pattern without a plan. Rethinking The Bronze Age Coaxial Field Systems On Dartmoor, South-West England

ROBERT JOHNSTON

PATTERN WITHOUT A PLAN: RETHINKING THE BRONZE AGE COAXIAL FIELD SYSTEMS ON DARTMOOR, SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND

Summary. The coaxial field systems on Dartmoor are widely interpreted asthe result of a relatively rapid period of planned land division during the middlecenturies of the second millennium BC. This article seeks to challenge thisnotion of a ‘planned landscape’. Using examples from southern (Shaugh Moor)and north-eastern (Kestor and Shovel Down) Dartmoor, it is demonstrated thatthe boundaries materialized existing structures in the landscape which hademerged through patterns of dwelling and long histories of tenure. In seekingto present a new narrative for the enclosure of the Dartmoor landscape, it isargued that tenure was articulated at a local level through the relationshipbetween occupancy and ancestral ties to the land, and that land division wasonly possible because the forms of tenure and perceptions of landscape werealready in place. The coaxial pattern emerged in a reflexive tradition ofboundary construction rather than as part of a transformative plan or aconscious strategy to reorganize and enclose the moor.

The Bronze Age fields on Dartmoor are amongst the best surviving examples of landenclosure that occurred across many areas of north-west Europe during later prehistory. Whilein most other regions the land divisions survive only in a fragmentary state due to lateragriculture and development, on Dartmoor they remain preserved as substantial stone and earthbanks that can be traced across thousands of hectares of moorland.1 Accompanying theboundaries there are a great many monuments, houses and enclosures, established in the latethird and early second millennia BC.

Our understanding of the development of this landscape has been dominated by thework of Andrew Fleming, who focused his studies on the coaxial field systems, otherwise knownas ‘reaves’.2 He interpreted the reaves as boundaries between land use zones, organized within

OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 24(1) 1–21 2005© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UKand 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1

1 Dartmoor is an area of upland granite moorland situated in south-west England. The archaeological remainsdiscussed in this paper are mainly concentrated on the lower slopes of the moor above the improved, enclosedgrassland (250–400 m AOD).

2 While many archaeologists have drawn extensively on Fleming’s research, very few have attempted to offeralternatives to his explanation of the reaves as a planned and rapid reorganization of the landscape. Price’sassertion that Bronze Age occupation of the moor was principally for the extraction of tin represents one exception(Price 1985; Price 1988; cf. Fleming 1987b), as do the issues raised by the RCHME following their survey of

a number of valley-based territories, laid out in a radial fashion around the moor (Fleming 1978;Fleming 1983) (Fig. 1). Fleming suggested that the reave systems were a development, duringone brief time span, of pre-existing territories established during the practice of ‘inter-commoning’ undertaken in the Neolithic (Fleming 1994). This dramatic formalization of

PATTERN WITHOUT A PLAN

OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY2 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Figure 1Schematic map of the main areas of coaxial field systems on Dartmoor (based on Fleming 1983, 221). The locationsof the case studies discussed in this article are indicated: (1) Shaugh Moor and (2) Shovel Down. Shaded areas depict

land above 200 and 400 metres.

Holne Moor (RCHME 1997, 8), and Spratt’s brief discussion of the evidence for prehistoric territories (Spratt1991, 444–5). Most recently, Richard Bradley (Bradley 2002, 72–81) emphasized the historical context in whichthe reaves were situated. Rather than being organized in a rigid, arbitrary system, he noted that existingmonuments and houses had an influence on the locations and alignments chosen for the boundaries. Thecommunities who built the reaves demonstrated an awareness of and a varying respect towards the visiblelandscapes of earlier generations.

ROBERT JOHNSTON

OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 3

territorial markers was the result of a ‘Commons Dilemma’ (Fleming 1985; cf. Lane 1998;McCay and Acheson 1987; Shoup 1990). Whether or not it was a decision made by a top-downautocratic authority, or it was mutually agreed among a collective of communities, the reasonfor the reaves was, according to Fleming, an attempt to deal with the problem of collectivelyowned grazing land coming under pressure.

