The Drowning of a Cornish Prehistoric Landscape: Tradition, Deposition and Social Responses to Sea Level Rise

By Oxbow Books

Between 2018 and 2019, Cornwall Archaeological Unit undertook two projects at Mount’s Bay, Penwith. The first involved the excavation of a Bronze Age barrow and the second, environmental augur core sampling in Marazion Marsh. Both sites lie within an area of coastal hinterland, which has been subject to incursions by rising sea levels. Since the Mesolithic, an area of approximately 1 kilometer in extent between the current shoreline and St Michael’s Mount has been lost to gradually rising sea levels. With current climate change, this process is likely to occur at an increasing rate. Given their proximity, the opportunity was taken to draw the results from the two projects together along with all available existing environmental data from the area.

For the first time, the results from all previous palaeoenvironmental projects in the Mount’s Bay area have been brought together. Evidence for coastal change and sea level rise is discussed and a model for the drowning landscape presented. In addition to modeling the loss of land and describing the environment over time, social responses including the wider context of the Bronze Age barrow and later Bronze Age metalwork deposition in the Mount’s Bay environs are considered. The effects of the gradual loss of land are discussed in terms of how change is perceived, its effects on community resilience, and the construction of social memory and narratives of place.

The volume presents the potential for nationally significant environmental data to survive, which demonstrates the long-term effects of climate change and rising sea levels, and peoples’ responses to these over time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781789259247

Book preview

SECTION 1:

BACKGROUND

1

Dealing with a drowned landscape

Andy M. Jones

In 2018 and 2019 Cornwall Archaeological Unit undertook two significant archaeological projects in the Mount’s Bay area of West Penwith, on the low-lying strip of land between Marazion in the east and Penzance at the western end of the bay, which forms the interface between the sea and the rising ground behind to the north (Figs 1.1 & 1.2). The first, at the Heliport site, was what appeared initially to be a small and fairly ‘scrappy’ barrow on the edge of the former wetlands, but which has subsequently been shown to be an intriguing monument with an unexpectedly long history of use, adjacent to an area with a well-preserved peat sequence, which was also investigated as part of the project.

Figure 1.1: Map showing land lost from around Cornwall and Isles of since c. 12,000 BP and areas of submerged forest

The second site differed in that there was no monument to excavate and, aside from a small-scale watching brief, the project was instead largely an environmental recording exercise within Marazion Marsh, an important wetland reserve for breeding and over-wintering birds at the eastern end of Mount’s Bay. Its special, perhaps in the past ‘magically’ perceived character, is potentially indicated by the very large number of Roman coins which had been deposited into it (Penhallurick 2009, 150). It too proved to contain a ‘treasure trove’ of information relating to long-term changes to the environment over several millennia, something that is, in an age of global warming, just as important a concern to modern communities as to those who inhabited the area in prehistory.

The results from two significant projects located in close proximity provided the opportunity to include all the analyses undertaken on the materials from the barrow and the auger sampling from Marazion Marsh and draw them together with the previous work undertaken in West Cornwall, so that they have a much wider significance than a typical site report. Extended works on the archaeology of south-west Britain and elsewhere tend to follow two trends. The first type of work is often focused on the more remote upland areas such as Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, Exmoor or West Penwith, where a combination of extensive areas of upstanding archaeological monuments and dramatic topographical features can often, with the aid of the palaeo-environmental record, be linked together to form narratives of long-term human engagement with the landscape (eg, Johnson & Rose 1994; Riley & Wilson-North 2001; Newman 2011; Herring et al. 2016). Often projects which take place in these remote landscapes are focused on monuments or ‘palimpsest’ settlement patterns and are for the most part quantitative and typo-chronological in scope; although some scholars have attempted to move beyond sites and embed social relations into their narratives (eg, Strong 1997; Bender et al. 2007; Jones 2016a; Tilley 2017).

