Introduction

The English Landscapes and Identities project will look at the long-term history of the English landscape from 1500 BC to AD 1086 combining evidence on landscape features, such as track-ways, fields and settlements, with the distribution of metalwork. The project looks at a crucial period of English landscape history from the start of the settled agricultural landscape in the middle Bronze Age to the date of the Domesday Book and the point at which the developing Medieval landscape comes into clear focus, in a world which was directly ancestral to that of modernity. The project will combine a mass of digital data from English Heritage’s National Mapping project, local Historic Environment Records and the Grey Literature with that on artefacts held in the Portable Antiquities Scheme and other artefact databases, such as the Celtic Coin Index. Not only will we analyse a mass of data on a scale not attempted previously, but we will also develop a theoretical framework for analyzing landscape and artefactual change over the long term as it pertains to issues of identity, community and ontology. Working from the Bronze Age to the early Medieval period reveals great evidence of change, but also surprising continuity in terms of land divisions and forms of settlement; what is less clear is whether this is echoed in the places and types of artefact deposition. People in the past built communities, which included humans and materials, but also various spiritual forces. Material things, including landscape features, channeled and influenced human relations, as did the need for reciprocal relations with spiritual forces, as evidenced by regular deposits of metalwork. This is a five-year project running starting in October 2011 and funded by the European Research Council.

Overall, key aims include: to create a digital map of settlements and landscapes across England from 1500 BC to AD 1086 to identify broad regional patterns and their stability through time; to pursue a series of more detailed case studies which overlay distributions of artefacts on contemporary landscape features; to create and present this mass of information digitally through the web to make it accessible to other researchers and interested parties. Key questions are: how to understand the forms of field systems, settlements and track ways in terms of human action and shared commitments; how to balance continuity and change, but also how various spatial scales of community interacted; how to understand changing social ontologies from the rural Bronze Age world into the partially nucleated communities of the Iron Age, the imposition of a foreign state power and its effects on the rural landscape in the Roman period, its subsequent withdrawal and collapse from which developed the new organizations of the Medieval state.

The main outcomes of the project will be a website and a monograph, together with individual articles. The website will make the data available for further analysis by all, opening up the data in a manner never before possible and allowing for an infinite number of broader and local analyses. We are developing a search tool based on the Semantic Web that will link our project website with existing on-line repositories, ensuring that HER data can be accessed and used more widely. This search tool, together with selected results from the project, will be made available via the web and we will engage in discussions with HERs and English Heritage about the best ways in which this can be done. Information will start to go live on the website (‘Portal to the Past’) from 2014, so that we can elicit comment and feedback, with the site becoming fully functional in 2016.

The English Landscapes project is a uniquely ambitious attempt to understand the social and material forces animating a series of pre-modern societies as they worked themselves out on the extended form of landscapes and the condensed relations contained in artefacts. The project is not purely empirical and will develop theory concerning the relations between people and the material world.

We very much hope that this project will be a cooperative one. English archaeology is entering a difficult time of cuts and redundancies, but we are hoping to work closely with a whole range of bodies from those in local government through to national organisations and academic institutions. The result, we hope, will produce a new reading and understanding of the English landscape, but also a novel set of linkages within professional archaeology and beyond.