all were wrapped in ox hides. These must have been freshly flayed as part of the funerary rites as one was covered with maggot skins (Glob 1974: 40). Uppermost in the old woman’s coffin from the same mound was an ox hide with the hairs still intact, with grooves in it made by scraping (43). At Muldbjerg the ox hide covering the corpse of a ‘chieftain’ had the hair side uppermost (77).

So-called ox-hide-shaped copper ingots dated to the Later Bronze Age have a widespread distribution in prehistoric Europe throughout the Mediterranean from around 1600 to 1100 BC. Single examples are also found as far north as southwest Germany. Two or three tin ingots of ox-hide shape amongst a hoard of 44 others are known from one of two shipwrecks discovered off the Erme estuary in Bigbury Bay, southern Devon, only a short distance from the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands (Fox 1995; Harding 2009). The metal finds indicate that one of these shipwrecks dated to around 1200 BC, the other to around 900 BC. The shape of these copper and tin ingots bears a general resemblance to an ox hide because of the four projecting handles at both ends of the rectangular body of the ingot. Ling and Stos-Gale have reported recent discoveries of images of ox-hide ingots in Scandinavian rock art from Bohuslän along the west coast of Sweden and eastern central Sweden (Ling and Stos-Gale 2015). The numbers of such rock carvings are small, but their shapes are indeed suggestive of this interpretation. On the basis of trace-element and lead-isotope analysis they also suggest that some bronze tools in Sweden could have been made from Cypriot copper, the main source of production for the ox-hide ingots in the Mediterranean.

## Bronze Age metalwork in East Devon

Finds of metalwork on the Pebblebed heathlands of East Devon or their immediate surroundings are sparse, amounting to only a few artefacts, including a dagger, a palstave and a hoard of three gold bracelets together with a folded sheet of gold dating to the Later Bronze Age (Pearce 1983; Taylor 1999). In this respect it is of great interest to note one additional find: that of a double-bladed copper shaft-hole axe of Cypriot origin from Mount Howe, Topsham. This was an unassociated find and was dug up in a market garden by a labourer around 1911 (Pearce 1983: 601; Briggs
<figure><img src="image_129.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.29** The double axe from Mount Howe, Topsham. Original in British Museum; copy in Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. Photograph of copy by Lesley Strong, © Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter</figcaption></figure>
1973: 318–19). The form of the blade is almost identical in shape to the axe-shaped Aylesbeare pebble platform (Figure 6.29). This axe is one of only four double axes recorded from Britain, the other three having been found in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland, the Bog of Allen, central Ireland, and Whitby on the northeast coast of England (Branigan 1970: 90; Harding 1975: 185–93). Such finds are dated to around 1200 BC or earlier and have long been regarded as providing evidence of long-distance contacts and exchange between the Mediterranean and western Europe (e.g. Hawkes 1940: Piggott 1953; Branigan 1970). Briggs, however (1973: 320), casts doubt on any of these being genuine prehistoric imports, suggesting instead that they might have been acquired by collectors and subsequently sold to museums. The find circumstances of the three other British examples are indeed entirely unknown, unlike those recorded for the Topsham axe. Further examination of the general find location provides more suggestive evidence that this find at least is indeed a genuine Cypriot import.

Mount Howe is a distinctive dome-shaped hill situated between the confluence of the river Clyst and the river Exe in the southern part of

<figure><img src="image_130.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.30** Mount Howe on the Exe estuary between the Clyst and the Exe: the area just beyond the buildings in the centre of the photograph (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
Topsham. This is the point at which the Exe estuary dramatically wid-
ens and salt and sea water mix together. The meandering river Clyst
and its boggy floodplain together with the Exe estuary bound the hill on
all sides, with land access only from the north (Figure 6.30). Formerly
the river Clyst ended in its own estuary, meeting that of the Exe. The
meeting of two estuaries providing a sheltered port, the dome-shaped
hill between them and the mingling of salt and fresh water all suggest a
highly charged symbolic location in the landscape (see Tilley 2010 for
general discussion), at which the deposition of an exotic Cypriot Bronze
Axe might well seem appropriate. Mount Howe is situated only 9 km to
the southwest of the heathlands of Aylesbeare Common and is intervis-
ible with the summit barrows in the vicinity of which the pebble plat-
forms are found. Topsham itself was an important port from well before
the Roman occupation, when it became the port of the Roman city of Isca
Dumnoniorum (Exeter).

The anthropomorphic pebble platform with horns, the double axe
and the ox hide can be broadly understood as ritual and cosmological
symbols drawing together the worlds of the living and the dead. The first
is a manifestation of a body with horns, perhaps a form of the ‘bull body’
found in western Swedish rock art (Ling and Rowlands 2015). There is
an obvious link between this and the ox hide used to wrap the body in
the context of mortuary rites symbolized by another of the pebble plat-
forms. The ox hide itself can be understood as male, the bull with the
head removed. In the centre and between the two there is the double
axe, a widespread symbol of ritual power and authority found in vari-
ous contexts from Mycenae to Scandinavia. It is also symbolically associ-
ated with the bull with horns and in its southern European context has
strong female connotations. It is located between the horns of the bull
that occur on either side of it. If we consider the three pebble structures
as representing a set of widely held cosmological ideas linked to stages
of mortuary rites we can broadly understand them in terms of a series of
symbolic and ritual transformations. A dead body with horns in the west
is sanctified by the ritual and female powers of the ritual double axe to
be ‘wrapped’ for burial on the ox-hide platform to the east that is nearest
to the pebble cairns. This progression of bodily states and rites from west
to east is itself associated with the rising equinoxal sun in the east, dra-
matically framed by the gap through the hills on the skyline to the east,
symbolizing the widespread theme found throughout the Bronze Age of
death and the regeneration of life.

We have seen that during the Early Beaker period of the Bronze Age
small pebble cairns were constructed that do not seem to be associated
with mortuary practices but rather with fire rituals and solar rites. Later
in the Early and Middle Bronze Age much larger monumental and prom-
inent cairns were constructed at high points in the landscape, such as
the two summit cairns on Aylesbeare Common, with which the pebble
sculptures are closely associated. These large cairns amassed carefully
curated pebbles and thus became charged with symbolic potency and
power. At the same time pebbles were being symbolically killed in the
bog at Jacob's Well: two diametrically opposed processes, the former
involving the accumulation of pebble wealth, the latter its destruction.
We now put forward a conceptual model for the Middle Bronze Age of
the Pebblebeds.

Conclusion: rivers of life and rivers of death

The mouth and course of the river Exe to the west of the Pebblebed
cairns may have been both actually and conceptually associated with
death. By contrast, the Otter, to the east, may have been associated with
birth and the regeneration of life. These possible associations are worth
exploring a little further, with reference both to the physical charac-
teristics of the two rivers and their association with Pebblebed cairns.
The Exe, with its source on Exmoor, far to the north, is a major river
linking different landscapes with Bronze Age settlement and barrows
and cairns across the southwest peninsula. By contrast, the Otter, with
its source in the Blackdown Hills, is of specific local significance. In
other words, it is far more intimately related to the East Devon land-
scape and, as discussed in Chapter 1, the locations of the barrows on
the Pebblebed heathlands are intimately related to valleys and streams
flowing into it. No such intimate relation can be claimed in relation to
the cairn locations and streams flowing west towards the Exe from the
spring line at the base of the Pebblebed scarp. The lower stretches of
the Exe, visible from cairn 19 (see Figure 1.10) and the highest part of
Woodbury Common, are inundated by the sea twice a day as this is a
wide tidal estuary. The river meanders sluggishly through shifting mud
and sandbanks in an estuary up to 2 km wide (Figure 1.14). The mud
and sand are left exposed and then covered by the tides and the smell
is salty and brackish. At the mouth of the estuary there are particularly
violent and dangerous currents. The water is saline, muddy and unfit
to drink. The Exe estuary would make an ideal depository for the bod-
ies of the dead, only a small minority of whom would ever have been
buried in the Pebblebed cairns. Acting as a kind of sump it would soon
conceal and bury or wash away the remains of the dead. The Exe could
then have provided the ideal place for the disposal and forgetting of
the dead. We know from numerous finds of unburnt bones from rivers
that river burial took place during the Bronze Age (Bradley and Gordon
1988; Garton et al. 1997). In this respect it is interesting to note the
large concentration of Bronze Age barrows clustering in the very bot-
tom and lower slopes of the Exe valley itself just beyond its tidal limit.
Here at least 29 are recorded by Grinsell (1983: 13) and about as many
more as ring ditches by aerial photography of the same area (Griffith
and Quinnell 1999c), just to the north of the symbolically important
confluence of the river Yeo or Creedy, the river Exe and the river Culm
about 9 km north of the normal tide limit (itself extending about 12 km
inland from the river mouth).

No barrow cemeteries occur along the bottom of the Otter valley,
whose normal tide limit extends only a few kilometres inland. The closest
possible barrows to the Otter itself are a pair of ring ditch sites about 150
m to the east of Wrinkly Cliff, an impressive red sandstone river cliff, just
over 1 km to the south of Newton Poppleford in the Pebblebed heathland
area. Otherwise, the nearest to it are the barrows and cairns situated
along the East Hill and Peak Hill ridges, those located further to the west
in the central Pebblebed heathlands themselves and on the spurs and
ridges of the Blackdown Hills to the north (Griffith and Quinnell 1999c:
map 6.5).

The river Otter, in contrast to the Exe, has a shallow and stony bed. The water is fresh, clear and fast-flowing: a most unsuitable and inappropriate place for the disposal of corpses. Only its very lowest reaches, the last few kilometres, form a muddy estuary, that is itself today almost completely blocked by an enormous pebble bank at its mouth as a result of west to east longshore drift. A few hundred years ago the river was navigable as far inland as Otterton (now 3 km inland from the mouth). The Otter flows beneath what have been suggested to be two very significant ancestral hills, Dumpdon and High Peak, and mixes together angular stones from these hills together with those derived from the Pebblebed exposures, a river of life associated with ancestors, pebbles, pebble cairns, pebble streams and fresh drinking-water.

