Qualla: Prehistoric Cornwall

Prehistoric Cornwall: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trevor Harris, CC BY-SA 2.0. A flint handaxe lies in a field at Lower Leha, near St Buryan. Roughly 200,000 years old, it was made by a hand that was not exactly human in our sense - earlier hominins working stone tools as they ranged across a Britain that was sometimes a peninsula of Europe and sometimes an island, depending on which way the ice was going. From that handaxe to the Roman conquest in 43 CE is a span of roughly two thousand and twenty centuries, and almost every one of them left something behind in Cornwall: a microlith, a barrow, a quoit, a stone circle, a hut foundation, a copper ingot, a grain of tin in a Mediterranean cargo wreck. The peninsula is not large. It is the density of evidence that makes it extraordinary - a place where prehistoric Britain stayed visible long after the rest of the island built over its past.

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Image: Trevor Harris | CC BY-SA 2.0

Prehistoric Cornwall: Ice and Returnings

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janet Ramsden, CC BY 2.0. Human presence here is intermittent for most of its length. Palaeolithic finds are scattered and rare - handaxes from Constantine, Coverack, Lanhydrock, the Lower Leha biface dated to perhaps 225,000 BCE. The Last Glacial Maximum pushed people out of Britain entirely. They came b...

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Image: Janet Ramsden | CC BY 2.0

Prehistoric Cornwall: The Stones of the Dead

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Around 4,000 BCE the Neolithic arrived from the European mainland - not as an idea adopted by hunter-gatherers but as people, Early European Farmers descended from populations that took the Mediterranean route from Anatolia. Genetic studies show only minimal mixing with the exist...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Prehistoric Cornwall: Tin and Trade

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Hardy, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Bronze Age, beginning around 2,400 BCE with the Bell Beaker migration that brought yet another major influx of people from the European mainland, gave Cornwall what would define it for the next four thousand years: metal. Cornish tin, alloyed with copper to make bronze, was e...

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Image: Tim Hardy | CC BY-SA 2.0

Prehistoric Cornwall: Hillforts and the Last Centuries

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Andrews, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the Iron Age, around 800 BCE, the climate was colder and wetter. Iron replaced bronze in everyday tools, and the peninsula bristled with defensive sites - rounds (small embanked enclosures), hillforts on the high ground, and cliff castles cut off by ramparts where the land met...

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Image: Chris Andrews | CC BY-SA 2.0

Prehistoric Cornwall: What Cornwall Keeps

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Law, CC BY-SA 2.0. What survives is not random. Cornwall's geology and acidic soils destroy organic remains - bone, hide, wood, plant fibre - and so the picture is dominated by stone. But its peripheral position meant successive cultures often built around earlier monuments rather than over them, a...

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Image: Richard Law | CC BY-SA 2.0