Fleming’s argument is persuasive. The regularity of the coaxial divisions, the scale ofeach system of boundaries, their interdependency, and the strict adherence to the dominant axisseem best explained as the result of an agreed strategy adopted in common by all thoseoccupying the moor. At an empirical level, however, there are aspects of the evidence that donot fit or are as yet insufficiently understood to support this interpretation. The regularity of thefield systems, and by implication the degree to which their conception and use were conceivedwithin a single plan, is dependent upon the scale at which they are studied. When representedat a small scale, the boundaries appear extremely straight, and unwavering in their adherenceto the axis of the overall system. Yet up close, it is often the variability in construction andirregularity of their course across the landscape that are an equally if not a more striking feature(Fig. 2). Variability is also apparent in the form of enclosure. The ‘classic’ pattern of coaxialboundaries is only present in a few areas. Elsewhere, enclosure strategies appear to have beenless consistent. In striking contrast to the axial boundaries, there are a great number of ‘aggregatefields’, characterized by small irregular enclosures, frequently situated outside, though onoccasions incorporated within, the main concentrations of reaves. Neither the function andchronology of this type of enclosure nor its relationship with the coaxial boundaries areunderstood. The chronology of the reaves is a further issue that has yet to be systematicallyaddressed. The only fully published radiocarbon dates come from the excavation of oneboundary, on Shaugh Moor (Balaam et al. 1982, 237–40).3 These do not bracket the constructionand abandonment of the boundary, but instead relate to phases of activity during the use of thefeature – calibrated, they span the period 2140–1260 BC.

Fleming has recognized all of these issues in his work, and has sought to accommodatethem within his arguments. Ultimately, concerns over chronology and functional variability canonly be tested through fieldwork. Nevertheless, it is possible, using our existing knowledge, tooffer a different narrative for the enclosure of the Dartmoor landscape. In this article I wish tochallenge the notion of a planned landscape, and to argue that the final form of the coaxial fieldsystems emerged as the result of independent communities following varied occupationstrategies but within common social and material conditions. This argument parallels thatalready made with reference to ceremonial monuments dating to the later Neolithic (e.g. Barrett1994, 24), in that large-scale building ‘projects’ do not necessarily require either the presenceof an elite controlling authority, or the structuring influence of a commonly conceived plan. Themismatch between the coaxial pattern and varied character of individual boundaries does notrepresent ‘the plan and its variable local outcomes’ (Fleming 1994, 73); rather it demonstratesthe working of individual agencies within the material conditions of an existing socializedlandscape and the ideational structure of land enclosure and division. There was never a single‘plan’ to enclose the moor. Instead, a long history of tenure can be traced that made land divisiona necessary means of inhabiting the landscape.

3 Radiocarbon dates are published for Fleming’s excavations on Holne Moor (Burleigh et al. 1981, 18–19). Butthis is only a summary of the assays with limited contextual information.

an alternative history of a boundary: saddlesborough reave, south-west dartmoor

Localized variability and an inadequate chronology are both apparent in an analysis ofthe excavated boundaries on Shaugh Moor, south-west Dartmoor (Smith et al. 1981, 209–16).The investigations were focused on a long stone bank stretching across the upper slopes of thehillside and forming the terminal for at least six axial boundaries (Fig. 3). Of the two mainphases of construction that were identified, the first varied along the length of the boundary: awide shallow ditch; a ditch with an accompanying bank, possibly with a fence on top of thebank; and a free-standing timber boundary with no ditch or bank. In contrast to this, the phasetwo boundary was a continuous stone wall accompanied by the silted-up phase one ditch to thesouth-west.

It is possible to offer an alternative sequence (Table 1), and to suggest that the finalalignment of the boundary on Saddlesborough was contingent upon many different actions



Figure 2The field boundaries on Horridge Common, south-east Dartmoor, follow a dominant axis yet this emerges from a more

fragmented process of piecemeal construction (based on Butler 1991, 45).

ROBERT JOHNSTON


taking place over an indeterminable length of time. It was variously a ditch, recut and remodelledon numerous occasions, and a routeway used by animals moving between the high ground inthe north-west perhaps to a water source below the lower slopes. In the first instance, the primaryfeatures that were excavated beneath the line of the boundary varied considerably in their

Figure 3Plan showing part of the system of coaxial boundaries on Shaugh Moor, south-west Dartmoor. Rescue investigationsin the late 1970s focused on a 600 m length of the ‘terminal’ of a system of axial boundaries between the high groundon Saddlesborough and a boggy area on the lower slopes to the south-east (based on RCHME 1998, 6; and Smith

et al. 1981, 210).

structure. Not all the trenches showed evidence for a single, unequivocal ditch (Fig. 4).Elsewhere, notably towards the south-eastern end of the boundary, the ‘ditch’ was wide andshallow, and consider-ing the cattle and sheep hoof-prints that were discovered in its base furtherupslope, these wide linear depressions may have formed as eroded trackways (Fig. 5) – aninterpretation acknowledged by the excavators. It can be inferred from the presence of stonesset into the sides of these features, including the example running perpendicular to the boundary



Figure 4Profiles through the ditch of the ‘Saddlesborough reave’ (based on Smith et al. 1981 and unpublished section drawings

in the archive of the Shaugh Moor Project, by permission of Plymouth City Museums and Art Gallery).

