Landscapes of Stone: Contextualizing Greenstone Working and Lithics from Clodgy Moor, West Penwith, Cornwall

What is it about?

Between 2004 and 2011 nearly eight thousand prehistoric artefacts from ploughed fields across the Clodgy Moor area of West Penwith. In 2011 a project was carried out by the Historic Environment Service Projects team, Cornwall Council, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Cornwall Archaeological Society to catalogue and digitize all the finds recorded from the fieldwalking.The project demonstrated that some places within the project area were persistent locales which were occupied throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The results were particularly signifi cant because they shed light on the context of the production of greenstone axes, widely exchanged around Britain and across the Irish Sea during the Neolithic, and suggest why, despite large numbers of artefacts, no greenstone ‘axe factory’ site has been found close to the potential sources of the greenstone before.

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Why is it important?

This paper presents the first evidence for stone axe making in south west England