The excavation was all worry, the settlement survey a laugh ...

The excavation was dominated by technological procedures, a rhetoric of recording. In the settlement work there was no obvious starting point or procedure to follow, no standard context sheets. But we rapidly tried to create standardization in recording and got very concerned if things were not being done in the 'right' way. At one stage we even had someone shouting out where we were to stand next and what we were to look at ...

There was this strange thing about temporality. In the excavation people seemed to be doing the same thing all the time, yet they were recording and doing different things every day. In the settlement work there seemed to be continuous variety, yet we were doing pretty much the same thing all the time ...

It is one thing to be told the names, to be initiated into the naming of places and the connections between the prehistoric monuments and the distant tors. It is quite another to begin the process of familiarisation. For us, the process of familiarisation and discovery is entirely different from how it would have been for the prehistoric people of Leskernick. They would have been socialised into ways of knowing that we can only try to recreate from a familiarity with the material culture that they left behind them. Initiation, is rather like what Alfred Gell calls mental mapping, whilst familiarity is closer to what he called physical mastery (1985).

I find the process of map reading and walking very interesting (Gell's practical mastery, though not much of that!). From slight elevations, certain angles, the walls become very clear, but then they swim out of focus again ...

Our attempts to move between the two are embedded in our way of doing things. Our first move was to use the map prepared by the RCHME. This was an amazing map and incredibly detailed. It was produced from aerial photographs and they are able to define the clitter and to show the dense concentrations, thin spreads, large boulders, relatively clear areas etc, as well as the house locations. What the map did not show was the contours of the land (it was only after the first field season that we were provided with an overlay which did mark the contours). It was curiously flattened. There was no way of orienting oneself in terms of slopes or hollows, uphill or downhill. The map nullifies the topography and makes it a non-element in the reading. It becomes something we had to find out for ourselves so that we can relate the house floors and the enclosures to an intimate topography. On the first, and subsequent days, we tried to move from this rather mysterious settlement map that looked so precise and knowledgeable, to a mass (morass) of rocks in the landscape, and tried to locate house floors.

I was convinced that very little was to be gained by looking at the huts, and the tangled jumble of stone on Leskernick hill filled me with trepidation. It was somehow the equivalent of a tropical jungle, with stones substituting for trees, in which the huts looked like stones and the stones like huts, a seamless web of the cultural and the natural. It occurred to me we would be lucky enough to find the huts, let alone do anything with them ...

There was another small problem. The RCHME survey had numbered off the houses and given coordinates and brief descriptions but, unfortunately, the numbers were not on the map. So we had to collate description and coordinate numbers with what was on the ground and on the map. We moved from the description to numbering the map, then to locating and pegging the house floors. The numbered pegs gave us a sense of security: we now knew where the houses were. Although, of course, if there were houses they had missed, we would miss them too! It took us three days to find all the houses.

We had been using a compass to check door orientations and after tea Sue and Helen came up to join us in locating more huts. Having seen us stumbling around they decided the compass might well be employed to help us find the right direction in which to walk. With this method we did find some huts. But in other cases the compass proved a dismal failure with Barbara's tried and proven semi-random stumbling method being far more effective, It was with a great sense of satisfaction that I found a hut before the compass did. The compass seemed to destroy all the spontaneity of the process and represented an intrusion of what was going on in the excavation trench into the world of the settlement survey ...

We wanted to think about the house entrances and what the people of Leskernick would have seen as they moved out of their doors. Where to start? One problem was the general lack of visibility of the stone row and the stone circles and turf-grown distant cairns from the settlement areas. We solved this problem by the use of white marker flags. We built a portable doorway (height: 1.40 m, width: 0.5 m). The width was a rough average for the house doorways. It was Sue's height, more like they were in the Bronze Age we surmised, and she was chosen because she was the shortest person on the project: I was only measured to shoulder height. I'm not so sure about everyone stooping to go through the house doors. With this doorway we framed the landscape. We stood it up at the entrance to each house. We checked the orientation, took photographs, and noted down on record cards, what could be seen as you looked straight out. We had some problems. What, we solemnly asked, constituted 'seeing'? Must we, as Chris at first maintained, only look straight ahead, or might we swivel our eyes? How much 'swivel' was reasonable? Use of a video camera allowed us to capture for posterity an agreed swivelling effect! Most of our time was spent peering through this door frame. We recorded: i) the hut door orientation; ii) all the names of the distant hills and tors that could be seen through the frame; iii) the numbers of all the other houses that would have been visible; iv) whether the stone row, stone circles, and cairns could be seen. In so doing we had to try and take into account that the views from some hut doorways would have been blocked by other huts. Since Mercer's (1970) excavations of houses at the Stannon settlement, north-west Bodmin Moor, had revealed that some may have had external wooden porches, entered from the side, we repeated the recording procedure moving the frame to the left and then to the right of the doorway. Finally we recorded everything that would have been visible standing around outside the door to contrast a 'framed' from an unframed view.

The greatest practical problem in recording was the proximity of other huts blocking the view. We might start recording the view straight out through the hut doorway only to realise that another hut was immediately in front of it. This problem was resolved by people walking over to the other huts, standing on the walls, and becoming huts themselves. 'You go over and be hut 23 and I'll be hut 24'; 'Which hut are you?'; 'O.K. Can you now go over and be hut 27' and so on. Looking out of the door in all these different directions, with people metamorphosing into hut walls, took an incredibly long time. It might take an hour or more to record the views from one hut doorway and everyone was rolling around with laughter at the madness of it all. Weather would create difficulties. If the mist came down the exercise would be impossible. Wind was another problem. You simply couldn't hear what hut someone was supposed to be in if it was any distance away. This had to be resolved by relay signalling ...

In looking through the doorways we got confused and elided two rather different questions. One question was about what could be seen and here the question of eye swivel etc. was germane. The other was about house door orientation. Entrances seem to have been orientated towards certain features like the stone rows or specific tors and hill top cairns. Where orientation is concerned it really doesn't matter whether other huts got in the way of the view or not ...