ROBERT JOHNSTON


in trench AP, that they were deliberately maintained as paths for stock. Elsewhere, the line ofthe boundary was recut, further ditches were added, and timber fences were erected. The bankand later stone wall are similarly variable. The construction of the wall therefore formalized analignment that had developed into a boundary.

The excavations along the ‘Wotter reave’, which ran perpendicular to the ‘terminal’boundary on Saddlesborough, demonstrated that it too was referenced to an existing landscape.In its initial phase it was constructed as a short length of bank and ditch, perhaps forming oneside of a field. Access to this field was through a gap, flanked by post-holes, at the junction withthe Saddlesborough boundary. The earthen bank was later replaced by a wall constructed fromstone removed from the boundaries of a small adjacent field system and aligned on a different

Figure 5Simplified plans of trackways along ‘Saddlesborough reave’ (based on Smith et al. 1981 and an unpublished plan in

the archive of the Shaugh Moor Project, by permission of Plymouth City Museums and Art Gallery).

axis to the reaves that continued downslope to the south-west. As on Saddlesborough, the stonewall significantly changed the character of the boundary, in this case it blocked the accesswayat the junction and slighted a previous field system, but its axis was determined by existingfeatures: the earth bank and ditch of an earlier field.

While there have only been a few other excavations of reave-type boundaries onDartmoor, in every case, without exception, there has been at least some evidence for a historical sequence. Of two parallel reaves excavated on Holne Moor (Fleming 1988, 71–93;Fleming 1994, 72–3), one consisted of a later wall situated upon an earlier bank accompaniedby a shallow ditch. Further along the same boundary there were no traces of earlier features. The other parallel reave was preceded by a line of stake-holes in the area close to itsjunction with the terminal reave, yet beyond this there was only slight evidence for a possiblefence. Approximately 150m further on, the reave consisted of a line of granite boulders. The terminal reave on Holne Moor had no predecessor, although a line of stake-holes wasdiscovered on the same alignment as the boundary but situated slightly to the north. At Gold Park, a short length of a silted-up ditch and a bank was excavated beneath a reave-typecoaxial boundary on a different alignment (Gibson 1992). Recent fieldwork on Shovel Down, north-east Dartmoor, demonstrated that a long axial reave consisted of at least two large enclosures that were subsequently linked together forming a single boundary (Brück et al.2003).

The archaeological excavation of reaves shows them to have long and complexbiographies. Some began as the edges of fields, others as trackways. They shared a commonalignment, but even this was the product of a long and complex process. The axes that the field systems adopt would appear to have developed piecemeal, and to be contingent upon avariety of occupation practices. When the variability in construction over the 600m of theSaddlesborough reave is projected throughout the many hundreds of kilometres of boundarieson the moor then the complexity of such a process begins to become apparent.

an alternative history of coaxial enclosure: shovel down and kestor, north-east dartmoor

The accretive character of the boundaries, their potentially lengthy history, and the co-presence and then replacement of different forms of field systems can all be emphasized inreviewing the evidence from Shaugh Moor. Doing so, it must be acknowledged, is at the expenseof discussing the regularity of the axial divisions of the reave system, and the fact that the lineof the Saddlesborough reave can be argued to cross the valley of the river Plym and, turningnorth-west, continue for a further 7km before terminating at a hilltop cairn on Eylesbarrow(RCHME 1998, 5; cf. Fleming 1978, 117). The challenge remains in explaining how these two scales of observation might be linked: in what way do the apparently localized andfragmented processes of land enclosure result in such an archaeologically distinctive andpervasive pattern?

The following analysis of the coaxial field systems on Shovel Down and Kestor offersan attempt to bridge these scales. Situated on the north-east side of Dartmoor, the fields aredistributed across an area of high ground (350–450m AOD) framed by the valleys of the Northand South Teign rivers and with up to seven topographically distinctive hilltops, most of whichare marked by a tor of outcropping granite (Fig. 6) (see also Butler 1997, 255; Fleming 1983,235–6).