If the Exe, situated to the west and thus associated with the dying
sun, represented a river of death, the Otter to the east might be concep-
tualized as a river of life. It was associated with the reborn sun, framed
and shining through the gaps between the ridges and hills. In relation to
the activities of the living and the disposal of remains of their dead, the
locations of the cairns on the Pebblebed heathlands in between these two
<figure><img src="image_131.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.31** Conceptual model of the Pebblebed landscape in the late Early/Middle Bronze Age (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

rivers can be regarded as betwixt and between, liminal places (Figure 6.31). The pebble cairns erected here, with their complex internal patterning and structural organization, were perhaps associated with the remains of, and offerings to, founding ancestors.

The continued presence of the outcropping Pebblebeds inland from the sea in the form of surface pebbles covering the heathland may well have been recognized and understood as the inland presence of
the same band of pebbles seen running through the red sandstone cliffs on the beach at Budleigh Salterton. This band of pebbles might well have been understood by prehistoric populations in a similar manner to the way in which geologists explain it today: as the course of a dead and ancient river. There could, then, be no more fitting place than the Pebblebed heathlands themselves to erect cairns to the memory of the ancestral dead.

The pebbles may have been understood as a special material created by the ancestors, a gift from the dead to the living that was then used to honour the dead. From the Neolithic onwards there is indisputable evidence, discussed in previous chapters, for both an interest in and use of the pebbles: their selective procurement, transport and relocation, use in broken form as temper for Neolithic pottery, arrangement into geometric patterns, the construction of large cairns and small pebble structures, the selection and arrangement of pebbles of unusual colour, their association with springs, water sources, the rising sun and the cardinal directions.

The multicoloured pebble cairns and their associated pebble platforms may thus have been conceived as transitional places situated between the world of the dead and the world of the living. They themselves were constructed from and rested on the colour-charged pebbles of an ancestral river connecting together these two domains. The pebble cairns thus represented conceptual entry points into an ancient dry river bed associated with the ancestral dead and their ultimate journey to a nether world beyond and beneath the sea.

Thus the pebble cairns were monuments and memorials to the memory of the ancestral dead and the old dead river of pebbles associated with them, while the river Exe became the medium by means of which corpses of the vast majority of the recently deceased in the Bronze Age could be moved and themselves transported, in a living river, to another world beneath the sea. Here it is of interest to note that the Otter flows out to the sea through a pebble bar laterally wedged between red sandstone cliffs to both the west and the east, just as the Pebblebeds are vertically wedged between red sandstone above and below them in the Budleigh Salterton cliffs. By contrast the muddy and sandy mouth of the Exe has no blood-red cliffs or pebbles bordering its exit to the sea. The other world may have been conceptualized as a watery world under the feet of the living, connected by ancestral and contemporary rivers with the sea through which one entered it. Glimpses of the actual course of the ancestral river to the sea were only visible in the cliffs at Budleigh Salterton. Here a dry river of pebbles could be seen running through the cliffs and disappearing into the pebble beach and the sea. Above this
river a layer of ‘burning’ (blackened strata with ventifacts) occurs, and above this again a bright yellow band of sandstone perhaps associated with the rays of the rising sun and thus symbolizing the regeneration of life (Figure 1.8). The red cliffs themselves and their pebbles perhaps provided inspiration both for the rituals taking place at the cairns and the pebble platforms and those involving the burning and crushing of the pebbles at Jacob’s Well, situated just below and to the west of the heathlands, closest to the Exe and from which the setting (death) of the sun was visible but not its rising (birth).

The old, dead or ancestral river is seen flowing through the cliffs and running downwards, west to east, in the direction of the rising sun, before reaching the sea. It narrows, rather than widens at its lowest point where it reaches the sea. By contrast the Exe and Otter rivers both flow north-south and widen in their lower reaches before they enter the sea. The relation between these two watery rivers and the dead ancestral river thus involves a triple inversion, or reversal, in terms of materiality, directionality and breadth. Thus the domain of the dead was an upside-down existence compared to that experienced by the living.
The value of pebbles in an original
affluent society

Only 10 km distant due east from the Pebblebed heathlands on the flat greensand tableland (c. 230 m OD) of Broad Down and Gittisham Hill there is an extensive and tightly clustered group of Bronze Age cairns and barrows. The area is bounded by the river Sid to the west and numerous tributaries of the Axe to the east, principally the Coly and the Yarty. The soils, like those of the Pebblebeds, are poor and thin, affording, at best, rough grazing land. Substantial areas today are covered by gorse and bracken. At least 100 barrows and cairns occur in a continuous 5 km stretch of the narrow ridge dividing the Sid from the Coly that is at most 1 km wide and in many places considerably less. They centre on a circular banked and ditched enclosure, Farway Castle, 60 m in diameter.

From here there are extensive and panoramic views south across
the sea, west to the East Hill ridge, north to the Blackdown Hills and to
the east across plateau areas of East Devon deeply dissected by valleys.
More than 100 barrows have been recorded in fieldwork surveys (Jones
and Quinnell 2008: 27). The largest barrows are 25–40 m in diameter
and up to 3.5 m high and ditched, others are between 10 and 15 m. There
are also numerous small mounds less than 10 m in diameter. The con-
centration and the size of many of these monuments contrast markedly
with the dispersed pattern and generally small size of the cairns on the
Pebblebed heathlands.

Antiquarian excavations by Kirwan (1868a, 1868b, 1870a,
1872) and reports by Hutchinson (1880, 1870–81) and R.H. Worth
(1899) and R.N. Worth (1880) (see Butler 2000) of some of the largest
mounds revealed that they had a funerary use and that all the burials
were cremations of Early to Middle Bronze Age date, periods 3–4. The evidence has been reviewed by Fox (1948) and Jones and Quinnell (2008) and the discussion below draws on these discussions. Kirwan’s Barrow C was originally 21 m in diameter and 1.8 m high. It contained sherds from a food vessel lying over cremated bones. Over it was a flint cairn 6 m in diameter edged with large boulders of flinty conglomerate laid horizontally. A second interment in the cairn 18 feet east of the centre consisted of burnt bones laid on the flints and a comb-impressed long-necked beaker found on its side with an approximate date of around 2250 cal. BC (Needham 2005; Jones and Quinnell 2008: 36). The flint cairn was covered with a layer of burnt earth and extended outwards. The end result was a composite structure with successive constructional phases (Fox 1948: 5). The structure of this Beaker burial contrasts markedly with those of Early Bronze Age date. Both the food vessel and the beaker are very fragmented and incomplete and may have been buried as sherds (Jones and Quinnell 2008: 36).

Barrow A, about 35 m in diameter and 1.4 m high with an encircling ditch, was constructed of alternate layers of blue clay and peaty earth, probably turfs. This was surrounded outside its surrounding ditch by a ring of chert boulders. Under the mound the centre was paved with flints set in clay with traces of burning that Kirwan interpreted as being from a cremation pyre from which there was much charcoal. In the centre of the charcoal there were cremated bones and a finely engraved shale cup of material that probably originated from Kimmeridge in Dorset, dated towards the end of the Early Bronze Age, around 1600 cal. BC.

Barrow E had a small central cairn of flints covering a corbelled cist with burnt bones with fragments of a small copper alloyed dagger of Early Bronze Age date, around 1800 cal. BC. Nearby was another shale cup. Barrow D was very similar, with a central cairn and cist covered by an earthen mound possibly dug up from a surrounding ditch. The cist contained remains of an adult and an infant with a segmented bone bead. A date on the cremated bone is 2020–1860 cal. BC (Jones and Quinnell 2008: 36). Barrow B was about 34 m in diameter and 1.7m high with a bed of charcoal and calcined bones at its approximate centre, with the rest of the structure probably formed of turfs. Bones from a small, elaborately decorated ‘accessory vessel’ with cover, filled with clean and compact bone, found by a visitor on Kirwan’s spoil heap, has given a date of 1940–1750 cal. BC (32).

Piggott (1938) in a very influential paper interpreted the evidence given above as a link between the Farway necropolis and a wider Early Bronze Age Wessex culture of central southern England that he
understood as arising from an intrusive elite from Brittany. The Farway barrows, like those of his broader Wessex culture, were the burial places of a chiefly elite with long-distance contacts exemplified by the presence of exotic materials and stylistic influences in the grave good assemblages. No equivalent finds of rich burials are known from the Pebblebed heathlands, although it has to be emphasized that the largest and most prominent cairns have not been excavated and we know nothing about their contents.

## Centre and periphery in Bronze Age England?

After Piggott developed the idea of a rich elite living in Wessex with exceptionally rich burials with metalwork and items of exotic origin indicating the presence of a warrior aristocracy, the only really significant change to this general perspective was an insistence on the indigenous rather than the continental European origins of the Bronze Age elite. This became a standard way to interpret the evidence for almost 50 years, repeated in almost every book or discussion (e.g. Ashbee 1960; Renfrew 1976; Megaw and Simpson 1979: 207ff.; Cunliffe 2001; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 125).

Piggott (1938) had singled out about 100 elite burials in Wessex, virtually all on the chalk downlands, and these remained the focus of discussion and were linked to another Early Bronze Age elite, with richly furnished graves, in Brittany. They are all dated to a period of 600 years from about 2000 to 1400 BC. The rich grave sets identified by Piggott later came to be interpreted in terms of the control of metals, the command of exotic prestige goods and the consumption of wealth by warrior aristocracies or chiefs. Precious materials were conspicuously buried with the dead in societies that were increasingly complex and stratified. Cunliffe puts it succinctly as follows: 'the social energy which had been channelled into monument building for the community [during the Neolithic] was now directed to celebrating the power of certain individuals among the elite. The adoption of the "Beaker package" around 2400 BC was simply a stage in this process of social transformation' (Cunliffe 2001: 248).

