English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086 0198870620, 9780198870623

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English Landscapes and Identities

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English Landscapes and Identities Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086 EngLaId Team A N W E N C O O P E R , M I R A N DA C R E S W E L L , V IC T O R IA D O N N E L LY, T Y L E R F R A N C O N I , R O G E R G LY D E , C H R I S G O SD E N , C H R I S G R E E N , Z E NA KA M A SH , S A R A H M A L L E T, L AU R A M O R L EY, DA N I E L S TA N SB I E , A N D L E T T Y T E N HA R K E L

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel 2021 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947354 ISBN 978–0–19–887062–3 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface and Acknowledgements The English Landscapes and Identities project (known hereafter by its acronym EngLaId) was a five-year project which ran between 1st August 2011 and 31st July 2016. It was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (269797) awarded to Chris Gosden and we are very happy to acknowledge the support of the European Research Council. The researchers on the project were Chris Gosden (principal applicant), Anwen Cooper (prehistory), Miranda Creswell (artist), Tyler Franconi (Roman period), Chris Green (GIS), Letty ten Harkel (early medi­ eval), Zena Kamash (Roman period), and Laura Morley (research coordination). The project looked 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 examined a crucial period of English landscape history from the start of the settled agricultural landscape to the medieval world, which was directly ancestral to that of modernity. Working from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period revealed great evidence of change, but also surprising continuity in terms of land divisions and forms of settlement. We were also interested in how this patterning relates to the types of artefacts deposited and the places in which they were deposited over this period. The project was not purely empirical and attempted to develop theory concerning the relations between people and the material world. The project attempted to synthesise all the major available data sets from English archaeology within a digital environment, making this a ‘Big Data’ project, eventually creating a database of over 900,000 items. Three doctoral students joined the project in October 2012. Victoria Donnelly examined the ‘grey literature’ from England since 1990 and through this the practices of archaeology after PPG 16. Sarah Mallet gathered together and analysed the major sets of isotopic data from humans, animals, and plants across England for the EngLaId periods. Daniel Stansbie tackled the topic of food and attempted to pull together evidence from pottery, animal bones, and plant remains for the Thames Valley and Kent for the EngLaId periods. Each submitted and defended their theses. Roger Glyde was an important member of the team throughout, carrying out a range of empirical work, as well as commenting on, and contributing to, the written results. We feel that the project has been productive, but it has also been really enjoyable, with the team forming a close group within which people worked and socialized. More information is given on the background to the project, our sources of data, and modes of analysis in Chapters 1–3, together with an outline of this volume. Here we simply provide a broad timetable of the project. As mentioned, the team started work in August 2011, although not everyone was able to join until January 2012 due to prior commitments. Zena Kamash was offered a lectureship in 2014, left the project, and was replaced by Tyler Franconi as the Roman specialist. The data-gathering phase of the project lasted until May 2013 and we were able to properly start analysis after that. The last year of the project was spent writing up. We are grateful to an enormous number of people and we hope we have not missed too many out. The earliest phase of the project gathered data. We are very grateful to numerous people in what was then English Heritage (and now Historic England (EH)) for the provision of data, including Simon Crutchley, Peter Horne, Lindsay Jones, Martin Newman, and

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vi  Preface and Acknowledgements Barney Sloane, as well as Nick Davies, Gill Grayson, Sarah Maclean, David McOmish, Sarah Poppy, and Poppy Starkie. The Portable Antiquity Scheme (PAS) was the main source of data on artefacts and we would like to thank Roger Bland, Michael Lewis, Sam Moorhead, Stephen Moon, Mary Chester-Cadwell, and Dan Pett. Catherine Hardman and Stuart Jeffrey of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) gave us important advice on the relevant archives held by the ADS. Tim Evans (ADS) steered us towards the Excavation Index and provided considerable advice. We also benefitted from advice and information from a number of Finds Liaison Officers, including Frank Basford (Isle of Wight) and Tom Brindle. Ehren Milner at the Archaeological Investigations Project (AIP) was an important source of data and advice. Our main source of data came from local archaeological officers. We would like to thank all Historic Environment Record (HER) officers who provided us with data. These include Christine Addison, Northamptonshire HER; Sarah Botfield, Peterborough HER; Stewart Bryant, Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers (ALGAO); Giles Carey, Shropshire HER; Jo Caruth, Suffolk HER; Rebecca Casa-Hatton, Peterborough HER; Sally Croft, Cambridgeshire HER; Ben Croxford, Kent HER; Phillip de Jersey, States of Guernsey; Lucie Dingwall, Herefordshire HER; Keith Elliott, Northumberland HER; Heather Hamilton, Norfolk HER; Mike Hemblade, North Lincolnshire HER; Richard Hoggett, Suffolk HER; Rebecca Loader, Isle of Wight HER; Fiona Maconald, ALGAO; Colin Pendleton, Suffolk HER; Guy Salkeld, National Trust; Melissa Seddon, Herefordshire HER; Graham Tait, ALGAO; Bryn Tapper, Emma Trevarthen, Jacky Nowakowski, and Andrew Young, Cornwall and Scilly HER; Ben Wallace, ALGAO; Penny Ward, Shropshire HER; Chris Webster, Somerset HER; Liz Williams, Northumberland HER; and Alison Yardy, Norfolk HER. Keith Westcott at exeGesIS SDM Ltd helped develop a query which could extract data from the HBSMR database system used by more than half of HERs. In the middle stages of the project a great number of people gave us advice and shared their knowledge of local archaeology or the situation across the country more broadly. These include Martin Allen, Fitzwilliam Museum; John Baker, Stuart Brookes for medieval data and discussions; Chris Evans for advice and critique; Graham Fairclough gave us information on Historic Landscape Characterisation and other matters; Duncan Garrow linked to the Celtic art database and gave advice on other matters; Ian Leins gave advice on coinage; Katie Robbins shared her thoughts on modelling PAS data; Iona Robinson for sharing unpublished material; Sarah Semple for general advice on the medieval period; Sue Stallibrass for suggestions on how to incorporate environmental data; Fraser Sturt, Southampton University, provided his modelling of sea levels; Pete Topping for general thoughts and advice; Clive Waddington for sharing his knowledge of the northeast; Philippa Walton for advice on Roman finds; and Ole Wiedenmann, History Data Service, provided information on historic parishes and place names. In Oxford, Jane Kershaw helped during the initial setting-up phase, John Pouncett and Gary Lock provided advice on digital and other matters. Janice Kinory provided her database of salt-making sites and Lisa Lodwick advised on plant remains and agricultural regimes. Steve Hick and Jeremy Worth gave us financial and IT support, respectively. Chris Gosden would like to thank Elizabeth Allen for organizing so much. We ran two successful workshops and a conference. We are very grateful to all speakers, chairs, discussants, and audience participants. We were assisted by volunteers who processed various forms of data and provided informed discussion. We are grateful to Pat Day, Pam England, Paula Levick, and Steve Northcott. Roger Glyde started as a volunteer and ended up a core member of the team.

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Preface and Acknowledgements  vii We are particularly grateful to our academic advisory committee—John Blair, Richard Bradley, Barry Cunliffe, Mike Fulford, Helena Hamerow, Mark Pollard, Jeremy Taylor, and Roger Thomas—for regular advice and guidance. Roger Thomas made detailed and helpful criticisms of the text. We are also grateful to members of the Roman Rural Settlement project for regular contact, discussions, and a sight of their first volume prior to publication, and they include Mike Fulford, Neil Holbrook, Martyn Allen, Tom Brindle, Lisa Lodwick, and Alex Smith. Miranda Creswell ran a series of successful art projects in a variety of venues and communities. These resulted in an exhibition, ‘Didcot Dog Mile’, of Miranda’s own work, as well as that of local artists and archaeologists, at the Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot. Important participants were Wendy Botto and Karen Leahy (from the local community), Kate Woodley (from Oxford Archaeology), and Miranda Creswell, Letty ten Harkell, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, and Anwen Cooper (from EngLaId). Miranda Creswell, together with members of the team, undertook a project focused around ‘Horatio’s Garden’ at the Salisbury Spinal Unit, allowing people who find it hard to access the landscape to gain knowledge of it. Miranda has produced her own art in Cornwall, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Devon, Hampshire, Northumbria, Norfolk, Buckinghamshire, Nottinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, often in more than one location and is grateful to a range of people in those places. Miranda and Laura Morley developed a project on the River Mersey engaging two schools on either side of the river, St. Saviour’s Primary School, Birkenhead and St. Christopher’s Primary School, Speke. We would like to thank staff and students of both schools and Kathy Heywood of the Williamson Art Gallery where the artwork from this project was displayed. More generally Miranda would like to thank Sarah Mossop and Tamarin Norwood of Modern Art Oxford, Alice Oswald for discussions on Dartmoor and other landscapes, as well as Helen Wickstead for thoughts on drawing and archaeology. We are very grateful to three anonymous readers who made extensive and positively critical comments which have helped us improve this manuscript. First Charlotte Loveridge and then Karen Raith have been our commissioning editors at Oxford University Press and we are very grateful to both of them for shepherding a tricky manuscript through the process of publication. Jenny King, our editor at OUP oversaw the production process with efficiency and grace. Ethiraju Saraswathi ensured the production process went smoothly. We are very grateful to Charles Lauder for superb copy editing. This volume is one of two outputs of the project, the other being a GIS website containing a simplified version of the main project database available at the time of publication: http://englaid.arch.ox.ac.uk The chapters in this volume feature different sets of authors from the project team, reflecting those who participated extensively in the writing of those particular chapters. However, the content of all chapters was discussed widely across the team and minor contributions were made to various pieces of work by members of the team not necessarily named as chapter authors. The maps in this volume contain Ordnance Survey (OS) Open Data © Crown Copyright and Database Right 2012.

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Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction Chris Gosden, Tyler Franconi, and Letty ten Harkel

xi xxiii xxv

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I .   T H E C R E AT IO N O F A R C HA E O L O G IC A L DATA , T H E M A K I N G O F O U R DATA BA SE , A N D T H E F O R M O F O U R A NA LYSE S 2. Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities Anwen Cooper, Victoria Donnelly, Chris Green, and Letty ten Harkel

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3. Patterns in the Data across England Letty ten Harkel, Anwen Cooper, Victoria Donnelly, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Tyler Franconi, and Laura Morley

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I I .   T H E E X P L O R AT IO N O F B R OA D E R PAT T E R N S 4. Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology Tyler Franconi and Chris Gosden

107

5. Movement Tyler Franconi and Chris Green

149

6. Substances and Cycles Sarah Mallet and Dan Stansbie

183

7. Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology Chris Green and Chris Gosden

218

8. Identity, Naming, and Division Letty ten Harkel and Chris Gosden

257

I I I .   U N D E R S TA N D I N G R E G IO NA L A N D L O C A L VA R IA B I L I T Y 9. Scale Anwen Cooper, Chris Green, and Chris Gosden

301

10. Time Anwen Cooper, Chris Green, and Laura Morley

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x Contents

11. Landscapes and Identities: Conclusions and Reflections Chris Gosden, Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Chris Green, Roger Glyde, Letty ten Harkel, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, and Dan Stansbie

399

Appendix 1.  RUSLE Model to Measure Soil Erosion Appendix 2. Methodology for Assessing the Morphological Structure of the Forty Field Systems

411

Bibliography Index

416 448

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List of Figures 1.1 Summed percentage probability of PAS records (excluding coins) falling within century time-slices.

21

1.2 Percentage probability of PAS/EMC records (including coins) by century time-slice, summed by hexagonal bins.

22

2.1 Example of a map produced using 3-km hexbins, showing presence/absence of records for Roman villas (blue) over records for the Roman domestic and civil category (red).

38

2.2 Map of the final case study areas and the 34 10 km × 10 km test squares.

39

2.3 Degrees of overlap between monument records (incl. findspots) in 35 HERs as against some of our other major databases. Boxplots show minimum, median, maximum, and quartile ranges for each set of values. Individual HER values are shown by the circles.

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2.4 Relative overlaps between HER data and AIP/NRHE data in the 34 10 km × 10 km test squares. Upper case names indicate those within case study areas investigated in more detail. The PAS was omitted as not all HERs include it.

40

2.5 Comparison of relative occurrence of monument types in the Northumberland case study area (unclean data) compared to clean data for the whole case study area and the 10 km × 10 km square.

41

2.6 Relative occurrence of the different periods per spatial bin (1 km × 1 km square) in the case study regions and across England (records broadly assigned to prehistoric were counted as both Bronze Age and Iron Age). This shows the broad distribution of evidence across England.

43

2.7 Pottery usage for (a) later prehistory; (b) Roman—number of wares; and (c) early medi­eval periods.

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2.8 Comparison of the spatial distribution of the majority of archaeological investigations for all five archaeological organizations with the highest output of grey literature report production. Based on GLL, AIP, and EI data with density surfaces created using the KDE tool in ArcGIS (after Donnelly 2016: Figure 18).

48

2.9 The 51 organisations in England which produced the most grey literature reports in the period between 1990 and 2010. Based on the GLL, AIP, and EI datasets (after Donnelly 2016: Figure 15).

49

2.10 Comparison of simplified EI and AIP investigation types for the EngLaId case study areas (per square km), 1990–2010.

51

2.11 Monument affordance maps for (a) aerial photography; (b) excavation; and (c) combined model.

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2.12 PAS affordance: (a) map of combined model; and (b) graph showing the relationship between findspot counts and affordance values.

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3.1 Comparison between different regions developed to study English archaeology: Roberts and Wrathmell, Fields of Britannia, and Roman Rural Settlement Project.

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xii  List of Figures 3.2 Kernel Density Estimate (KDE) of the number of EngLaId thesaurus types represented across England (based on 1 km × 1 km spatial bins).

58

3.3 (a) Fifty-km KDE plots of presence/absence of thesaurus categories by 1 km × 1 km grid square by period (unspecified prehistoric included in Bronze Age and Iron Age time-slices at a 50/50 weighting). Data presented as z-scores (red values = above average; white values = mean average; blue values = below average). (b) Fifty-km KDE plots of presence/absence of thesaurus categories by 1 km × 1 km grid square by period (unspecified prehistoric included in Bronze Age and Iron Age time-slices at a 50/50 weighting). Data presented as z-scores (red values = above average; white values = mean average; blue values = below average).

59

3.4 The number of investigations per square kilometre in various EngLaId case study areas compared to the national pattern, using EI investigation types, 1990–2010. The national distribution is seventh from the right, indicated in capital letters.

61

3.5 The relative importance of EI investigation types by EngLaId case study areas compared to the national pattern, 1990–2010. The national distribution is sixth from the right, indicated in capital letters.

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3.6 The 10 km × 10 km squares used for cleaning and comparing data.

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3.7 Representation of the different EngLaId periods across the fourteen test squares within the case study areas (clean data). Test square names printed in capitals are classed as ‘upland’.

63

3.8 Relative height of the fourteen 10 km × 10 km test squares. A (somewhat artificial) line was drawn at 300 m OD to separate lowland from upland areas. Upland areas are generally (but not always) characterized by relatively large numbers of generic prehistoric and uncertainly dated records.

64

3.9 Representation of the EngLaId database categories across the time periods, showing the nationwide and seven local distributions similar to the national pattern. With the exception of Somerset (which is a borderline case) these are mostly lowland areas (see inset for more arch­aeo­logic­al detail on Somerset).

65

3.10 Representation of the EngLaId database categories across time periods, showing nationwide and seven distributions which differ from the national pattern. With the exception of Cornwall and the London, these all include upland areas.

67

3.11 Distribution of the test squares similar to the national pattern (yellow) and those that differ from it (red).

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3.12 Graph of different monument types across case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution (all periods).

69

3.13 Monument types across all case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the Bronze Age.

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3.14 Monument types for all case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the Iron Age.

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3.15 Monument types for the case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the Roman period.

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3.16 Monument types for the case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the early medieval period.

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3.17 The distribution of metalwork in the Bronze Age showing a broad divide between the south and east and the rest of the country. Numbers of records are relatively low and some of the larger numbers in the northwest are possibly due

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List of Figures  xiii to individual detectorists and individual productive sites. The map shows the number of records and not the number of objects (one PAS record can represent more than one object), as this would be skewed by individual hoards. Data from the PAS.

78

3.18 The distribution of metal finds from the Iron Age showing the number of records and not the number of objects, as this would be skewed by individual hoards. The distribution includes coin finds. Data from the PAS.

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3.19 The distribution of metalwork in the Roman period showing the number of records and not the number of objects, as this would be skewed by individual hoards. The distribution includes coin finds. Data from the PAS.

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3.20 The distribution of metalwork in the early medieval period showing the number of records and not the number of objects, as this would be skewed by individual hoards. The distribution includes coin finds. Data from the PAS.

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4.1 Elevation (left) and terrain ruggedness (right) of England.

110

4.2 Shallowest geology (left) and soil conditions (right) of England.

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4.3 Average annual temperature (left) and precipitation (right) in England (derived from WorldClim).

112

4.4 Surface wetness (a) and river basins (b), and stream lengths (c) in England.

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4.5 Elevation within Fox’s highland and lowland zones.

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4.6 Land use and environments in Fox’s highland and lowland zones.

114

4.7 Comparison of palaeoclimate series discussed in text, with lines indicating period divisions.

115

4.8 Factors contributing to erosion in England: (a) R-factor (rainfall erosivity), (b) K-factor (soil erodibility) corrected by stoniness rating, (c) L-S factor (slope angle and length), and (d) wind erosion.

126

4.9 Erosion susceptibility in England.

127

4.10 Erosion models of Boardman and Evans (2006) and Morgan (1985) for comparison, redrawn from Panagos et al. (2016).

128

4.11 The distribution of (a) lynchet fields and (b) all fields plotted against erosion susceptibility.129 4.12 Lynchet fields compared with all EngLaId fields of different periods plotted against soil erodibility (FS = field system). The differences are relatively subtle, with many fields of all periods situated in areas of low erodibility as shown by their medians, but some fields also placed in areas where soil is more likely to erode, as is seen when all fields are looked at for the early medieval period.

130

4.13 Soil erosion susceptibility at the national level by EngLaId period.

131

4.14 Relative probability plot of UK ‘anthropogenic alluvium’ with key moments in agricultural innovation (purple line = relative probability, blue bars = frequency). Also includes periods of highlighted lacustrine sedimentation in yellow, and the summed probability distribution of radiocarbon-dated cereal grains in orange (redrawn from Macklin et al. 2014: Figure 2). Note that the temporal scale here is in years before present.

131

4.15 Thames and Eden River basins with EngLaId case study outlines.

133

4.16 The Thames basin.

135

4.17 Soil types within the Thames basin.

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xiv  List of Figures 4.18 Soil wetness in the Thames basin.

137

4.19 Erosion susceptibility of the Thames basin.

138

4.20 Alluvial deposits within the Thames basin.

139

4.21 HER records in Thames basin, total = 18,022.

140

4.22 Distribution of EngLaId records on dry and seasonally wet soils in Thames basin.

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4.23 EngLaId records by period and erosion susceptibility within Thames basin.

141

4.24 EngLaId records in alluvial areas, total = 1,454.

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4.25 The Eden River basin (a) and the soils of the basin (b).

142

4.26 Soil wetness (a) and erosion susceptibility (b) in Eden basin.

143

4.27 Alluvial deposits within Eden basin.

144

4.28 HER records in Eden basin, total = 867.

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4.29 EngLaId records by soil type in Eden basin.

145

4.30 EngLaId records by soil wetness in Eden basin.

145

4.31 EngLaId records by period and soil erosion susceptibility within Eden basin.

146

5.1 (a) Cumulative terrain-based cost surface generated by summing individual cost surfaces created using each black dot as a starting point. (b) Flat-cost cumulative cost surface used to normalize output like that shown in (a).

152

5.2 Terrain Ruggedness Index (TRI)-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as z-scores of values above (red) or below (blue) the mean, in units of standard deviations.154 5.3 Wetness-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption.

155

5.4 Visibility-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption.

156

5.5 Combined cumulative cost surface, based upon TRI (double weighted), wetness, and visi­bil­ity, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption.

157

5.6 Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—Bronze Age.

159

5.7 Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—Iron Age.

160

5.8 Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—Roman.

161

5.9 Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—early medieval.

162

5.10 Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surfaces plotted against transport networks: (a) Roman, including major Roman towns; (b) early medieval, including major towns as of ad 1086 (after Reynolds 1977: 35).

163

5.11 Comparison of values by 1 km × 1 km grid square for each of the four period-based movement models against the terrain-based movement model (TRI × 2 + wetness + visi­bil­ity). Red lines are linear regressions.

164

5.12 The routes of the Antonine Itineraries marked (in network form) in orange (after Rivet and Smith 1979) over the Roman road network within England.

165

5.13 Bronze Age (left) and Iron Age (right) evidence for communication and transportation networks mapped against each period’s movement model. Generically dated ‘prehistoric’ records shown in the background of each.

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List of Figures  xv 5.14 Prehistoric evidence for roads and river crossings mapped against (a) the Iron Age movement model and (b) major river ways. On the maps, ‘crossings’ (points) represent the intersection points between rivers and routeways, whereas ‘bridges’ (hexagons) represent anything recorded in one of our input datasets as a bridge.

168

5.15 Horse gear from the (a) prehistoric period and (b) Roman period.

168

5.16 Roman roads, river crossings, and bridges mapped against (a) Roman movement model and (b) major river ways. On the maps, ‘crossings’ (points) represent the intersection points between rivers and routeways, whereas ‘bridges’ (hexagons) represent anything recorded in one of our input datasets as a bridge.