ROBERT JOHNSTON


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Monuments

Our understanding of the landscape prior to the construction of the buildings andboundaries is rather limited, as it is elsewhere on Dartmoor. Nonetheless, it can be argued that by the beginning of the second millennium BC there would already have been an intri-cate patchwork of places and paths linking various locales associated with monuments andagricultural activity (Evans 1999, 26–34). There is good evidence for the management ofwoodland fringes on the high moor during the Mesolithic, with the coincidence of microscopiccharcoal and a gradual reduction in arboreal pollen between 7700 and 6300 BP (Caseldine andHatton 1994, 40). Undoubtedly clearance continued, albeit on a small scale, until the middle ofthe second millennium BC by which time some have argued that the lower slopes of the moorwere substantially cleared of woodland.4

This picture of an earlier landscape structured by a focus on particular places issupported by the archaeological evidence from Shovel Down. Scatters of flint debitage and toolswere recovered from three locations within 1.5km of the area, and in each case these seem torepresent several millennia of activity. The reasons for visiting these places were no doubtvaried, but it is unlikely to be a coincidence that they are close to groups of ceremonialmonuments. The lithic scatter at Batworthy, for instance, lay only a short way from the fivestone rows built on the eastern slope of the high ground on Shovel Down, while the most recentlydiscovered lithics, and a possible Late Mesolithic/Early Neolithic pit, are immediately adjacentto the stone rows (Brück et al. 2003). Although they all follow a roughly north–south alignment,these monuments show subtle but significant variations in their form and location. This can betaken to suggest that just as the lithic scatters appear to represent phases of occupation andabandonment the rows result from a history of building projects rather than being part of asingle, planned monument.

The stone rows on Shovel Down not only served as a focal place, but also as an axisaround which future occupation was structured. They occupied an unenclosed corridor, whichwas both the alignment for what seems to be one of the earliest reaves, and also a boundarybetween the lower-lying pasture enclosed by parallel field systems and the higher moor whereboth parallel and irregular systems of fields were built. The concentrations of monuments atplaces such as Shovel Down have previously been interpreted as central places within largecommunity territories. But it is perhaps their influence upon their local landscape that is mostrelevant to understanding how the systems of field boundaries came about.

Buildings

The pattern in the distribution of settlements either side of the stone rows is one that islikely to have emerged when the monuments were still ‘in use’. Although none of the houseswithin the fields on Shovel Down and Kestor have been excavated under modern conditions,5

early second millennium BC radiocarbon dates were associated with the earliest phases of



4 This impression must be tempered somewhat: the main evidence for major woodland clearance comes directlyfrom archaeological sites on the lower slopes (e.g. Balaam et al. 1982; Maguire et al. 1983), yet the pollen coresfrom the high moor are dominated (>50 per cent) by arboreal pollen (Caseldine and Hatton 1994, 43).

5 A roundhouse is currently under excavation at Teigncombe, on the eastern side of the Kestor field system (Gerrard2001).

settlement at Shaugh Moor on the south-west side of Dartmoor (Wainwright and Smith 1980).Elsewhere, it is possible to date a small number of the more than 300 buildings excavated bylocal antiquarians and archaeologists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bytheir association with a style of pottery known as Trevisker Ware, which is considered to havebeen in use from c.1700 BC (Needham 1996; Parker Pearson 1990; cf. Radford 1952). A moreunequivocal example of the relative date at which the buildings were constructed is that theyare frequently in a primary relationship to and therefore earlier than the boundaries, either atthe centre of a radial arrangement of small plots or incorporated into the course of one of thecoaxial boundaries. This is not meant as an argument for all buildings being of an earlier periodthan the field systems. Rather that in some cases buildings were constructed before theboundaries, though it is not possible to tell whether over a matter of centuries or as part of thesame period of occupation.

The earliest stone buildings added a further important structural element to an alreadycomplex landscape. It is clear from the excavated examples that a high proportion were occupiedand probably served a variety of domestic functions. They have substantial stone walls, anentrance that is occasionally elaborated with a porch, hearths, pits and a range of materialculture. These structures served to contain and categorize domestic activities, and were thereforeimportant in making distinctions between activities and identities within the social group, andas a consequence access to resources. Buildings might therefore have served as places throughwhich rights of access and use over resources could be legitimated. Crucially, the buildings alsodefined the place and fixed the memories of such occupations within the landscape. Theyfrequently acted as the nodes of networks of boundaries, or they were incorporated into the lineof a boundary. Assuming that all the buildings and fields were not constructed and occupiedcontemporaneously, then abandoned dwellings remained important in structuring people’sperceptions of their present landscape. The fact that many of the buildings do not appear to havebeen robbed of their stone when the boundaries were constructed also lends support to thisargument (Bradley 2002, 79).