The second, and most frequent, form of extended archaeological reporting is that which results from larger-scale development of buried archaeological sites. Often it is the case that little is known about these sites prior to excavation and the resulting publication is typically a form of mitigation, with the focus being the production of an accurate record of what has been removed (eg, Fitzpatrick et al. 1999; Mudd & Joyce 2014). This type of technical reporting is the most frequent for archaeological sites, of which there are incredibly large numbers. Ben Roberts (2013, 531), for example, has noted that in the period between 1990 and 2007 there had been 19,000 fieldwork evaluations in Britain and Ireland, 20 per cent of which had produced evidence for prehistoric activity. It can be the case that the remit of these types of project precludes the possibility of extended lengthy syntheses which consider the wider context of the project. Increasingly, supporting technical additional data are uploaded on to online repositories such as ADS, so that they can be accessed later for inclusion within research-focused projects. Indeed, several ‘big picture’ projects and publications have drawn on and made good use of the data that are now more widely accessible (eg, Bradley 2007; Bradley et al. 2016a; Brück 2019; Bland et al. 2020; Webley et al. 2020; Booth et al. 2021; Cooper et al. 2021). A danger remains, however, that detailed localised narratives associated with place, areas or kinship connections (cf. Johnston 2020) can be lost in individual technical site reports, or only appear as a findspot in a bigger grand narrative (eg, Barclay & Brophy 2021), with what have been termed by Cipolla et al. (2021) ‘Royal Science Ambitions’.

To a certain extent this trend can be seen in our study area, where previous archaeological recording and sampling has tended to go into ‘grey literature’ or conversely appear as individual site reports in more specialist focus journals (eg, Healy 1996a; Camidge & Randall 2009; Timpany 2009; Fyfe et al. 2017; Sharpe 2017; Southwest Archaeology, forthcoming). Given that this volume developed as a result of two separate archaeological investigations, which are not in the first instance obviously associated with an extensive upstanding archaeological landscape, and were undertaken as ‘developer-led’ projects, they too could well have ended up within the second category of archaeological reporting, that is to say as a ‘preservation by record’ account.

Arguably, however, this volume marks something of a departure as it moves beyond the individual sites and is instead concerned with placing the results into the context of their longue durée landscape setting, a topographically defined strip of land approximately 4.5 km long between the settlements of Penzance and Marazion, which is for the most part under 1 km wide and up to just 10 m Ordnance Datum above sea-level. Consideration, however, is also given to the ‘lost land’ which in the Mesolithic extended for a further kilometre to the south and connected St Michael’s Mount to the mainland. Likewise, the relationships with the higher ground to the north and West Penwith are also discussed as the lowland strip is recognised as being part of a wider landscape and indeed seascape. Today, the southern extent of the project area is demarcated by the ever-encroaching sea and the northern side by the start of a notable rise in the topography. Aside from the eastern and western ends which are marked by distinctive topographical features (see below), the area appears to be more or less ‘featureless’. Consequently, despite the acknowledgement of the significance of certain aspects of the archaeology it has never been considered in its wider context, that is to say, either as an important, potentially ambiguous, transitional zone between and linking the high ground with the open sea, or a place which prior to submergence, was a diverse landscape containing myriad resources.

Perhaps very surprisingly, the long palaeo-environmental record for this area has never been synthesised before and the prehistoric sites and findspots within the area have tended to be dealt with as separate entities, yet consideration of both aspects is essential for understanding changes and impacts on the occupation of the area. Changes to patterns of inhabitancy caused by rising sea-levels will have occurred before and during the Bronze Age (and continue to do so), especially in coastal areas of the south-west region (eg, Bell 2013, 319; Fig. 1.1); although to date only the Isles of Scilly have had very detailed analytical work undertaken; that work showed that large areas were becoming submerged during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods (Charman et al. 2016, 206–211; Barnett et al. 2020). Those archaeological discussions of the effects of loss of land on human communities that have been written have tended to be of an androcentric, economic nature, with changing patterns of wetland occupation and land management being focused on.

