Leskernick Project

If God created the world, Linnaeus was able to claim that he ordered it. A distinction between nature and culture is one of the key building blocks of modernist epistemologies and in various ways has been central to anthropology and archaeology. In cultural ecological approaches nature is regarded as determining or shaping and constraining human action requiring an adaptive cultural response. Alternatively, in structuralist and symbolic positions nature may be regarded as a kind of void or a blank slate on which societies, more or less arbitrarily and contingently, impose meaning, order and coherence. The roots of culture may be regarded as residing in nature, or nature is referred to as a cultural construction. Both these approaches accept the nature/culture distinction. The only difference is the relative weight given to one of the terms in the binary opposition. It has, characteristically, been rather easier to make these kinds of blanket statements than to specify and justify what is actually meant by them. The central paradox is that while nature may be the product of a constructional process it is also a precondition for this process to take place at all. In a curious way it is then both present and absent in culture. In this paper we address the relationship between 'nature' and 'culture' through considering the human modification of clitter (boulder and rock spreads) below hilltop tors in south-west England through reference to an ongoing research project on Leskernick hill, Bodmin Moor. We first set out a series of geomrophological criteria for distinguishing between 'natural' and humanly modified stones. We then move on to consider archaeological evidence for stone movement and/or placement. Finally we attempt to provide an interpretation of modified clitter masses leading us back to challenge the very nature/culture distinction from which we introduce our analysis. Our argument is that whilst we can acknowledge that the distinction between a stone that has been moved by human agency, and one that has not, is important for interpretation this does not necessarily make that stone more, or less, culturally significant. The result is a kind of paradox which can never be resolved: in research and interpretation we both require a distinction between culture and nature and need to abolish it!

The problem

Many archaeological investigations and reconstructions in the uplands of south-west England have concentrated on the recognition of cultural overprinting in the landscape. Implicit in these studies has been the ability to differentiate between culturally affected landscapes and those created by geomorphological processes. However, distinguishing between these may be difficult where the landscape is a hybrid of both or where the evidence is unequivocal. For example, although standing stones are important archaeological phenomena and are easily recognised when they appear in isolation, upright stones in boulder fields may also have a geomorphological explanation. Reconciliation between these is important if the cultural impact on landscapes is to be correctly assessed and fully interpreted. While archaeologists and geomorphologists have attempted to distinguish between such features on a number of occasions, no guidelines exist to inform this debate and it is the intention of this paper to set out some of the criteria by which elements of the landscape may be interpreted. By the very nature of the problem, these cannot be unequivocal.

Clitter

Clitter is a rather evocative Cornish term used to describe extensive boulder and stone spreads which lie downslope of upland tors on the granite hills of the county and the term has been applied to similar deposits in other areas of the world. It is now assumed that they have formed following the large-scale frost-shattering of the tors and the subsequent mass-wasting of the gelifracted material during extensive periglaciation. In the past, however, there has been much debate about the nature of the climatic conditions under which the tors had formed (Linton 1955; 1964; Palmer 1967; Palmer and Radley 1961; Palmer and Nielsen 1962), although the status of the clitter spreads does not appear to have been questioned. The age of the tors and clitter is problematic. Linton's (1955) two-stage hypothesis of tor formation required the initial deep weathering of granite during sub-tropical (probably Tertiary age) conditions, followed by the stripping of the weathered regolith (termed grus or growan) during periglacial phases. In this view the tors are pre-Quaternary in age, although the clitter developed during repeated cold periods during the Quaternary. The alternative hypothesis to explain tor development was championed by Palmer and co-workers and required a single cycle of periglaciation involving the extensive, large-scale frost-shattering of the tors and the removal of the blocks downslope by mass-wasting processes (mainly solifluction). In the absence of saprolite (deeply weathered in situ rock) on Leskernick hill, the one-cycle hypothesis is accepted as the most likely explanation for the development of the tors on the hill.

Apart from minor microgelivation and chemical weathering of the tors and exposed bedrock masses, it is assumed that large-scale modification of the landscape by periglacial processes ceased at the end of the last cold period (the Younger Dryas: 11,000-10,000 B.P.). Since then, Holocene geomorphological processes have not modified the clitter or tors to any great extent, although recent peat development and vegetation growth has obscured some areas of the clitter. The prevailing view among geologists, geomorphologists, and most archaeologists, is that the tors and clitter are the products of nature and amenable to geological description and explanation requiring no reference to culture and meaning.

Today people are fascinated with the dramatic and weirdly weathered shapes and sculpted forms of the tors endlessly reproduced in photographic images of Cornwall. They are part of the cultural construction of locality and place. Since the first human use and encounter with the granite uplands of Cornwall we can plausibly infer that the tors had enormous cultural significance as landmarks, orientation points, places invested with stories, myth and meaning (Tilley 1995; 1996). Nobody made the tors and we can readily acknowledge that they are geological formations which have variously become invested with cultural meaning, an overlay of culture on nature. But what of clitter? Clitter does not carry the same kind of contemporary cultural baggage as the tors. A jumbled pile of stones sometimes resembling the products of a quarry rarely provides a picturesque image. Clitter, unlike tors, never features in postcards or snapshots. Where it does occur this is only by default because it gets in the way of a photograph of the tors. In the conventional wisdom all the clitter masses, like all the tors, are also a product of natural processes. Just as nobody sculpted the tors, nobody piled up and spread out these stones. While people have been interested in the tors because of their inherent aesthetic qualities and dramatic and impressive forms nobody, apart from geologists, has been interested in clitter. Archaeologists have ignored clitter because it has been universally regarded as natural rather than cultural. Clitter, in prehistory, was a useful source of building stone, and nothing more: a natural quarry. Geologists have always regarded clitter as a natural form. That clitter might be humanly transformed, and thus be invested with meaning and value, has never occurred to them previously. It is curious that geologists have described the periglacial weathering processes which form clitter but little work has been done on the cultural modification of clitter spreads.