If Bronze Age Wessex was the major elite centre during the Early and Middle Bronze Age, East Devon, 130 km distant to the west, was very much a peripheral area in relation to it: a few rich graves in the Farway cemetery, none on the Pebblebeds. But with the proximity of the Channel coast and given the importance of long-distance travel by boat, rather
than overland, East Devon could be considered to be simultaneously well connected in terms of exchange and wider social networks.

Needham has recently pointed to the significance of the English Channel coast in the Earlier Bronze Age, with a series of exceptionally rich graves stretching from Kent to Cornwall along it with evidence of long-distance contacts extending into continental Europe in general and close connections with the rich Breton graves in particular (Needham 2006). He thus displaces the notion of an inland Wessex centre for the elite to a more dispersed distribution of rich burials nearer to the coast. The ‘rich’ Farway burials would thus form part of this overall coastal distribution.

Recent research has indicated that many of the first round barrows built on the chalk downland of southern England were built near to older Neolithic monuments: long barrows, enclosures, cursuses and henges and in areas of fertile land that had never been densely wooded (French et al. 2007). This, the inland heart of Piggott’s Wessex culture, might thus be quite distinct from Needham’s postulated ‘Channel Bronze Age’ with its elite coastal burials. The origins of both in relation to the preceding Neolithic were different.

In the case of the Pebblebed heathlands we have an area that was similar to the Wessex chalk downlands with their dense concentrations of sometimes richly furnished graves in one respect, in that it too was not densely forested (see Chapter 8). However, the cairns are numerically few (the total would amount to just one cemetery area in the vicinity of Stonehenge) and most are small. The area is completely lacking in earlier prehistoric monuments, the only exceptions being Early Neolithic hilltop enclosures. However, even these are situated some distance away. High Peak and Hembury are, respectively, 5 and 10 km distant from the heathland fringe. There are no henges or cursus or other Later Neolithic monuments.

But did an Early Bronze Age elite really exist in central southern England or is it an exaggeration of the evidence – or perhaps even a figment of the archaeological imagination? It is worth noting that the number of these elite burials is tiny, six per year over a 600-year period. The attention paid to them in the interpretation of the character of Early Bronze Age society might be described as an archaeological version of the great man or woman view of history in which the majority of the population is effectively ignored.

As Bradley recently notes, ‘a small selection of exceptional artefacts has come to dominate the discussion’ (Bradley 2007: 153). Cunliffe (2001) gives two examples of these rich burials: Bush Barrow, visible
with and to the south of Stonehenge, and the burial of a woman at Upton
Lovell in the Wylye valley to the west. He is hardly alone in doing so – the
same two exceptional graves are used over and over again to demonstrate
the presence of a rich chiefly elite, possessing gold, weapons and other
bronze artefacts, amber, jet shale and faience, etc. All but a few of the
other 98 elite Wessex graves are furnished with far fewer ‘riches’. A few
of the East Devon Farway barrows, mentioned above, with only an occa-
sional exotic or precious item, fall into this category. Woodward (2000)
points out that only a very few of the barrows even around Stonehenge,
a supposed centre for a Wessex elite, are in fact rich. Other exception-
ally rich graves are widely spread and situated at long distances from
each other and occur as single barrows rather than part of cemeteries
(Woodward 2000: 105).

Cunliffe and others refer to Wessex as a great trading and exchange hub commanding riverine and overland routes all over England along which the exotic prestige goods flowed. Despite his reservations about the representativeness of the evidence, Bradley still argues that concentrations of richer burials in Europe are closely related to the proximity of metal sources and that communities in Wessex were well placed to control the cross-Channel movement of tin between northwest France and Ireland (Bradley 2007: 156). This seems somewhat strange, since a supposed centre of Bronze Age Wessex, if we place it around Stonehenge, is over 110 km from the nearest coastline and about twice that distance from the tin sources of southwest England. Who could realistically control the movements of metals and materials from that distance?

There is one thing that links together all the discussions of the distributions and relationships of elite graves and those of contacts and exchange routes in either Early or Later Bronze Age Europe. They are somewhat surreal views of the landscape derived from looking at small-scale modern maps. They are truly representative of a modern cartographer's eye, but we can be sure that Bronze Age populations did not think like that nor did they conceive of Wessex or Europe in the modern way. Wessex itself constitutes a huge and differentiated area, and knowledge of both it and the world beyond would have been improvised, localized and fragmented. 'Rich' burials occur in local landscapes with local meanings and need not necessarily be connected together at all in any simple way or in terms of a single interpretative framework supposedly good for Europe in general.

One highly influential model has come to dominate our understanding of society in the European Bronze Age and that is the prestige goods model of tribal societies first put forward by Friedman and Rowlands
(1977) and further developed by Rowlands and Kristiansen (Kristiansen and Rowlands 1998; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005). They argue that the diverse histories of individual tribal societies in Europe are all manifestations of shared structural principles governing their social reproduction. This is dependent on a primary relation with the supernatural in which wealth and group prosperity are regarded as controlled by supernatural spirits, conceived as ancestors of competing lineage groups, who need to be celebrated through offerings and who in turn bestowed prosperity. This sophisticated model integrates consideration of local agricultural production involving tribute relations, the exchange of marriage partners between groups and the exchange and consumption of valuables, whose circulation is controlled by the elites, in an overall model of tribal social reproduction. Different types of exchange are constituted by relations of indebtedness and patronage between local populations and chiefly elites in which the conspicuous consumption of wealth is linked to status and its attainment. This involved the procurement and movement across the European continent of metals and exotic items and presumed prestige goods that became fundamental to the development of political institutions, power and prestige. The conspicuous consumption of wealth indicated by its presence in rich burials represents competition for status between elites and exchange of materials between them in a restricted sphere of exchange from which the general populace were excluded. Thus metals were being exported to continental Europe from England and Ireland while bronzes of continental origin were being imported into Britain as part of a much larger exchange system in which metals and other precious materials were circulating.

Earle (2002), Kristiansen and Larsson (2005) and others have interpreted the European Bronze Age not only in terms of controls on the flows of materials but widespread mobility between chiefly elites in Scandinavia and the Mycenaean world through central and eastern Europe, or in terms of a western European route involving movements of persons, bronze artefacts, cosmological ideas, copper and tin ingots and Scandinavian amber.

According to this model, towards the end of the Early Bronze Age increasing demand for copper and tin seems to have led to a change in trade routes to Scandinavia around 1600 BC, with copper being acquired directly from Cypriot and other sources and tin from Devon and Cornwall. Competitive social elites were engaging in interaction with distant peers and journeying widely.

Long-distance contacts between the Mediterranean world and northern Europe are now quite well documented in terms of both
artefact distributions and shipwrecks containing metals. Shipwrecks in the English Channel from off the Erme estuary in Devon and from Dover demonstrate that the tin sources of Devon and Cornwall were being exploited during the second half of the third millennium BC and the first half of the second millennium BC, with trade and exchange growing in intensity around 1600 BC (see e.g. Kristiansen and Larsson 2005; Harding 2009; Van de Noort 2009). In terms of a western European maritime route, the highly valued tin resources of Devon and Cornwall played a key part in links between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean world with its palace civilizations.

Most of the metal in Scandinavia from around 1700 BC was refined and alloyed there and the metal must have arrived in ingots, some of which would have been of tin from Devon and Cornwall (Ling et al. 2013). Flows of metals, etc., being part of a broader and integrated set of cosmological and spiritual relationships and ideas, may have had various and very different expressions in local contexts. Controlling flows of gold and metals, amber from south Scandinavia and other raw materials with high economic and ritual value provided a means by which local chiefly hierarchies and elites could reproduce themselves through exchange. But there was inherent instability in a situation in which economic exchange creates forms of value and the supplies of raw materials and finished items such as bronze swords were both unstable and unpredictable. The social reproduction of status was always difficult to secure in such circumstances.

There is of course a constant danger of anachronistic interpretations in which the presence of gold, metalwork and exotic materials in, it should be stressed, a very few graves in barrows in so-called 'elite centres' becomes considered the sole measure of wealth, and therefore prestige, and becomes a measure of hierarchy. We might say that archaeologists have quite literally adopted a *gold standard* of wealth: a fascination with such 'riches' may just be a contemporary preoccupation of archaeologists, a reflection of our own cultural bias in which value is something synonymous with price. Any grave with gold in it is *ipso facto* considered rich or wealthy, as social capital, but there are many other ways to understand what richness and wealth might be. There is no reason to automatically assume that everyone in the Bronze Age understood wealth in this manner, as will be argued below. Standards of wealth and value are always likely to have been local productions with local meanings.

There have been a number of cogent recent critiques of this model of competitive wealthy elites in Bronze Age Europe controlling and consuming prestige goods in the attainment of personal power and status. In
terms of an analysis of the burials we cannot make the simple assumption
that the grave goods found are necessarily either the possessions of or
represent the real identity of the dead and their status in society.

Instead it has been argued that we could understand them in terms
of relations between the living and the dead (Brück 2004, 2006; Brück
and Fontijn 2009; Fowler 2013) in which a social persona was constructed
during mortuary rites. Consequently the character of relations that made
that person what they were in burial rites were multiply authored by the
local communities conducting them, a gathering and bundling of rela-
tions. This is essentially the application of a Melanesian model for the
European Bronze Age, clearly heavily influenced by the work of Strathern
(1988), Battaglia (1990) and others.