The loss of land, however, does not only have detrimental economic outcomes. Changes also affect the nature of social relations, not only between humans but also between human and non-human inhabitants (eg, Kohn 2013; Cipolla et al. 2021; van den Berg 2021). As Neil Price (2020, 31–32) has pointed out in relation to the Viking world, people believed that they shared their world with ‘others’ who were not human and who did not have to be seen to be considered real. Comparable beliefs are likely to have existed in later prehistory too and we should not expect our definitions of where boundaries between the animate and the inanimate and the human and non-human lay to be the same as those in the past. The slow death of trees and the incremental submergence of substantial tracts of land would not only have impacted on many of those who lived in the area by changing access to resources but would also have altered human relationships, and the often overlooked non-human relationships (as discussed, for example, by Shaw 2016), by severing connections with place and the communities of plants and animals that occupied them. The sea is often a source for stories and myths of lost lands and settlements (eg, Marsden 2019) and the dark skeletal branches and stumps of the trees in submerged forests would have fed stories and social remembrances of lost places (eg, Leary 2015).

The social memory of rising waters and preserved tree stumps around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly could even have given rise to the well-known legends about lost lands such as Lyonesse (Reid 1913, 100; Crawford 1927; Hencken 1932, 34). This publication therefore draws several elements together to consider the drowning landscape of Mount’s Bay in prehistory from both social and economic perspectives. Indeed, the title of the volume takes its inspiration from Charles Thomas’s (1985) much admired work, Exploration of a drowned landscape: Archaeology and History of the Isles of Scilly. That work, too, was both a serious and reflective volume concerned with telling the long-term story of another submerged landscape.

Figure 1.2: Location map showing the project area and the investigated sites with prehistoric and Roman period sites as identified in the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Historic Environment Record

Location, archaeological setting and research questions: the Mount’s Bay area

The Mount’s Bay area lies at the western end of Cornwall (Figs 1.2 & 1.3). The eastern end of the bay is dominated by the St Michael’s Mount, an iconic topographical feature, situated approximately 0.5 km beyond the current limit of dryland. Despite rising to a height of only 95 m OD, the low-lying land to the north means that it is visible both from the sea and from the land and its distinctive profile has caught the attention of artists (see Satchell et al. 2015, 422–439) and writers, with Harris Stone describing it as a ‘weirdly pyramidical, and uneven in outline… a steep mass of rock which rises straight up from the sea’ (Harris Stone 1912, 222). As such it can be regarded as a ‘persistent place’ used by people who were navigating across the sea and over the land from prehistory onwards (eg, O’Brien 2021).

For most of the time the Mount is an island surrounded by water, apart from around eight hours each day at low tide when it is approachable from land by walking along the causeway (Herring 1993, 26). Journeys on foot to the Mount from dryland are not, today at least, part of the awe inspiring, or personhood-changing travels such as those made in prehistory may have been (eg, Helms 1988; Needham 2000). Nor indeed, partly thanks to the causeway, are they as exciting or revelatory as those to remote coastal places can still sometimes be (eg, Macfarlane 2019). The physical separation and potential for getting ‘cut off’ or at least getting one’s feet wet can still, however, sometimes engender a distinct feeling of wariness. This is especially true out of season on a stormy day visit to or from the Mount (without the aid of a tide timetable) on foot when the tide is rising.

Figure 1.3: Lidar image showing the investigated sites and the low strip of land forming the coastal hinterland. Note how the modern transport system, roads and rail bisect the low ground

By contrast, the western end of Mount’s Bay is now largely covered by the urban settlements of Penzance and Newlyn, although in later prehistory the western end of the Bay would have been dominated by the ramparts associated with the hillfort at Lescudjack (Kirkham, forthcoming) which, despite being surrounded by more recent urban development, still retains extensive views over the bay and St Michael’s Mount (Fig. 1.4). The mature Monterey pines emerging from its summit ensure that the hillfort site still forms a prominent landmark on the skyline.

The land between St Michael’s Mount and Lescudjack is largely composed of a long sandy shore behind which is lower-lying ground under 10 m OD. Much of the area – and beyond to the south – would, for much of prehistory, have been a mosaic of wet woodland and open spaces, a marshy liminal zone before sea-level rise led to the increasing submergence of areas, in what is now Mount’s Bay, and the establishment of a beach and harder seashore during the later prehistoric period. A great deal of the land behind the beach became enclosed farmland, including the site of the excavated barrow (see Chapter 2). Today, however, most of this low expanse has been built over, and there have been significant alterations to the character of the coastal strip since the earlier 19th century, let alone since prehistory. In the 19th century a railway was built upon a causeway which runs parallel with the coast and there is widespread evidence for former extractive industries for brick clay, as well as mining. In the 20th century landfill, housing, supermarkets, industrial units, roads, carparks and tourism-related infrastructure, have covered much of the low-lying ground, leaving few unaltered ‘natural’ spaces. To these pressures we must of course also remember the effects of climate change (cf. Phillips 2007) and continuing sea-level change – the two being partly related – and the resulting coastal erosion and submergence.