169

5.17 Early medieval roads, river crossings, and bridges mapped against (a) early medieval movement model and (b) major river ways. Black lines represent Roman roads still in use as evidenced by place names studied by Cole (2013); red lines represent Roman roads probably still in use based on modern use of the same routes. On the maps, ‘crossings’ (points) represent the intersection points between rivers and routeways, whereas ‘bridges’ (hexagons) represent anything recorded in one of our input datasets as a bridge.

170

5.18 Early medieval horse gear.

171

5.19 Schematic model of water transport in early medieval England with impressionistic indications of relative traffic levels and direction of travel (adapted from Blair 2007: Figure 5).

174

5.20 Evidence of prehistoric watercraft and harbour/quay installations mapped against river basins (CEH hydrological areas) and major watercourses.

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5.21 Evidence of Roman watercraft and harbour/quay installations mapped against river basins (CEH hydrological areas) and major watercourses.

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5.22 Evidence of early medieval watercraft and harbour/quay installations mapped against river basins and major watercourses. Ship burials are indicated in blue.

177

5.23 Distribution of place name evidence from seven case studies. Data adapted from Palmer (2010).

179

5.24 Comparisons between place name evidence and EngLaId data for (a) rivers, (b) roads, (c) fords, and (d) bridges.

181

6.1 Proposed model of dynamic isotopic processes (illustration by Zoé Mallet).

187

6.2 The location of the case study areas used in the study of plants, animals, and pottery.

188

6.3 The frequency of cereal species by period and case study area.

189

∂15N

6.4 Boxplot distribution of the charred grain and cattle values in the Iron Age. All the data are from the Ceramic Phases 3 and 7 of Danebury and nearby settlements of similar dates (Lightfoot and Stevens, 2012; Stevens et al. 2013a). Barley ∂15N average: 3.82‰, wheat ∂15N average: 2.77‰.

191

6.5 ∂15N for charred barley and wheat from Danebury (from Lightfoot and Stevens, 2012) compared with data from long-term field experiments from England and Germany showing different levels of manuring (intensive, 35 t/ha per year; moderate, 20 t/ha per year; data from Fraser et al. 2011 and Bogaard et al. 2007).

192

6.6 Major animal species (that is the percentage of the number of identified specimens or NISP) by period and case study area.

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6.7 Ceramic repertoires by period and case study area.

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xvi  List of Figures 6.8 Distribution of the cattle isotopic data by broad time period.

197

6.9 Boxplot comparison of the cattle data by broad period (Iron Age n = 206, Roman n = 99, early medieval n = 138).

198

∂13C

∂15N

(left) and (right) values across all 6.10 Boxplot distributions of cattle sub-periods (early Iron Age n = 74, middle Iron Age n = 53, late Iron Age n = 49, latest Iron Age n = 16, late Iron Age/early Roman n = 3, early Roman n = 12, middle Roman n = 56, late Roman n = 13, early Anglo-Saxon n = 61, middle Anglo-Saxon n = 10, late Saxon/Norman n = 10). The less well-dated samples have been excluded (Iron Age n = 14, Roman n = 15, Anglo-Saxon n = 57). The red line is a LOESS regression, which is used to plot a smooth line through a series of data points by weighted quadratic least squares regression.

199

6.11 Boxplots of the regional distribution of cattle ∂13C and ∂15N in the Iron Age.

200

6.12 Boxplots of the regional distribution of cattle ∂13C and ∂15N values in the Roman period.

201

6.13 Boxplots of the regional distribution of cattle early medieval period.

∂13C

and

∂15N

values in the

202

6.14 Boxplot comparisons of the sheep data by regions in the early medieval period (Hampshire n = 80, Suffolk n = 76, Yorkshire n = 15).

203

6.15 Diachronic evolution of the human data (early Iron Age n = 20, middle Iron Age n = 135, late Iron Age n = 62, early Roman n = 21, middle Roman n = 610, late Roman n = 49, late Roman/early Anglo-Saxon n = 87, early Anglo-Saxon n = 651, early Anglo-Saxon/middle Anglo-Saxon n = 12, middle Anglo Saxon n = 107, late Saxon n = 68, late Saxon/Norman n = 51). Samples dated less precisely, i.e. dated only to a broad period (‘Iron Age’ n = 79, ‘Roman’ n = 61, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ n = 111), and also the single ‘latest Iron Age’ sample have been excluded. The red line is a LOESS regression, which is used to plot a smooth line through a series of data points. The left-hand side of the graph shows carbon values, those on the right nitrogen.

204

6.16 Distribution of the data according to the different levels of enrichment.

205

6.17 The outline of the third-century walls of Roman London used to define sites within and without the city for the late Iron Age–Roman and early medieval periods (after Rowsome and Burch 2011).

207

6.18 The frequency of cereal species by period in the Middle Thames Valley within and without the walls of third-century London.

208

6.19 Major animal species (% NISP) by period in the Middle Thames Valley within and without the walls of third-century London.

208

6.20 Minor animal species (% NISP) by period in the Middle Thames Valley within and without the walls of third-century London.

209

6.21 Boxplot distribution of the cattle and urban (blue) data.

∂13C

6.22 Boxplot distribution of the human (a) (orange) and urban (blue) data.

(a) and ∂15C

∂15N

and (b)

(b) values in the rural (orange) ∂15

N values in the rural

210 211

6 .23 ∂13C and ∂15N differences between cattle and humans from urban and rural sites.

211

7.1 Presence of records of field systems (in red) in the EngLaId database for: (a) Bronze Age; (b) Iron Age; (c) Roman; and (d) early medieval. Non-specific prehistoric records shown in pink in (a) and (b). Records based solely upon place names or documentary sources have been excluded.

227

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List of Figures  xvii 7.2 Four areas of human ecology and field systems in the second and into the first millennia bc.228 7.3 Field systems studied as part of this exercise, in ascending order of total enclosed area (left to right, top to bottom).

230

7.4 Locations of field systems studied as part of this exercise, by apparent period. Markers displaced from spatial location where necessary to show all values. The numbers given are those found in Table 7.1.

231

7.5 Histograms of mean elevation of 1 km × 1 km cells nationally containing field systems for: (a) Bronze Age; (b) unspecified prehistoric; (c) Iron Age–Roman; and (d) early medieval. Red lines show the pattern for England as a whole.

235

7.6 Modern broad soil type, shallowest geology, and land use classification of field systems studied as part of this exercise.

236

7.7 Schematic rendering of metrics used to define and measure ‘peaks’ in field system orien­ta­tion.

237

7.8 Coaxiality against intravisibility.

238

7.9 Field system variation in orientation (0°–359°) (black) against variation in aspect of the ground surface (0°–359°) (red).

239

7.10 Frequency/variation of each system’s two strongest orientation peaks (0°–179°) as histogram and radial chart.

240

7.11 Density scatter plot of coaxiality against higher and lower bearing value of orien­ta­tion peaks ranked 1 and 2. The point data mark the various values and the shading shows a kernel density plot of their distribution.

240

7.12 (a) Density of areas of NMP ridge and furrow which had arrow lines showing their direction, making them useful for automated extraction of orientation data; (b) schematic showing an example of a ridge and furrow plot in the NMP.

241

7.13 Orientations (0°–359°) of field systems studied as part of this exercise, prehistoric (inc. Bronze–Iron Ages) and Roman field systems subjected to automated extraction of orientation data, and ridge and furrow subjected to automated extraction of orientation data. Data binned into 100 km × 100 km OS grid squares.

242

7.14 Density scatter plots comparing nodes per hectare, lines per hectare, and length per hectare for field system studies as part of this study.

244

7.15 Density scatter plots comparing nodes, lines, and length per hectare against coaxiality.

244

7.16 Nodes, lines, and length per hectare, and coaxiality across England. Markers displaced from spatial location where necessary to show all values.

245

7.17 Example of polygons included or excluded from plot area calculations (pink are included, red excluded for being too small, and purple excluded for being too large)—ID 1.

246

7.18 (a) Boxplots showing the distribution of plot enclosed areas (in hectares) for 21 of 40 field systems; (b) histogram of frequency of plot enclosed areas (in hectares) for all 21 field systems.

247

7.19 Examples of field system orientation alignments on the solstices. Positive values on the y-axis relate to sunrise and negative values to sunset. The left-hand vertical line represents the declination of the midwinter sun and the right-hand vertical line represents the declination of the sun at midsummer. Field systems shown are IDs (clockwise from top right): 2, 10, 26, 14, 9, 1.

250

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xviii  List of Figures 7.20 Alignment of early Bronze Age linear round barrow cemeteries compared to the solstices. Graph set out as described in Figure 7.17’s caption.

251

7.21 Orientation of house doorways in Wessex from the middle Bronze Age to the middle Iron Age. Data taken from Sharples 2010 (Figure 4.5).

252

7.22 Bronze Age and Roman field systems at Perry Oaks/Terminal 5, alongside Bronze Age waterholes (after Framework Archaeology 2011).

254

8.1 Line graph of the relative spatial occurrence of different categories of enclosure (linear land divisions, field systems, enclosed settlement forms including hill forts, and enclosures) by broad time period (with generic prehistoric records half-weighted to the Bronze and Iron Ages). The data were collated on a presence/absence basis in 1 km × 1 km squares; the y-axis depicts the presence of enclosure categories in relation to all spatial units containing data of any kind (including undated records). Dated records represent 67.8 per cent of all records for linear ditches, 70.2 per cent for field systems, 97.1 per cent for enclosed settlements and 63.2 per cent for enclosures.

264

8.2 As described in Figure 8.1’s caption, but for six selected case study regions. Data mapped as presence/absence in 350-m hexbins. Dated records represent variable percentages of all records for linear ditches (Northumberland: 47.2 per cent; Humber: 91.3 per cent; Kent: 47.8 per cent; Devon: 66.0 per cent; Marches: 56.9 per cent; Cumbria: 56.4 per cent), field systems (Northumberland: 74.4 per cent; Humber: 72.9 per cent; Kent: 76.1 per cent; Devon: 88.7 per cent; Marches: 53.4 per cent; Cumbria: 73.3 per cent), enclosed settlements (Northumberland: 96.2 per cent; Humber: 96.8 per cent; Kent: 95.8 per cent; Devon: 97.8 per cent; Marches: 96.6 per cent; Cumbria: 96.8 per cent) and enclosures (Northumberland: 55.4 per cent; Humber: 64.7 per cent; Kent: 59.4 per cent; Devon: 83.7 per cent; Marches: 64.0 per cent; Cumbria: 62.9 per cent).

265

8.3 KDE surfaces of the different categories of enclosure on a nationwide scale, based on presence/absence in 1-km squares. Dark areas indicate greater density. The shading of each KDE surface is numerically scaled relative to itself only (i.e. a specific shade of grey on one map will not represent the same density on any other map).

266

8.4 Place names combining a personal name with –tun, –ham, –by, or –thorpe (in red) in seven EngLaId case study areas, mapped against all Domesday place names (in black). They represent just under 17 per cent. Data adapted from Palmer (2010).

271

8.5 The boundary of the estate in the South Hams in Devon mapped on the ground, based on a ninth-century charter boundary clause (L298.0.00/Sawyer 298; South Hams, Devon; ad 846). After Hooke (1994: 105–12). Blue lines represent rivers; grey lines represent roads, and red dots represent Domesday estates that fall within the enclosed area. Names in bold represent modern place names (one river name and three Domesday estates), but in this case they all fall outside the enclosed area.

273

8.6 An example of a charter boundary clause mapped on the ground (L1033.1.000/Sawyer 1033; Ottery St Mary [2], Devon; ad 1061). Based on Hooke (1994: 207–12) in conjunction with 1st edition OS maps (1:2500 County Series 1st Edition (TIFF geospatial data), Scale 1:2500, Tiles: devo-06916-1 and devo-07009-1, Updated: 30 November 2010, Historic, Using: EDINA Historic Digimap Service, http://digimap.edina.ac.uk, Downloaded: 2016-07-25 14:39:39.932). Blue lines represent rivers; thick grey lines represent former Roman roads, and

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List of Figures  xix thin grey lines are other roads. Features drawn only in relation to the estate boundary (red dashed line). Names in bold represent modern place names.

274

8.7 Total number of charter bounds per case study region, compared to the mean number of structuring elements per charter boundary clause, reflecting the preponderance of (the relatively simple) Type 1 charter bounds in Kent.

275

8.8 Relative distribution of structuring elements within charter bounds.

276

8.9 Relative distribution of structuring elements within place names. The high peak in the buildings and settlement category results from the habit of including an element describing the kind of settlement (such as –tun or –by) in Old English naming practices.

277

8.10 A 200-m buffer zone around Bronze Age fields in Northumberland (in red) and all HER records (small black dots).

283

8.11 Bronze Age fields in Northumberland and associated monument types.

284

8.12 A 200-m buffer zone around Bronze Age fields in Kent (in red) and all HER records (small black dots).

285

8.13 Bronze Age fields in Kent and associated monument types.

286

8.14 A 200-m buffer zone around Iron Age enclosed settlement in Northumberland (in red) and all HER records (small black dots).

287

8.15 Iron Age enclosed settlements in Northumberland and associated monument types.

288

8.16 A 200-m buffer zone around Iron Age enclosed settlement in Kent (in red) and all HER records (small black dots).

289

8.17 Iron Age enclosed settlements in Kent and associated monument types.

290

9.1 A schematic rendering of the tension between space, time, and type in terms of the reso­lution of analytical units.

304

9.2 Records of Roman villas plotted on a presence/absence basis using three different reso­lutions of spatial bin.

305

9.3 The complexity of archaeological evidence (all periods) plotted as 5-km KDE.

307

9.4 Complexity of archaeological evidence (all periods) plotted as 50-km KDE.

308

9.5 (a) Input dot density, showing clear edge effects along coastlines, rescaled numerically to vary between 0 and 1; (b) complexity (all periods) plotted as 50-km KDE, with edge effect corrected.

308

9.6 (a) Monument affordance model, smoothed using 5-km circular focal mean; (b) complexity (all periods) plotted as 50-km KDE, with edge effect corrected and adjusted to take into account monument affordance model.

309

9.7 Complexity (all periods) plotted as 5-km KDE: (a) global measure; (b) local measure adjusted for regional variation and monument affordance.

309

9.8 Complexity (Bronze Age, including half-weighted prehistoric) plotted as 5-km KDE: (a) global measure; (b) local measure adjusted for regional variation and monument affordance.

310

9.9 Complexity (Iron Age, including half-weighted prehistoric) plotted as 5-km KDE: (a) global measure; (b) local measure adjusted for regional variation and monument affordance.

310

9.10 Complexity (Roman) plotted as 5-km KDE: (a) global measure; (b) local measure adjusted for regional variation and monument affordance.

311

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xx  List of Figures 9.11 Complexity (early medieval) plotted as 5-km KDE: (a) global measure; (b) local measure adjusted for regional variation and monument affordance.

311

9.12 Number of periods (from 0 to 4, i.e. Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, early medi­eval) above the mean average value for each local complexity model, showing persistence of local focal areas of activity over time.

313

9.13 As described in Figure 9.12’s caption, but with overlay of roads and tracks (prehistoric to early medieval, with ‘supposed’ etc. filtered out) recorded in the NRHE and royal forests of the high medieval period which were generally less densely populated (after https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal. Forests.1327.1336.annotated.jpg based upon Simmons 2003: 72).

314

9.14 Assemblage of Isle of Wight stone in the wall of an upstanding post-medieval farm building.

316

9.15 Roman villa sites recorded in the EngLaId database.

317

9.16 Stone buildings in rural contexts in Roman Britain (based upon Allen et al. 2015).

319

9.17 Distribution of all potential Roman villa sites on the Isle of Wight.

323

9.18 Chronology of villa complexes on the Isle of Wight (based on information from Tomalin (1975, 1987); Busby et al. (2001); Neal and Cosh (2009); Cunliffe (2013b), and from Isle of Wight HER records). Where the chronological information in published texts comprises only broad dates or date spans, these were simplified as follows: first–second century ad = ad 1–200; mid-third century ad = ad 250; late fourth century ad = ad 375. Overall, this should be seen as a ‘best fit’ diagram based on evidence which is vague and sometimes contra­dict­ory.

324

9.19 Map of simplified Isle of Wight geology.

326

9.20 Plan of the main building phases at Brading Roman villa (redrawn from Cunliffe 2013b: Figure 14.2).

327

9.21 Location of Roman villas in relation to stone sources on the Isle of Wight.

336

9.22 Occurrences of stone from the Isle of Wight in contexts on the English mainland from 1500 bc to ad 1086.

340

10.1 Major intertidal fieldwork projects around the English coast.

354

10.2 Intertidal archaeology recorded within the EngLaId database.

357

10.3 National distribution of intertidal wooden structures (post alignments, fishing structures, landing stages, trackways and bridges) and salt-making sites dating to the period 1500 bc to ad 1086, as known from archaeological sources.

358

10.4 The Wootton-Quarr study area showing key sites mentioned in the text.

358

10.5 Prehistoric wooden structures at (a) Pelhamfield, (b) Quarr/Binstead, (c) Fishbourne, and (d) Binstead.

360

10.6 Early Anglo-Saxon post alignment stretching from Quarr to Binstead.

361

10.7 Broad tempo of wooden structures recorded in the Wootton-Quarr survey.

362

10.8 Round barrow relationship case study areas.

375

10.9 East of England Transect case study area showing key sites mentioned in the text.

376

10.10 Marches case study area showing key sites mentioned in the text.

377

10.11 Humber case study area showing key sites mentioned in the text.

378

10.12 History of round barrow excavations in the three case study areas.

379

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List of Figures  xxi 10.13 (a) The density and (b) the elevation of round barrows in the three case study areas.

380

10.14 Summary of all activity recorded at round barrows in each of the three case study areas by period and by broad EngLaId thesaurus type. Note that this includes activity where the spatial association appears to be coincidental as well as activity that was seemingly meaningfully associated with round barrows. It is also worth noting that many of the findspots recorded within the ‘Other’ thesaurus type category could represent formal deposits of material: as such, the incidence of ritual activity at round barrows may be underestimated in these figures.

382

10.15 Cremation burials at round barrows in the east of England.

383

10.16 Direct intersections between round barrows and later prehistoric fields in the east of England (after Harding and Healy 2007; Daniel 2009; Richmond and Coates 2010; Evans, Appleby et al. 2013; Evans et al. 2016).

384

10.17 Later Bronze Age flint knapping at Barrows 1 and 3, Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire (after Harding and Healy 2007: 187).

386

10.18 Spatial relationships between all aspects of landscape (organized by Historic England thesaurus class; see Chapter 2) and round barrows in the East of England over the period 1500 bc to ad 1086.

387

10.19 Iron Age–Romano-British enclosure cut into two round barrows at Sharpstones Site A, Shropshire (after Barker et al. 1991: Figure 7).

389

10.20 Broad tempo of later activity at round barrows in the East of England, Humber, and the Marches.

391

10.21 Rhythms of engagement with separate round barrow sites in the east of England, 1500 bc to ad 1086.

393

10.22 Middle Iron Age square barrow cemetery, clustered along a linear ditch (and round barrow) at Wetwang Slack, Humber.