A more explicit expression of the ways in which buildings materialized the attachmentbetween people and place can be found in the related depositional and architectural histories of houses and cairns. For instance, buildings and cists share a common dominant alignment –to the south-east (Bradley 2002, 77). There are also examples where it has been argued that houses were restructured to look like burial monuments (Butler 1997, 137–8). Morefrequently we find close similarities between the character of the deposits found within housesand cairns, particularly ring cairns (Johnston 2001, 150–60). For instance, excavations ofbuildings, ring cairns and to a lesser extent burial monuments frequently uncover pits filled with burnt soil, stone and charcoal (Fig. 7). In the context of the ceremonial monuments these pits have been interpreted as ritual deposits, ‘eccentric cremations’ and cenotaphicofferings. In contrast, those discovered in buildings are commonly referred to as ‘cooking holes’.Based on the published excavation evidence, there is frequently little to distinguish between thepits found in buildings with those found beneath cairns. They are of similar size; they are located centrally or close to the inner perimeter of the structure; they are occasionally lined withstones and/or sealed by a single stone; they contain charcoal; and they are accompanied bysherds of pottery or the remains of a complete vessel. Examples of such pits are known fromthe excavated ring cairns at Shaugh Moor (Wainwright et al. 1979), Metheral (Worth 1937),Farway Hill (Pollard 1971) and Deadman’s Bottom (Worth 1900); 14 of the barrows listed by Grinsell, including Broadun and The Croft (Grinsell 1978); and 15 settlements, the best

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Figure 7Plans showing the location of pits filled with charcoal within houses and ring cairns (based on plans in Baring-Gould

1896; DEC 1894; Fox 1957; Wainwright et al. 1979).

known of these being Grimspound (DEC 1894), Watern Oke (Anderson 1906) and Dean Moor(Fox 1957).

An increasing number of interpretations have drawn parallels between the architecturaland depositional histories of monuments and domestic buildings (e.g. Hodder 1994; Bradley1998). What seems most pertinent here is the recurring link that is made between burial mounds,houses and tenure. Neolithic long barrows acted as houses for a community’s ancestors, and assuch embodied a direct link between people and place through the generations interred in thetomb. Early Bronze Age round barrows were built upon hilltops and ridgelines where theydelimited the boundaries of territories. The linear character of some of the barrow cemeteriesformed a visible expression of the lines of descent and inheritance through which access toresources and social status was maintained. The construction of round houses redefined socialorganization such that smaller kin groups appropriated and held tenure over specific places ona long-term basis. These ideas are all closely linked in the way that they associate theconstruction of lasting structures, which were directly associated with individual and groupbiographies, with claims over land and resources. Undertaking rituals at cairns and living inhouses were both key contexts where agents created, sustained and challenged senses of identityand place.

If, as both Fleming and Bradley have argued, the monuments on Dartmoor formed theearliest physical markers of a community’s attachment to an area of the landscape, then thehouses represented a continuation of this process. Crucially, with the construction of buildings,the scale at which tenure operated was now visibly focused around the household unit,howsoever it was constituted. It brought about a change in how people identified with particularplaces, and where the memories of occupation were made permanent in the landscape. It wasduring the building, abandonment and revisiting of such structures that the link betweenoccupation, memory and tenure developed.

Boundaries

The construction of boundaries appears at first to be an altogether different approachto identity, place, and tenure. The demarcation of distinct parcels of land related as much to howland was used and access to it controlled, as it did to the formation and maintenance of socialgroupings. Yet on Shovel Down and Kestor, the boundaries were built within the networks ofaccess and rights to resources that had developed over centuries, and which were being mediatedin part at least through the occupancy of buildings.