Most people pass quickly through this area on a dual carriageway or on board a train, probably without giving what lies beneath their feet much thought. The area is, as the naturalist Roger Deakin noted, a gateway zone (2000, 140), and if archaeology is thought about at all, it will almost certainly be the iconic sites such as Lanyon Quoit, Men-an-Tol or the Merry Maidens stone circle to the west that come to mind. Marazion Marsh itself, however, towards the eastern end of the bay, still retains a flavour of the natural wetland environment which would have been more widespread in prehistory. Indeed, even today, walking amongst the towering reeds interspersed by pools of water can still give a sense of separateness from both the higher ground to the north and sea that lies to the south.

The archaeological background

Despite this ‘coastal squeeze’ and a lack of upstanding prehistoric monuments found in other parts of West Penwith or the along the Cornish coastline (eg, Herring 2016a; Nowakowski 2016a; Jones 2009–10), the littoral around Mount’s Bay does nonetheless contain a number of significant archaeological findspots, most notably of Bronze Age metalwork (Knight 2022; Chapter 12) (Fig. 1.1). The zone also possesses an exceptionally rich palaeo-environmental record, with peat deposits stretching back into the Mesolithic and preserved trees from submerged prehistoric forests beneath the sands, the stumps of which sometimes emerge after storms and survive as proxies for land and wet, alder-dominated woodlands which included birch, oak, hazel and willow, lost to the gradual rising sea-levels in prehistory (Harkness & Wilson 1979; Reid 1913, 100–102; de Beer 1960; French 1999) (Fig. 1.5). This exceptional environmental record from the area will form the background for much of the synthesis given in the succeeding chapters (Chapters 6, 9, 10, 11 and 14).

West Penwith (and probably also Mount’s Bay) are, of course, also thought to be amongst the few places in Britain to be identifiable from pre–Roman Conquest classical sources, with the Mount sometimes being suggested by several scholars to be Ictis, a place of pre-Conquest exchange (eg, Oldfather 1933; de Beer 1960; Cunliffe 2001, 305), thereby offering a tantalising glimpse of otherwise undocumented communities in the far west of Britain. Indeed, this brief record has inspired archaeological writers to include Mount’s Bay on maps and diagrams of prehistoric trade routes (eg, Hencken 1932; Fox 1938; Bowen 1972), long before the first properly recorded prehistoric metalwork finds were made in the 1990s and 2000s (Herring 2000; Jones & Quinnell 2011a).

However, despite the long-held association with prehistoric trade routes, prior to the archaeological recording in 2018 and 2019 as part of the projects described here, comparatively few archaeological interventions had been undertaken within the coastal strip. As a consequence findspots, other than those of metalwork (Chapter 12) and prehistoric sites remain scarce. A spotted slate axe-hammer was recorded from Eastern Green (Stone & Wallis 1951) and a standing stone has been suggested to have existed on the eastern side of Marazion Marsh as the Tithe Award records the location as ‘Longstone Meadows Tenement’. No actual standing stone, however, has been recorded and the suggested location of the stone on the eastern side of the marsh (Fig. 1.2) is perhaps unlikely. It is also unfortunate that much of the development within this zone had taken place in an era which predated requirements for archaeological monitoring, and the records from the project area consist of reports of antiquarian finds made over a century ago (eg, Borlase 1769; Edmonds 1849; Evans 1881), or else have been derived from palaeo-environmental research that was not specifically designed to answer archaeological questions (eg, Healy 1996a).