394

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List of Tables 2.1 Datasets obtained by the EngLaId project

32

2.2 List of categories and subcategories for sites/monuments

34

2.3 Simplified EngLaId investigation types and their relationship to original Excavation Index investigation types

50

3.1 List of case study areas and their associated 10 km × 10 km square

63

3.2 Differences in archaeological work across England

73

5.1 Place names relating to transportation infrastructure from seven case studies

178

6.1 Cycles of social expression based on production/consumption in southern England, 1500 bc–ad 1086

213

7.1 Basic details of the 40 field systems that form the detailed study

232

7.2 Approximate azimuths of sunrise and sunset at the solstices at latitudes within the north–south extent of Great Britain during the period 1500 bc to ad 500, assuming a ‘flat’ horizon (horizon angle = 0°)

248

8.1 Broad chronology of settlement and field enclosure in England from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period

263

8.2 Two examples of charter boundary clauses

272

8.3 Categorization of structuring elements within charter boundary clauses

276

9.1 Summary of villa sites on the Isle of Wight including key bibliographic references

325

9.2 Summary of the main building phases at Brading Roman villa (following Cunliffe 2013b)

328

9.3 Broad patterns in the use of stone at Brading Roman villa

329

9.4 Summary of materials used in other villa buildings on the Isle of Wight (beyond Brading) and also how they were used

331

9.5 Summary of incidences of Isle of Wight stone at excavated sites on the English mainland from 1500 bc to ad 409 including key bibliographic references (see Tomalin et al. 2012 for a summary of Quarr limestone exports during the early medieval period)

341

10.1 Basic summary of intertidal zone evidence from across England, 1500 bc to ad 1086

355

10.2 Intertidal wooden structures recorded in the Wootton-Quarr survey, 1500 bc to ad 1086

359

10.3 Evidence for different activities undertaken in the Wootton-Quarr intertidal survey area, 1500 bc to ad 1086

362

10.4 Makeup of woodland species represented in intertidal structures, 1500 bc to ad 1086

365

10.5 Types of timber used in intertidal structures, 1500 bc to ad 1086

366

10.6 Building practices (and other activities) associated with intertidal structures, 1500 bc to ad 1086

368

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xxiv  List of Tables 10.7 Basic quantification of round barrows/later activities at round barrows (within the period 1500 bc to ad 1086) in the three case study areas

381

10.8 Distribution of later activities by broad period at round barrows in the three case study areas

381

10.9 Key round barrow sites mentioned in the text and associated bibliographic references

382

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List of Abbreviations AIP Archaeological Investigations Project ALGAO Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers BA Bronze Age EAS Early Anglo-Saxon EH or HE Historic England (formerly English Heritage) NRHE Excavation Index EI EIA Early Iron Age EM Early medieval EMC Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds EngLaId English Landscapes and Identities Project GIS Geographic Information System(s) HER Historic Environment Record(s) HERO Historic Environment Record Officer IA Iron Age KDE Kernel Density Estimate LAS Late Anglo-Saxon LBA Late Bronze Age LIA Late Iron Age MAS Middle Anglo-Saxon MBA Middle Bronze Age MIA Middle Iron Age NMP National Mapping Programme NRHE National Record of the Historic Environment OASIS Online AccesS to the Index of archaeological investigationS PAS Portable Antiquities Scheme PPG 16 Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning PR Prehistoric (unspecific) RO Roman RRSP Roman Rural Settlement Project UAD Urban Archaeology Database UN Undated

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1

Introduction Chris Gosden, Tyler Franconi, and Letty ten Harkel

Histories of England, as taught in schools or written about in popular books, generally focus on the millennium since the Norman Conquest in 1066. Is there a case to be made for a longer set of histories, combining archaeology and historical records? Long before the Normans we have the three periods of prehistory—the Neolithic, the Bronze, and Iron Ages—starting around 6,000 years ago and brought to an end by the invasion of Rome in ad 43, which in turn transformed into the early medieval period after the end of formal Roman control in ad 410. These earlier periods saw the introduction of now-familiar animals and plants, such as sheep, cows, horses, wheat, barley, and oats, all foreign on their entry into these islands around 4200 bc. The Bronze Age brought not just new forms of production and exchange around the alloy of copper and tin which is bronze, but also the first laying out of substantial fields and trackways (with some settlements) around 1500 bc, some of which are still visible today, especially in upland areas. Iron Age hillforts are a common feature of landscapes across Britain and new sets of fields were laid out from around 150 bc, which continued into the earliest Romano-British landscapes. Radical change occurred at some time in the Anglo-Saxon period with the creation of new villages, many of which still exist, based around church and manor, with ridge and furrow cultivation strips still commonly preserved today despite the destructive forces of enclosure and modern agriculture. Two observations struck people forcibly in the twentieth century, which have informed our work. First, aerial photography from the 1920s onwards revealed relict landscapes of great extent and detail, and then large-scale excavation towards the end of the century showed that even in areas deeply ploughed there were often evidences of extensive field systems, trackways, and settlements over large parts of the midlands and south. Secondly, this mass of evidence for past landscapes helped foster the thought that change was ­counter-balanced by deep continuity. For instance, Herring (2008) estimates that 60 per cent of landscapes of dispersed settlement in Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset may date back to the second millennium bc in their basic structure. The landscape historian W. G. Hoskins said that ‘everything is older than we think’, stating the case for surprising amounts of continuity in the present landscape back to the medieval and Roman periods and maybe beyond. To pursue such possibilities of continuity archaeology is necessary, as historical records start in very fragmentary way in the Roman period and only really ­provide interesting indications of past ways of life in the early medieval period. Field archaeology has been undergoing a boom period in the past 25 years, as a change in the law has required developers to fund excavations in advance of modern construction or mineral extraction. A huge new body of archaeological information is now, rather slowly, being synthesized and its broader historical import understood.

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Chris Gosden, Tyler Franconi, and Letty ten Harkel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0001

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2  English Landscapes and Identities Information is part of what is needed to write such long-term histories, but we also need ideas concerning how past societies worked together, formed internal solidarities, and differentiated one from another. Not only was the world of the past very different from our own, but also history as it unfolds over many centuries or millennia provides challenges in how we think about sweeps of history that are way beyond individuals and events. Some ideas can be drawn from broader thought within anthropology and other disciplines about the nature of human difference and how it unfolds. We will explore some such ideas in the section ‘Our Broad Intellectual Approach’. Ultimately, archaeology is on its own not only in terms of the unusually material nature of its evidence, drawn from landscapes, sites, and artefacts, but also because the societies of later prehistory and early history have their own sets of historical trajectories without any current analogy. This volume will cover both issues of data and questions of the intellectual frameworks we use to think about this mass of information. The English Landscapes and Identities project (known as EngLaId) investigates the period from the laying out of field systems and settlements in the middle Bronze Age (c.1500 bc) to Domesday Book, the first detailed documentary account of the English landscape compiled in ad 1086. This span of 2,500 years sees arable farming become basic to the life of groups in southern England, although less so in the west and north, in ways that shape the landscape and provide the starting point for a series of trajectories which unfold over the long term. The EngLaId team have taken a so-called big data approach to questions of long-term histories. We have constructed a database of nearly a million entries from the major local and national sources within England, as will be described in more detail later. Such data are not big by the standards of scientific or medical disciplines, but are of unprecedented size for archaeology. It is not only, or indeed mainly, the question of size which is important, but how we can use this material to think anew about long-term histories or to confirm things we already knew. Our analyses have only been possible due to current computers, their databases and software such as GIS and Python, which allow for a range of manipulations of the information in new and imaginative ways. We have looked at England, rather than the whole of the British Isles, because of the scale of our information. England is not a real unit of historical analysis in any period of the past with which we are dealing. We can only hope that people in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland feel moved to carry out similar work to provide comparison and contradiction to our own.

Archaeology and Modernity Archaeology has emerged as a discipline over the past few centuries as part of moves towards industrial societies with large populations and complex structures of class and state. Human populations have increased dramatically and moved from rural to urban areas. In 1801 the population of England was under 10 million, by 2001 it was almost 50 million people. At the beginning of the nineteenth century 20 per cent of the UK population was urban; this had risen to 70 per cent by 1925 with London exploding from less than a million inhabitants in 1800 to 6.4 million people a century later. The northern towns and Birmingham grew hugely through the nineteenth century, to decline again at the end of the twentieth. Indeed, from the 1980s onwards Britain has entered a new demographic phase, with local populations remaining at a steady state overall, only in the past few decades growing again because of migration. As mentioned, the northern English towns grew

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Introduction  3 hugely with industrialization, but have shrunk in population since the Second World War as a result of a shift in population from the north of England to the south. From the later nineteenth century the building of individual houses has seen a number of peaks and troughs, such that the 1870s saw roughly 120,000 houses built per year, the 1890s around 150,000, with no building during the First World War, but then unprecedented levels of house construction in the 1930s (in 1934, 350,000 houses were built) and again in the 1960s and 1970s, reaching a peak of around 400,000 houses in the late 1960s. Since the 2008 recession, an average of around 140,0001 houses has been built every year. House building required materials, such that the aggregates industry mines for sand and gravel, as well as rocks that can be crushed, for use in building projects of all types, as well as road and railways. Sand and gravel is found in the river valleys of England from the Thames to the Humber and also in areas like the West Midlands and East Anglia where it can be quarried. The construction of large buildings in city centres, houses in cities and suburbs, and railways and roads has occasioned both a huge amount of archaeology, as well as debate about the nature of urban growth, the decline of rural life, and the role of planning versus private development in this whole process. David Matless (1998) examines the contra­dict­ ory and complex nature of discussions concerning development, preservation, and planning from the start of the twentieth century onwards, contrasting those who advocated a planned approach to both development and preservation and those who wished un­real­is­ tic­al­ly merely to preserve the old and hold back the new. The Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) was set up in 1926 towards the start of the interwar housing boom. Despite its name it advocated a balanced attempt to maintain the old and plan for the new. ‘[W]hile the CPRE was not averse to rural elegy, . . . this movement for preservation entailed not a conservative protection of the old against the new but an attempt to plan a landscape simultaneously modern and traditional under the guidance of expert public authority’ (Matless 1998: 25). The rapid house building and development in the 1930s occasioned a range of more-orless negative views too. Famously, the narrative of Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape (first published in 1955) was one of decline and despoliation. Johnson (2007: 56–7) précises and slightly parodies the storyline of Hoskins’ most influential work as follows: ‘later medieval economic changes left the middling sort, including his own Devon yeoman forefathers, better off than they ever had been before. They consolidated their pos­ition through the changes of the Reformation and the agricultural improvements of the 16th to 18th centuries. It all came to an end with enclosure and industrialization in the latter half of the 18th century.’ The most famous passage in Hoskins’ work is that decrying the effects of modernity on the English landscape: What else has happened in the immemorial landscape of the English countryside? Airfields have flayed it bare . . . And those long gentle lines of the dip-slope of the Cotswolds, those misty uplands of the sheep-grey oolite, how they have lent themselves to the villainous requirements of the new age! Over them drones, day after day, the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable’s and Gainsborough’s sky. England of the Nissen-hut, the ‘pre-fab’, and the electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable development.  (Hoskins 1970 [1955]: 299)

1 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-net-supply-of-housing

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4  English Landscapes and Identities Johnson sees Hoskins’ work as fitting neatly within the Romantic tradition of English approaches to the landscape going back at least to Wordsworth (Johnson  2007: xii). Hoskins married a Romantic sensibility with great descriptive and deductive powers (influenced partly by Crawford’s Archaeology in the Field (1953)). His twin starting points that the landscape is the greatest historical document we possess and everything is older than we think spurred amateur and professional alike to pore over Ordnance Survey maps and to take to the fields to discover for themselves old trackways, settlements, and field arrangements. Hoskins’ work had great positive effect, but, as Matless notes, ‘it is defined by and delights in its melancholy, gently transcribing what is left of the country before modern acid dissolves England’s local variations’ (Matless  1998: 274). The history of the English landscape is not to be written to understand the modern, but as a means of escaping from it. Crawford shared this distaste for the modern, but as a Marxist, was more inclined to invoke state intervention as a means of regulating, preserving, and presenting the past to the contemporary world (Hauser 2008). The major empirical difference between the two men was that Hoskins was an historian with little understanding of, or sympathy for, prehistory, whereas Crawford was one of the key figures in the discovery of prehistory. From the passing of the first Ancient Monuments Protection Act in 1882 archaeology became part of the debates about protection, investigation, or destruction that still continue to this day. From the 1880s the Office of Works was responsible for ancient monuments, but it was not until the Ministry of Works was formed in 1940 that lists of protected historic buildings and archaeological sites were put together. The Ministry of Works was in turn absorbed into the Department of the Environment in 1970, with its Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, from which English Heritage was formed in 1984. English Heritage (now Historic England) has been crucial in protecting sites, in developing and maintaining standards of data curation, and having a hand in promoting survey and other forms of fieldwork. The crucial cultural and policy question lying behind all the acts and ministries was how to create a modern nation but with a series of deep urban and rural roots. This question is always fought out through the tension between private property and the right to develop as one pleases and the duty of the state to be a custodian of ancient sites and landscapes. The state apparatus is probably even more active and effective at a local level. Since the passing of PPG 16 (Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning) in 1990 archaeology has been seen as a material consideration, to use the jargon, in the planning process and that any damage to ancient or historic remains should be mitigated through preservation in situ or preservation by record (with the developer paying for any archaeological fieldwork and subsequent analysis carried out on sites to be disturbed by their development). PPG 16 has morphed into the National Planning Policy Framework and there are fears that with cuts to local government departments and a general move to speed up and streamline the planning process in favour of developers that the protections for archaeology will be weakened. We take up these issues in more detail in Chapter 2. The point to be made here is that PPG 16 has had a host of positive effects in that developers have paid for huge amounts of archaeology—contrast the situation in the past 25 years with that in the late nineteenth century or the interwar years when development destroyed huge amounts of archaeology, most of it unnoticed and unrecorded. The question that can be asked of the structures resulting from PPG 16 and its successor forms of legislation is how far has the new mass of information about England’s past changed either academic or public perceptions and understanding of that past? To address this question in a little more detail, we can turn to the tangled history of the structures for fi ­ eldwork and curation that have grown up through the twentieth century and into the present one.

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Introduction  5

The History of Knowledge Concerning English Long-Term History Paralleling these broader debates have been a series of structural developments in the way archaeology has been carried out in Britain. Here is not the place to give a full history of English archaeology, but certain changes and points in time stand out as important. As we shall see in the following, data always come in cascades that threaten to overwhelm the interpretative powers of the profession. Simplifying the matter somewhat we can see four bursts of data since the First World War. Between the wars were two important developments. The first of these was supplied by aerial photographs, with figures like Crawford, Keiller, and St. Joseph demonstrating the additional information that could be gained from well-known sites—the discovery of the Avenue at Stonehenge by Crawford (1923) being an influential example, but also the plethora of new information, for instance on so-called Celtic fields and deserted medieval villages. That sites of all periods could show up as soil and crop marks helped reveal the sheer amount of archaeological information that still existed despite the mass developments of the past 150 years. A second burst of information derived from research excavations, often rural, on everything from Neolithic to medieval sites. Sequences were established, material was recognized and added to typ­ olo­gies, and techniques of excavation and recovery (including of plant and animal remains) were honed and extended. Famous names excavated famous sites, from the Wheelers at Verulamium or Maiden Castle, Clark in the Fens, Childe at Skara Brae or Charles Phillips with the Piggotts, Grimes and Crawford at Sutton Hoo. These so-called ‘flagship sites’ were joined by many others after the war, providing the basis for understanding later prehistory through to the early medieval period. Research excavations continue to this day, but have a diminished importance compared to developer-funded work. Partly as a result of wartime bombing of city centres and partly due to post-war development (itself enabled by bombing in part) came a rash of urban excavations (as we shall explore more later) which showed that, despite the destruction caused by urban expansion after the Industrial Revolution, a surprising amount of the Roman and medieval phases of towns still existed, due in considerable part to the depth of much urban stratigraphy (Carver 1987). The final burst of data started in the 1980s, but has really gained impetus since the ­passing of PPG 16 (see earlier section, ‘Archaeology and Modernity’). In 1971 the organization Rescue started to campaign for greater public awareness of how much archaeology was being destroyed and how much support was needed to properly record and understand sites in danger of destruction. ‘By 1986 the MSC provided funding of £4.8 million for archaeology, compared to £5.9 million from the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission (Crump  1987), and in September 1986 there were 1,790 places on arch­aeo­ logic­al projects through the CPs [Community Programmes]’ (Everill 2015: 160). The formal structures of archaeology have been supported by a host of volunteers and local societies. One of the central features of British and English archaeology over the past 150 years has been local participation and impetus. In a list compiled in 2012, the Council for British Archaeology provided details of over 300 local societies in England with some interest in archaeology, with many thousands of people having some first-hand experience of archaeology every year. Some societies are definitely local—The Welwyn Archaeology Society—and others have specific interests—The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Roman Antiquities Section. Many trace their origins back to the early nineteenth century, together with national bodies, such as the British Archaeological Association (founded 1843), the Royal Archaeological Institute (1844), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831, but with Section H Anthropology, including archaeology, coming into being

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6  English Landscapes and Identities in 1884). The Council for British Archaeology held its first meeting in 1943 and started to think about the archaeological responses that would be necessary following the bombing of many major cities, setting up local excavation committees in many towns. An attempt to set up a Central Council for Archaeology funded by the Ministry of Works to run and coordinate archaeological work on a national scale did not work. The twin challenges of regeneration after the destruction of the Second World War on the one hand and post-war development of town and country on the other meant that new responses were needed from archaeology to excavate, record, and curate archaeological evidence. An important response was the setting up of a series of research committees, often for specific purposes and hence of finite duration and which often combined amateur and professional. Possibly the earliest of these was the Fenland Research Committee which was started in 1932 by Grahame Clark and the Penningtons to coordinate work on the longterm history of the Fens in a manner which combined archaeology and environmental science, taking account of the mutual interaction of each. Clark, Hawkes, and Crawford used this committee to take over the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia and transform it into a national body—the Prehistoric Society—in 1935 which published articles often combining scientific and archaeological approaches. In 1936 Clark started as a Faculty Assistant Lecturer in Cambridge, helping to give that department its post-war prominence in both British and global archaeology, seeing in the process a shift from museum-based to ­university-based archaeological research. Hawkes, for instance, moved from the British Museum to Oxford in 1946, becoming the first Professor of European Archaeology. More broadly, in archaeology research committees developed to conduct specific projects. Post-war urban campaigns, such as those by William Grimes and the Roman and Medieval London Excavation Council (1946–62), as large-scale urban excavation developed in London, York, and Southampton (among others), transformed our understanding of seventh- and eighth-century ports and trade. The Winchester Excavation Committee, which between 1962 and 1971 carried out some of the first open-area excavations under the directorship of Martin Biddle, did much to uncover the Anglo-Saxon and Norman phases of the town, as well as setting new standards for excavation and recording. To take Oxfordshire as one example, reproduced across the country, there has been considerable development in the towns together with larger rural projects, especially the building of roads. The Oxfordshire City and County Museum was set up in 1965 under the directorship of Jean Cook. In 1967 the Oxford Archaeological Excavation Committee started, under the direction of Tom Hassall. In 1970 this was complemented by the M40 Research Group. Even more challenging was aggregates extraction in the upper Thames Valley and in 1967 the Upper Thames Archaeological Committee was set up to coordinate and lobby for archaeological work between Lechlade and Goring. In 1973 an Oxfordshire Excavation Committee was set up with the Oxfordshire Archaeological Unit as an executive element to carry out coordinated excavation across the county under its first director, again Tom Hassall (Bond and Rowley 2015). It was also recognized that a consistent record of archae­ ology across the county was needed and during the late 1960s England’s first Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) was instituted, run by Don Benson and employing the young Mick Aston (Benson  1972). Records were made, partly by volunteers, of the Ordnance Survey’s Archaeology Division’s file cards and record maps, complemented by information from the National Monument Record, so that in 1972 there were 5,000 sites, monuments, and find spots collated on file cards and maps (Benson 1972). The situation in Oxfordshire, with county unit and SMR, provided a model for many other counties and unitary au­thor­ ities, with the nature of units only changing with the advent of widespread commercial

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Introduction  7 tendering in 1990. In the 1990s a network was set up between SMRs and included Urban Archaeological Databases. In the following decade SMRs became known as Historic Environment Records (HERs) due to the incorporation of a wider range of information on buildings and the environment. From the 1980s onwards records of all kinds began to be digitized and attempts were made for developing standards, in terms of both the information held in them and the forms of software and hardware that are used (more detail is provided on this crucial point in Chapter 2). The OASIS project is key to current attempts to standardize and centralize archaeological information (Evans 2013). Having looked at some of the forces influencing the policies and practices of archae­ ology we want to turn to narrative structures—what sorts of stories have been told over the past century about the history of England in late prehistory and into early historical periods?

The History of Narrative on British/English Long-Term History Stories of Prehistory ‘For more than two centuries specialists have been gathering materials illustrating the development of civilization in the British Isles prior to the Roman conquest. During the last two decades the harvest has been augmented by a burst of activity surpassing qualitatively and quantitatively all previous efforts.’  (Childe 1940: v) ‘Britain’s past has changed in the last few years almost beyond recognition: the new datings, new discoveries and new assessments have come so fast that any survey written more than five or so years ago is inevitably out of date.’  (Renfrew 1974: xi) ‘Work is now being undertaken on an unprecedented scale and often in regions where little had been attempted before. The problem is not one of professional competence but of information, for the results of so much activity have undermined received wisdom about the past.’  (Bradley 2007: xv) Britain’s archaeology is in a state of permanent revolution brought on by great leaps forward in fieldwork and analysis. As these three quotes, each at roughly thirty-year intervals, make clear we are continually arriving at a newly rich state of archaeological knowledge about Britain with attendant worries about the possibilities of creating a new synthesis or understanding of the materials. Looking back, the earliest syntheses seem only partly about British material, being influenced in considerable part by broad notions of European and indeed world prehistory. Childe’s quote is drawn from his book Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles, which was the first synthesis of British prehistory, which stood until Renfrew’s demolition of it in 1974 using the results of radiocarbon dates. Fox, another synthesizer to whom we will return, has a succinct summing up of what became the dominant position, when discussing the so-called invasions of Britain—‘the underlying cause [of the invasions], in most cases, may well have been tension, social and economic, induced by the surge of Europe upward from barbarism. It is now well known that the sources of our civ­il­ iza­tion—urbanization based on stock-raising, agriculture, and metallurgy—are in southwest Asia and Egypt’ (Fox 1932 (1959): 10). The need for chronology in British prehistory

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8  English Landscapes and Identities which sought for links with cultures with calendrical dates, principally Egypt, was easily allied with a division between higher and lower cultures and the thought that human history generally saw progress from a less to a more civilized state. Fox also noted that the further one moved north and west from the centres of civilization in the Middle East, the lower the cultural form and that it was also possible to work out whether any particular invasion had raised or lowered the cultural level in Britain (1932 (1959): 11). The new data Childe referred to were mainly employed to flesh out the range of cultures (Windmill Hill, Skara Brae, Glastonbury culture, etc.) existing across time and help chart their points of entry into Britain and their effects once here. Information from new excavations and fieldwork had no effect on the interpretative framework itself. Childe’s 1940 book was the most influential of a number written during the Second World War (Clark  1940; Hawkes and Hawkes 1943). What each of these gives is a highly compressed prehistory, with the Neolithic starting in 2700 bc or even later and the late Bronze Age dated to around 1000 bc, so that the whole of the Neolithic and earlier part of the Bronze Age was packed into 1700 years. The other strand of evidence emerging at this time was palynology which started to provide an environmental outline of Britain, although again with a very brief absolute chron­ology. Alternations of warm and cold, wet and dry periods were linked to the effects of topography by Fox in his important The Personality of Britain (first edition 1932, fourth edition 1959). Britain’s personality depended in large part on a division into a lowland and highland zone along an imaginary line from the mouth of the Tees to the mouth of the Exe. On the northern and western side of this line were harder igneous and metamorphic rocks—gneiss, schists, and granites; to the south and east were limestones, chalk, sandstones, gravels, and sands. The former resisted erosion, producing a higher topography and often poorer soils. Towards the end of the book Fox presents a series of propositions, the first of which is ‘i. Position, outline, relief and structure are involved in this study of this island of Britain; the climate resulting from position and relief, and the soil related to structure, determine the vegetable life which she nourishes and the animal life which she harbours. The whole represents Man’s environment, and Britain’s personality’ (Fox 1932 (1959): 86). It is interesting that Fox gives Britain a personality, which, with its hints of idiosyncrasy, goes some way to soften the more obvious environmental determinism of his argument. There is also a wonderful romanticism to his writing. When thinking of the early megalithic people’s (so-called Neolithic A) voyages up the west coast as far as Scotland, he imagines that ‘we can, like them, enter deep estuaries which reflect blue hills and green forest on mile after mile of their mirrored surfaces’ (Fox 1932 (1959): 11). Together with the beauty of some of the maps and the simple, but compelling, argument it is easy to see why this book was so widely read and influential. Fox sees some important cultural differences which emerge from the sets of invaders and their variable encounters with highland and lowland Britain. Outside cultures tend to be imposed in the south and east, but absorbed in the north and west. The ease of movement makes for a greater unity of culture in the Lowland Zone, but a greater continuity of culture in the Highland. In the Lowland zone the main influence on activities was soil type, with people avoiding the heavy clay lands (especially before the drainage and better ploughs of the Roman period). In the Highland zone altitude was at least as great an influence as soil, with only pastoral economies possible higher up. Fox took the invasionist structure of the times, but looked at the influences of the British environment on the incomers. He was keen to stress that his was not a full synthesis of early British history—he looked at the whole period from the Neolithic to the Vikings—but rather an essay in interpretation using some salient information, particularly as could be displayed on distribution maps.