This is most evident amongst networks of aggregate enclosures which, unlike thereaves, form irregular patterns of boundaries. In every case the location of the buildings withinthese settlement groups structured the pattern of the boundaries built around them (e.g. Fig. 8a).This situation is less common amongst the coaxial boundaries, where in many cases thebuildings were located within the fields rather than along the line of the boundary. Nevertheless,there are at least five examples of buildings that appear to have preceded the construction of acoaxial boundary. For instance, the north-west–south-east aligned boundary that seems to haveformed the initial limits of the coaxial fields on Kestor, before further boundaries were addedto the west of the tor, incorporated a small building into its construction (Fig. 8d, no. 1). Theboundary on the south-east side was kinked slightly so as to join with the wall of the structure.A further two structures, situated just to the south of Kestor Rock, were both incorporated intoa coaxial boundary extending to the south-west from the north-west–south-east boundary

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associated with the preceding example (Fig. 8c, nos. 2 and 3). The boundary was built aroundone of the buildings, and abutting either side of the other. The small enclosure into which oneof the buildings faces seems to have been built after the construction of the boundary. Thebuildings pre-dated the stone boundary but were built on the same alignment that the boundarywould later take.

A physical link was also established when a building was joined to a coaxial boundarywith a short length of walling, such as on Kestor, north-east of the Round Pound; on the eastern



Figure 8Examples of the relationships between boundaries and buildings on Shovel Down and Kestor: (a and b) withinsettlement areas; (c and d) buildings incorporated into the line of an axial boundary; (e) a building joined to an axial

boundary with a short length of walling (based on surveys by English Heritage, copyright reserved).

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side of the north–south boundary forming the ‘spine’ of the coaxial fields on Shovel Down (Fig.8e); and three instances among the plots and buildings on the northern side of the stream to thenorth of Stonetor Hill.6 These short walls may have been part of an enclosure, the rest of theboundary being constructed from other materials, such as timber. Nevertheless, it is stillinteresting that the boundary between the roundhouse and the fields was constructed in stone.In most cases the gap between the structures is quite small, yet it was clearly important that thelink was substantial and prominent.

The links between buildings and boundaries demonstrate that existing structures hadan important influence upon where people chose to locate field walls, and that there was anintentional effort to physically emphasize the links between houses and boundaries by joiningthem together with short lengths of stone wall or bank.

Discussion: the enclosure of Shovel Down

The synchrony that seems evident from the neat patterns of boundaries, settlements andmonuments on Shovel Down and Kestor is wholly deceptive. Not only can the horizontalstratigraphy of the boundaries be unravelled, but it is also possible to identify a much broadersense of process in this landscape as successive actions were structured by, and themselvescontinued to structure, the material resources and networks of significance for future generationsof inhabitants.

Inhabitation of the area before the construction of any of the standing archaeologywould have defined places and routeways. Areas had already been cleared of trees for grazingstock and perhaps for small patches of cultivation. Before and during such deliberate activity,the movements of animals within their own territories would have created ‘small-scale diversity’(Evans 1999, 27). The influence of previous dwellings is evident in the way that alignmentsbetween tors and along watercourses and valleys are maintained by the later boundaries. Suchnatural features were foci in earlier landscapes (e.g. Tilley 1998). The names and narrativesassociated with these places were no doubt reworked over the generations, but as structures theyremained influential.

6 Examples of this relationship were excavated on Wotter Common during the Shaugh Moor Project (Smith et al.1981, 226–7) and on Holne Moor, site B (Fleming 1988).

table 1

An alternative sequence for the boundary on Saddlesborough

Excavator’s phasing Alternative sequence

Phase 1a Single ditch, ditch and bank, and timber Pre-boundary Trackway, field ditches, possible lynchetboundary

Phase 1b Some recutting and enlarged bank Phase 1 Elaboration and maintenance of some lengths of ditch and bank, possibly also construction of timber boundary

Phase 2 Wall Phase 2 Build-up of banks and some lengths of walling

The coaxial boundaries broadly respected the topographic form of the landscape andthe distribution of ceremonial monuments. The north–south axial boundaries were constructedperpendicular to the North Teign river that flows east to west with a series of 90 degree bends,framing the moorland of Shovel Down and Kestor. The hilltop tors also served as markers duringthe laying out of the fields. Though fragmentary, one of the coaxial boundaries runningperpendicular to the alignment between Kestor Rock and Frenchbeer Rock links together MiddleTor and Thornworthy Tor, while the principal north-east–south-west boundary on Shovel Downcurves from the main boundary to the west of the stone rows, over the high ground and acrossthe valley towards Stone Tor. The rivers, tors and relief are of course all interrelated, as theyresult from the geomorphological processes that shaped the topography of the moor. But, thehumanly constructed features relate closely to the form of the landscape, even if they may onfirst appearances seem to impose a different, more rigid, order.