Brück and Fontijn put it like this:

[E]arly Bronze Age communities in different regions and in excep-
tional circumstances [objectified in ‘wealthy graves’] chose to por-
tray particular people in a way that gave material form to widely
shared understandings and beliefs: as such the key concern in these
‘princely’ burials may have been to express dominant cultural val-
ues rather than wealth and status.

(Brück and Fontijn 2009: 206)

Fowler notes that ‘the term “elite” holds unqualified connotations
of hierarchical power relations over an unspecified and undifferentiated
broader community, and terms such as “high status”, “wealthy”, “lead-
ers”, “paramount chiefs”, and “prestige” have become rolled together and
also represent only a narrow range of possible interpretations’ (Fowler
2013: 89).

The biographical history of objects deposited in graves embody-
ing social memory may have been important: their landscape origins,
the technologies involved in their production and the social relations
involved in production and exchange.

Woodward has pointed out that in relation to the rich Wessex
graves, two of the most important features of the artefacts found is their
colour and texture (2000: 111, 113). The objects when freshly buried
were ‘all brightly coloured, shiny, lustrous, smooth, mainly cool to the
touch, and neatly shaped ... blue and green objects, mainly faience but
also incorporating various polished stone pieces would have stood out in
strong contrast to the predominant red/gold and black/white schemes
apparent among the individual assemblages’ (113). This represents a very
different way of thinking about what ‘wealth’ means. The counterpoint
in the prestige goods model has been to weigh metalwork in one grave, compare it with that in another and thus provide a quantitative evaluation of relative wealth. 'Rich' burials from the alternative perspective discussed above thus relate to the constitution of personhood relationally in society. Personhood is emergent from networks of social relations and may have little to do with the lived identities of the dead (Fowler 2013: 80). Instead the grave goods found in barrows and cairns may represent the ritual practice of the burial rite itself by the local community. The individual social persona and status of the deceased is not necessarily at the centre of this, or at the very least it is relationally constituted.

Weiner discusses objects that are withdrawn from circulation, or never enter it, as constituting inalienable wealth (Weiner 1985, 1992). Inalienable possessions have absolute value, placing them above the exchangeability of one thing for another. Inalienable objects are a materialization of biographical, historical and spiritual values. They are replete with cultural meanings and values through association with individual owners who have held and used them, ancestral histories and sacred connotations. Early Bronze Age grave good assemblages can be regarded as inalienable in just this sense. Burying objects in a grave was the ultimate act in ensuring that they could no longer circulate or be exchanged among the living, be treated as mere commodities through which status might be acquired. This act was about the *veneration* rather than consumption of a thing and is indicative of a very different way of valuing things.

In this manner we can regard grave good assemblages as deeply symbolic acts: things were made absolutely inalienable by burying them in the ground. This act of giving things away was a means of keeping or retaining them for ever. Beyond that, these acts took place at a particular place in the landscape associated with a particular social group. In this manner things in burials *placed* identities in particular landscapes. Society was thus in part primarily reproduced through the loss of things rather than their acquisition, clearly an inversion of the prestige goods exchange model of value.

Strathern (1988) argued that while in contemporary Western societies all the emphasis is on individualism (each individual is considered to have a unique identity, a core of their Being) and owning personal possessions, so you own what you produce, by contrast in Melanesia individuals have no unique core. They are instead constituted by the manner in which they are perceived by others. This is partible or multiple personhood. The corollary is that you don't necessarily own what you produce, so simple Western notions of exploitation and alienation in exchange relationships no longer apply and notions of wealth and value have to
be rethought. Production is always a social relationship. Both people
and possessions, or things, are multiply authored and their past is part
of them. Social relations make some potential aspects of a person visible
in one context, while hiding others. A person or a thing thus has latent
properties and potentialities brought out and made manifest in some cir-
cumstances, such as a burial ritual, but not in others. Meaning, wealth
and value are constituted by what others think they are. They remain
relative and shifting, not absolutes. Exchange relations shift what things
mean from one social context to another so that, for example, a pig is
the product of a marriage relation between a man and a woman but
when it enters into an exchange relationship between men its meaning
and value shifts from embodying a husband-wife relation to embodying
male relations in the context of ceremonial exchange. In the process its
former social value and meaning gets detached and a new one arises. So
we might argue, if we liked, that ‘rich’ Bronze Age burials involved the
creation of new sets of values and relations between always multiply con-
stituted persons and things rather than simply representing a person’s
status and individual wealth. This certainly provides an effective critique
of a prestige goods version of the Bronze Age, but the Melanesian alter-
native is hardly a panacea.

Strathern’s interpretation of what persons and things mean in
Melanesia and how this contrasts with Western conceptions of personal
identity, wealth and value is entirely rhetorical, a fictional ideal type. One
is apparently the simple inversion of the other. Personhood and identity
in the contemporary West can be easily understood in a ‘Melanesian’ way.
In fact Strathern’s model of the Melanesian Other is simply a version of
contemporary post-structuralist thought applied to a Melanesian context
and juxtaposed to an old model of Western individualism. Our identities
are created in multiple ways, we have no inner core of being, we are as
we appear to be to others, our identities are fashioned out of relation-
ships and shift and change, the values of things are relative to the social
contexts in which they occur. However, there still remains one very clear
and dominant notion of what wealth is based on: commodities and their
prices in relation to what people desire.

The general idea that special objects in graves indicate personal or
dynastic wealth and prestige implies the spread of specific kinds of value
systems along with the objects. However, the values attached to different
kinds of things obviously vary. Fowler suggests that changes in ritual activ-
ity and material culture during both the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze
Age can be understood perhaps as changing relations of desire arising
from new entanglements between people and things: ‘perhaps those
moving notable distances during their lives and those exchanging valued material and objects desired new social partners, new interactions ... new knowledges and ideas, new lives for themselves even, rather than new (hierarchical) statuses, generic power or particular possessions' (Fowler 2013: 90). To put it another way, the endless pursuit of hierarchy and power is only one rather limited desire. Furthermore, ideas of what wealth and value actually are may be expressed in often highly different and culturally variable ways, as discussed below.

An emphasis on the variable meanings, social relations and ritual practices bound up with the deposition of assemblages of grave goods usefully redirects interpretations away from a mantra of Bronze Age elites. We can argue that rich graves are rich in terms of complexity of relations, they objectify rather than necessarily being related to the individual status of the deceased. There is both a density of objects in them and the symbolic entailments and metaphorical associations of these objects (Tilley 1999; Brück 2004). But such a position still has to cope with precisely why there are such significant differences in the Bronze Age, from barrows and cairns that contain nothing to those replete (or 'rich') with a whole array of different artefacts and materials, some of which were acquired over huge distances.

Clearly there is considerable differentiation in grave assemblages across Europe. If this is not necessarily a reflection of the individual status of the deceased but his or her social relationships, this implies that those group relationships differed considerably in terms of movement of persons, knowledges, access to materials and relationships to things. To put it at its simplest: some grave assemblages are far more complex than others and this suggests important differences between local communities in terms of the breadth and depth of social ties and dependencies and their ability to acquire and keep things. At the heart of this are two questions: what was of value? What did people value and why? These questions can have no general answer. We need to try and understand the specificity and difference of the past. Rather than applying top-down, ready-made ethnographic models to illuminate the past, an alternative is to try and build an archaeological model of that past from the material evidence to hand.

## Landscape, value and identity

Anthropological studies of value show over and over again how value is a relative concept, defined and redefined by local communities, each
having its own cosmology and type of value. Things considered valuable in one context may have little or no value for people in another (e.g. Gregory 1982; Appadurai 1986; Munn 1986; Graeber 2001). This is the primary and most important anthropological insight that is worth pursuing. The first premise is that social groups in European Bronze Age societies valued things in different and multiple ways. Giving value to things did not involve an equivalent standard of value applicable everywhere. It was always a local production and has to be understood in the context of a local landscape. Value was something intimately related to the embodied identities of persons in those landscapes.

If we examine Bronze Age barrows and cairns in detail in either Wessex, southwest England or elsewhere in Britain, or at a European scale of analysis, the overwhelming and consistent point to be drawn out of the evidence is that what we witness is a record of difference, not repetition. What is found in one barrow or cairn compared to another is largely unpredictable. The contributions in a recent collection edited by Last exemplify this point strongly (Last 2007), as does Jones's discussion of Cornish barrows (2005), Jones and Quinnell's discussion of the Farway barrows and cairns in East Devon (Jones and Quinnell 2008) or Fowler's (2013) analysis of the Early Bronze Age in northeast England.

The differences are not only related to assemblages of grave goods but to the architecture and histories of barrows and cairns. Some, like the small cairns on the Pebblebeds, are not even places for burial and so are not associated with the dead. Equally they are not even monuments in the sense of being monumental. These differences need to be understood within the contexts of the local landscapes in which they occur. This is unfortunately largely absent in the studies cited above (apart from Jones 2005), in which the individual barrow or cairn treated as an isolate remains the primary entity being analysed and the landscape gets reduced to dots on a distribution map.

The counterpoint to this almost infinite difference is that we simultaneously find broadly similar architectural expressions in different places, such as the circular form of barrows and cairns, and artefacts that resemble each other, partly as a result of circulation and exchange and partly because of a shared repertoire of ideas and knowledges as discussed in Chapters 3, 6 and above. Places were linked at local, regional, inter-regional and European scales. We witness a network of interacting communities and movement of some individuals between them who shared similar artefact types and similar burial practices.
Kristiansen and Larsson (2005) make the very important general point that imported metalwork, such as the copper double axe from Mount Howe discussed in Chapter 6, was not just random artefacts stripped of their original social, economic and political meaning, but can instead be understood in terms of the transmission of knowledges and cosmological beliefs in which economic and political and ritual cosmological and shamanic powers were often intertwined (Kristansen and Larsson 2005: 200ff.). The meanings and symbolism of some types of artefacts were something shared between people, but as often as not would become reworked and transformed in local contexts.