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Introduction  9 The most original treatment of Britain’s history was Jacquetta Hawkes’ A Land (Hawkes 1951), which covers four billion years of history in Britain, from the creation of the Earth to her own individual biography. The book was written in parallel with Hawkes’ work as an advisor to the Festival of Britain and became a best-seller, much better known to the public than any of the more conventional works of archaeology. It combines a planetary history with reflections on Britain’s position at the end of the war. The two disciplines of geology and archaeology are blended together with a poetical writing style and illustrations by Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. Hawkes was part of links between art and archae­ ology that developed partly from the impact of aerial photography on a generation of British artists including Paul Nash, John Piper, and Eric Ravilious, as well as John Betjeman—many of whom were influenced by O. G. S. Crawford’s work with aerial photography and tracing features on the ground in his work for the Ordnance Survey (Hauser 2007). Our understanding of rural Britain and particularly the profusion and var­ iety of prehistoric remains is due in good part to results from aerial photography (Crawford and Keiller  1928). Crawford’s founding of Antiquity in 1927 had influence way beyond archaeology, being widely read by a broader cultural elite (Hauser  2007: Chapter  3). Crawford had a complex relationship with contemporary Britain, decrying many of the despoiling features of a rampant capitalism, including urban sprawl, the mass of advertising hoardings along the roads, cheap hotels, and a degraded public culture (Hauser 2008). The invasionist structure of these early periods was brought to an abrupt end by new radiocarbon dates, with British Prehistory edited by Renfrew (1974) being a key statement. Although possibly overinterpreting, we can see a subtle shift in terminology here from the Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles to British Prehistory. In the former, the communities often came from elsewhere; in British Prehistory the main story concerned the prehistory of Britain and its generally local inhabitants. This shift in terminology followed on from Clark’s critique in 1966 of the invasionist neurosis, as he termed it, which changed the terms of the debate not just about invasions, but over whether the distribution of arch­aeo­ logic­al artefacts could be interpreted in terms of cultures. Once issues of calibration had been reasonably resolved it became obvious, for instance, that the megalithic tombs of Britain were fully a millennium earlier than their supposed prototypes in the eastern Mediterranean, the round tombs of Crete (Renfrew 1974: 32). A series of such observations led to a much more independent, and generally earlier, chronology for northwest Europe as a whole and helped usher in two new emphases. The first of these was an assumption that local developments and sequences were the key to much of prehistory, swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction to the invasionist hypothesis. Complementing this was a second theoretical emphasis on process, rather than culture. Process was the key focus of a new transatlantic approach to archaeology, known broadly as the New Archaeology. British prehistory in some universities at least (although not generally beyond the university world) became deeply entangled with broader debates in New Archaeology. With independent dating and an exploratory aim of understanding what cultural processes across time and space might look like for the first time there was a real emphasis on arch­aeo­ logic­al evidence for its own sake. Others have argued, on the contrary, that frameworks such as the New Archaeology made British material subservient to questions of global process and the overall shape of human history. Our third and most recent quote is from Richard Bradley, at the start of the most recent attempt to synthesize British (and now Irish) prehistory influenced heavily by the results of developer-funded archaeology (which we will look at in a little more detail later). Richard is one of the few courageous enough over the past 35 years to attempt broader statements

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10  English Landscapes and Identities about British prehistory, starting with The Prehistoric Settlement of Britain (1978), The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain (1984), The Passage of Arms (1990), and then (leaving much out in between) The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland (2007). These books have never attempted to be comprehensive surveys of materials and interpretations, but have always pursued themes that have changed from book to book. From the back cover blurb of Bradley (1984) we find five stated themes: ‘the importance of ancestry among the earliest farmers; the production and exchange of fine artefacts before the adoption of metals; the importance of elaborate monuments and burials during the Neolithic and Bronze Age ­periods; the use and deposition of rich metalwork; and, finally, the changing scale of pol­it­ ical relations during the late prehistoric period’. These themes have run through much of Bradley’s work subsequently, with that work in turn shaping the questions of British archaeology more widely. It is this thematic approach to English (or British) prehistory that has been most ef­fect­ ive in recent years and one which we mainly follow here, allowing the archaeological evidence to shape the debate to some degree at least. There has also been a shift away from a consideration of people, their histories and movements towards artefacts, and of course landscapes. An emphasis on landscape is probably most novel—the term was not emphasized in archaeological works before the 1970s. It is this emphasis which is crucial to the EngLaId project and we will pick this up later.

Roman Stories ‘It is impossible for the inquiring amateur, impossible for the beginner in archaeological studies, impossible for the foreign scholar and all but ­impossible even for the best equipped expert in the country to work with the necessary books round him or even consult them at all. The longer this situ­ation is allowed to continue the worse it will inevitably become.’ (Collingwood and Richmond 1969: xx) ‘The overall impression one gets reading the books and papers on Roman Britain published in the late 1970s and early 1980s is of Britannia as an aged, cosseted old lady, sitting immobile in an airless room reeking of stale scent, fawned on by a bevy of tireless, dedicated servants. Can we not at the very least open a window or two?’   (Cunliffe 1984: 178) ‘The past two decades have seen an enormous growth in developer-funded archaeology as well as individual research initiatives in fieldwork. These have produced a mass of new information which has not always been well-enough integrated into current syntheses.’  (James et al. 2001: 1) The study of Roman Britain has long been typified by generational monographs that provide snapshots of the state of the field through its development (e.g. Haverfield  1905; Collingwood 1930; Richmond 1947; Frere 1967; Salway 1981; Millett 1990; Mattingly 2006). The vast majority of this work focused on understanding the most visible remains of the Roman period across the country, namely towns, fortresses, and villas. Each of these cat­ egor­ies of archaeological sites were new introductions of the Roman period—none had existed prior to the Roman conquest—and the study of their remains perpetuated a

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Introduction  11 discourse of ‘Roman’ and ‘native’ throughout much of the twentieth century. The field experienced other polarizing trends as well—military and civilian, north and south, preand post-Roman transitions, and urban and rural—and while large amounts of data were gathered to support these divisions, the general tone of discussion became stagnant. The extensive historiography of these works and of the trajectory of the field is well discussed elsewhere (Hingley  2000; James et al.  2001; James  2002; Mattingly  2006; Hingley 2008; Smith et al. 2016), but a major theme is that of division. Whether investigating the differences between military and civilian, pre-Roman and Roman, Roman and post-Roman, urban and rural, or Roman and native, Roman archaeology in Britain has often based itself on contrast. In parsing different aspects of the Roman period within Britain, however, scholarship in this tradition has made it difficult to understand the big picture and to understand how aspects of military, civilian, urban, and rural life mixed together to give the province of Britannia its character. The overviews provided by those monographs listed above have often sought to craft stories of this character, but these narratives have become increasingly difficult to write since the creation of PPG 16 in 1990 and the subsequent explosion of archaeological data (Mattingly 2006: 44). The new availability of data that especially pertains to rural settlements not often addressed by previous work focused on urban or military centres brought a new appreciation for the extent of life in the Roman countryside (Taylor 2007; Fulford and Holbrook 2011; Smith et al. 2016), though this has yet to be reincorporated into discussions of urban and military centres. The Roman occupation between ad 43 and 410 was an anomalous period in the history of England in many ways. Leaving aside the particularities of the social, economic, and religious developments of the period, the sheer number of remains of the Romans in England vastly outnumber any other period under consideration. Out of the nearly one million records in the EngLaId database, 40 per cent are Roman—a remarkable number considering that the 367 years of Roman rule only account for 14 per cent of the time between 1500 bc and ad 1086. Thus, while the other periods of history under con­sid­er­ ation here each had significant impacts on the landscape, it is crucial to recognize the scale of Roman impact on the archaeological record of England. This Roman influence can take many forms. The ways that Rome shaped the environment, agricultural systems, socioeconomic organization, foodways, and mobility systems are discussed throughout this volume, and these themes provide insight into the ways that the Roman period was similar and different to what came before and after. This longuedurée view, especially when centred on the Roman era, also highlights important differences in the conception, construction, and display of personal, group, and national identity. The discussion of identity in Britain under the Romans has ranged from significant topdown enforcement of Roman ways (Haverfield 1905) to bottom-up displays of provincial allegiance to Rome by provincial elites and other groups (Millett 1990; Revell 2009), and now encompasses many views in between (Mattingly 2006). Haynes (2013) has recently emphasized the elements of Roman provincial culture, especially in Britain, that aimed to incorporate different social groups under the umbrella of ‘Roman’ life, while allowing many aspects of local practice to continue relatively unaltered. The military played a key role in this process, forming an ‘occupational community’ (2013: 10) that helped standardize and integrate Roman practice across provincial lines despite whatever variation might otherwise exist in different regions. Spiritual and institutional practices such as the worship of the emperor, the payment of taxes, and the consumption of a wide variety of foods and commodities from across the Empire each played a role in shaping a society that was notably Roman, even if it contained internal diversity.

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12  English Landscapes and Identities Mattingly (2006, 2014) has argued that the internal diversity of the Roman Empire, his so-called ‘discrepant’ interaction between individuals and the Empire, makes any assessment of Roman identity necessarily nuanced. There was such a variety of identities, ethnicities, and other socioeconomic values that any attempt to class them into groups like ‘Roman’, ‘native’, ‘provincial’, or ‘British’ is pointless, as any individual would relate to each group (and plenty of others) in a dynamic and variable way. This variety is certainly readily apparent, but the scale of the EngLaId project also makes other truths evident. Regardless of the diversity seen within the Roman period, even in a geographic space as relatively small as Britain (or, even smaller, England), this diversity perhaps more than anything else can be taken as a firm marker of Romanitas. It is perhaps too easy when viewing the Roman era by itself to get lost in the overwhelming diversity of personal experience that Europe’s first global period (in institutional terms at least) brought to Britain but, when viewed within the context of a much longer period of social development, it is clear that there are very marked differences between life in the Roman period and life on either side of the imperial period. Those elements of Roman life (taxes, cults, language, trade) that were so typified by diversity are precisely what mark out ‘Roman’ identity in Britain. Whether anyone described themselves as ‘Roman’ is a moot point; that level of detail is surely beyond our reach in anything but exceptional circumstances. What matters for the Roman period is that those 370 years of imperial administration united the people of Britain into a much larger system that shared in an empire-wide koine. When viewed in stark terms of comparison to the prehistoric or early medieval period, this koine united the people of Britannia in a way that the fractured (politically, religiously, eco­nom­ic­ al­ly) societies of other periods did not. This unity did not result in sameness. As the study of Roman Britain advances at a rapid rate with the publication of other projects utilizing large datasets (Rippon et al. 2015; Smith et al. 2016), many specific details will be filled in to historical narratives. It is important to remember, while rewriting these narratives, the place of the Roman period within a longer span of history.

Early Medieval Stories ‘One of the most intractable problems in the whole range of early medieval studies concerns the dwellings of the Anglo-Saxons. It is generally agreed that they were of wood and that no example survives above ground. Beyond this the student must rely on incidental references in the literature and on the scanty data provided by excavation. Neither source is satisfactory and the data do not appear to correspond.’  (Radford 1957: 27) ‘Many local correspondents, and more recently Archaeological Units, have also been producing good plans so that with these, and the air photo cover, there is now a considerable data base for more research on village planning.’  (Hurst 1986: 9) ‘The past 30 years, and the past decade in particular, have witnessed ­revolutionary developments in our understanding of rural life in the British Isles . . . The key impetus has been a surge in new archaeological data, particularly in the form of excavated early medieval settlements, though . . . any

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Introduction  13 assessment also needs to acknowledge the important contribution made by field-walking and metal-detecting.’  (Thomas 2012: 43) The development of thought and narrative of the early medieval period has been different again to that of prehistory and the Roman period. In contrast to their prehistoric c­ olleagues, early medievalists have long bemoaned an absence of excavated settlement evidence, a ­situation that has only begun to change in recent decades. Providing the first comprehensive account of The Archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements in 1913, E.  T.  Leeds (p. 15) ­complained that ‘not a single instance of an early Anglo-Saxon o ­ ccupation-area . . . has ever been brought to light in this country’. This provided a stark contrast to the highly visible fifth- to seventh-century tradition of furnished burial in southern and eastern England, which (paradoxically) informed his book. As a consequence, most early medieval narratives that emerged in the first half of the twentieth ­century, such as Frank Stenton’s seminal (1943) Anglo-Saxon England, were predominantly based on the rich and varied historical record, providing a context into which the burial archaeology and grave goods could neatly be fitted. In 1921, Leeds began the first systematic excavation of an Anglo-Saxon settlement at Sutton Courtenay in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) ahead of gravel extraction (Leeds 1924). This was a turning point for early medieval settlement archaeology. However, subsequent opportunities were few (but see Lethbridge and Tebbutt 1933), so that in the 1950s, when the Society for Medieval Archaeology was founded, Radford (then Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries of London) remained less than optimistic about the state of know­ ledge regarding Anglo-Saxon living conditions (see first epigraph in this section). Radford’s quote also illustrates another tension that came to dominate early medieval archaeology: the relationship between history and archaeology. This eventually led to the medieval historian Sawyer describing medieval archaeology—in what have become his most famous words—as ‘an expensive way of telling us what we know already’ (quoted in Rahtz 1981). A widening gap between the two disciplines ensued, as some archaeologists attempted to establish independence from their historic colleagues through a focus on scientific and processual approaches and a stronger relationship with prehistorians: the ‘New Medieval Archaeology’ (Rahtz 1981). Yet history was not rejected by all. Another research tradition that lies at the heart of medieval settlement archaeology remained firmly engrained in local historical approaches. There was a long-standing consensus that many early medieval settlements ‘stood on the site of the village or town which still bears their name’ (Leeds 1913: 15), resulting in a teleological tendency within medieval settlement studies to seek the roots of high medieval and even modern life. Domesday Book, nineteenth-century parish boundaries, historical place names, old tithe maps, and even modern village plans and field layouts all held clues to the unravelling of early medieval settlement patterns. A central focus was granted to the English village and its associated open fields. In 1952, the Deserted Medieval Village Group (now the Medieval Settlement Research Group or MSRG, reflecting the group’s widened focus to include historic landscapes) was founded to record systematically the surviving earthworks of deserted medieval villages. Although excavation was part of their remit, most notably at Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, much of the research carried out by its associates was non-intrusive, including survey and surface collection. This is clearly reflected in Hurst’s (1986) summary of the MSRC’s contribution to medieval settlement research between 1952 and 1986.

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14  English Landscapes and Identities By the 1980s, medieval archaeology as a subject had become firmly established, with important contributions from urban ‘rescue’ excavations in towns like Winchester and York as well as increasing numbers of excavated rural settlements, including key sites like Mucking (Essex), Goltho (Lincolnshire), and West Stow (Suffolk) (Dyers and Everson 2012: 12–19; Hamerow 2012: 8–9; Griffiths 2013: 5–9). Yet it was only from the 1990s that a real surge in new data occurred. In part this was the result of new heritage legislation (PPG 16) and the increasingly systematic methodologies employed by archaeological contractors. Another major contribution came from amateur metal-detectorists, especially after the foundation of the Portable Antiquities Scheme in 1997, which among many other things has shed new light on the historically documented Scandinavian settlement in the North and East (Leahy 2007: 166–71). As the earlier third and final epigraph by Thomas illustrates, written in the MSRG’s ‘flagship’ publication reviewing 60 years of active research, the pace continues to quicken. Meanwhile, relations between archaeologists and historians have been restored. Historical sources—such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the AngloSaxon Chronicle—were composed from the eighth and ninth centuries with the aim to record the origins of Anglo-Saxon society. They describe in great detail the invasions of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in the fifth century, the Scandinavian settlement of the 870s, and the Norman Conquest of 1066. In the first half of the twentieth century, this led to a dom­in­ ant emphasis on issues of ethnicity, possibly influencing Childe’s developing concepts of archaeological cultures. Gray (1915) saw the open fields as a Germanic introduction of the fifth to seventh centuries, and Leeds (1913) neatly organized the Anglo-Saxon burial evidence into Bede’s three ethnic categories of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The historical framework continues to influence scholarship (e.g. Leslie et al.  2015). However, generally speaking, the rigid ethnic classifications of the earlier twentieth century have been rejected in favour of a more nuanced approach to medieval identities, as is true of the Roman period. The inherent biases of the historical source material are also widely acknowledged, but the fact that invasions took place remains an early medieval dictum. For a long time, the only recurring question was one of numbers: should we envisage political takeover by a small dominant elite, or mass folk migrations (Hadley  2006: 1–6 for an ­outline of the debate; also Reich  2018: Chapter  5 for the emerging DNA picture of the migration period in Europe)? The emerging consensus leaves scale aside, and instead argues that a complex process of two-way cultural assimilation should be envisaged. The Scandinavian settlement is an interesting example. Scholars have long puzzled over a general absence of typical ‘Scandinavian’ house types, settlements, and burials in England. However, the distribution of Scandinavian-style metalwork, brought to light through the Portable Antiquities Scheme, corresponds to the distribution of Scandinavian-influenced place names and the boundary between ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Scandinavian’-controlled England as described in the historical sources. The importance of language as a cultural diversifier brings up an important conundrum when viewed from a long-term perspective. Take the linguistic (and historical) evidence out of the equation, and one is left with scarce archaeological data that would never stand up as evidence for invasion to a sceptical prehistorian. Perhaps medieval archaeology is less flexible in its interpretative models as a result of the availability of historical sources. Although the post-processual era has resulted in a greater emphasis on landscape and burial archaeology to investigate themes like identity and spatial and sensory experiences, old topics like village formation, ethnicity, conversion, and state formation also remain key (e.g. Blair 2005; Roberts 2008; Brookes and Harrington 2010; Kershaw 2013; Williamson et al. 2013; Banham and Faith 2014; Hall 2014; Harrington and Welch 2014; Blair 2018). This may be linked to what Gilchrist and Reynolds (2009: 6) have

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Introduction  15 termed ‘medieval archaeology’s lack of confidence in our own discipline’s ability to write distinctive narratives’. Their solution for this problem is greater communication and integration within the discipline of medieval archaeology, and collaboration across the trad­ ition­al early to late medieval divide. Continuities in landscape and settlement organization are becoming increasingly apparent, not only at the ‘end’ of the early medieval period (e.g. ten Harkel 2017) but also at the ‘start’ (e.g. Rippon et al. 2015). Another important step forwards is collaboration on an equal footing across all traditional period boundaries, a challenge that lies at the core of the EngLaId project.

Summary Discussion The dawning realization through the twentieth century in the study of all periods from prehistory to the Norman invasion was just how much evidence was preserved. Particularly, for all periods, there has been an unexpected richness in evidence of the agricultural landscape, so that even when we encounter a range of historical sources, such as in the early medieval period, archaeology has much to offer. The radiocarbon revolution showed the length of prehistory and broke any immediate link between Britain and the centres of civ­il­ iza­tion in the eastern Mediterranean. The prehistory of Britain is now much more firmly located within that of northwest Europe as a whole, with some acknowledgement of broader population movements and forms of influence. In both the Roman and early medieval periods there are still considerable debates about the strength and nature of outside influence as against local longer-term trends. The Romanization debates have tended to emphasize the ‘native’ role as against the imperialist outsiders, and recent big projects may be giving more strength to this view. The trending opinion among early medievalists is towards more continuity than has sometimes been acknowledged of Roman ways into the fifth and sixth centuries. But there is also a growing realization that big changes, such as the growth of villages and open fields, happened later, although the timing of changes is hotly debated with some arguing that changes occurred perhaps as early as ad 850 and others looking at a date around the Norman Conquest. Overall, however, there is more of a stress on continuity between the late Iron Age and the Roman period, as well as between that latter period and the Anglo-Saxon world. Perhaps it is truer to say that the identification of periods of change have shifted—the alterations between the middle Iron Age into the late are considerable, the late Roman period looks different from what went before, and the long ninth century might be when things seriously shift in the early medieval phase. In any event, it is clear that changes in the lifeways of past people did not always conveniently align with conventional archaeological period boundaries. From the 1960s onwards there was a move towards a more anthropologically informed archaeology, first with processualism and then its post-processual critics. This was initially more marked in prehistory, but of recent decades debates about time, materiality, identity, and the politics of the discipline have been found in Roman and early medieval archae­ ology too. Roman archaeology has seen a considerable influence from post-colonial thought; medieval archaeology much less so. In recent years, for all periods, there are central questions, but less of an attempt to produce a single narrative and more a desire to explore topics and issues of importance. We certainly follow this in not trying to write a single story for this long period of England’s history, but to work instead on questions of current interest, in archaeology and beyond. It is not clear how far the richness of archae­ ology from prehistory to early historical periods has really changed our national stories and sense of ourselves today.

