A Bronze Age farm with a
view: pastures new
Woodland was still an important part
of the landscape around Greenhead Moss until 4150
years ago (152 cm), when the oak and hazel woods
became much more open.
Does this mean that the farmers
were rich enough to get more animals or did more
people come into the area?
It is very hard to answer such
detailed questions, especially in a very urban area
like central Scotland, where settlement and industry
have often destroyed archaeological traces of earlier
people’s lives. There may have been more animals
around the Moss, gradually grazing away the woods,
because many plants commonly found in pastoral
grassland became more abundant, including plantain,
docks and nettles.
This
happened during an archaeological period called the
Bronze Age, which lasted from 4500-2600 years ago, or
2500-600 BC. These farmers started to understand and
use metals for the first time, although metal objects
were probably rare to start with. The people lived in
thatched or turf-covered round houses. In some upland
areas amazing Bronze Age landscapes can still be seen
in aerial photographs, with hut circles – the
remains of the round houses – field walls and
cultivation marks.
Find
out more about the Bronze Age in Scotland>
www.scotshistory.org/bronze.asp
Or search at www.scran.ac.uk/
Bronze
Age houses and animals (SE England)>
www.flagfen.freeserve.co.uk/
Oak and hazel grow on good soils, and
their disapperance from around Greenhead Moss
suggests that Bronze Age farmers used the most
fertile ground more intensively than the wetter,
peaty soils near the bog edge, where alder and birch
still grew. Some of the trees may have been chopped
down to provide wood for building houses, stockyards
and tools. Oak provides good timber and young hazel
branches are flexible enough to make woven panels
called wattling. Alder and birch
were left much longer, probably because they grew on
less useful ground.
But the farmers did not just clear
the whole landscape, perhaps because they knew how
important it was to manage plant communities in
different ways to make the most of them and because
they recognised the value of the woodland products
for repairing or replacing houses, fences and tools.
Grazing might have made the Moss more
open, with sedges and heath or bell heather. The bog
vegetation cover could also have been managed using
fire, especially after 3630 years ago (120 cm), when
the charcoal and heather curves in the pollen diagram
often follow the same pattern. Burning heathland to
keep it more nutritious for grazing is common now.
More about fire and
Greenhead Moss
Back
More