The stone rows respected existing alignments. Though they seem divisive on a modernsurvey plan, it is unlikely that they created boundaries that did not already exist in people’sexperiences of such places. It seems that stone-built roundhouses were first constructed only tothe west of the stone rows. Such settlement areas generated and reproduced structures withinthis landscape. They were built in locales that might have already been occupied, but throughtheir continued occupation they contributed to the creation of new places. The ways in whichthese areas were inhabited is as yet unknown even though the character and intensity ofoccupation practices and land use must be recognized as fundamental.

Practices were not restricted to spaces formalized by stone walls and boundaries. Therewere resources distributed both on and off the moor that structured the movement and tempoof people’s daily lives. Crucial to the local concern of this study, there were ‘in-between places’(Rocheleau and Edmunds 1997) on the moor itself where resources such as fuel, wild foods andmedicinal plants might be gathered: small gardens adjacent to houses, the plants and shrubsgrowing along boundaries, or the scrubland found along stream courses and on steep rockyslopes. Divisions along the lines of kin, gender and social responsibility contributed to the waysin which space was used and organized. Such divisions were reproduced and maintained in themanner that people lived their daily lives, and such practices in turn structured and werestructured within time-space settings with limits and material boundaries that were defined botharbitrarily and according to the availability of resources. Added together with the moreformalized expressions of place embodied in the houses and non-axial field boundaries, thealignments of the stone rows, the tors and the river, the moorland on Kestor and Shovel Downbecame a temporally and spatially complex network of inhabitations.

The construction of coaxial boundaries within this inhabited environment was not awholesale reorganization, regardless of whether or not the reaves were constructed over a shortor a long time span. They maintained the dominant alignments that had been present since peoplefirst came to the area: notably the tors and the river. They were also built to incorporate pre-existing features, particularly roundhouses, other buildings and small enclosures. The buildingswere material linkages between people, through their kin associations, and the land with itsancestral associations. They were, therefore, critical places for negotiating tenure. The coaxialboundaries were constructed within these existing human-land relations; tenure was notrewritten. Nonetheless it would have changed; the coaxial boundaries did in themselves createnew material conditions. They had the potential to formalize boundaries that had once been opento negotiation, or perhaps had never before been recognized discursively.



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concluding discussion

The argument presented thus far is that the layout of the reaves was not consciouslystructured according to an agreed plan adopted by all the communities inhabiting the moor, butrather that it emerged within particular traditions of tenure and land use. These ‘traditions’, aswe recognize them now, were not necessarily consciously articulated or maintained by peopleat the time. Rather the principles that structured how people inhabited and organized theirlandscapes existed through those very same actions of inhabitation and organization. Thisrecursive relationship was dynamic because the individuals and communities using the moorwere agents situated in a history, both of their own life and that of the social worlds that theyinhabited.

Such an interpretation does not preclude the kinds of communal decision-making thatFleming advocates. But nor is a discursive plan required in order to explain a distinctive patternof homogeneous material and ideational conditions. The structures of everyday life, the formand history of the environment, the geographies of people’s lives, their occupation strategies,and the networks of social relations, enabled particular forms of land organization and precludedothers. In other words, the conditions and practices that constituted social life during the thirdand second millennia BC on Dartmoor enabled land to be divided and enclosed within coaxialfield systems. The regular pattern of the boundaries emerged in a particular though diverse setof social and material structures. Given the fact that we do not yet know over what timescalethis process took place, it is possible that the initial layout of a few of the fields was of criticalimportance in structuring subsequent land use, allotment and enclosure (Fleming 1987a).

It diverges from Fleming’s approach in that it does not consider the coaxial boundariesas a unitary phenomenon, and therefore the layout of the fields is not necessarily part of asynchronous system. It is argued that land enclosure was only possible because the structureswere already in place to enable it. Rather than there being a plan or a conscious strategy toreorganize and enclose the moor, land division emerged as the way that communities conceivedof the relationships between the land and with each other. Furthermore, once coaxial boundarieswere built they became critical in transforming how the future landscape was perceived andinhabited.

This also relates to scales of community and landscape. The ‘commons dilemma’ thatFleming believed emerged during the second millennium BC requires tenure to operate withinlarge groupings. Power over the land was invested in the community – a human collectiveoccupying valley-based ‘large terrains’. The studies of boundaries and landscape that werepresented in this article, taken together, suggest that tenure was articulated at a local level,through the relationship between occupancy and ancestral ties to the land.