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16  English Landscapes and Identities

History of the EngLaId Project EngLaId is one response to the current richness of archaeological information from England. We were interested, following a reading of recent medieval and Roman literature, in whether there was continuity between those two periods in settlement structure and the general distribution of finds. We also wondered whether any continuities stretched back into the prehistoric period. The middle Bronze Age, which sees the start of many field systems and a more settled landscape in southern England at least, seemed a sensible temporal starting point. We are now not so sure about the question of continuity, or indeed about the nature of regionality, but that will come out in the following chapters. The mass of data, mainly from developer-funded archaeology, was the empirical attraction, together with the challenge of what it was possible to do with a large amount of data created and curated in various ways. We have ended up looking at periods of unequal length, with the period of prehistory we have considered being 1,500 years long, the Roman period some 370 years in length, and the early medieval phase lasting some 650 years. England, of course, is not an analytical unit in any period, but merely a convenient means of limiting the data we have to a manageable size, as well as circumscribing the number of different bodies from which the data came. Our starting point, as just mentioned, was a number of larger projects looking at individual periods. The outcome of many large synthetic projects has been a definition of regional difference. As we have seen, this goes back to Fox and earlier. The most influential recent discussion is that in Roberts and Wrathmell’s Region and Place (2002; building on Roberts and Wrathmell 2000). They divided England into 4,300 2 km × 2 km squares and then starting with the first edition Ordnance Survey maps, plotted on these what they considered to be nucleated settlements, which varied in size between cities, towns, market towns, villages of various sizes, and even large hamlets (Roberts and Wrathmell 2002: 7). These were differentiated from individual houses and farmsteads seen as dispersed settlements. From mapping dispersed and nucleated settlements, Roberts and Wrathmell came up with three provinces: a central province of nucleated villages from Somerset and Dorset through the Midlands and up to the North Sea lowlands; a south-eastern province of savannah parkland and more dispersed settlement; and the north and west where small farms and fields predominate. These distinctions between a planned and managed central province and more organic and dispersed landscapes southeast and north/west go back to Rackham’s The Ancient Countryside and The Planned Countryside (Rackham 1986). Stephen Rippon and his team have emphasized the continuity between the Roman and early medieval periods, which many have doubted, preferring to see collapse and radical change as characterizing the fifth century ad (Rippon et al. 2015). They divided England into seven zones based on the distribution of archaeological evidence, but also differences in geology, soil, and ecology (Rippon et al.  2015: Figure  2.11). One of these, the Central Zone, ‘broadly corresponds to Roberts and Wrathmell’s Central Province and Rackham’s Planned Countryside’ (Rippon et al. 2015: 52). The regions were then subdivided into pays on the basis of cultural characteristics, geology, and topography, allowing for a patchwork quilt of variety across England and Wales. Working at the same time as Roberts and Wrathmell, Taylor attempted to gain the first real sense of variety within Roman England (which encompassed much of the Roman province). He looked at settlement, which he categorized broadly into open, enclosed, and linear, showing that enclosed settlements were more common in the southwest and northwest (Taylor 2007: Figure 4.6), where settlements were often small and dispersed. Linear

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Introduction  17 systems were found more commonly in the centre and southeast of England and the southwest and northwestern zones parallel those of Roberts and Wrathmell’s relatively closely, leading one to wonder about continuity. Taylor’s work led on to Fulford and Holbrook’s Roman Rural Settlement Project, where they carried out a survey of all the grey literature (grey literature is discussed more generally in Chapter 2) concerning the late Iron Age and Roman periods. This project has produced a mass of new data (Allen et al.  2015; Smith et al.  2016; Smith et al.  2018). They collated and analysed 3,654 records of excavated archaeological sites, 75 per cent of which had been produced since PPG 16 in 1990. They came up with eight regions, which bear some resemblance to Rippon’s seven. Once again there is sparse, dispersed, and enclosed settlement recognized in the southwest, west midlands, and northwest. They also emphasize the lack of pottery and other artefacts in these regions as compared to England more generally (Smith et al. 2016: 309–10). While recognizing settlement forms as a continuum, they essentially use Taylor’s three categories of open, enclosed, and complex (the last term is used in preference to linear). When looking at the distribution of settlement types and other features, one of their chief regional findings is the definition of a Central Belt, which runs from the Quantock Hills to the Fens, including parts of a series of major river valleys, from the Severn and Avon (both Warwickshire and Bristol), the Thames, the Trent, and across to the West Anglian Plain drained by the Nene and the Ouse. It is in these valleys that much of the evidence lies. There is a relatively high density of both open and complex settlements, with a particular concentration of villas in the west (which are most prom­in­ent in the late Roman period). The South also sees a concentration of evidence of settlement and artefacts. The East Anglia region is interesting in its paucity of building evidence, but large amounts of artefacts, such as coins and personal ornament. In all regions, settlement peaks in the second century ad, with a drop-off in the third and fourth centuries, although this varies somewhat with geography. This contradicts the long-held view that the late Roman period saw the flowering of the rural economy, influenced by the number of rich villas of that date in the west. It may well be that there was population decline before the end of Roman control in ad 410. Some regions, especially the Central Belt and the South, may have been more hierarchical than others, especially when compared with the relatively autarkical organization of the western regions. The various regions recognized from the late Iron Age through to the medieval period raise the question of continuity over time at a broad level, so although they are initially spatial patterns they have temporal implications. In general, there is a recognition that the southwest to northwest is different, with possible continuity of small dispersed settlements, sometimes in regionally distinct types, like the Cornish rounds, from prehistory through to the medieval period. The relatively sparse artefactual evidence in the west is also seen in all periods, which in some ways is the mirror image of East Anglia, which has high levels of artefacts, but much less evidence of buildings. The large-scale synthetic surveys that have taken place on the basis of the grey literature for the prehistoric period are less inclined to generate maps of regional difference, perhaps because of lower levels of evidence, but also due to different research traditions (Bradley 2007; Bradley et al. 2015). Some continuities can be traced back into this earlier past, such as the relative lack of material culture in the west and its abundance in East Anglia from the Bronze Age onwards. Continuity in settlement patterns and the distribution of field systems are less easy to discern, although the latter may be more common in southern England in the Bronze and earlier Iron Ages than in the north. All these observations do suggest that there are some deep trends in cultural life in various parts of England that may run through the whole of our period and into the

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18  English Landscapes and Identities high medieval period. We will discuss this more in the section ‘Our Broad Intellectual Approach’. As we will explore in Chapter 2, we have chosen to gather together and analyse all the major sources from English archaeology, including local authority records and national databases. This has given us a mass of data to work with, but much of it derives from older work and is of varied quality. The main question of big data projects is ‘what can an analysis of a mass of data tell you that a consideration of a smaller amount cannot?’ The main answer concerns broad patterning where the consideration of large data sets allows larger trends and geographical differences in the nature of the evidence to emerge where a smaller consideration would not. This answer is linked to theoretical questions of what the causes of large-scale patterning might be, with some sort of environmental answer usually given to this question (in a manner that would have been familiar to Fox), but also empirical worries about whether a mass of data with individual difficulties and uncertainties can mass together to show larger patterns with some validity.

Our Broad Intellectual Approach This volume represents not so much a singular narrative account—it will quickly become obvious to the reader how difficult this would have been with our data—but rather a series of explorations into themes that project members have considered important. We have tried not to be too idiosyncratic in choosing these themes, but have to some degree responded to more general discussions in English archaeology, trying also to bring our own novel insights where possible. Three broad issues lie behind all elements of our work and these we have glossed as landscape, identity, and continuity and change. We will consider each of these in turn, before looking at how we broke these broader issues down through individual chapters. Landscape is a very large issue not just for archaeology, but across the humanities and social sciences, so that we are unable to cover the full range of topics brought together around the idea of landscape. A core element of the idea of landscape is that it provides the basis for a holistic view. For archaeology, it is clear that individual sites cannot be understood each on their own, but a broader consideration is needed of the network of contem­ por­ary sites, their relationship to other humanly created features, such as fields and trackways, but also topography, climate, soils, and so on. How artefact distributions relate to sites and features is of great interest. Landscapes are inherently historical, being the product of long-term geological, climatic, and human influences, so that the spatial aspects of landscape analysis need to be complemented by temporal considerations. At a more conceptual level, we can say that landscape crosses or nullifies the distinction between nature and culture. Human actions shape landscape and it then effects people in ways that are physical, aesthetic, and emotional. The English landscape results from a complex nexus of forces, which are human, non-human, or frequently a combination of the two. Once nature is complicated, then the idea of environmental determinism drops away. We are rather emphasizing the idea of landscape force, which is the agency of landscapes, once we acknowledge that landscapes are both the cause and the outcome of human action. Nor can landscapes be thought of in purely physical terms, as sets of energy budgets, impediments, or enablers of human movement. They are also cosmological or ontological, by which we mean that they are where schemes of cause and effect are worked out.

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Introduction  19 We see three broad schemes of cause and effect. The first derives from a feeling, or assumption, of immersion in the world. We tend to think of this state in terms of animism— all things in the world, such as rocks, rivers, trees, deer, sheep, swords, clothing, or burial mounds, are animate and have intentions, which derive from their stored memories of the past and their desires for the future. A second state, which may exist in tension with that of animism, is one where powers of the world are externalized from the rest of reality into gods or a single god. These deities are often seen as creators of the universe, having purposes of their own, with little regard for those of other entities. Religious views overlap and mingle with a more animistic or magical notion of the world. A third tendency or tension in human affairs is the analytical view. This is a tendency to break the world down into qualities and quantities that can be abstracted from the whole and seen in their own terms, often considered as more mechanical forms of cause and effect. An analytical approach is the opposite in some ways of the immersive notion, but coexists with it. All three of these tendencies—the animistic, the religious, and the functional—are found in all human so­ci­ eties to varying degrees and in changing forms of tension. Archaeologists and ancient his­ tor­ians have tended to see the Roman period as being dominated by more functional approaches than periods before or after. But we should also notice that it was only after ad 43 that regular evidence for religious observance, in the shape of shrines and temples, became common in the English landscape, to be given new structure and modes of efficacy with the renewal of Christianity in the early medieval period. We would not agree with Descola (and Lloyd 2013) who sees four ontologies (animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism) existing in different societies in various parts of the world. Our own contemporary thought, labelled naturalism in Descola’s scheme, which he defines as scientific and dividing nature from culture, is always tinged with magical and religious elements and controversies. Conversely, an approach such as Ingold’s (2011) yearns for the immersive as the true and unalienated human state, with religion and science as siren voices tempting us away from our healthy development within and through a mass of relations. As well as these three attitudes to the universe, we would also see two basic tendencies in our mutual shaping and being shaped by the material world. The world is made up of energy and matter, with energy flowing through the world and matter taking temporary shapes due to a variety of forces. These flows and forms operate at a series of temporal and spatial levels. At a relatively small level, the human body is kept alive by flows of nutrients into it and waste products out. This is true of all animals, plants, and the soil, so that one set of forms, such as grains of bread wheat, become part of the energy flows into a human body. Energies are shifted and recombined into changing forms. Thinking in terms of energetics, the human body also sees a series of synapses firing, communicating messages to muscles and nerves, which provide us a shifting picture of the world, in turn the basis for our actions in and on the world. The nature of energy flows through a human body changes during its life, being different in the growing body of a child to the mature body of an aged adult. We are also all aware that the human body is finite and that at some stage the energies composing tissues and bone will return to the biosphere. All living things are tem­por­ ary nexuses of matter and energy in determinate forms, but it is also the case with things we take to be non-living, such as pots, cloth, or bronze axes, although some of these can potentially last for a long time, giving the illusion of permanency to transient people. In thinking of the energy and matter of which the world is composed it is also useful to think in terms of extended and condensed relations. On the one hand are things that are produced by, and in turn help produce, extended relations. These are material things that

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20  English Landscapes and Identities can only be made and used by a group of people in cooperation. In the case of the English past these are such things as monuments (henges, stone circles, or churches), field systems, hillforts, or road networks. In each case, construction is only possible or realistic through a group of people working together, often over some period of time and through exercising various degrees of skill. Furthermore, most of these things do not just need to be created, but maintained or looked after. Ditches of a field system, henge, or hillfort fill up through erosion, roads decay, church roofs fall in. These are often long-term commitments and cannot be taken lightly. As such, these group projects derive from important values within the group; they are the social commitments of the group writ large. By realizing such commitments, extended material products help create and reinforce that group that worked together in production and maintenance. Relations extend beyond the human group, to plants and animals, reinforcing their importance. And, as we will see, fields also make manifest relations to less proximate entities, such as the sun and moon. In making a set of fields of particular forms, the group is shaping itself also in a particular manner. It is important to note that extended relations and their products are only powerful if the labour expended is controlled by the group engaged in the labour. The field systems of the late Iron Age and Roman period look like continuations of the Bronze Age forms, but there is a suspicion that these later fields were created and maintained by slaves, who laboured but did not feel the fields were theirs. It is not just the expenditure of labour that results in extended relations, but the expenditure of labour for explicitly or tacitly agreed group ends. I will come back to this point later in this section. In tension with extended relations are condensed relations (Gosden 2012; Gosden and Malafouris  2015). Particularly through items of material culture we are able to condense down complex chains of human action, and the materials they involve, into a singular object. A bronze axe can held in the hand, but condenses into itself a mass of material and skilled labour. This includes minimally mining the metals from which it is alloyed (copper with tin and/or lead), smelting and combining these, and shaping into an artefact through casting, hammering, and polishing, each of which require other materials such as wood, clay, and wax, the tools used in manufacture and so on. If an axe is to be hafted, then the list extends further. The same is true in a different way of an item of woollen clothing, fancier forms of pottery, or even a cow or a sheep dog. Many condensed artefacts gather together human labour and multiple materials from varying places and over periods of time. To hold a bronze object in your hand is not to be conscious of all the relations behind it in detail, but in a general sense the multiplicity of labour will be known and some elements of these chains will be picked out consciously and discussed. Condensed artefacts are individualized and allow in turn the individualization of the people who possess them, picking artefact and person out from the mass of relations, while at the same time acknowledging this condensation and alienation. The period we are interested in from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period sees a great growth in the number and range of artefacts up to the end of the Roman period. Notoriously, they disappear in the fifth and sixth cen­ tur­ies ad to start to re-emerge, setting up a trajectory that leads ultimately to mass ­consumption in the present (Figures 1.1–1.2). This rise of artefact-dominant societies, especially marked in the later Iron Age and Roman periods, allows for the differentiation of individuals and of subgroups within the larger whole. This is especially true of objects connected to the person: clothes; personal ornament, and weapons. Individuals and groups emerge in late prehistory, are fully present in the Roman period amongst sectors of the population, and become less marked to rise again in the centuries prior to the Norman

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Introduction  21 Summed probability of records 18000 16000 14000 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000

–1500

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Figure 1.1  Summed percentage probability of PAS records (excluding coins) falling within century time-slices.

Conquest. We have not in general given enough attention to this objectification of human relations, partly because it becomes most obvious when period boundaries are ignored.  The group-making effects of extended relations act in an opposite direction to the individualizing results of condensed relations through artefacts. It is important to be aware of these tensions all through the EngLaId period. We would not, for instance, see the fields of the middle Bronze Age as evidence of an intensification of agriculture, the ultimate aim of which was the aggrandizement of a few people. At this stage, the group is at least as im­port­ant as the individual and through continued and considerable labour the group was affirmed over individuals, for which we have only some evidence in the artefactual record. Roman fields are very different. It may well be that they were created and maintained by an alienated group (slaves?) and the products of agriculture did go, in many cases, to help individualization for which there is now considerable evidence through ornament, weapons, clothing, housing, and so on. Ultimately, we need to attempt to understand the complex interactions between the three broad attitudes of animism, religion, and functional approaches and as they link to the balance between extended and condensed relations. From the middle Bronze Age onwards new modes of extended relations arise, through group products, such as field systems and trackways, continuing and morphing into enclosures, linear boundaries, and hillforts through the late Bronze Age and Iron Age. From the late Iron Age the rate of production of artefacts picks up, with the condensed relations they encapsulate also becoming

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22  English Landscapes and Identities 1500 to 1401 BC

1400 to 1301 BC

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0 – 0.1 0.1 – 5 5 – 50

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Figure 1.2  Percentage probability of PAS/EMC records (including coins) by century time-slice, summed by hexagonal bins.

important. The extraordinary levels of material culture found in the Roman period are well known and may not be seen again until the start of modern consumer society in the seventeenth century. Compared to those of the prehistoric period, the amounts of artefacts are high in the early medieval phase, but still only a fraction of those created by the Romans. We will also note that there are long-standing differences in the amounts of material culture across England. We have worried considerably about the tricky issue of identity, but have come up with the idea of identity as a structure of care. Identity can be seen to derive from a series of attachments to significant others, be these people, plants, animals, things, or places. The identity of an individual or group is reciprocal, deriving from the creation and cultivation of these significant others. Care has a temporal dimension, best understood through the extended and condensed relations we just discussed. As we will see, one central element to care is the gathering and deposition of what we would think of as household rubbish, which

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Introduction  23 in all periods seems important to the sense of the group and individuals. Within this the care of the dead fluctuates, with parts of bodies, cremated remains, and whole corpses being deposited in a changing range of contexts on land and in the water. We have also been inclined to say that

Identity = content × process

If this formula does have a virtue, it is to reinforce the concept of time into our con­sid­er­ ations. We have sketched a complicated mix of factors here that influence human inter­ actions with the world around them, the nature of the group, and their views of cause and effect. But we should also be aware that all these factors were in motion and that human life is in flux (Gosden and Malafouris 2015). We would argue that identity is realized, that is it is created through work on and through material things. This does not make it real, in the sense that identity has an essence or a core. Rather the realizing of identity is always a process of becoming, although this becoming has some structure and shape as it unfolds. For instance, in Chapter 3 we will argue that it is hard to identify fixed regional differences in our evidence. Regional differences always exist, but not in fixed form. Rather people are always ‘regioning’—creating regions, rather than living within fixed regional differences. Regioning does unfold at varied speeds, some of which are quite slow, so that areas in the west and northwest seem to have a long-term predisposition to live with lower amounts of material culture, possibly also living in a more wooded environment, until the end of the Iron Age at least. Following our previous arguments, this might make for lesser degrees of individuation, but we will argue these points out when analysing data from Chapter  3 onwards. For now, I hope to have sketched out some broad parameters of thought which we will return to periodically when thinking about underlying dispositions, relations, and modes of temporality.

