Key Themes

Linking Landscape and Identity: 

There are dangers in the study of landscape, especially when linked to identity. Many features in the contemporary landscape are ancient, providing connections to ways of life dating to well before historical records. The ancient nature of the landscape can lead to conservative readings of people and place, in which autochthonous populations exist, under perceived threat from newer migrants. Landscapes are however unstable and complex, escaping any simple reading or straightforward significance; a mix of active contemporary practices and elements created long ago, of long-term histories and newer negotiations around these histories. Identities demonstrate similar complexity. We live in communities which are partly imagined, held together by language, discourse and common norms. Communities are also realized in physical settings in which people work to grow food, raise children, fight and travel. Such realization gives communities no ultimate ontological status, but it does mean as analysts we can start from the material circumstances of people’s lives as they worked in fields, drove their animals along trackways and negotiated domestic life in houses, using particular forms of material culture and sets of skills. Archaeologists cannot view such activities directly, but by combining evidence from landscapes and artefacts we can gain a sense of how families were constituted and local communities or regional groups held together. Linking landscape and identity is to combine two complex areas of human life, but through such a linkage we can tackle a series of important questions confronting the humanities and social sciences at present, such as the combined nature of the social and material worlds, the nature of long-term historical change and the generation of varieties of communities over time and across regions. In this project we shall use an enormous new body of data on the history of the English landscape as a series of case studies to allow discussion of these broader issues from an archaeological point of view. The focus on England is certainly not parochial in intent, as we hope to develop methods, theories and modes of presenting our results which can be applicable elsewhere. The extraordinary richness of archaeological evidence for landscape from across Europe invites engagement of this kind.

Balancing Change and Continuity:

A key aim of the project is to elucidate and evaluate the balance between continuity and change, raising questions as to what we mean by either of these terms.

Although domesticated plants and animals arrived in Britain from continental Europe around 4000 BC organized agricultural landscapes with settlements, fields and crop processing did not generally arise until much later, in the middle Bronze Age around 1500 BC. From that period on Britain became a landscape with a particular set of historical logics creating both continuity and change. In many ways change is more evident: in the late Bronze Age in many upland areas long ditches were dug to divide land up into large new blocks; in the early Iron Age hillforts were constructed and some of the earlier field systems were given up; in the late Iron Age fields were re-used and extended, hillforts were abandoned and large lowland centres started; the Roman invasion of AD 43 brought the first real towns, road systems and market exchange, with villas and other estates dominating in some areas of the countryside; Roman withdrawal in AD 410 had a more dramatic effect on Britain than most other areas of the Empire with population collapse, new forms of unenclosed rural settlement and lack of long-distance exchange; this only started to change from roughly AD 600 with more stable enclosed settlements, the growth of towns and estates own by the church or the secular elite; from around AD 900 onwards the Medieval landscape of fixed villages and surrounding fields, common land, estates and towns starts to crystallize out of earlier more fluid arrangements. Such an account emphasizes change. This perception is reinforced by our traditional period boundaries and archaeological/historical specialisms. We need to counter-balance an understanding of change with an appreciation of continuity, best pursued if conventional period boundaries are ignored.

Longer term continuities are empirically evident. In some areas of East Anglia new work is showing that the pattern of late Iron Age road and field division may last right through the Roman period, not only persisting into the Medieval period but perhaps even still present in the landscape today. Equally, Herring (2009) estimates that roughly 60% landscapes of dispersed settlement in the southwest (Devon, Cornwall and Somerset) may date back to the 2^nd millennium BC, and that in the northwest (Lancashire, Cumberland) there may be considerable continuities from the Bronze Age onwards, only disrupted by the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

On a broader scale, drawing on the period-specific surveys, it is possible to recognize four periods when ditched enclosures, trackways and fields were laid out on a large scale: the middle Bronze Age, the late Iron Age (sometimes returning to and extending the Bronze Age systems), the Hadrianic period c. AD 130 (there is still a question as to how extensive this re-organization was) and the middle Anglo-Saxon period around AD 600. Although alignments differ, morphologically these track way and enclosure systems look surprisingly similar from one period to the next (a fact that is so far not recognized, as they have been considered by different period specialists). Explanations for these major investments in the landscape differ. In the Roman period it is thought that demands of taxation and the lure of the markets caused agricultural intensification, and nascent market exchange is also considered probable for the middle Saxon period. The earlier periods lack a single explanation for such widespread changes. One interesting aspect of the English Landscape and Identities project will be to compare the different explanatory frameworks used for the various periods for what appear superficially at least to be morphologically similar phenomena.

Exploring Regionalism:

Recent work carried out variously on the results of developer-funded archaeology and that working back from 19^th century maps into the Anglo-Saxon period and before has identified broad zones of settlement, whereby the southwest and northwest exhibit dispersed settlements amongst areas of field systems and common land which can be contrasted with the more nucleated settlement of the Midlands, south and east, where more isolated settlements are also found. David Yates’s doctoral thesis on Bronze Age field systems in southern England (2007) used the results of developer-funded archaeology to chart the establishment of a settled landscape around 1500 BC and its intensive use until the end of the late Bronze Age (800 BC), with its subsequent partial abandonment. Taylor (2007) pulled together information on some 28,000 Roman sites in England to distinguish between a western and northwestern zone of small dispersed, enclosed settlements and a central and eastern area with nucleated settlement, enclosed field systems and trackways, interspersed with more isolated farmsteads. These have been complemented by a broad, and necessarily general, survey of Britain and Ireland from the start of the Neolithic to the end of the Iron Age by Bradley (2007), also drawing on the ‘Grey Literature’ from developer-funded archaeology to identify hitherto unknown site types,  refine chronologies and highlight key trends. In addition Roberts and Wrathmell (2002) have worked back from the distribution of rural settlement in the first Ordnance Survey maps of the mid-nineteenth century to define three provinces in England. The first of these is based on dispersed settlement in the southwest and northwest; the central province runs from Somerset to the Scottish border east of the Pennines and is characterized by more nucleated settlements with villages and surrounding fields; while the east is the third province again with relatively dispersed settlement in what they term a ‘temperate savannah’ of mixed fields and woods. They trace these provinces back to the ninth century AD and there are intriguing similarities with the pattern of Roman rural settlement identified by Taylor, especially in the dispersed, enclosed farmsteads of the southwest and northwest, with echoes also between the distribution of Roman villas in their central zone of nucleated settlements. Although each study focuses on specific periods there are indications of longer term continuities and broader patterns beneath the equally obvious variability, and these will be investigated further within the present project.