The land adjacent to the coastal strip has, however, fared rather better. In particular, archaeological recording in the 1990s on St Michael’s Mount has shed more light on its prehistoric character, confirming it as a significant place since at least the 1st millennium BC (eg, Herring 2000). Moreover, metal detecting and chance discoveries have led to major artefactual discoveries being made in the area, most notably by the recovery of an important Late Bronze Age metalwork hoard on St Michael’s Mount (Knight 2022; Knight et al. 2015) (Fig. 1.6). These finds have very significantly altered our understanding of later prehistoric activity and long-distance contacts, and as such they will be discussed in subsequent chapters (Chapters 12 and 14). These more recent discoveries remind us that the people who inhabited the area during the later Bronze Age did not dwell in isolation from the wider world and were, in fact, well connected with communities in Continental Europe, and linked to extensive networks by the sea (eg, Lehoërff & Talon 2017). At least intermittent connections and social relations between West Penwith and far-flung communities may well have run deep, as evidenced by successive shared cultural features, including Early Neolithic portal dolmens, with their Irish Sea comparanda (Kytmannow 2008; Jones 2020a); Early Bronze Age entrance graves, with their connections both to south-east Ireland and to the Channel Islands (Kirkham 2011; Jones 2016a); and Atlantic rock art in the form of cupmarks (Jones & Kirkham 2013; Valdez-Tullett 2019; Bradley 2020, 18–27). There are marked concentrations of all three cultural features in West Penwith.

Artefacts and materials in particular have also had a long history of being circulated from west Cornwall, including the distinctive axeheads made from the hard and distinctively coloured metagabbros or ‘greenstones’ in the Neolithic, followed by tin and later copper, and also the gold that was exported to Ireland and used to make Early Bronze Age lunulae and other objects (eg, Clough & Cummins 1988; Mattingly et al. 2009; Ehser et al. 2011; Standish et al. 2015; Jones et al. 2017; Carey et al. 2022; Krause et al. 2021; Berger et al. 2022). The exchange of these items may have drawn visitors to special or visually striking places such as Mount’s Bay and led to the creation of long-term social relations (eg, Bradley et al. 2016a; Jones, forthcoming a). These relations were also sometimes linked to shared practices, notably the hoarding and selective deposition of metalwork which is widely found in the western European Bronze Age (eg, Bradley 1990; Bradley et al. 2018; Fontijn 2019; Webley et al. 2020). During the later Bronze Age West Penwith was part of an extensive western European network of contacts – the ‘Atlantic Late Bronze Age – with shared traditions, including architectural forms such as roundhouses and circular enclosures (Bradley et al. 2016a, 213–266), and it is noteworthy that West Penwith has a significant concentration of later Bronze Age metalwork hoards, with one of the notable foci for metalwork deposition being the Mount’s Bay area (eg, Pearce 1983). Given its significance, the character of depositional practices in the Mount’s Bay area will form the subject for Chapter 12. Indeed, the area was already part of a cross-Channel ‘maritory’ during the Early Bronze Age (Needham 2009; Sheridan & Shortland 2004; Nicolas 2016). Kinship and social relations in the Mount’s Bay area may therefore have been vibrant, outward looking and maritime, as much as land based, and the nature of connections, local and distant, human and non-human will be explored in subsequent chapters.

The objectives and questions

The recovery of very significant amounts of new palaeo-environmental information together with the excavation of an unusual later Bronze Age monument, itself associated with Late Bronze Age metalwork, constitutes a great advancement in knowledge of the later prehistoric activity and change in Mount’s Bay and the wider West Penwith landscape. The results also, however, have raised a several key questions about the nature of inhabiting a landscape in a time of change, which included the following:

•What was the effect of climate change, how much sea-level and coastal change was there in prehistory and how quickly did the change occur?

•How did changes to the land and sea-level rise influence human activity and inhabitation of the landscape; and how did people in a changing world respond to those changes?

•Can the loss of land, and the changing character of the local topography, be associated with the increase of metalwork/ hoard deposition which is evident in the later Bronze Age?

•What was the narrative behind the barrow? Why was it constructed where it was? And why was it reused in the Late Bronze Age, at a time when barrow construction was a rare event?

•What evidence is there for the social and economic effect of the landscape drowning in the Bronze Age, how might social relations have been affected by shifting landscapes and patterns of contact?