## Wealth and value in East Devon

Where does East Devon fit into a wider prehistoric context? Despite its proximity to the tin resources of Cornwall and Dartmoor there is very little metalwork. The pebble cairns that were built occur in a heathland tract unsuitable for agriculture (unlike the Jutland and Wessex barrows they are not swallowing up huge quantities of arable land) and, relatively speaking, even the very biggest are modest in scale.

In terms of a wider European Bronze Age world and a prestige goods model of that world, this was definitely a marginal and peripheral area. However, considered in terms of the availability of land, crops and livestock East Devon was far from being a marginal area in the Bronze Age (see Chapter 8). The soils, particularly those on the Otter sandstone, were easily tilled and fertile, while the heath provided good grazing ground. There was abundant fish, fowl and shellfish to be exploited along the Exe estuary and along the coast, no shortage of timber for constructing round houses, fuel for cooking, mushrooms and nuts and berries and plant foods in the woods, etc. How important were gold, metals, exotic artefacts and so forth in the everyday life of people? What relevance has that concept of value to understanding anything about the past? Were local populations much exercised because they might not have lots of metal to consume, display or bury with the dead or amber beads from Scandinavia to adorn their clothes?

Most things of value to people today, in a market economy, in their everyday lives, are valuable precisely because they have no price, they are too valuable to be priced, and wealth and notions of what is of value are conceptually separated and not linked to prestige. This is because
most cultural values are drawn from social relationships and personal experiences, notions of what makes a good life, and not from general economic mental abstractions in which value is to be solely understood in terms of the kind created by exchange. Value instead relates to sentiment, thought and feeling constituted relationally through living and experiencing the world with others.

## Pebble affluence in East Devon

Some time ago Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers with only basic technologies available in abundance, such as digging-sticks, plenty of easily exploitable food resources and much leisure time, represented the original affluent society, because needs were easily satisfied and very little labour time was required. They were a happy lot and to be envied (Sahlins 1972: 1–39). This perspective, while much debated in hunter-gatherer studies (anthropological and archaeological), has not been considered beyond that specific context, but in fact it has a much wider relevance because this perspective directly addresses the two fundamental questions of what value is and to whom the concept applies. It raises the question of what an affluent society is and what makes it affluent. Once Sahlins had formulated this position dispelling the notion that all hunter-gatherers had a short, brutish and miserable life because they did not have stores of grain and domestic animals to eat, giving them a secure life, the vexed problem became why people should ever start to farm and adopt a ‘civilized’ way of life in the first place. It required a much greater investment in technologies, labour and land and inevitably led to various forms of social inequality and exploitation. As Sahlins notes, wants can be satisfied by producing much or desiring little (Sahlins 1972: 2). We can easily adapt this line of thinking to a consideration of local Bronze Age evaluations of wealth in the Pebblebeds landscape.

Another pertinent anthropological observation needs to be made here. In all studies of exchange it has been noted that items of rank and value are durable things. Because food is perishable it can have only transitory value and always ranks low on a scale of value. It has value (in an economic sense) because it can be converted through exchange to the acquisition of durable things such as shell necklaces and stone axes; things that endure may acquire histories through their exchange that give them further value (Graeber 2001: 44).

If the pebbles amassed in cairns and easily collected from the landscape, requiring no fabrication and little labour investment, are
regarded as a form of wealth then the East Devon Bronze Age society was fabulously wealthy. In fact it had an endless source of durable material wealth unmatched by any other area of Europe. This wealth was used in building cairns and platforms. Pebbles, as far as is known, were not drilled and used as body adornments and no objects were made out of them apart from the two flaked pebbles from Tor Cairn and Jacob's Well discussed above.

The reason may well be that a pebble transformed is no longer a pebble. It loses its power. This was collective wealth and not individualized. What this society clearly lacked were other trappings of wealth expressed in the form of gold and metals and exotic artefacts acquired through exchange that were being valued elsewhere. Even these kinds of things might be produced anyway in sculptural arrangements of pebbles such as the double axe on Aylesbeare Common, and this was huge in size compared with any petty copper axe in circulation. Indeed the giant pebble axe can be interpreted as a grandiose display of what these people lacked: the metalwork they did not have but which they knew others elsewhere desired. However, unlike the portable artefact their axe was fixed in the landscape and could not be taken away or given to others. This static axe safely remained in place.

In a similar fashion if the Stonehenge bluestones were being transported to Wiltshire along the sea coast of southern England from south Wales to dramatically transform the Stonehenge landscape, they would be passing beneath the cliffs at Budleigh Salterton and past the Pebblebed landscape at about the same time as the small pebble cairns were beginning to be constructed. Perhaps those moving the bluestones sheltered in the mouth of the river Otter on their journey and came into direct contact with the cairn builders, who acquired knowledge of the power of these exotic stones. They found locally, amongst the pebbles, their own tiny versions of the bluestones, and duly incorporated these into their cairns. Again the pebbles substituted for exotic imports and the effort and labour that would be required to obtain them.

The cairns, as we have seen in Chapters 3 and 5, amassed pebble wealth redolent with the power of brightly coloured materials concentrated together in the landscape of pebbles. In them pebble jewels (our category of 'special pebbles') were deposited in place, in the landscape. The cairns were great treasure troves in which those things of utmost value, the pebbles, were carefully grouped together, side by side and layer upon layer.

These pebbles represented perfection, completeness, finesse, to the Bronze Age populations of East Devon in just the same way as a
bronze sword might signify these things to others elsewhere. In fact pebbles were a superior form of local wealth, because unlike the sword they could never be made, they could only be found in this landscape of pebbles. Pebbles embodied value precisely because they could not be made and that made them more important than anything that could be made. The colours and patterns on the surfaces of these pebbles were infinitely different from each other, infinitely complex, unlike bronze swords produced from standardized moulds that all looked the same. While swords could be duplicated, pebbles could not. Each was absolutely unique.

Pebbles were the inalienable wealth of the local community, the material media of value, which were symbolically consumed by depositing them in the cairns but the supply never ran out. Pebble wealth burst forth from the landscape: it was everywhere. These pebbles were not exchanged or given away to others, because they were the unique medium through which value was realized and understood in this local context, and that required local knowledge.

Pebbles are, as argued in Chapter 5, above all uniquely transformative stone materials. The pebbles themselves, some with eyes, were perhaps understood as sentient beings with a spirit, animate and alive. The pebbles when dry were dead. They could be animated, brought alive or be born again, by wetting them with water. Thus their value emerged from the transformation, dull to brilliant. In the brilliant state the personality of the individual pebble was displayed, contributing to its magical power, something that was immediately lost when the pebble dried out.

In other societies in the Bronze Age only permanently brilliant and colourful things seem to have been appreciated as powerful things of value in some local contexts: the amber and faience and metals found in some Wessex barrows and graves (see above). These things, however, lacked the kind of power manifest in the transformative potentialities of pebbles, in which value was linked to process.

The symbolic destruction of pebbles at Jacob's Well made perfect sense in such a local context with its own local conception of wealth. Destroying this pebble wealth made sense locally. This was a rite of destruction forming the other side of the coin from accumulating the pebbles in the cairns. Both were alternative ways of realizing and putting on display the power of pebbles in the local context of a landscape made of pebbles, an act of celebration. Such practices would make no sense and have no meaning or value anywhere else. These were displays in which people showed themselves to themselves and their wealth to
themselves. Through these ritual acts they put on display their embodied
identities in relation to the world of pebbles that they inhabited.

Gathering together and destroying pebbles was about the ability
to maintain an assembly of practices, knowledges, objects and places,
a sacred assemblage of pebbles. Ultimately the pebbles represented the
local community in a pebbled landscape and their shared values of care
and concern. They formed a medium for the material expression of iden-
tity and objectified it.
# How landscape defines communities in prehistory: an environmental reconstruction of the prehistoric Pebblebeds landscape

Michael J. Allen and Christopher Tilley

## Why environmental archaeology?

Environmental archaeology should be used to inform archaeological enquiry and not just gather palaeo-environmental data from an archaeologically derived data set. Environmental archaeological scientists undertake excellent programmes of analysis. In the past few decades, although they have addressed an archaeological agenda (contra Thomas 1990), all too often their reporting is more directed to fellow archaeological scientists (i.e. their peers) than either the archaeology of the project or, more specifically, to how their evidence may allow us to consider and experience landscape from a prehistoric community or personal perspective. Ironically, environmental archaeological science is well set to address issues of landscape, land-use and the lived-in environment in a holistic way and help define prehistoric life-ways and the constraints of the environment in which past communities lived; they were immersed in the detail of the changing landscape for their survival and their livelihood (Tilley 2010). As archaeologists we must attempt to recreate the world in which they lived; of which the physical landscape, vegetation and soils were more than just a stage upon which they acted their lives but were the world *in which* they lived and within which they learnt, engaged, reacted to, modified and tamed.
Environmental archaeologists are good at taking samples and analys-
ing soils to provide data and interpretations of these physical elements and
also to track changes through time, especially those directly or indirectly
caused by human action (cf. Bell 1983). They are less good when apply-
ing scientific, objective principles to wider, more ephemeral interpretation,
and find it harder to explore areas less easily and demonstrably definable.
Defining vegetation and land-use *histories* is one thing; commonly done
exceptionally well within the archaeological discipline (e.g. Scaife 1991;
Macphail and Scaife 1987; Fyfe *et al.* 2003a, 2003b, etc.), but attempts
to actually define and map vegetation and land-use over time *and* space
are very few and far between. This praxis seems to be unconsidered and,
surprisingly, archaeologists have not engaged with it. Allen's work in the
Stonehenge landscape nearly 30 years ago, for instance, was quite naïve and
simplistic (Allen *et al.* 1990); the four maps of the Stonehenge landscape
at different periods (Allen *et al.* 1990: fig. 155) showed the environmen-
tal reconstruction (woodland, secondary wood, grassland and tillage) only
around each site or sample point. Restricted by 'academic honesty' or lack
of self-confidence, the rest of the area was left uninterpreted and blank –
a failure in one respect as the white spaces looked like an open, rather than
the wooded, landscape that at the time we assumed existed in the earlier
prehistoric periods (Mesolithic–Neolithic). Nearly 10 years later, the acqui-
sition of more data (20 years of research) and increased boldness allowed
land-use or vegetation 'envelopes' to be draped over a 3-D terrain model of
the landscape (Allen 1997) and thus, for the first time, provided a complete
map of prehistoric vegetation and land-use based on environmental arch-
aeological data and interpretation, to date surprisingly still one of the few
examples of this approach. These data also provided the basis for the land-
scape video on display in the Stonehenge Visitor Centre. Obviously we can-
not verify every location, but it does provide a more scientific, data-based,
interpolated landscape map; and one that can be tested and modified
with new fieldwork and data. The current research from Parker Pearson's
Stonehenge Riverside Project will do just that (Allen unpublished MS).