Our Broad Questions and the Structure of the Volume Our basic approach is to consider the available information at a large scale. First of all, this means using all the major sources of data available, while trying to exclude as little as possible. Such a policy of inclusion meant taking aspects of the data ‘warts and all’ in the belief that large trends would emerge and when considered at the largest scale the individual vagaries of the evidence would be less important than broader trends. Secondly, in looking across the conventional period boundaries we might see larger temporal trends obscured by period-specific views and this would put some of the observations made by period specialists into new perspective. One immediate outcome of larger considerations meant that it is impossible to tell a single or simple story. What follows in this volume are a series of attempts to present broad trends and regional variations, but with no claim to being comprehensive or developing all the narratives possible with data at this scale. Nevertheless, we hope to have teased out some broader trends in the unfolding of the English landscape from the middle Bronze Age to Domesday Book which will spur further debate and investigation. As is obvious from the title of our project, the two main issues are identity and landscape. When looking at the evidence, our basic premise is that identity derives from patterns of practice. Recent work in the anthropology of kinship argues that ideas of kinship,

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24  English Landscapes and Identities relatedness, and group derive from the ways in which a group organizes itself in the process of food production, craft making, or exchange—in sum, the business of everyday life. This has links with philosophical approaches to communal intentions, where the fundamental sociability of human beings is seen as a starting point, rather than the motivations of atomized individuals maximizing their own perceived advantage. A practice-based approach to the kin group is attractive to the archaeologist who would add that patterns of everyday life are channelled, structured, and influenced by physical circumstances such as field systems, trackways, and tools. Identity operates at a series of scales, from the individual farmstead or community to a broad region of England and on to further flung connections. In many ways, landscape and identity are the same things by different names, connected in the same way as time–space is for Einstein. Identity is the felt outcome of action in and on the land, together with work with and through artefacts. Linking these concepts of landscape and identity, a series of questions become important: • Can we discern regional variations in the evidence, either across England as a whole or at more local levels, that indicate important differences in how people lived in various regions and places? Did these regional differences show any similarities with those found by Roberts and Wrathmell or more recent projects, such as that of Rippon et al. or Smith et al. (see the earlier section ‘History of the EngLaId project’)? • How do we think about issues of spatial scale ranging between the whole of England and individual sites and localities? Are each of these scales an analytical construct or do they indicate important differences in how people lived? How do different scales interact? • How should we think about the relationship between people and landscapes, bal­an­ cing questions of environmental and cultural determinism? • What sorts of continuities and changes can we see in our evidence over time? Do such changes accord with the conventional period boundaries? Are there important changes unfolding at longer time scales that our conventional chronologies? • How far can and should we think in ecological terms, about either the effects of ­people on the landscape or the influence of topography, climate, or the availability of food stuffs and resources on people? • Woven through each of these questions are issues of how archaeological data are created, curated, and made sense of—these issues influence everything we can say on the basis of our evidence. In pursuing these questions, the volume has the following structure. We have divided the volume into three sections: Section I—The Creation of Archaeological Data, the Making of Our Database, and the Form of Our Analyses (Chapters 2 & 3); Section II—The Exploration of Broader Patterns (Chapters  4–8); Section III—Understanding Regional and Local Variability (Chapters  9 &  10), with a final concluding chapter. This structure takes the reader from more general issues to more specific questions, with the earlier chapters presenting a series of models and considerations of England as a whole. Starting in Section I, Chapter 2 looks at the manner in which archaeological evidence has been created, recorded, and used, identifying overlaps and contradictions between various sources, as well as affordances influencing how well different types of evidence have shown up and entered our record. This includes an important analysis of the practices of commercial archaeology over the past 25 years. It argues overall that data are characterful, taking on character by

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Introduction  25 virtue of all those processes and people involved in their creation. Chapter 3 attempts to understand regional differences in both the evidence and, more particularly now, ways of life in the past. We will review other projects’ thoughts on regional differences, look at our own data, and come to the conclusion that there is a major contrast between past ways of life in the north and west and those in the south and east, although, as just mentioned, more local regional differences were unfolding and unstable. We present thoughts on the links between houses, middens, and pits which influenced how material was curated and deposited in both later prehistory and the early medieval periods, which is picked up in later chapters. The chapter ends with the presentation of 14 case studies, arranged around the divide between the north and west and the south and east. Section II commences with Chapter 4, which provides a broad physical characterization of the English landscape through mapping the physical parameters of climate, soils, topography, and rivers. Consideration of these physical differences helps us think through issues of environmental determinism, critiquing Fox’s influential notion of highland and lowland Britain. The chapter also presents an England-wide model of erosion and synthesizes the data for tree clearance and ecological change. More substantively, analysis focuses on two river catchments, the Thames in the south and the Eden in the north to look at complex interactions of clearance, climate change, and human action in two contrasting parts of England. Chapter  5 presents two general models for understanding movement across England, the first based on factors effecting the physical ease of movement, with the second looking at differential densities of archaeological evidence, on the simple assumption that better connected areas generally had more activity and hence more evidence. We will then compare the two models, before focusing on direct evidence of communications through trackways, roads, and rivers, looking also at how these have changed over time. Chapter 6 presents data and arguments on food and agriculture, combining the first large-scale synthesis of isotopic results from people, animals, and (some) plants on the one hand, with a big data analysis of animal bones, plant remains, and pottery from various parts of the Thames Valley and from Kent. Together these analyses indicate the potentials of the data we have and the rethinking that needs to be done to understand the complexities of agriculture and food more fully. We refer back to the house–midden–pit cycle we introduced in Chapter 3. We link issues of food and fertility. Food is intimately linked to identity and we consider the possibility of quite localized differences in identity. Chapter 7 analyses a set of forty field systems dating between the middle Bronze Age and the end of the Roman period in terms of their alignments, morphology, and structure, as well as a broader ana­ lysis of early medieval ridge and furrow. We will show that there are marked continuities in the ways in which fields are laid out, probably aligned on the movements of the sun, which have echoes in the construction of houses and other aspects of the landscape. The early medieval period emerges as very different in its structure to anything seen before. Chapter 8 considers the smaller scale divisions of the landscape and how these might have been reflected in the local names given to the landscape, which in turn have considerable issues for local identities and a sense of belonging. The chapter draws in important ways on the historical record from the early medieval period. Section III looks at slightly more detailed issues—Chapter 9 focuses on the important concept of scale, including a consideration of how the scale of analysis affects the patterns we can see in our data, and presents a broad model of the complexity of archaeological evidence across England, which complements the discussion of local divisions in Chapter 8. It concludes by focusing on how the Roman villas of the Isle of Wight can help us think in a more detailed empirical fashion about scale. Chapter  10 considers time, initially by

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26  English Landscapes and Identities presenting two contrasting analyses of wooden structures along the foreshore in the Isle of Wight and how they throw light on woodland management practices, before turning to Bronze Age barrows and the relations in which they subsequently become enmeshed. Rather than working with notions of continuity and change, we will argue for a notion of multi-temporality, as elements of varied ages exist and are drawn on in any contemporary landscape. Chapter  11 attempts to pull together the main conclusions of our work and returns to the central issues of the nature of our data, to landscape and identity. The information on past lives available from archaeology is now extraordinarily rich, enabling us to tell multiple stories. One current priority is to think seriously about the nature and possibilities of our data, as well as the stories we want to tell from this newly rich evidence. We hope this volume provides a thought-provoking first step in considering archaeological data at a large scale.

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SECTION I

T HE C R EAT ION OF A RC HA E OLO G IC A L DATA , T H E M A KING OF OU R DATA BASE , A ND T HE F OR M OF OU R A NA LYSE S

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2

Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities Anwen Cooper, Victoria Donnelly, Chris Green, and Letty ten Harkel

A Bold Experiment with English Archaeological Data In terms of geographical and temporal scope, the EngLaId project is the most ambitious research project ever to have taken place in English archaeology. Its database contains 900,812 records from 92 existing data repositories. This has been augmented with add­ ition­al data from seven other existing electronic databases as well as extensive literature research, which, amongst other things, has resulted in the creation of the largest database of the results of stable isotope analyses in Britain to date. The decisions that led to the com­ pilation of the EngLaId database were inspired by a drive towards inclusivity, a desire to embrace all available data relevant to the period c.1500 bc to ad 1086. Over the course of five years, the EngLaId team has studied and researched the potential of these data, finding new ways to analyse, visualize, and interpret this unprecedented mass of information. Much remains to be explored, however, and we hope that the completion of this project heralds the start of a new era in archaeological research which will allocate a central role to Big Data. There is much discussion at present across a range of disciplines about the nature, role, and possibilities of so-called Big Data. Some take an expansive view of Big Data, which they feel needs to be measured in terabytes or petabytes, accumulating at high speed, diverse in variety and type, fine-grained in resolution, and exhaustive in scope. Our view of archaeological Big Data is more modest—it is that amount and diversity of data that can only be processed using computer hardware and software, the latter often including data­ bases, GIS, and statistical programmes. In a sense, we see a cognitive limit to Big Data. It is more than we can easily understand using traditional means of recording and organizing data, such as card catalogues, maps in physical form, or folders full of information on sites and finds. The search functions of databases, the dynamic mapping possible through GIS, and the statistics showing the frequency distribution of values are all needed in our view of Big Data, so as to perceive and appreciate broader trends over time and space. Information scientists make distinctions between data, information, and knowledge (Floridi 2011). Data (the plural of datum, from the Latin meaning a given) are values of various kinds—the number of sites in an area of a given period, the number of pits in a site, the amounts of bone in a pit, the isotopic values of that bone, and so on. By and large the more interesting data are, the less their given nature is apparent and the more we might think they have been constructed in accord with human interests. For the first time in archaeology we have a large amount of data in digital form. The EngLaId project represents a series of experiments with the possibilities of digital archaeological evidence. English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Anwen Cooper, Victoria Donnelly, Chris Green, and Letty ten Harkel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0002

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30  English Landscapes and Identities Developing a Big Data approach within archaeology means that we are cultivating interests in the general over the particular, the broad pattern over local differences, and have assumed that a large amount of evidence will point in an interesting and intelligible direc­ tion, even if some individual data records are somewhat dubious. Seeking for the big pat­ tern and the general trend is only one of the modes in which archaeologists can seek to understand the past. We are not saying that big is always beautiful. Ours is an essay in a new form of interpretation, not an argument that smaller trends in time and space are uninteresting. In fact, we will try and work across scales, appreciating local trends against broader patterns. More important to our general argument is the idea that data, information, or know­ ledge are dynamic and processual, as are the boundaries between each of those three terms. Evidence is relational and dynamic, not static and fixed. Data, information, or knowledge do not exist on their own, but through relationships with a mass of human and non-human actors. The dynamic nature of evidence derives from its modes of generation from field­ work or laboratory analysis, forms of categorization, processing, synthesis, and in­ter­pret­ ation. The idea is not to fix or stabilize evidence, as this would do violence to its relational and dynamic nature (although some minimum accuracy in reporting is definitely needed), but rather to understand its histories of generation and use. These histories we feel have made data characterful; just like human character this has given archaeological evidence a complex set of shared and idiosyncratic valences (Cooper and Green 2016). The EngLaId website1 provides a glimpse into the wealth of information that exists now in English archaeology. Given the all-inclusive nature of the EngLaId project it is im­pos­sible— for practical and legal reasons—to make the raw data available. This is still accessible through the various Historic Environment Records (HERs), Urban Archaeology Databases, Historic England’s National Record of the Historic Environment, and other data sources that made EngLaId possible in the first place, but creating a static database was never our intention. The speed and quantity of archaeological fieldwork is so impressive these days that any database will be outdated in a matter of years if not months; even the EngLaId database is already out of date at the time of this publication (we deliberately drew a line under our data collection phase in 2013). Instead, this project should be understood as having two inter­ related aims. The first is to understand the nature and character of English archaeology in the twenty-first century, some 25 years after Britain took a leading role in the implementa­ tion of legal provisions for heritage protection (PPG 16, followed just over a year later by the European-wide Valletta Treaty of 1992). The second is to reassess our knowledge about England’s past in the light of these new results. Put simply, do the patterns that ­scholars have identified from the mid-twentieth century onwards, as discussed in Chapter 1, stand the test of time and more data, or will they have to be revised in the light of our work? We will look in order at where data come from through field practices, how it is curated and stored by various agencies but primarily HERs and Historic England, complemented by major schemes such as the Portable Antiquities Scheme. There are various dissonances, over­ laps, and gaps in the manner of data curation which affected what was possible through our analyses and we will discuss the methods we used to understand and work with these effects. Finally, the methods used by the EngLaId project are novel and need some explanation.

1 http://englaid.arch.ox.ac.uk

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   31

Data Sources and Categories A large number of datasets fed into the EngLaId database, of both a regional and a national scale. All of these have separate developmental histories, and in some cases they were col­ lated for different purposes or grounded in different types of research. Some are arch­aeo­ logic­al whilst others are historical or refer to place names. Most datasets largely reflect the work of professional archaeologists, whereas others depend more significantly on efforts by members of the public. Some have specific purposes or include only specific data, whereas others intend to be comprehensive for a given area. All these factors can affect the arch­aeo­ logic­al patterns that we study as much as ‘real’ events in the past. Table 2.1 lists the datasets obtained by the EngLaId project. Data collection took place over a period of almost 500 days starting from January 2012, with the final dataset being obtained in May 2013. As such, it should be noted that the results of archaeological research that took place after this time will not have been taken into account within our discussion. There are exceptions to this rule, where specific pieces of work have been studied by indi­ vidual researchers, but the main project databases form a snapshot of the state of the English archaeological record at the time of collection (i.e. mostly 2012, with a few sections dating to 2013). HERs (previously referred to as Sites and Monuments Records) are digital archives of archaeological monuments and interventions held at local authority level (county councils, district councils, or unitary authorities). This group also includes a number of Urban Archaeological Databases (UADs), which are the equivalent of HERs but covering major historic towns and cities instead. Their main purpose is development control (for more information, see Heritage Gateway2). The National Record of the Historic Environment (NRHE), currently searchable online via Historic England’s PastScape3 site, is an England-wide digital inventory of sites that have been investigated or recorded by Historic England, or its predecessors English Heritage and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. Similarly, the National Trust HER lists all National Trust properties. Historic England (at that stage still English Heritage) provided a mass download of all relevant NRHE data; this in­corp­­ orated interpretative records linked to the National Mapping Programme (NMP) spatial data transcribing the results of aerial photography. David Yates’ catalogue of Bronze Age field systems (Yates 2007) and Janice Kinory’s cata­ logue of Iron Age/Roman salt processing sites (Kinory  2012) were both doctoral theses, made available to the EngLaId project by the authors. The Portable Antiquities Scheme4 (PAS) is an inventory of artefacts (mostly metalwork) from England and Wales, found and reported by the public. The Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds5 (EMC), held by the Fitzwilliam, lists single coin finds of early medieval date, likewise found and reported by the public. The NRHE Excavation Index (EI) is an inventory of archaeological investigations, pre­ dominantly excavations, maintained by Historic England (Historic England  2011). The Archaeological Investigations Project6 (AIP), an initiative from the University of Bournemouth, lists reports of archaeological fieldwork for the period 1990–2010. The

3 http://www.pastscape.org.uk/ 2 http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk 4 https://finds.org.uk/ 5 https://emc.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ 6 https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/aip_he_2018/index.cfm

Table 2.1  Datasets obtained by the EngLaId project Acronym

Source

Type of data

Record count

DB

Historic Environment Records

HERs

Y

NRHE NT Yates Kinory

Monuments, events, and finds Monuments Monuments Monuments Monuments

439,609

National Record of the Historic Environment National Trust HER David Yates’ catalogue of Bronze Age field systems Janice Kinory’s catalogue of Iron Age/Roman salt processing sites National Mapping Programme Portable Antiquities Scheme Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds

84 different local authority/national park/urban databases Historic England National Trust Yates (2007) Kinory (2012)

132,587 1,877 614 523

Y Y Y Y

Mapped features Finds Finds

n/a 277,734 10,131

N Y Y

NRHE Excavation Index

EI

123,326

N

Archaeological Investigations Project Online AccesS to the Index of archaeological investigationS Electronic Edition of Domesday The Language of Landscape: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Countryside (Early Medieval Charter Boundary Clauses) Key to English Place-Names Museum of London Archaeology and Oxford Archaeology

AIP OASIS Domesday LangScape

Historic England British Museum Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Historic England/Archaeology Data Service University of Bournemouth Archaeology Data Service Palmer (2010) King’s College (2008)

Events Events Documentary Documentary

24,398 n/a 13,335 n/a

Y N Y N

KEPN MOLA and OA

University of Nottingham MOLA and OA

Onomastic Archaeological

n/a

NMP PAS EMC

Events

 

N N

The yes/no column on the right records whether each dataset has been incorporated within the main project database or whether it has been left as its own stand-alone database/set of files. By ‘monument’, we mean any assemblage of archaeological material or structures larger than a single findspot.

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Title

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   33 awkwardly capitalized Online AccesS to the Index of archaeological investigationS7 (OASIS) is also a database of fieldwork reports, held by the Archaeology Data Service in York, which relies largely on self-reporting by archaeological contractors (for more information on these datasets, see Donnelly et al. 2014; Donnelly 2016). Some datasets were specific to the early medieval period. The Electronic Edition of Domesday (Palmer 2010) is an open-source digital inventory of all landholdings listed in the eleventh-century Domesday Book. The LangScape8 site provides a fairly comprehensive list of surviving Old English and Latin written descriptions of the boundaries of seventh- to eleventh-century ad estates across England—commonly known as charter bounds or boundary clauses—added to the end of early medieval charters. This more qualitative data­ set was used selectively in the context of a small number of case study areas. Finally, the Key to English Place-Names9 (KEPN) is a resource for place name studies created and maintained by the Institute for Name-Studies (INS) at the University of Nottingham. It focuses mainly on existing places in modern-day England, and is therefore not exhaustive for the later part of the early medieval period. This was the period when many place names were recorded for the first time—for example, in Domesday Book and charters—but many of these places have since been abandoned or lost. For current purposes, a selection of Domesday place names was made for five case study areas (Marches, Devon, the Isle of Wight, Kent, and Humber), amounting to a total of 1,297 names. To ensure coverage of now-lost settlement names, the KEPN website was used in conjunction with published resources (e.g. Ekwall 1960; Watts 2004; Mills 2011).

Data Collection and Integration HER data was obtained directly from each HER. To facilitate data gathering, we commis­ sioned exeGesIS SDM Ltd to produce a query for their HBSMR software package that is used as a database by around two-thirds of HERs. This was ultimately a substantial saving in both costs and time and would be highly recommended by us as an essential step for any other projects considering HER data capture on the scale of EngLaId, assuming HBSMR maintains its current market reach. HER data were then reprocessed on receipt using vari­ ous automated processes by the project team, as directed by Green. Historic England data was also obtained directly from the relevant HE staff and reprocessed in a similar manner by the project team. A not dissimilar process was used for the PAS data. All other datasets were obtained and reprocessed on an ad hoc basis as required. The data were integrated into a database structured to largely mimic HBSMR and linked to GIS. This was not the final step in the process of data preparation: the ‘character’ of the various constituent parts of the combined EngLaId dataset included various aspects that needed further consideration. The most obviously problematic of these is that records of the same archaeological ‘object’ (a monument, a find, or an event) can appear across mul­ tiple original data sources often with slightly different spatial coordinates and/or site names. In most cases, no links have been built between the various datasets prior to our own project, with the end result that the only perfectly reliable way (albeit subject to some inevitable human error) to remove these overlaps is by hand. Naturally, for a main database comprising over 900,000 records, undertaking such an exercise for our entire dataset 7 https://oasis.ac.uk/pages/wiki/Main 9 http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/

8  https://langscape.org.uk/index.html

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34  English Landscapes and Identities would have been an impossible task, taking into account our time and resources. As such, we had to find other ways to deal with this problem on a national scale and for our larger case study areas, whilst manual map-based processing was only applied in selected 10 km × 10 km test squares (see insets at the end of Chapter 3) and to the smaller case study areas (see below). Once the data were collected, a thesaurus of specific monument types based upon the Forum on Information Standards in Heritage Thesaurus of Monument Types (Historic England 2014) was created, as this is used as a data standard by most of our data providers. We defined eight broad categories (given a number from 01 to 08) and a series of up to 19 subtypes (given a subscripted letter) for each broad category (Table 2.2). Broad periods were also given letter codes (PR = unspecified prehistoric (filtered where feasible to c.1500 bc—ad 43); BA = Bronze Age (c.1500–800 bc); IA = Iron Age (c.800 bc—ad 43); Table 2.2  List of categories and subcategories for sites/monuments 01 –

Agriculture and subsistence

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O 02 – A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q 03 – A B C D E F

Coaxial field system Linear field system Aggregate field system Strip field Unspecified/other field system Other arable farming evidence Linear earthwork Pit alignment [deprecated—moved to 08S] Waterhole/pond/well Corn drying oven Granary Fishpond Stock enclosure/animal husbandry Cross dyke Religious, ritual, and funerary Inhumation burial Cremation burial Unspecified burial Inhumation cemetery Cremation cemetery Unspecified cemetery Other funerary Barrow Cairn Temple Shrine/sanctuary Church Abbey/monastery/minster Standing stone Stone circle/cove Cross/slab/grave marker Timber platform Domestic and civil Town/small town Burh Civitas capital/colonia Hamlet/village Vicus Canabae legionis

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   35 01 –

Agriculture and subsistence

G H I J K L M N O P Q R S 04 – A B C D E F G H I J K L M 05 – A B C D E F G H I J K 06 – A B C D E F G H I J 07 – A B C

Oppidum Hillfort/promontory fort Unenclosed settlement Enclosed settlement Linear settlement Palisaded settlement Riverside settlement Dispersed settlement Nucleated settlement Road-side settlement Midden Timber platform Unspecified settlement Architectural forms Villa Mansio Roundhouse Longhouse Farmstead/farm enclosure Ringwork D-shaped enclosure Sub-rectangular enclosure Banjo enclosure Aisled building Other rectilinear building Burnt mound Grubenhaus Industrial Metal working site Bronze working site Iron working site Mineral extraction site Quarry Pottery manufacturing site Tile works Lime kiln Salt production site Mint Textile manufacturing site Communication and transport Road Trackway Hollow way/ridgeway Drove road Quay/jetty/harbour Bridge Canal Aqueduct Causeway Walkway Defensive Hillfort Fort (castellum), incl. non-Roman forts Fortress (castrum) (Continued)

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36  English Landscapes and Identities Table 2.2  Continued 01 –

Agriculture and subsistence

D E F 08 – A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S

Fortlet Burh Ringwork Other Mound Ditch Pit Find(s) Hoard Metalwork deposit Watercraft Flood defences Enclosure Gully Building Midden Linear earthwork Boundary/land division Timber structures Manor Dyke Ring ditch Post alignment

RO = Roman (c.ad 43–410); EM = early medieval (c.ad 410–1086); UN = undated). Based upon the original monument types attached to each record, a code (or set of codes) was created using an automated script that created the EngLaId type. As an example, a Roman villa would be given the code RO04A, which translates to ‘Period: Roman; Category: Architectural forms; Subtype: villa’. Alongside this, another thesaurus was created for find types, consisting of 22 different categories of find. These categories were ‘soft’ in the sense that an object could belong to multiple categories. For example, an axe would be classified as both a ‘Tool’ and a ‘Weapon’. Each of these categories was given a two-letter code, which was appended to the same period codes used for monuments. As an example of this, an early medieval brooch would be given the code EM-PD, which translates to ‘Period: early medieval; Type: personal decoration’. Again, this process was automated using a script applied to the original input data. Finds would also be given the monument code 08D to record their existence as a findspot (within the Category: ‘Other’). Importantly the database was linked to GIS. Using the Identity tool in ArcGIS, spatial intersections between each record’s geographic location (which could be a point, points, a line, or a polygon) and the cells of a perfectly tessellating grid of some description were defined. Three regular polygons can be tessellated perfectly: triangles, squares, and hexa­ gons. Triangles are inconvenient, as their orientation has to be reversed for each row or column to achieve tessellation. Squares have a certain useful simplicity in that they relate directly to the units of the coordinate system used. Hexagons are less simple than squares but possess a useful property in that their tessellated rows or columns are partly offset. People have a tendency to see false linear alignments in tessellations of squares, due to the horizontal and vertical linear arrangement of the cells: this problem is lessened by the use of hexagons. As such, for the national survey we used three sets of tessellations: a set of 1 km × 1 km squares (for statistical purposes), a set of hexagons with a 3-km distance

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   37 between each corner of each hexagon and its second nearest neighbouring corner (for most cartographic purposes), and finally a set of larger hexagons with a 5-km distance between each corner and its second nearest neighbouring corner (for coarse maps of the whole country). Various other finer resolution hexagonal tessellations were used for the larger case study areas (see Chapter 3). Using these three spatial distinctions (the 1-km, the 3-km, and the 5-km) three sets of tables were generated and each was attached to a mapping layer. In each case presence and absence were registered rather than the number of each find or monument type. For the coarser spatial intervals some detail was lost—if more than one Roman villa was found in a 5-km hexagon, this was not registered or then mapped across the country as a whole. However, it is likely that two such villas would occur in different 1 km × 1 km squares, so that this information was retained in the statistical analyses (see Green 2013 for more detail on the method). As we moved up the scales there was a simplification of the character of the original data. For cartographic purposes, this does not matter, as any differences in count would not be visible when working at the scale of all of England, because the dot symbol used for a villa record will almost always be at least the size of our 3-km hexagons (and usu­ ally larger) (Figure 2.1). For our statistical analyses using the 1 km × 1 km squares, this clearly acts as a source of a low degree of error, but this should be minimized by the relatively small size of squares used. One of our datasets had this level of precision to begin with: spatial information in Palmer (2010) is only recorded to the nearest kilometre, which masks under­ lying complexities such as population distribution and the relationship between estate ­centres and dependent holdings. In any event, so long as we are clear about the meth­od­ ology used to quantify our data, these caveats should be apparent to other scholars. 

