Jacqui Wood (born 4 January 1950) is a British experimental archaeologist and writer, specialising in the daily life of prehistoric Europeans.
As of 2001, she is director of Saveock Water Archaeology, and also the director and founder of Cornwall Celtic Village, a reconstructed Bronze to Iron Age settlement, at Saveock. [1] [2]
Wood was a member of the National Education Committee of the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) for three years, and secretary of the CBA for the south west region for another three years.[ citation needed ] As of 1995, she was a member of the General Committee of the Cornwall Archaeological Society and consultant to the Eden Project in Cornwall.[ citation needed ]
Wood has published papers in archaeology journals and conferences, and given lectures. She has also appeared on TV programmes about prehistoric dwellings and cooking, including episode 8 of series 11 of Time Team.[ citation needed ] And the Great British Baking Show season 1 episode 3. She has also given demonstrations of Bronze Age technology for English Heritage, researched the grass cloak of Ötzi the Iceman, as well as his shoes (which she believes are actually snowshoes), and made replicas of them for the Bolzano museum devoted to the mummy.[ citation needed ] She also made a replica of the Orkney Hood (Britain's oldest textile) for the Orkney Council, and replicas of various prehistoric dwellings. [3] She has published on food history. [4]
Wood has excavated a site at Saveock Water which she has interpreted as evidence of early modern witchcraft. [5] [6]
She has written two fantasy novels set in prehistory, Cliff Dreamers and Return to the Temple of the Mother. [7]
Bodmin Moor is a granite moorland in north-eastern Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It is 208 square kilometres (80 sq mi) in size, and dates from the Carboniferous period of geological history. It includes Brown Willy, the highest point in Cornwall, and Rough Tor, a slightly lower peak. Many of Cornwall's rivers have their sources here. It has been inhabited since at least the Neolithic era, when early farmers started clearing trees and farming the land. They left their megalithic monuments, hut circles and cairns, and the Bronze Age culture that followed left further cairns, and more stone circles and stone rows. By medieval and modern times, nearly all the forest was gone and livestock rearing predominated.
Cornwall is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is recognised by Cornish and Celtic political groups as one of the Celtic nations, and is the homeland of the Cornish people. The county is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, Devon to the east, and the English Channel to the south. The largest urban area in the county is a conurbation that includes the former mining towns of Redruth and Camborne, and the county town is the city of Truro.
Skara Brae is a stone-built Neolithic settlement, located on the Bay of Skaill in the parish of Sandwick, on the west coast of Mainland, the largest island in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland. It consisted of ten clustered houses, made of flagstones, in earthen dams that provided support for the walls; the houses included stone hearths, beds, and cupboards. A primitive sewer system, with "toilets" and drains in each house, included water used to flush waste into a drain and out to the ocean.
A fogou or fougou is an underground, dry-stone structure found on Iron Age or Romano-British-defended settlement sites in Cornwall. The original purpose of a fogou is uncertain today. Colloquially called vugs, vows, foggos, giant holts, or fuggy holes in various dialects, fogous have similarities with souterrains or earth-houses of northern Europe and particularly Scotland, including Orkney. Fewer than 15 confirmed fogous have been found.
A promontory fort is a defensive structure located above a steep cliff, often only connected to the mainland by a small neck of land, thus using the topography to reduce the ramparts needed.
St Keverne is a civil parish and village on The Lizard in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom.
Souterrain is a name given by archaeologists to a type of underground structure associated mainly with the European Atlantic Iron Age.
Trevellas is a village in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom, situated midway between St Agnes and Perranporth.
Carnewas and Bedruthan Steps is a stretch of coastline located on the north Cornish coast between Padstow and Newquay, in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It is within the parish of St Eval and is part-owned by the National Trust. The trust maintains a shop and café, and the cliff–top views of rocks stretching into the distance along Bedruthan beach make the area a popular attraction for tourists and painters. The property affords walks along the coast path and the steep steps at Bedruthan allow access to a series of rocky beaches at low tide. Signs at the top of the steps down to the beaches warn visitors not to risk swimming in these waters due to heavy rips, fast tides, and submerged rocks.
Mining in Cornwall and Devon, in the southwest of Britain, is thought to have begun in the early-middle Bronze Age with the exploitation of cassiterite. Tin, and later copper, were the most commonly extracted metals. Some tin mining continued long after the mining of other metals had become unprofitable, but ended in the late 20th century. In 2021, it was announced that a new mine was extracting battery-grade lithium carbonate, more than 20 years after the closure of the last South Crofty tin mine in Cornwall in 1998.
Prideaux Castle is a multivallate Iron Age hillfort situated atop a 133 m (435 ft) high conical hill near the southern boundary of the parish of Luxulyan, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It is also sometimes referred to as Prideaux Warren, Prideaux War-Ring, or Prideaux Hillfort. The site is a scheduled monument and so protected from unauthorised works by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979.
Boscawen-Ûn is a Bronze Age stone circle close to St Buryan in Cornwall, UK. It consists of nineteen upright stones in an ellipse with another, leaning, middle stone just south of the centre. There is a west-facing gap in the circle, which may have formed an entrance. The elliptical circle has diameters 24.9 and 21.9 metres. It is located at grid reference SW412274.
Antony Charles Thomas, was a British historian and archaeologist who was Professor of Cornish Studies at Exeter University, and the first Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, from 1971 until his retirement in 1991. He was recognised as a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth with the name Gwas Godhyan in 1953.
Bodrifty is the modern name of an Iron Age village, now in ruins, in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It is 700 yards west of Mulfra Hill in Penwith District, 3 miles northwest of Penzance and 1.5 miles southwest of Porthmeor, on the high ground of the watershed between the Atlantic and the English Channel. Today the settlement is barely more than a farm within the boundary of the village of New Mill, just north of Boskednan.
Stannon stone circle is a stone circle located near St. Breward on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, England.
The Eastern Isles are a group of twelve small uninhabited islands within the Isles of Scilly Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, part of the Scilly Heritage Coast and a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) first designated in 1971 for its flora and fauna. They have a long period of occupation from the Bronze Age with cairns and entrance graves through to Iron Age field systems and a Roman shrine on Nornour. Before the 19th century, the islands were known by their Cornish name, which had also become the name of the largest island in the group after the submergence of the connecting lands.
Cornish promontory forts, commonly known in Cornwall as cliff castles, are coastal equivalents of the hill forts and Cornish "rounds" found on Cornish hilltops and slopes. Similar coastal forts are found on the north–west European seaboard, in Normandy, Brittany and around the coastlines of the British Isles, especially in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Many are known in southwest England, particularly in Cornwall and its neighbouring county, Devon. Two have been identified immediately west of Cornwall, in the Isles of Scilly.
Trevelgue Head, also known as Porth Island, is a headland north-east of Newquay, Cornwall, England, next to Porth at the eastern end of Newquay Bay.
The Cornish Bronze Age is an era of the prehistory of Cornwall that spanned the period from c. 2400 BCE to c. 800 BCE. It was preceded by the Cornish Neolithic, and followed by the Cornish Iron Age. It is characterized by the introduction and widespread use of copper and copper-alloy (bronze) weapons and tools.
The prehistory of Cornwall spans an extensive timeframe from the earliest evidence of archaic human presence in Cornwall, perhaps c. 225,000 years ago, to the Roman conquest of Britain c. 43 CE, encompassing the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age periods. Throughout this era Cornwall underwent significant cultural and environmental changes, evolving from a sparsely-populated hunter-gatherer society reliant on rudimentary stone tools to an agricultural society characterized by developed metallurgical practices, expansive trade networks, and emerging social complexity.