Time depth is easy, but the spatial parameters are more difficult
to prescribe and define with any degree of confidence without the vast
amount of data required (cf. Allen 1997, 2000a; Table 8.1), and there is
also a real lack of self-confidence and engagement amongst the analysts
as a whole. The next step, of trying to really recreate that landscape as a
living world and get a feel for the landscape, is seen by many as a 'step
too far'. Yes it is difficult, and yes in many ways it is unprovable, but if it
allows archaeologists to better understand people and communities in the
past then it is clearly an avenue that should, with appropriate data and
<table><caption>Table 8.1 Comparison of density of environmental data sets in chalkland landscapes and the calculation of a ‘confidence factor’ (based on Allen 2000a: table 4.2).</caption><thead><tr><th>Study area</th><th>No. of data sets</th><th>Km² study area</th><th>Density (data-sets km²)</th><th>Confidence factor (density × 100)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Allen Valley/Down Farm</td><td>35+</td><td>12</td><td>2.917</td><td>291.7</td></tr><tr><td>Dorchester</td><td>12</td><td>35</td><td>0.343</td><td>34.3</td></tr><tr><td>Stonehenge 1</td><td>13</td><td>54</td><td>0.240</td><td>24.1</td></tr><tr><td>Stonehenge 2</td><td>19</td><td>80</td><td>0.238</td><td>23.8</td></tr><tr><td>Winchester</td><td>3</td><td>16</td><td>0.187</td><td>18.7</td></tr><tr><td>Avebury</td><td>20</td><td>130</td><td>0.154</td><td>15.4</td></tr><tr><td>Cranborne 1</td><td>22</td><td>150</td><td>0.147</td><td>14.7</td></tr><tr><td>Isle of Wight</td><td>9</td><td>64</td><td>0.140</td><td>14.1</td></tr><tr><td>Pebblebeds</td><td>15</td><td>150</td><td>0.1</td><td>10.0</td></tr><tr><td>Strawberry Hill</td><td>1</td><td>10</td><td>0.100</td><td>10.0</td></tr><tr><td>Lewes</td><td>9</td><td>106</td><td>0.085</td><td>8.5</td></tr><tr><td>Kent</td><td>3</td><td>1,500</td><td>0.0002</td><td>0.2</td></tr></tbody></table>

albeit with caution, be attempted. In Cranborne Chase we have one of the largest and densest palaeo-environmental data sets. Using our palaeo-environmental interpretations based on land snails, soil analysis and more limited charcoal and charred plant remains, I have attempted holistic landscape reconstruction from two viewpoints; first passing through the Allen Valley, Cranborne Chase, Dorset in the Later Neolithic and describing the landscape (Allen 2000b), and second as a view from Gussage Down looking out over Down Farm and Wyke Down as Middle Neolithic ‘Cranborne woman’, and then again in the Later Neolithic and Later Bronze Age, describing the landscape, vegetation and land-use she could see (Allen 2002).

## Our aims for the Pebblebeds

The Pebblebed heathland (Figure 8.1) is about 153 km², and although it contains over 30 prehistoric cairns (see Figure 1.10), only 7 prehistoric sites have environmental data which span the Neolithic to Later Bronze
<figure><img src="image_132.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 8.1** The geology of the Pebblebeds landscape showing the cairns and location of the palaeo-environmental evidence (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

Age (Table 8.2). We do not have enough data to look at environmen-
tal reconstruction in any great temporal or spatial resolution (see Table
4.1), so instead of examining this in landscape detail (cf. Allen 1997:
plates 1–5), our aim here is to define a series of prehistoric landscape
types and see change over time between those zones, and thus develop
a narrative defining and characterizing the landscape and land-use, and
examine changes in, principally, the area of the Pebblebeds. We are lim-
ited by just 15 reports covering three or four disciplines, some of which
are only assessments or species identifications. The most useful data are
<table><caption>Table 8.2 Palaeo-environmental data sets from the Pebblebeds.</caption><thead><tr><th>Site</th><th>Phase</th><th>Charcoal</th><th>Pollen</th><th>Soil microscopy</th><th>Geoarchaeology</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Colaton Raleigh settlement</td><td>M-LBA-IA</td><td>Challinor (n.d.) 13 ids</td><td>–</td><td>–</td><td>–</td></tr><tr><td>Aylesbeare platforms</td><td>MBA c. 1400 BC</td><td>Challinor assessment</td><td>–</td><td>Banerjea (Appendix 14)</td><td>–</td></tr><tr><td>Jacob's Well</td><td>Neo-MBA peat 1400–1300 BC structure 1700 BC</td><td>Challinor (Appendix 9)</td><td>Batchelor (Appendix 12)</td><td>–</td><td>–</td></tr><tr><td>Tor Cairn</td><td>EBA/Beaker</td><td>Challinor (Appendix 2)</td><td>Scaife (Appendix 6) – old land surface; Pokorný (Appendix 4) – centre</td><td>Macphail (Appendix 6)</td><td>Allen (n.d.)</td></tr><tr><td>Little Tor Cairn</td><td>EBA/Beaker</td><td>Challinor (Appendix 8)</td><td>–</td><td>–</td><td>–</td></tr><tr><td>Twin Cairn A</td><td>EBA/Beaker</td><td>Challinor (Appendix 9)</td><td>Pokorný (Appendix 10)</td><td>Lisá (Appendix 11)</td><td>–</td></tr><tr><td>Longo Bottom bog</td><td>Neo-BA</td><td>–</td><td>Batchelor (Appendix 16)</td><td>–</td><td>–</td></tr><tr><td>Data sets</td><td>–</td><td>6</td><td>5</td><td>3</td><td>1</td></tr></tbody></table>
the pollen analysis from Jacobs Well, Tor Cairn and Little Tor Cairn, and soils and geoarchaeology of the Aylesbeare Platforms, Tor Cairn and Twin Cairn A.

**The Pebblebeds landscape and study area**
*(Figure 8.1 and Figure 8.2)*

The Pebblebeds are framed by two different geologies and landscapes; to the west is the Exmouth Sandstone and Mudstones and the Littleham Mudstone formations and the river Exe and its estuary, and to the east the Otter Sandstone formation and river Otter. The main Pebblebeds (Budleigh Salterton Pebblebed formation) exposure extends for about

<figure><img src="image_133.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 8.2** The Pebblebeds landscape. The big late Early/Middle Bronze Age cairn is visible in the cut patch above the heather to the north. Tor Cairn below in heather. Twin Cairn A is to the right and at the end of the vegetation-cut area on the spur to the left of the valley to the west (left) of Tor Cairn. Areas of scarring are topsoil-scraped areas. The two semi-circular ones are at the top of the valley separating Tor Cairn and Little Tor Cairn from Twin Cairn A. Variations in vegetation cover are the product of rotational heathland management (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
1 km from West Hill to Budleigh Salterton along the coast and runs parallel with the river Otter for 13 km inland. They are currently lowland heath supporting humo-ferric podzols of the Goldstone Association (Findlay *et al.* 1983) with a scarp edge to the west overlooking the Exmouth Sandstone and Mudstones and the Littleham Mudstone formations, which generally support stagnogley argillic brown earths of the Whimple 3 association. The Pebblebeds slope gently southeast onto the Otter Sandstone formation, supporting typical brown earths of the Bromsgrove association, with the river Otter about 5–6 km to the east.

## Land-use history

Human activities and use of the landscape modify, alter and both directly and indirectly fundamentally change the vegetation cover, the soils and local hydrology, create a changing landscape which is the stage upon which societies act, and within which they react. It is the resource base for much of the food economy, as well as for expressing social, political and individual identity. This is exemplified in the Pebblebeds by the selected use of colourful and attractive pebbles to create non-funerary cairns; monuments that reside in a landscape to be engaged with from construction to visitation (see Chapters 3–7). They are monuments specifically located with extensive viewsheds; locally the small cairns often overlook a local dry valley or small stream, but generally not over the contemporary heath landscape. Beyond this, most look out and over the landscape of the Otter Sandstone formation to the east and south-east (see Chapters 1 and 3). In contrast to many of the later Early and Middle Bronze Age monuments, despite a careful choice of location and viewsheds, the very Early Bronze Age Beaker cairns are deliberately but not conspicuously located. They cannot be seen from many locations in the landscape. In fact these small, modest cairns are hardly visible even in the current low open heath, predominantly of herbaceous plants and grasses, until you are within metres of them.