This relationship was realized as boundaries were built between places and along paths.On Shovel Down, the ancient and contemporary histories associated with the buildings werecombined with the significance of a house, as a symbol of identity, occupancy and tenure, tostructure where and how physical boundaries could be constructed across the land. Suchboundaries were materializing virtual divisions which emerged through patterns of dwelling andlong histories of tenure that had already left structures in the landscape.

Pathways and the spatial and temporal limits of everyday activities were equallypowerful structures. The routeways that linked places were a strong embodiment of occupancy.They became more prominent through use, and their identity changed as the localities that they

joined and the areas through which they passed acquired or lost significance. These trackwayscould themselves be virtual boundaries: either delimiting one space from another along theirlength, or laterally, as a byway between locales. Ditches, stone banks and fencelines formalizedthese trackways, as at Shaugh Moor.

Occupations not only defined places and paths, they also structured areas of landscape.As woodland and scrub were cleared or as pasture was turned to cultivation, practices generatedtheir own time-space settings. The limits of these areas were not necessarily arbitrary, but norwere they consciously monitored and sustained. Where such rights of access or statements ofcontrol did become part of a physical discourse, they are recognizable in the selective recuttingof a ditch, the blocking of accessways or in the construction of boundaries along the edges ofzones of land use.

In all these ways, inhabitation of the land conditioned the location of physicalboundaries. Fundamentally, tenure was rooted in the occupancy of the living. That occupancywas embodied in the places where people lived, the paths they made and followed, and the time-space limits to daily practice. The legitimation for occupation lay with those that had inhabitedthe landscape previously, embodied in the barrows and cairns and articulated through depositsleft in houses and monuments. The concern with occupancy enabled the knowledgeability thatwould have been necessary for a firmer and more localized control over land.

The networks of Bronze Age coaxial boundaries that we can see today dividing up theland on Dartmoor were built within the social and material conditions outlined above. The resulting pattern was never conceived as a plan, even at a broad scale. The construction ofthe stone banks was contingent upon many different conditions and practices. As they were built,and the, in places, unwavering regularity of the pattern was formalized, so further boundariesrepeated, mimicked and fitted in. The construction of boundaries was reflexive, as each furtheraction looked back upon those that had gone before. There is certainly a place in such a processfor what Bourdieu has termed ‘unconscious coordination’ (Bourdieu 1990, 58 ff.), though on agrand scale. Therefore, rather than identifying a dominant discourse through which the reaveswere planned, it is better to think of the interaction between individuals, families andcommunities as a multitude of elements that came about through a variety of different strategies.

To leave it at that would be to suggest that there was nothing consciously intended bythe reaves. The tone of the argument could be taken to mean they were an accident, mere chancebrought about by the concurrence of certain social and material conditions. Or, on the otherhand, by interpreting the changing human-land relations on Dartmoor as a process, I amsuggesting it was somehow inevitable or predetermined. Neither of these is the case. For onething, the fundamental reason that land could be divided in this way lay in the fact that tenurewas sustained and negotiated through occupancy. This made the reaves possible. Yet such agencywas worked out in peculiar, contingent and localized conditions. For all the varied reasons thatseemed necessary at the time, there emerged local traditions of boundary building founded onthe close ties between occupancy and land.

Acknowledgements

The ideas developed in this article formed part of my doctoral thesis, and I must firstacknowledge the support and advice of my supervisor, Jan Harding, the examiners, Professor RichardBradley and Professor Geoff Bailey, and the funding body, the AHRB. In addition, I am grateful to FionaPitt at Plymouth City Museum for helping with access to the archive of the Shaugh Moor Project and the



lithics from Batworthy, Louise Barker for her invaluable assistance during several field visits to Dartmoor,and Mark Edmonds, Rachel Pope, John Roberts and Helen Wickstead for offering comments on drafts ofthe text. An immeasurable debt is owed to Joanna Brück and Helen Wickstead for the many discussionsthat we had together while undertaking fieldwork on the moor. This article was written whilst on a periodof sabbatical leave supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

Department of ArchaeologyUniversity of Sheffield

Northgate HouseWest Street

SheffieldS1 4ET

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Documents

pattern without a plan. Rethinking The Bronze Age Coaxial Field Systems On Dartmoor, South-West England