'Emmets Post' excavation blog - weeks 1-2

When Olaf mentioned that he was going to be digging a round barrow in its entirety on the edge of Dartmoor in August, I did everything I could think of in order to secure a place on the crew. This is an incredible and very rare chance to investigate what hopefully may yet turn out to be a relatively undisturbed Bronze Age ring cairn/round barrow c. 2000 BC or so. I have been interested – to an almost manic degree – in British prehistory and specifically megaliths for more than 20 years now. I am a self-confessed stone circle, longbarrow, standing stone, stone row and rock art-loving fanatic and proud of it.

Long before I began a career in archaeology in the late 1990s I travelled to England with fanciful ideas of our prehistoric ancestors and only a handful of sites under my belt to ponder. I had been to Avebury and Stonehenge and the like but, amazing as these sites are, they were covered in throngs of people. I first went to Dartmoor in the summer of 1997 and fell madly in love with every aspect of this lonely and enchanted land, and this love drove me around much of the rest of the British Isles to see more. Being back in Dartmoor for a month has given me the chance to hike around the Moor in the evenings to new and ever more mysterious sites. This place is really a paradise for hikers and lovers of the prehistoric past. This near-obsession back in Canada at the dawn of the new millennium drove me to pursue a degree and career in archaeology. Almost 20 years later I am back here again been given the chance to fully investigate something from the period, people and type of place that turned me into an archaeologist in the first place.

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