Our Approach: National and Case Studies A multi-scalar approach is central to the working methodology of the EngLaId project (see Chapter 9 in particular, but also throughout this volume). When the EngLaId project was designed, it was initially envisaged to combine a nationwide survey with work in a number of case study regions that had been selected for their good NMP coverage. However, fol­ lowing discussion with HER officers, it was decided that those chosen had seen a great deal of research in the past, so that we modified our choice of the case studies. Many of the final case study areas (particularly the Mid-England Transect) deliberately cut across different bio-geographical regions (Figure 2.2). This introduced new in­ter­pret­ ative challenges, such as the contextualization of observed differences by dividing the case study areas according to landscape type (for example, upland versus lowland). It also cre­ ated methodological problems: some case study regions were particularly large and a single case study dataset could amount to more than 55,000 records (for the East of England Transect). Smaller 10 km × 10 km square areas (where possible) were therefore also selected to be able to engage in more labour-intensive probing of the data with the time and resources available, such as elucidating overlaps between data sources, and to get a cleaner perspective on the relationship between differences in topography and archaeological variability (Figure 2.2). Together with the case study areas, the 10 km × 10 km squares provide a series of keyhole perspectives of the English past at varying scales to improve understanding of regionality without drawing firm lines between regions (see the presen­ tation of a series of 10 km × 10 km squares at the end of Chapter 3). With some exceptions, our datasets were usually collated for the entire country, but different approaches had to be employed to achieve synthesis and interpretation on ­

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nationwide and case study levels and in the 10 km × 10 km test squares. Archaeology is traditionally executed at fairly limited spatial scales, but recent advances in computing have made it possible to analyse data patterns on much larger scales as well. Given the large amount of data, broad-brush nationwide analyses were all done by computer. However, the geo­graph­ic­al and chronological breadth of our overall analyses made in-depth research harder, and in each case decisions had to be made about the most suitable approach to the dataset in question, including more traditional work on case study level and in targeted 10 km × 10 km squares.

Data Cleaning, Data Overlaps, and Temporal Uncertainty The case study areas allowed for more detailed engagement with the data on a record-byrecord basis. This allowed the EngLaId team to fine-tune the datasets more by manually ‘cleaning’ the records. Two main objectives were pursued. The first was to remove records that fell outside the EngLaId period, which was done for all case study areas. Most data

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feeding into the EngLaId database were not structured according to sub-periods, but the EngLaId project starts in the middle Bronze Age. All ‘Bronze Age’ and ‘unspecified prehis­ toric’ records that could be assigned to the early Bronze Age (based on the information in the description field) were therefore manually removed at the case study level. A cleaning strategy was also devised to filter out records on the early medieval end of the chronological spectrum. This affected place name evidence in particular, as only records whose first recorded instance fell within the EngLaId project’s time period were kept, unless there was corroborating archaeological evidence or other documentary evidence to suggest an earlier date. This particularly affected the HER dataset from Cornwall. The Cornwall HER was the only dataset from an EngLaId case study region that systematically included all place name evidence with elements that could be of early medieval der­iv­ation— such as names containing tre– (‘settlement’) or lann (‘enclosed churchyard’)—even if their first recorded instance was much later. Although this may have removed some records of early medieval date, it made the dataset more comparable on a national scale. The second objective of the manual cleaning process was to remove overlaps between datasets, to see where the same site or findspot might have occurred more than once. A

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40  English Landscapes and Identities series of tests were therefore carried out to assess interregional comparability and levels of repetition between different datasets. For the larger case study areas (or for spatial compari­ sons between case study areas) similar automated spatial binning techniques were employed as for the nationwide survey, but using smaller-sized spatial bins (350-m hexbins—this term is short for hexagon bins, where the term ‘bin’ refers to a single spatial division, in this case shaped like a hexagon). However, for the smaller case study areas—particularly Somerset, the Isle of Wight, and North Northumberland—and the 34 10 km × 10 km squares within case study areas, overlaps between the main datasets were removed manually. This was done in GIS, by overlaying the four main data sources (HERs, the NRHE, the AIP, and the PAS) and visually assessing the relationship between the data sources, each time taking the HER data as primary and deleting other repeating records: repetition was looked for between the HER and other datasets. The results of the study of overlaps are summarized in Figures  2.3–2.4. The degree of overlap varies significantly, in the case of the AIP and the HERs between 0 and 100 per cent and in the case of the NRHE and HER records between 28 and 92 per cent. The compari­ son between HERs and the NRHE was most straightforward, as both map archaeological monument types. Some difficulty existed only in relation to the different spatial structure of NRHE data as compared to HER data. The exeGesIS query and our own subsequent data processing had translated all HER data into point data (for consistency across all HER Min

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   41 datasets), but for the NRHE we had obtained three layers—point data, polygons, and lines—with obvious implications for ease of cross-reference and identification of overlaps. The difference between the HER and the AIP data is mainly due to their sources. The AIP focused on archaeological reporting for the period 1990–2012, although the previously known archaeological monument types are also extracted in the process of digital archiv­ ing. Although one might expect all AIP records therefore to occur within the HER, Figures 2.3–2.4 reveal that this is not the case. A number of factors can explain this, includ­ ing differences in data collection methodologies and design between data providers, as well as simple errors or omissions (for example, a lack of report submission to the relevant HER) (summarized in Donnelly et al. 2014). Finally, the PAS differed most from the HERs. This was because not all HERs include PAS data, and even those that do often have a back­ log of unentered PAS data due to time pressures.  Thus the EngLaId project eventually worked with a combination of ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ data, which raises the question as to how important issues of data ‘quality’ are for Big Data analyses. Is it safe to assume that, because the data are so numerous, broad patterns remain the same whether data are ‘cleaned’ or not? Are the spatial binning techniques as reliable as the manual processing of data, which removes any overlaps or inconsistencies? To some extent the answer is yes, little difference is made by cleaning, as can be illustrated with an example from the Northumberland case study area. Figure 2.5 compares the relative repre­ sentation between the eight data categories for the whole case study area (unclean ‘raw’ data as well as ‘clean’ data where all the overlaps were removed manually) and the 10 km × 100% 90% 80% Miscellaneous

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42  English Landscapes and Identities 10 km test square (‘clean’ data). It is immediately clear that the overall representation of thesaurus categories remained little altered between the three instances, highlighting the relative unimportance of working with ‘clean’ data when attempting broad cross-regional comparison. In other words, although the fine-grained data patterns and absolute numbers changed, hours of data cleaning did not affect the general archaeological signature of a given region. More comparisons are needed across England to ensure this result is repeated.

Evidence Types and Their Affordances for Dating Monuments Questions of dating are central to many of our analyses. Although we have attempted to refine dating, our efforts met with limited success when looking at a large dataset. In some cases, imprecise temporality is unavoidable or even correct: field systems, trackways, or quarries can be extremely long-lived. Chronology becomes more of an issue when records that could be dated more precisely are dated to an entire archaeological period, such as the dating of an Iron Age coin to 1500 bc to ad 43, or an early medieval burh to ad 410–1066. This issue is particularly apparent for the generic ‘prehistoric’ category, which potentially includes all records that pre-date the Roman period, thus masking even broad changes and/or continuities between the Bronze and Iron Ages (and sometimes before). In many of the analyses that follow, this category has therefore been either ignored or—to flatten out peaks in the resulting patterns—half-weighted to the Bronze and Iron Ages. Nevertheless, even a basic mapping of multi-periodicity using the broad archaeological time periods of Bronze Age, Iron Age, prehistoric, Roman, and early medieval can show interesting results. Figure 2.6—based on the entire EngLaId database, including finds—reveals that, even on a relatively coarse resolution, evidence from three or more periods within a 1 km × 1 km square is relatively uncommon, occurring in just over 20 per cent of 1 km × 1 km spatial bins on a national level, and only on the Isle of Wight approaching half the spatial bins. When finds are removed from the equation and/or the size of the spatial bins is reduced, the numbers drop even further. What is more, the largest concentration of 1 km × 1 km squares with evidence for three or more EngLaId periods occur in the south and southeast, creating a division along a general southwest–northeast axis that will reappear repeatedly in subsequent chapters. We have also thought about the factors that enable or hinder the dating of archaeological sites. Pottery is without doubt the most widely used method for dating archaeological sites due to its abundance and its relatively diagnostic nature. But pottery use in the past was never a spatially continuous phenomenon: people in some areas of England used far more pots than those in other areas, who might in fact never have used pottery at all. As such, areas with greater levels of pottery usage in the past are likely to feature more closely dated archaeological sites in the present. To look at these effects we attempted to map pottery across England for different periods. Most time periods have seen few attempts to collate pottery data since the post-1990 boom in commercial archaeology. For later prehistory, the best resource available to us was the database constructed by Earl et al. (2008) in the 1990s. For the Roman period, the best national resource available is the website maintained by Tyers (2014). The early medieval period lacks comprehensive surveys that include both earlier, handmade and later, wheelturned wares. For the earlier part of the early medieval period, no comprehensive survey appears to have been undertaken since Myres’ work in the 1960s and 1970s (1969; 1977). No comparable attempt involving comprehensive spatial mapping on a nationwide scale was

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   43 100000

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44  English Landscapes and Identities made for the wheel-turned potteries of the later Anglo-Saxon period, although we also pieced together a few more modern sources for specific types of pottery (Vince  1993; Wood 2011; Blinkhorn 2012). To help improve this early medieval picture and bring it more up-to-date, we also built in the database of fifth- to sixth-century cemeteries constructed by Martin (2011), as areas of furnished burial and pottery usage broadly seem to cor­re­ spond for this period (Martin himself was studying cruciform brooches, often found in funerary contexts). In the model, the latter source and also the coarse maps created by Vince (1993) were built in at a lower weighting than the other data sources, as they were a proxy and of relatively coarse resolution, respectively. Using the information on pottery distributions we have tried to model the broad pat­ terns of site occurrences in our different periods. These three models are very imperfect, but they do show greater pottery usage in the south and east of England in all our periods of interest (Figure 2.7). The picture is somewhat distorted during the Roman period, but primarily only by areas of intense military occupation in the north (especially York, Chester, and Hadrian’s Wall, but also largely non-military Wroxeter). The end result is that sites in the south and east of Britain ought to be much more easily dated than those in the north and west, where any excavator is likely to need (potentially expensive) scientific methods to date their archaeological contexts. We should therefore expect to see the exca­ vated monuments to be more easily and precisely dated in the south and east than else­ where. We must bear differences in dating precision in mind when carrying out analyses.

The Factors Influencing the Nature of Archaeological Evidence As we saw in Chapter 1, archaeological evidence in England has been generated in many different ways by many groups and agencies and much of what we now know derives from work over the past century. Indeed, the majority of surveys and excavations have been car­ ried out since PPG 16, which came into effect in 1990, through work carried out in advance of development (Bradley 2007). A PhD carried out as part of the EngLaId work by Victoria Donnelly (Donnelly  2016) focused on the generation of grey literature since PPG 16, (a) Later prehistory

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   45 providing a nuanced account of the working of commercial archaeology over the past twenty-five years, with some unexpected results. This work has allowed us to see how large portions of our data were generated through developer-funded archaeology since 1990. Commercial development is a major structuring force in the creation of archaeological evidence (as shown by Darvill and Russell 2002). These economic drivers are external to archaeology. The changing development pressures of the past decades have powerfully shaped our understanding of the resultant archaeological record. Housing developments, aggregate extraction sites, road schemes, major infrastructure upgrades, the expansion of urban centres, and the siting of airports are all factors in the creation of the archaeological record. As shown by the work of Aitchison and Rocks-Macqueen (2013), commercial forces dictate the nature and size of the area under investigation, the investigative tech­ niques selected from the wider range of options open to archaeology, the number of staff assigned to a project and the time allowed for all stages of the project, the manner in which artefacts, finds, and features will be analysed, curated, and presented, and how all of these elements are transmuted into the data presented in the associated publication or report. Commercial forces also influence the wider milieu of development-led archae­ ology: the number of active archaeologists in the workforce, their level and access to skills and training, and the relations between archaeological organizations and those re­spon­ sible for monitoring and oversight. Donnelly’s project began with an overview of archaeological investigation and grey lit­ erature reporting in England from 1990 to 2010. This was based around an examination of the creation and composition of three major datasets related to archaeological investigation and grey literature reporting across all of England: the Archaeological Investigations Project (AIP), the Excavation Index (EI), and the Grey Literature Library (GLL). How these different datasets were created, curated, accessed, and shared, and how all of this might impact, distort, or enhance our conception of recent archaeological investigation in England was questioned. The distribution of these grey literature datasets was examined through mapping and through considering the factors that influenced the spatial pattern­ ing of archaeological work. Through an investigation of these three major datasets, over 2,400 individual archaeological organizations involved in reporting on archaeological fieldwork investigation were identified and their distribution throughout England charted. Although the English archaeological community seems on the surface to be dominated by a small number of big producers, a great deal of work is carried out by small organizations or even individuals. A key element structuring archaeological work in England (and indeed Britain) is the changing nature of legal protection for heritage. All heritage, which includes, but is not limited to, the built historic environment and below-ground archaeological deposits, is protected in law throughout England and has been for some time. The specifics of what is meant by ‘heritage’ and ‘protection’, how the mechanisms of protection operate, and in what circumstances the relevant policy and legislation can be triggered have all evolved over time and will continue to do so. Key moments of evolution include the Ancient Monuments Act of 1882 and the early Town and Country Planning Acts of 1932 onwards up until the introduction of PPG 16 in 1990. Fitzpatrick describes the evolution of planning law and development-led archaeology from the first competitively tendered archaeological project in the UK (said by ‘oral history’ to be 1987) up until 2010, which therefore includes some of the more recent changes to policy and legislation (Fitzpatrick 2012: 140). Fitzpatrick also situates archaeology within the larger sphere of planning. Interestingly, he states that out of the many diverse non-archaeological topics to receive planning policy guidance

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46  English Landscapes and Identities notes, ‘Planners widely regarded PPG 16 as one of the most effective planning policy guidance notes issued’ (Fitzpatrick 2012: 140). The replacement of PPG 16 in 2010 with new planning policy guidance—Planning Policy Statement 5: Planning for the Historic Environment (PPS 5)—marks the end of an era. Although archaeology continues to be protected as part of the planning and development process, the failure of the Heritage Bill in 2008 and the subsequent introduction of the Localism Bill (2011) and the National Planning Policy Framework (2012) have marked a change in focus, such that the government’s strong desire to see development take place, especially house-building, combined with cuts in local authority planning departments, have had an impact of the effectiveness of archaeological protection through the planning system. Further changes to legislation and planning policy as a result of the recent vote to leave the European Union can be anticipated. The most thorough analysis of the state of developer-funded archaeology in Britain has been through the AIP, which has published a number of interim reports, the most detailed being Archaeology in the PPG16 Era: Investigations in England 1990-2010 (Darvill et al. 2019). Through investigating the number, scale, and distribution of archaeological field­ work events, the AIP has also managed to characterize the recent changes in the nature and development of the organizations who undertake archaeological field work. This report contains a very useful thematic review of legislation and archaeology, with sections detail­ ing the relationship of archaeological fieldwork to planning law, development, and the archaeological roles that predated and evolved into the currently existing frameworks and roles. Both planning in England and archaeology and planning application procedures are clearly and usefully summarized (Darvill and Russell 2002: 12–16). To gain a more detailed understanding of the formation processes behind grey literature and hence of developer-funded archaeology, three case study areas were selected in order to look in more detail at factors lying behind the national pattern—the Lea Valley, the MidEngland Transect, and North Northumberland—being three of the fourteen case studies used by the EngLaId project as a whole (see the earlier section ‘Our approach: national and case studies’). The Lea Valley provided an opportunity to examine the wide diversity of grey literature reporting in a region that included both urban and rural areas. It was pos­ sible to compare the AIP, EI, and GLL data for the case study area in detail and identify the spatial patterning of work and reporting. This allowed for a characterization of the grey lit­ erature producing organizations in the case study area and a detailed examination of 114 grey literature reports using a variety of methods. The Mid-England Transect encompassed a region that would allow investigation of the influence of various local authorities and frameworks on the production of grey literature. Using the same techniques employed in the first case study area, the grey literature pro­du­ cing organizations in the case study area were characterized. Using a variety of methods, 289 grey literature reports were examined in detail. The final case study area, North Northumberland, involved a region with a comparatively low level of development pres­ sure. Again a detailed comparison of the AIP, EI, and GLL datasets was made, together with the factors which influenced their distribution. Here it is telling that only 14 grey lit­ erature reports were available for detailed examination. The case study areas provided a different scale of analysis to compare with the broader investigation of grey literature pro­ duction at the national level; combining all of these has provided a greater understanding of the complex character of grey literature, its producers, and the associated framework of behaviours, regulations, economics, and relationships which structure and define grey lit­ erature, as we will see in the following.

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   47 Grey literature reports from north Northumberland included more large-scale land­ scape survey work and were often longer with more additional specialist reporting; many of the Northumberland projects were continuations of work at a long-running site. Reports from the Lea Valley, in contrast, were more likely to be communicating results of trial trench evaluation or other forms of sampling and keyhole investigations along linear devel­ opments or on isolated smaller sites. The grey literature reports reflected both the different landscapes and types of development pressure in different regions. Reports from the MidEngland Transect clearly demonstrated that archaeological organizations had very narrow territories of operation, often matching older county or regional boundaries. There are five organizations that produced the greatest amount number of grey literature reports nationally between 1990 and 2010: Museum of London Archaeology (MoLA), Oxford Archaeology (OA), Suffolk County Council Archaeological Services (SCCAS), Cotswold Archaeology (CA), and Wessex Archaeology (WA). A closer examination of the five biggest contributors of grey literature makes it possible to identify the links between the different types of archaeological organizations and the nature of grey literature report­ ing that is produced. Although each of these organizations generated high volumes of grey literature reporting, their comparable geographical ranges of operation were significantly different (Figure 2.8). However, if we look more broadly at the top fifty-one producers of archaeological grey literature, a different picture emerges, with many smaller players being important. Figure  2.9 maps the activities of these fifty-one largest contractors conducting arch­aeo­ logic­al fieldwork in England, showing a contrast between the south and north of England. In the south much of the work is carried out by a small number of large contractors, while in the north more smaller firms operate, making for a more variegated environment. Bradley encountered these difficulties when pulling together the evidence for prehistoric Britain and Ireland, much of it generated by commercial archaeology (Bradley 2007). In describing some of the problems he encountered in the process of researching and writing, he stated that ‘In regions where a small number of organizations had undertaken fieldwork it was possible to gain an overview’, but that in areas where a larger number of different organizations had undertaken fieldwork it became ‘difficult, and sometimes impossible, to compare them between different parts of the study area’ (Bradley 2012: 174). Overall, a wide variety of groups are shown to be producing grey literature in England although clearly the main producers are commercial archaeological organizations special­ izing in development-led archaeology. These groups have different ranges of activity, from a focus on one city or county, to operating across several counties or regions, although no one group appears to work across the entirety of England. These commercial groups also appear to experience differing levels of intensity of archaeological investigation and related grey literature reporting, whether they operate across a large or small geographical range. Finally, these groups all appear to work within their own boundaries or self-determined territories, but the larger commercial groups generally share an interest in the central south area of England; very few of the archaeological investigations that take place in the far north (such as Cumbria or Northumberland) or in the far west (such as Cornwall) are undertaken by the biggest commercial practices. Variation in grey literature was found over time, by region, by producer, by the type of investigation, and by the nature of the associated development. Significantly, the actual archaeological remains themselves were generally not the main cause of variation in report­ ing. Grey literature reports could be very similar or very different to each other regardless of the nature or scale of the archaeological findings. Similarities were more likely to be

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Figure 2.8  Comparison of the spatial distribution of the majority of archaeological investigations for all five archaeological organizations with the highest output of grey literature report production. Based on GLL, AIP, and EI data with density surfaces created using the KDE tool in ArcGIS (after Donnelly 2016: Figure 18).

found regionally, or through the clear ‘in-house’ styles of many grey literature-producing organizations. Regional variation was clearly demonstrated across each case study and when grey literature reports from different case studies are compared, they clearly differ in both content and form. If the grey literature reports are different depending on location and producing or­gan­ iza­tion, this has implications for how comparable the archaeological record actually is across the whole of England. Considering how many large-scale synthesis projects have now taken place or are underway, the issue of the comparability of archaeological data across the country is extremely significant. How can we take a holistic approach to under­ standing the archaeology of England when the composition of that understanding is a patchwork quilt of highly variable data? The few larger archaeological organizations which attain more extensive coverage in their fieldwork, such as OA, mask the many smaller organizations which only operate within a small regional territory and yet which col­lect­ ive­ly produce a large proportion of archaeological grey literature and underpin much of the

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   49 300000

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Figure 2.9  The 51 organisations in England which produced the most grey literature reports in the period between 1990 and 2010. Based on the GLL, AIP, and EI datasets (after Donnelly 2016: Figure 15).

