An expert in prehistoric land use from the University of Plymouth is part of a team working to analyse a discovery that has the potential to shift understanding of Early Bronze Age life on Dartmoor.

Ralph Fyfe, Professor in Geospatial Information, has been liaising with the Dartmoor National Park Authority, archaeologists and teams from across the UK following the discovery of a Bronze Age burial cist at Cut Hill.

A week-long excavation revealed an exceptional cist – a stone-built box used to bury the dead in prehistoric times – containing well-preserved wood and a host of other material yet to be identified.

The team says the discovery has parallels to a cist unearthed at Whitehorse Hill in 2011, with further analysis now taking place at sites across the region.

Professor Fyfe, who was part of the Whitehorse Hill study, has worked for many years to develop means of quantifying past land cover, and identifying how that might be used to impact decisions around present-day conservation and climate change.

As part of the Cut Hill project, he and former postdoctoral researcher Dr Francis Rowney carried out a palaeoecological analysis which helped to reconstruct the environment the cist would have been built in.

He also provided evidence for other types of land use, such as animal grazing, with data showing intense bursts of human activity in specific periods of prehistory that weren’t known about previously.