Defining the precise nature of the landscape, vegetation cover, soils and the land-use before, during and subsequent to their construction is crucial to attempting to understand how past communities saw and used this landscape and how the Pebblebed cairns became an integral and significant part of that landscape in the Earlier Bronze Age. The aim is to try and mantle the visible and viewed contemporary landscape with an experiential interpretation of prehistoric land-use
and vegetation patterns in order to further develop an understanding of human actions, activity and even decision-making in the prehistoric Pebblebed landscape. We attempt to provide a reconstruction of the changing landscape and land-use patterns from the pre-cairn (later Neolithic) to post-cairn and Early Bronze Age cairn phases (Mid to Later Bronze Age). We may begin by posing a number of questions. How did the vegetation cover affect communities' decisions to use this landscape? How did the communities respond to the some of the inadvertent changes in the vegetation and soils and their unintentional consequences? How is this reflected in the surviving archaeological record? The Pebblebeds landscape has subtle but significant topographic variation in its slopes and the minor dry and wet peat-filled valleys that are an important part of this landscape. The generation of just large, broad generic and landscape-wide changes in vegetation types allows only very non-specific generic interpretations that cannot do justice to the landscape lived in and used in the past.

We need, therefore, to be bold and aim to provide a reconstruction of the changing land-use patterns at a scale that is valid for archaeological interpretation – and this needs to be undertaken in relation to specific site locations and their immediate environs, rather than at a sub-regional scale. Allen previously attempted such a reconstruction in relation to the environmental landscape of the prehistoric monuments of Cranborne Chase in Dorset by adopting the perspective of a Neolithic woman surveying the landscape she could see from a specific and single viewpoint (Allen 2002). Such reconstruction stresses the central role of the imagination in the environmental reconstruction of landscapes, without which a picture of how it might have been to live in, and experience, these landscapes in the past will never emerge. A map with ‘envelopes’ of uniform single vegetation types draped over the whole Pebblebeds area, or even schematic landscape profiles, is not very useful here. We do not wish to create a two-dimensional ‘stage’ with a single vegetation or land-use type, nor to view the twenty-first-century landscape inhabited by prehistoric monuments, but to inhabit the prehistoric landscape and attempt to view it, to some extent at least, as prehistoric inhabitants may have done (cf. Allen 2002).

The date of the construction of the first cairns on the Pebblebeds (see Figure 3.4) is early: the first of these (2130–1890 and 1920–1690 cal. BC; Bronze Age period 2/3) is much earlier than that for many other well-studied heathland and podzolic landscapes such as the Dorset Heath (e.g. Cox and Hearne 1991) and Surrey Heath (see Macphail and Scaife
1987, and to a lesser extent Branch and Green 2004). Recent research by Groves et al. (2012) on the Lower Greensand areas of Hampshire and West Sussex has suggested that heathland vegetation here only became established in the Late Bronze Age, c. 1000 BC, period 6, in association with human activity involving animal grazing and burning. The extent of the heathland area subsequently changed in tandem with less or more human activity but reached its maximum during the medieval to post-medieval periods. Elsewhere archaeological evidence has suggested that the oldest monuments in heathland areas in eastern and central southern England were constructed during the Middle Bronze Age (Dimbleby 1962; Branch and Green 2004). None of the barrows in these heathland areas contained Beaker burials. The first diagnostic artefacts associated with them are dated to the later part of the Early Bronze Age (period 4) (Bradley and Fraser 2010: 20). The development of heathland on the East Devon Pebblebeds associated with cairns of Beaker date is thus significantly earlier than in lowland areas in central southern and southeast England and, like much else in southwest England, represents a quite distinct regional tradition.

Many of the first round barrows built on the chalk downland of southern England were constructed near to older Neolithic monuments – long barrows, causewayed enclosures, cursus monuments and henges – and in areas of fertile land that had never been densely wooded (French et al. 2007). In the case of the Pebblebed heathlands we have an area that was similar to the Wessex chalk downlands with their dense concentrations of sometimes richly furnished graves in that it, too, was not densely forested. However, the Pebblebed cairns are comparatively few in number (the total would equal just one cemetery area in the vicinity of Stonehenge or on the south Dorset Ridgeway). The Pebblebeds are completely lacking in earlier prehistoric monuments. Known Neolithic hilltop enclosures are situated some distance away to the south, northwest, north and possibly northeast (Chapter 1). The nearest of these, High Peak and Hembury, are, respectively, 5 km and 10 km distant from the nearest heathland fringe.

In the coastal area between south Dorset to the west and the South Downs to the east most heathland barrows were built in a single phase on newly opened ground in areas that had not been inhabited before. Most are significantly smaller than those found on the chalk downlands of central southern England and they are either isolated or occur in much smaller groups. Extensive areas of land around them were stripped of turf and a mound of sods constructed. The mound was then enlarged by enclosing it with a ditch and completed with a capping of sand and
gravel. Few of these mounds have produced any grave goods (Bradley and Fraser 2010: 22–3). There are significant contrasts between these Middle Bronze Age barrows and the Beaker cairns on the Pebblebed heathlands that were (a) constructed in a number of distinct phases; (b) not ditched; (c) had no extensive areas of cleared sods around them; (d) involved the curation of materials to construct them from a wide area in their surroundings; and that (e) did not cover a burial but were associated with multiple fires prior to and during their construction (see discussion in Chapter 3). The only direct point of similarity is the relative absence of artefacts and the fact that both are associated with the development of an open heathland landscape.

## The evidential basis

Before we go any further, we review the data on which our interpretation is based, thus clearly identifying both the strengths and weaknesses in time, space and resolution. What we are attempting is a nested land-use reconstruction; at one end a slightly more general but intimate vegetation and land-use map, and secondly at the site scale (i.e. around Tor Cairn/Little Tor Cairn, Twin Cairn A and at Jacob's Well) a higher-resolution interpretation of the lived-in landscape at the walk-over scale.

Our nested landscape interpretations are based on limited but targeted environmental work: pollen analysis (and assessment), charcoal identification, soil micromorphology and geoarchaeology. Our data sets derive from the excavation of three Early Bronze Age (Beaker) cairns, Tor Cairn, Little Tor Cairn and Twin Cairn A, on the southeast part of the heathlands, the Middle Bronze Age (period 5) burnt mound of Jacob's Well situated just below the western scarp edge of the heathlands, and three pebble platforms on Aylesbeare Common in the northern area of the heathlands. It also includes peat and pollen analysis at Longo Bottom in the southeast heathland area. Numerous attempts were made to obtain pollen cores from bog valley sediments across the heathlands but we were successful in just this one location. Elsewhere there was insufficient depth of deposits to provide viable samples for study. Detailed work of a small area of c. 4 km² provides the basis for attempting to provide a concept of land-use patterns over the wider Pebblebeds landscape comprising some 50 km² (Figure 8.1 and Figure 8.2). The weakness in our interpretations can be seen in the distribution of the locations of environmental work (Figure 8.1), and the list of the analyses, some of which are just assessments (Table 8.2).
## A landscape and land-use history for the Pebblebeds

Land-use history will be examined for four periods: (1) the Mid to Later Neolithic (i.e. pre-cairn construction landscape); (2) Beaker/Early Bronze Age period 3 (cairn construction); (3) Early Bronze Age (immediate post-cairn construction); and (4) Mid to Late Bronze Age period 4/5 (a wider landscape of cairns). There is relatively little archaeological activity or palaeo-environmental evidence for the pre-cairn environment and land-use so we have, in part, to turn to evidence from wider afield, set against a regional background provided by analysis from other projects such as the A30 Honiton to Exeter (Fitzpatrick et al. 1999), southwestern gas pipeline (Mudd and Joyce 2014), the Exe valley palaeo-environmental studies (Fyfe et al. 2003a, 2003b) and from regional overviews (e.g. Wilkinson and Straker 2008; Straker et al. 2008). We have little tangible evidence of the nature of the landscape in the Neolithic for the Pebblebeds. Changes did not occur coevally across the Pebblebeds, although this text may to some extent imply this. The broad changes have been highlighted though at individual places where they may have occurred at slightly differing times.

## The cairn landscape as seen through 'prehistoric' eyes

### Evidence for a pre-cairn landscape (Earlier to Mid Neolithic)

The Pebblebeds are clearly marked out in the published map of 'climax' woodland at c. 3750 BC in the southwest (see modified map in Wilkinson and Straker 2008: fig 3.3, 67, based on Bennett 1989; Jones and Keen 1993: fig. 10.5, 232), as an area of alder within an otherwise oak woodland, excepting birch woodland on high Dartmoor. Otherwise a lime, oak and elm woodland is seen as prevalent (Wilkinson and Straker 2008), but researchers have just draped this interpretation over the entire Triassic and Devonian hills and valleys of south Somerset, Devon and Cornwall (70). Much of the Southwest is considered to have been wooded throughout the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (Robinson 2002: 55; Wilkinson and Straker 2008), with clearance only occurring later in the Bronze Age across most of the high moors, where, as a consequence, heathland had developed by the end of the Bronze Age. The model for South Devon (based on pollen from numerous workers across the southwest) suggests that these large-scale clearance episodes had occurred by the Mid-Late Bronze Age. The work in the Exe Valley (Fyfe et al. 2003a) provides a long vegetation history, but that for the Neolithic and Bronzes Ages does not
differentiate readily between upland and lowland heath/moor, and certainly does not attempt the finer-grained ground-level land-use interpretation we seek for the Pebblebeds. There are, however, three elm declines in the southwest which are accompanied by a decline in oak woodland and increases in grasses, and this, together with the suggestion of the upland having scrub>brier woodland and open grassland in the Later Mesolithic (Fyfe et al. 2003a, 174), may suggest an open woodland with grasses and herbaceous vegetation.