•How did the loss of landscape shape subsequent generations’ perceptions of their past? Did the loss of land lead to the creations of myths and stories?

Figure 1.4: View through the trees from Lescudjack hillfort across Mount’s Bay towards St Michael’s Mount

Figure 1.5: A prehistoric tree stump, part of the submerged forest at Chyandour, (re)emerging from beneath the sands after the storms of 2014

Figure 1.6: The St Michael’s Mount hoard site being recorded. (Photograph: Jim Parry)

These questions will be addressed in the following chapters to build a narrative that uses archaeological and environmental data to consider how people lived and adapted to change as the sensory world around them altered, and how the landscape gradually shifted from being a diverse mosaic of wet woodland and open areas, to the one we know today featuring marsh, sand and open sea. The narrative also considers how these changes might have affected both local and more distant social relations.

The results of the project also have much wider significance, given the current sea-level rise which involves more regular tidal surges, storm damage and which threatens and destroys coastal archaeological sites. Indeed, in Cornwall excavations have already been carried out after storm damage has occurred to such sites (Jones 2009–10; Jones & Mikulski 2015); this work echoes that of the CHERISH Project in Wales and Ireland (http://cherishproject. eu/en/), and the SCAPE project in Scotland (https://scapetrust.org/), which have been monitoring and documenting changes to eroding archaeological sites. In Wales and Scotland there are now historic environment climate change subgroups (Barker 2020; https://www.historicenvironment.scot/about-us/what-we-do/climate-change/). These interventions are likely to become much more frequent and widespread, and archaeological and heritage sites across Britain, Europe and beyond are already suffering damage, with many more under threat (eg, van Heeringen & Theunissen 2007; Wickham-Jones 2015; 2018; Vousdoukas et al. 2022).

Volume structure

This, the resulting monograph, is divided into four parts with specialist appendices at the end. The chapters have been arranged by theme, so that they can be read sequentially, with the fourth interpretative section picking up and expanding upon on the key findings of the volume given at the end of the monograph. This section, the first, outlines the background to the archaeological projects at the Penzance barrow and Marazion Marsh and their context, and sets the out the scope of the succeeding chapters, and conventions used.

The second section is concerned with the excavations at the Penzance Heliport barrow. The opening chapter describes the methods and results from the 2018 excavations and the environmental coring at the barrow site (Chapter 2). This is followed by specialist reporting on the analysis of the artefactual assemblage, including the ceramics, worked stone, flint and the copper alloy ingot (Chapters 3, 4, and 5). The artefactual chapters are followed by the environmental analysis of the samples taken on and beyond the barrow, including pollen, diatoms, waterlogged plant remains, and charred plant remains (Chapter 6). The section concludes with the radiocarbon determinations from the barrow (Chapter 7).

The third section presents the results from the augur core sampling at Marazion Marsh in 2019. A brief background to the project and sampling methodology is given (Chapter 8) and this is followed by the specialist analyses of the environmental samples, including pollen, plant macrofossils and marine shells from the core and the radiocarbon dating obtained on the samples (Chapter 9). The section concludes with a geoarchaeological overview of the Marazion Marsh area (Chapter 10).

The fourth, synthetic, section draws together the results from the analyses and places them within a much wider context than would be the case with a standard excavation report of a developer-funded project. This section has six principal areas of focus, which are linked to the original questions raised by the projects. The first (Chapter 11) places the results from both the Heliport and Marazion Marsh projects within their wider context by providing a model of the drowning Mount’s Bay landscape from the Upper Palaeolithic through to the Late Neolithic. The second chapter in this section (Chapter 12) considers the significant evidence for the selective deposition of metalwork from the Middle Bronze Age to the Roman period in the Mount’s Bay area. A particular focus lies in the Late Bronze Age when there was a significant increase in the number of sites associated with metalwork, especially at the eastern end of the bay. The third (Chapter 13), is concerned with the interpretation of the nature and character of activity in the area of the Penzance Heliport barrow and its wider significance. This chapter is focused upon later prehistoric occupation but is especially concerned with the Bronze Age and the excavated round barrow when significant changes to the surrounding landscape were occurring. It places the results from the excavation into their broader regional context.

The fifth part of this section (Chapter 14) provides an overview of the major themes that have arisen from the preceding chapters, including the changing nature of the environment and how this could have affected communities over time, and the opportunity is taken to synthesise the results into the wider west Cornish setting and beyond. It reviews the results from both the current projects and previous research to consider the effects of sea-level and landscape change over several millennia, especially during the later Bronze Age, where there are two broadly contemporary trends, a considerable increase in obvious human activity in the area and the formation of a hard shoreline. Shifting patterns of dwelling, settlement, kinship connections, distant connections, community resilience, ceremonial activity, and the effects of gradual loss of land in the area of Mount’s Bay over time to stimulate myth and story are considered. Suggestions for avenues for further research and consideration of lives lived at a time of change and rising, numinous waters are also made. This latter reflection is important for considering how people in the past may have perceived and reacted to the loss of their land. It is also a timely reminder that in the 21st century this is an ongoing and increasing experience for coastal communities around the globe who are threatened and being displaced by the rising waves of what has been termed the Anthropocene era (cf. Braje 2016; Macfarlane 2019, 74–75).

This section ends with a short concluding ‘last word’ that looks beyond archaeological interpretations of change. Artists have of course played an important part in documenting the coastline of Britain (eg, Satchell et al. 2015), in terms of creating a record of what has been lost archaeologically and of the communities who have lived by the sea. It is therefore fitting that the last part of this section, Chapter 15, presents a contribution from the EXPERIENCE project, an arts project which has been making installations, involving different communities and gathering their perceptions of the submerged forest. This section brings the lived experiences of Mount’s Bay into the present, and is an important reminder that archaeology represents one narrative amongst many in any perception of landscapes, and these will differ according to social group, dwelling perspective, gender and individual experience (cf. Bender & Winer 2001; Edmonds 2004, 29–30; Koskinen-Koivisto & Seitsonen 2019; Seitsonen 2021). Places, landscapes and our perceptions of them are anything but static; they are multifaceted and myths are constantly in the making.

Finally, at the end of the volume, there are two specialist appendices: the first relates to the conservation of the copper alloy ingot and the second comprises the borehole logs and accompanying photographs from the sample cores.

SECTION 2:

EXCAVATIONS AT THE PENZANCE HELIPORT BARROW

2

Penzance Heliport barrow: auger survey and excavation 2018

Andy M. Jones and Anna Lawson-Jones with Michael J. Allen

In 2018 the Cornwall Archaeological Unit was commissioned by Penzance Heliport Limited to undertake a programme of archaeological recording of what appeared to be a ring ditch associated with a relatively small barrow, which was just about discernible as a low rise in a field on the eastern side of Penzance (Fig. 2.1). The 2018 archaeological investigations followed two previous stages of recording. A geophysical survey (AOC 2017) had identified the barrow site and in 2017 an evaluation opened up the area of the barrow and 14 further trenches across the field (Southwest Archaeology 2018) (Fig. 2.2). The evaluation trenching, which involved stripping of the site and the almost total excavation of features in quadrant 4 (the eastern quadrant), confirmed that the site was Bronze Age in date and comprised an oval ring ditch measuring approximately 12 m by 15 m, the north-east portion of which had been subject a great deal of later disturbance by large pits and post-medieval field boundaries. Aside from a few abraded sherds of pottery no prehistoric artefacts or features were identified beyond the barrow area, although deposits of peat were found beneath layers of ‘Made Ground’ (ibid.).

In 2018 the full programme of archaeological mitigation commenced with the excavation of the barrow and environmental sampling. The environmental recording involved coring to investigate the geoarchaeological potential beyond the barrow and the excavation of the barrow itself. In total 19 profiles were recorded, enabling the deposits within the site to be modelled and profiled. A humose layer was recorded in three locations, and palaeo-environmental subsamples obtained from three. The humose layer seemed better preserved than previously recorded. Consequently, the potential existed for pollen (land-use and vegetation data) and diatoms (reflecting the nature of the local watery environment – for example, depth, flow, salinity) to be preserved, and to define local land-use history in which to set the barrow. As the upper portion of the dated and analysed sediment profile is contemporary