So what was the Pebblebeds landscape like? For Tor Cairn we have two pollen spectra. One of these is derived from inverted turfs beneath the cairn. The other is from context 22, a dark, charcoal-rich sandy layer beneath the primary core cairn overlying a central pebble-filled pit, discussed in Chapter 3. If we are correct in assuming that the material composing context 22 in Tor Cairn was raked up from the area in the vicinity of the cairn and represents deposits below the humic A horizon of the former soil then the pollen from it (Pokorný, Appendix 4) relates to a precairn environment, and possibly the post-clearance phase. This shows the area in the vicinity to be an open oak woodland with an understorey of hazel, grasses and ferns. There is limited heath in the area. The oak woodland at this time would be significantly different from that occurring off the Pebblebeds to the east along the Otter valley and on the soils mantling the Otter sandstone and to the west below the scarp slope of the Pebblebeds extending to the Exe estuary. The trees would have been much shorter, relatively speaking, and stunted, with less prolific growth and the canopy significantly less dense, allowing more sunlight to penetrate, with an understorey providing more browse. Such woodland would have been significantly easier for people to move through and would have provided excellent resources for hunting and gathering.

The pollen analysis from Longo Bottom (Batchelor, Appendix 16) by contrast suggests a much more open scrub woodland of hazel and grassland and ferns, with alder (reflecting the valley location), oak, lime, pine, birch and elm at 3660–3530 cal. BC during the Neolithic. The Pebblebeds at this time constituted a complex mosaic of a relatively open oak woodland in the higher areas (now mantled by dry heath) and a more open landscape along the valleys with their mires. For Jacob's Well, immediately below the western scarp of the Pebblebed ridge, the pollen analysis of peat below a Middle Bronze Age burnt mound shows it was located in drying damp open alder carr with hazel, willow, holly, ivy and honeysuckle shrub understorey, with grasses and herbaceous vegetation including sedges and fern (Batchelor, Appendix 12). The drying of this wetland wood and the increase in birch as alder carr dwindled occurred
prior to the burnt mound and fewer fens occurred in the grasses and sedges. Drying locally occurred to such an extent that the soil surface was dry, enabling relatively easier human passage (Figure 8.3). Perhaps this drying out might have enabled easier access to, and in part facilitated, the later burnt mound activity, which itself may be a part of the process of opening up the landscape and clearing the wetter areas of woodland on floodplains and around springs (cf. Brown et al. 2016).

## Later Neolithic open woodland and moorland

Prior to cairn-building, the Pebblebeds would have been a mosaic of open, principally hazel woodland with some oak, with denser oak and hazel woodland on sheltered gentle slopes and valley sides, and valley bottoms containing some alder and willow. The oak trees would have been perhaps no more than 5–10 m high. The closest contemporary analogy would be the stunted oaks of Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor (Figure 8.4), where in contrast the trees grow in a dense jumble of boulders hintering movement, whereas on the Pebblebeds the forest floor was free of stones. Even at this stage higher areas on the Pebblebed bedrock supported thinner soils, some of which were already becoming podzolic (i.e. patches of heathland were developing, of limited extent). Visibility of the wider landscape would have been limited. The Otter and the Exe and the hills beyond them and the sea to the south, although clearly important to the local communities for fishing and fowling (see Figure 1.9), would not have been visible even during the winter months following leaf fall. The woodland allowed the further penetration of sunlight through the woodland, making the movements of animals more visible. The open nature of the woodland, with bright and dappled light, can be seen from the mixed alder carr at the base of the peat at Jacob's Well (Figure 8.3). Again at Longo Bottom, although also from peat, the openness of the woodland in the surrounding drier landscape is also hinted at with oak, lime, pine, birch and elm and open grassy vegetation; there is also a small heathland component there throughout as far back as the Neolithic with a hint of development towards the top of the sequence (Batchelor, Appendix 16).

Trackways through the landscape showed where animals have foraged, browsed and drunk in shallow pools and where water seasonally trickled; the valleys were not yet true wet mires as the soil cover was generally a thicker brown earth or acid brown earth (possibly 40 cm thick), with patches of weak podzolic soils acting as a sponge soaking up much of the rain-water. Some small incised gulleys and rivulets may have channeled some water into valley bottoms where seasonal streams flowed
<figure><img src="image_134.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 8.3** Percentage pollen diagram from Jacob's Well, Woodbury Common, Devon (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_135.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 8.4** Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor (Source: author)</figcaption></figure>

over ground and, in so doing, locally exposed the pebbles. Elsewhere they were still concealed by a mantle of dark soil.

With patchy heath on the upland exposed moor and grass and ferns providing a good ground cover, parted only by animal tracks, rivulets, stream cuttings and localized balding patches in the most exposed places, only rare and limited but important glimpses were given of the Pebblebed geology; the wet rounded pebbles with their smooth multi-coloured surfaces gleaming against the greens of the ferns, bracken and undergrowth. Looking out from this upland the Otter Sandstone landscape would have been more uniformly and densely covered by alder within an otherwise oak woodland interspersed with hazel. From the Pebblebeds the local mosaic and variations within this woodland would not be that apparent, as only the woodland canopy would be seen. The surrounding landscape would have resembled an almost complete 'sea' of woodland that effectively concealed the movements of people through it, their presence apparent only from the smoke of fires. Although not visible at this time from the Pebblebeds, the river Otter, an important communication route and source of a variety of resources, would have been visited regularly – so although hidden it was not an 'invisible' part of prehistoric communities' life-way.

The occasional glimpses of the Pebblebeds, the rounded, colourful, attractive stones, would have made them a rare, and by the Early Bronze Age, possibly prized commodity, valued by communities in the
area, and imbued with more than just esoteric value and significance. Their rarity, being exposed only within and along the sides of the occasional slope or gully, although much more frequently along rivulet and stream beds, and more rarely and randomly distributed bare patches in higher areas and the steeper slope edges, would have contributed to their perceived social and symbolic value. The local populations of the Later Neolithic, Beaker and Early Bronze Age were familiar with these beautiful pebbles from their visits to the beach at Budleigh Salterton as part of their seasonal round. Seeing such stones normally only found in the liminal space of the beach between the sea and the land must have been a source of wonderment and surprise: how had they ended up so far inland and on a ridge brushing against the sky? Some were collected and taken away to their temporary seasonal dwellings on High Peak and Hembury. There the woodland had been removed and the hilltops were bald. Neither settlement was visible, but from both one could look down and across the Pebblebeds to the north of High Peak and to the south of Hembury. The lighter character of the woodland running along the Pebblebed ridge would have been apparent and provided a stark contrast in relation to the density of the forest cover elsewhere.

## Beaker and Early Bronze Age period 3 immediate pre-cairn environs: open moor and open wood

The pre-cairn construction land-use is evidenced in data from the Tor Cairn buried soils (pollen, soil and to a lesser extent geoarchaeology). The immediate pre-cairn environment is, however, missing from Tor Cairn as a result of truncation and loss of the A horizon (Macphail, Appendix 5; Scaife, Appendix 6), but was possibly a grazed glade within open woodland of oak, hazel and lime with some birch and alder existing with grasses and pasture, and again hints of heathland development (Scaife, Appendix 6; Pokorný, Appendix 4). The presence of heather in the truncated soil suggests greater heath existed at the time of construction and is confirmed by the presence of acid soil formation and weak podzolization (Macphail, Appendix 5) – and possibly even management of the heath by fire as indicated by micro-charcoal presence. Although much of the pollen and soil data refer to the phase 1 Neolithic environment, the fact that the soil shows podzolization indicates clearances, grassland and heath. This is a developed open landscape, thus clearance must have occurred prior to, and not for the construction of, the Early Bronze Age and Beaker pebble cairns. The cairns were built in a landscape that had
already been cleared and had become locally relatively open, charac-
terized by grasses, ribwort plantain and dock/sorrel-type plants typ-
ical of pasture with ferns (Dryopteris) and herbaceous flowering plants
(Melampyrum) possibly typical of forest grazing, and heath occurring
within areas of open woodland that had been little altered.

In the Earlier Bronze Age the Pebblebeds had become a wider, and
more varied, landscape in terms of the vegetation that grew on it. Much
of it was still forested but substantial open areas now existed. On these
there developed a fine-grained mosaic of vegetation consisting of tus-
socky grasses and herbs, with heath and ling and stands of scrub and
shrubs (such as hazel, Prunus, blackberry, heather and honeysuckle).
The valley slopes were dry and locally supported light oak- and hazel-
dominated woodland, elsewhere dominated with patchy scrub – typi-
cally shrubby plants such as hazel, blackberry and some heather – that
is, an intermediate community between grass or heath and high forest.
The valleys to the east of Tor Cairn and to the west, between it and Twin
Cairn A, contained intermittent streams cutting through sandy soils fur-
ther exposing the bedrock of pebbles. Some of the valleys cutting into
the Pebblebed ridge at this time were broad, dry and open. Other smaller
valleys were much more overgrown. Up and down all of them were track-
ways through the vegetation made by animals and communities moving
from the Otter Sandstone landscape and the Exmouth and Littlesham
Mudstone areas and up onto the Pebblebeds ridge. This was a season-
ally visited, opened but not tamed landscape. The opening of the original
woodland cover allowed and encouraged more graze, altering the veg-
etation, encouraging coarse grasses and herbs and low-growing shrubs,
and exposing patches of bare soil and pebbles. Soil erosion and runoff
increased, gullying locally and intermittently some of the ridge slopes
and the valley sides, feeding water to the streams. Around the edges of
the pebble ridge clearance was also occurring and some of the denser
woodland was shed. Localized activity and probably temporary settle-
ment took place on the spurs of higher land fringing the Pebblebeds to
the south and southeast by the edge of the Otter Sandstone and overlook-
ing the Otter valley. At this time small pebble cairns were constructed on
the spurs bounded by valleys. The pebbles were collected or dug up from
exposures in the valley sides. Other special pebbles and blue stones were
curated and transported from elsewhere, where they were exposed dur-
ing journeying across the landscape, and the cairns were both enlarged
and their multicoloured surfaces renewed. Some of these small, discreet
structures were locally intervisible but never from very far away. Because
the landscape around them had been cleared of woodland, views out from