English archaeological record. Differences are further amplified by the many regional systems in English archaeology, such as the role of county archaeologists or local HERs, ensuring that these regional differences are perpetuated and making comparison between the archaeological record between different places challenging, for example between the Lea Valley and North Northumberland. Researchers wishing to synthesize large datasets must be willing to adopt a methodology that can account for highly variable data (Bradley 2007). For this reason, the EngLaId project has put considerable efforts into understanding the regional variability in the nature of archaeological findings, starting with how easy it is to discover archaeological evidence given current techniques.

Archaeological Working Practices and Affordances Further insights into how archaeology is practiced can be gained from two datasets on the nature of archaeological investigations mentioned earlier: the AIP and the EI. Both of these record archaeological ‘events’ rather than ‘monuments’. Events refer to archaeological inter­ ventions intended to discover and examine archaeological remains: survey, excavation, and

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50  English Landscapes and Identities so on. Monuments refer to any cluster of archaeological evidence beyond a few scattered finds and which might indicate an archaeological site of some kind. Both the AIP and EI have their own emphases in recording. The AIP focused on the period following PPG 16 and was closed down not long after the EngLaId project started; complete records were never obtained for the whole of England. By contrast, the EI has England-wide coverage, is actively in the process of incorporating all AIP records, and is currently the most compre­ hensive source (see Evans 2013). However, the database is often less detailed, especially for older records. The EI also incorporates a large variety of events, but both sources give broadly comparable information. To gain a sense of the variability of archaeological interventions across England, work was carried out on a coarse scale as well as at a more detailed level (see the earlier section ‘The Factors Influencing the Nature of Archaeological Evidence’). We devised a simplified classification to combine information from both sources, dividing events into broad types which influenced our understanding of archaeological remains (Table 2.3 lists the EngLaId investigation types in comparison to the EI). Event types 1 and 3 were considered most likely to result in the identification of large-scale archaeological landscapes.10 Given the larger number of records, simplification of the EI investigation types was automated, and therefore by definition broad-brush. A more detailed characterization of AIP investigations, using the same classification but not automated, was therefore carried out in a number of selected case study areas as a control, to assess both the significance of the differences between the AIP and the EI and the impact of the automated versus the non-automated simplification processes. This comparative methodology revealed differ­ ences in patterns of archaeological work across England. Figure 2.10 demonstrates that—according to both the AIP and the EI—case study areas in the north or west of England (often including significant upland areas) and the Isle of Wight have fewer investigations per square kilometre than those in the south and east. This Table 2.3  Simplified EngLaId investigation types and their relationship to original Excavation Index investigation types Simplified EngLaId type

Original EI type

1. Intrusive: open area 2. Intrusive: keyhole

Excavation; salvage excavation Environmental assessment; evaluation; field observation (visual assessment); salvage recording; test pit; watching brief 3. Non-intrusive survey Aerial reconnaissance; air photo assessment; air photograph (geophysical/aerial/earthwork) interpretation; archaeological field investigation; earth resistance (resistivity) survey; geophysical survey; marine geophysical survey; survey—level three; survey—project; topographic survey 4. Field walking/metal detecting Field walking survey; metal detecting survey; survey—level one 5. Other Architectural survey; desk-based assessment; management survey; measured survey; multidisciplinary project; photogrammetric survey; photographic survey; research Deleted Archaeological diving unit assessment; maritime activity; underwater evaluation; underwater excavation; underwater survey; urban implication survey

10  Given the land-based and rural focus of the EngLaId project, explicitly maritime and urban investigations were excluded.

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   51 Intrusive: open area

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means that there are much denser records of monuments/sites in the south and east than elsewhere, due to the larger number of investigations. This is true even though some areas are better represented in the AIP, and others in the EI. One of the biggest differences between the EI and the AIP is in the inclusion of field walking and metal detecting surveys, which reflects the different content of the two databases. Differences in work practices are also apparent and it is clear that intrusive keyhole investigations comprise a slightly larger percentage in the southeast and east of England than elsewhere, whilst non-intrusive sur­ veys are generally underrepresented in the southeast. It should be apparent that the primary influences on the majority of archaeological field­ work in England over the past 25 years have not been purely archaeological questions. Rather these consist of a combination of where development and other destructive ac­tiv­ ities take place, as well as the differential assessments by local planners and curators of the likelihood of these activities having an archaeological impact. This introduces a clear struc­ tural bias into the recovered archaeological record, particularly in regard to where in the country things are discovered and examined. A term like ‘structural bias’, although accurate, brings with it baggage that implies that it is a problem, rather than simply another element of the character of our data. As such, we find it more useful to think of these structuring influences using the concept of affordance (borrowed from J. J. Gibson—Gibson (1986)). This was introduced more broadly by Ingold (1992), but is perhaps most usefully summarized in an archaeological context by Gillings (2007: 38–9; 2012: 604–8). In essence, affordances are opportunities provided to people by their environment during practical activity, but this is also a concept that can be applied to the processes that result in archaeological data being recovered through current arch­aeo­ logic­al practice (Green et al. 2017). In short, there are influences that make it more likely that archaeological evidence will be detected, and that archaeological work will be carried

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52  English Landscapes and Identities out and taken through to analysis and some form of publication—these positive factors can labelled as affordances. Essentially, different affordances exist which provide opportunities for, or impediments to, various modern archaeological activities. In the context of the EngLaId dataset, the pri­ mary sources of monument data records generated by professional archaeologists are aerial survey and excavation (alongside a whole other host of prospection techniques used less commonly). As such, we attempted to map the structuring affordances that aid or hinder recovery of data through aerial survey and excavation. For aerial survey (Figure 2.11a), the primary affordances are land cover type and soil type. We thus built a model that took into account whether the ground surface was pasture (considered good for seeing earthworks and occasional parch-marks in dry summers) or arable (considered good for showing cropmarks), and whether the ground surface was obscured by various masking factors, such as woodland, urban areas, and soils poor at showing up cropmarks (based on Evans 1990 and the National Soil Map11). For excavation (Figure 2.11b), the primary affordance would be where planning decisions are made and the size of the resulting developments, but this kind of data is very hard to both obtain and combine for more than the past hand­ ful of years. We instead modelled the affordances for excavation by mapping the dens­ity of excavation events recorded in the NRHE Excavation Index from 1990 onwards. Obviously, it is problematic to attempt to model structural bias using a dataset that is itself subject to the same structural biases, but we tried to mitigate this by including all events, even those with negative results or only yielding material outside of the EngLaId time period. In order to create a model of affordances for where opportunities to discover monu­ments are higher or lower, these two models were then combined according to the relative proportions of evidence in our database discovered by each method (Figure 2.11c). The model forms a useful heuristic device for attempting to test the degree to which various distributions seen in our data are structured by modern archaeological practice, rather than by genuine patterns of past activity. Research that includes post-1990 arch­aeo­ logic­al material for England that does not attempt to take into account these influential structuring affordances runs a very real risk of reporting results that are not caused purely by differences in past activity, but in large part by non-archaeologically driven practices in the modern day. This a lesson that has been learnt well by researchers working with data provided by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), particularly in the excellent studies undertaken by Robbins (2012,  2013,  2014) into structural bias in the PAS. As the PAS is (b) 200000

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Characterful Data: Its Character and Capacities   53 another of our key datasets, we also attempted to create a combined national model of those relevant affordances (Cooper and Green 2017). Of the many factors seen by Robbins as biasing the PAS record, three are clearly amenable to national modelling: land cover type, obscuration of the ground surface (whether real or legal/statutory, e.g. the banning of metal detecting in national parks), and proximity to existing monuments (for our pur­ poses, any Roman site and any early medieval funerary site, as these were shown in our testing to have the strongest relationship to the distribution of PAS findspots). Surfaces were created that represented these factors numerically and our distribution of PAS finds tested against them (Figure 2.12a). The three surfaces were then combined as a mean aver­ age into our final model of PAS affordance (Figure 2.12b). This model shows where greater or lesser opportunities exist for material to be discovered by members of the public (pri­ marily metal detectorists). The model has a very good relationship to the actual distribu­ tion of PAS findspots, with the vast majority of findspots occurring in areas of over 0.6 out of 1 ‘affordance value’. Between them, these two models of affordances relating to modern archaeological prac­ tice (including practices engaged in by non-professional non-archaeologists) enable us to (a) 100000

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54  English Landscapes and Identities get a clearer handle on whether spatial patterns which we think we can see in our data are the genuine results of past practice or more likely the result of modern activity.

Summary We can see and potentially quantify a number of the mass of influences on archaeological survey, fieldwork, data curation, publication (in various forms) and the discussion of archaeological evidence. Although it is good to take various steps to ensure some com­par­ abil­ity and lack of overlaps between the datasets it is not possible, or even desirable, to cre­ ate a record of English archaeology that is all categorized in the same manner. In creating a single database of the major sources of English information between 1500 bc and ad 1086 we have set up a source of information that works in a practical sense, but is also in tune with our broad interests in the variability of evidence across time and space. Another pro­ ject looking at the same evidence could well categorize and analyse the information in dif­ ferent ways, searching through the myriad relations between sets of evidence to highlight new links and differences. Ours is very much a first pass through this mass of data, which we are confident have produced novel insights into the past of the area we now call England. Subsequent work will be based on and react against our own, giving new character and dynamism to the evidence we have. We used our data to work at three levels: that of England as a whole, within case studies, and the test squares, giving us some sense of the global, regional, and local patterns in the evidence which might derive from differences in how people lived in the past. We have taken seriously differences in how information was categorized and stored, but have taken a generally positive view of the possibilities of mass analysis in the light of the initial com­ parisons of data we carried out. We were relieved to discover that the archaeological evidence we gathered exhibited structure. One has to keep in mind that patterns seen might not be wholly archaeological and that there are a whole host of factors, human and physical, which influence how archaeology is discovered, investigated, analysed, and reported. At first glance we can see both broad-brush patterns and more local variability. The nature of these patterns is the subject of Chapter 3.

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3

Patterns in the Data across England Letty ten Harkel, Anwen Cooper, Victoria Donnelly, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Tyler Franconi, and Laura Morley

In this chapter we tackle the question of how far broad similarities of evidence exist across England and whether local forms of regional variability might have existed from the whole of the period from 1500 bc to ad 1086. We also ask whether some forms of inhabitation and use of artefacts were special to particular periods and areas. We con­ clude that there is a broad distinction in all periods between the rich evidence from the south and east with the sparser amounts from the north and west. The differences in the amounts of artefacts have long been remarked upon (Piggott 1958; Cunliffe 2005: 82–3), but we find it too in the amount and nature of landscape features and sites. We wondered, looking at the work of others, whether it might be possible to identify specific regions, which persisted through time. Lying behind broad differences, which we might think of as actively ‘regioning’ rather than creating fixed regions, are at least two tendencies or dispositions, one in the north and west, the other in the south and east. In the former area settlement is dispersed, field systems are small, and artefacts are relatively few, with more concentrated settlement, larger field systems, and more artefacts in the south and east. We will also start to think about the implications regional and local differences might have had for issues of identity. As we saw in Chapter 2, there is regional variability in the manner in which arch­aeo­ logic­al work is carried out across England and we need to address whether the differences we see are due solely or mainly to those working practices or whether it derives from varied ways in which people lived in the past. Once we have laid out our evidence for regional differences we will then present a methodology we developed looking at 10 km × 10 km test squares across various case studies. The limited size of these squares allowed us to carry out more detailed data cleaning, evaluation, and analysis than was possible across our dataset as a whole. We have also been able to organize them against aspects of the landscape, pre­ dom­in­ant­ly elevation, which allows us a more controlled understanding of variability across different topographical zones. The test squares do not, however, represent a fully randomized sample across our case studies, so that there is a localized and anecdotal elem­ ent to them, although we also believe that they are broadly representative of the variability we see. To test this further we will also present and discuss the evidence of our dataset as a whole. At the end of the chapter we will consider differences in evidence across 14 of the 10 km × 10 km squares.

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Letty ten Harkel, Anwen Cooper, Victoria Donnelly, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Tyler Franconi, and Laura Morley. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0003

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56  English Landscapes and Identities

Regionality: Approaches and Methodologies Inspiration for this project derived from broad similarities others had recognized in the distribution and continuity of archaeological evidence, especially in a central zone of England from the Yorkshire to the Devon coast, which might have existed as a zone of dense settlement not just from the late Iron Age onwards, but also in earlier periods. The recognition of such a zone in our data was somewhat unclear, with it perhaps showing up as part of a broader set of differences across the country, as we shall see. A number of sets of previous work provided an impetus for our own, as we outlined in detail in Chapter  1. The influential work of Roberts and Wrathmell (2000,  2002) used ­historic map regression to define three main regions within England along a broad northeast–southwest axis, including a so-called ‘Central Province’ of nucleated villages, and two flanking zones of more dispersed settlement. Two projects contemporary to our own have also put significant work into understanding regional differences. The Fields of Britannia project (Rippon et al. 2013, 2015) investigated the Roman to early medieval tran­ sition in England and Wales and divided the country up into a series of biogeographical ‘pays’, using a combination of cultural and topographic criteria. The Roman Rural Settlement project conversely divided the country up according to the nature of the excavated evidence found within each region. Both of the latter projects again defined central regions featuring more settled lifeways. One further synthetic project based largely on the study of grey literature that ran con­ currently with the EngLaId project was John Blair’s People and Places in the Anglo-Saxon Landscape, which also identified regions but slightly different ones again. Identifying zones of visible Anglo-Saxon material culture for different periods, Blair (2013: 36, Figure 9) defined what he termed the Anglo-Saxon Building Culture Province, broadly corresponding to the Wash River catchment zone and almost certainly influenced by ease of access to people and goods from the continent. Again, his work reinforced the notion of a broad east–west dis­ tinction, but along different lines than the other studies. However, on a detailed level these deep regional trends are hard to correlate against each other, which has methodological implications for the usefulness of such exercises for future generations of scholars. If, for example, we compare the regions defined by the Fields of Britannia project and the Roman Rural Settlement Project on a map against the Settlement Provinces defined by Roberts and Wrathmell we can see that there are broad similarities but also important local differences (Figure 3.1). Herein lies the major problem with pro­ jects defining their own regions for analysis and reporting: it makes cross-comparison between different projects’ results difficult. For example, the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs both fall within the southeast regions of Roberts and Wrathmell and Fields of Britannia, but within Roman Rural Settlement Project’s central zone: is this due to change over time or the varied criteria used for defining regions? It is partly because large synthetic projects are so new that these issues of comparison have only just become an issue. A problem with defining regions is that the archaeological record (and thus, by implica­ tion, past human culture) always varies across space, but it does not always change at sharp boundaries. For that reason, although they can be useful to think with, we decided to avoid designating regions. We will identify some broad tendencies and differences between the west and north of England on the one hand and the south and east on the other, but these provide the basis for local ways of life that are always in the process of becoming. We might think of ‘regioning’, rather than regions—that is the directions of change that help local particularities unfold, rather than seeing this process as creating bounded regions.

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Patterns in the Data across England  57 100000

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Figure 3.1  Comparison between different regions developed to study English archaeology: Roberts and Wrathmell, Fields of Britannia, and Roman Rural Settlement Project.

Figure 3.2 presents the overall densities of evidence across England for all aspects of our evidence. More subtle patterns are indicated in Figures 3.3a and 3.3b, which show the broad distributions of evidence using our thesaurus categories (discussed in Chapter 2). We can indeed see a general greater density and complexity of data in the south/east than in the north/west across many categories and time periods. In contrast to this, the southwestern counties (Cornwall/Devon) and North Yorkshire have a tendency to show particular peaks for certain time period/category combinations, such as prehistoric field systems. The Midlands region, recognized as an area of dense settlement and finds in the Roman and early medieval periods, did not stand out in our data from East Anglia and other areas of the south. The picture of a more archaeologically dense south/east of England is re­mark­ ably consistent across time and type. Our immediate questions concern how far such patterns derive from action in the past or from archaeological work or other influences in the present (Chapter  2). In order to explore these possibilities we looked at our data in more detail using a series of test squares.

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58  English Landscapes and Identities 100000

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Regional Variations in Investigation Types In order to understand the significance of archaeological evidence, we have to grasp the mechanisms that created it as evidence. This is especially true when we are looking at largescale patterning, where regional differences in working practices can be crucial. Working practices respond to the specific circumstances of a given region. Prehistoric field systems and settlements survive better in upland areas that have seen little arable exploitation in subsequent years. Upland regions have seen relatively little development and also tend to be investigated more often by large-scale landscape surveys likely to identify extensive settle­ment or landscape complexes. Such surveys produce good maps, but dating features like ring-ditches or linear earthworks beyond a generic ‘prehistoric’ or even broader date range is hard. By contrast, in densely built-up areas, typically characterized by smaller-scale intrusive investigations (such as watching briefs and test pitting), well-dated individual fea­ tures such as pits or ditch sections are more likely to be identified, with some potential for dating through finds or radiometric means.

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Patterns in the Data across England  59 (a)

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Figure 3.3  (a) Fifty-km KDE plots of presence/absence of thesaurus categories by 1 km × 1 km grid square by period (unspecified prehistoric included in Bronze Age and Iron Age time-slices at a 50/50 weighting). Data presented as z-scores (red values = above average; white values = mean average; blue values = below average). (b) Fifty-km KDE plots of presence/absence of thesaurus categories by 1 km × 1 km grid square by period (unspecified prehistoric included in Bronze Age and Iron Age time-slices at a 50/50 weighting). Data presented as z-scores (red values = above average; white values = mean average; blue values = below average).

We argued in Chapter  2 that the Excavation Index dataset was best suited to identify regional working practices, as its fuller coverage allowed comparison of individual case study regions to national patterns. Figure 3.4 compares investigations per square kilometre, with case study areas roughly organized from lowest to highest density of investigations. Figure  3.5 graphs the areas with below- and above-average investigation densities,

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60  English Landscapes and Identities (b)

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Figure 3.3  Continued

revealing a broad south/east and north/west division in the intensity of work, with areas from Devon to mid-England on the graph having numbers of investigation below the national average. The only outlier is the Isle of Wight, whose history of research is not typ­ ical for the south of England. It is clear that above-average densities in investigation also result in above-average dens­ ities of archaeological monuments. Another aspect of the archaeological investigative pat­ terns was the differential occurrence of non-intrusive surveys, such as the relatively high number of surveys in Northumberland, or the greater numbers of excavations (ranging from test pit to area exposure) in the more built-up area of the Lea Valley. Figure 3.5 illus­ trates these investigation types for the case study regions, roughly arranged according to above- and below-average relative quantities of non-intrusive surveys. Again this shows a north/west to south/east divide, albeit along slightly different lines.

National and Regional Patterns Despite early attempts at national synthesis (Chapter 1), the strong regional organization of British professional archaeology has since resulted in a degree of fragmentation of

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Patterns in the Data across England  61 Intrusive: open area

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Figure 3.5  The relative importance of EI investigation types by EngLaId case study areas compared to the national pattern, 1990–2010. The national distribution is sixth from the right, indicated in capital letters.

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62  English Landscapes and Identities know­ledge that recent large-scale data projects seek to overcome. Our project centred around digital data and our database has provided the impetus to develop a series of ­methods to compare and contrast the comparability and consistency of the data across England. Analysis was carried out in a variety of ways from nationwide to case study areas and selected 10 km × 10 km squares within which we ‘cleaned’ data (Figure 3.6) and com­ pared information from various sources. These test squares were not chosen totally ran­ domly, but to reflect various aspects of the broad environment and archaeological variability across our case studies, with one such square in each case study area (Table 3.1). The squares were used to look at a variety of variables, one of the first of which was the contrast between so-called a highland zone of the west and north and the lowland zone in the south and east. From there we examined the varying representations of each period from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period, as well as the types of evidence most common in each period and part of the country. The use of 10 km × 10 km squares allowed for a relatively controlled view across England, so that some general comparative statements can be made, as we will explore at the end of the chapter.

200000

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Figure 3.6  The 10 km × 10 km squares used for cleaning and comparing data.

150 km

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Patterns in the Data across England  63 Table 3.1  List of case study areas and their associated 10 km × 10 km square Case study area

HER associated with 10 × 10 km square

Avon-Thames-Avon Transect Cornwall Cumbria Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley East of England Transect Hoskins’ Leicestershire Humber Estuary Isle of Wight Kent Lea Valley Marches Mendips and Somerset Levels Mid-England Transect North Northumberland

Oxfordshire HER Cornwall HER Lake District National Park HER Devon HER Norfolk HER Leicestershire HER Humber HER (East Riding of Yorkshire) Isle of Wight HER Kent HER (and Canterbury UAD) Greater London HER Shropshire HER Somerset HER Derbyshire HER Northumberland HER

Occurrence of EngLald periods in fourteen 10 km × 10 km test squares 1600 1400 1200 1000 Uncertain Prehistoric Early Medieval Roman Iron Age Bronze Age

800 600 400 200

D EV O N D ER BY SH LA IR E KE D IS TR IC T

r O xf or ds hi re Le ice ste rs hi re SO N M O E RT RS H ET U M BE RL AN D SH RO PS H IR E

ht

H um be

ll

of W ig

Isl e

Co rn wa

ey

N or fo lk

aV all

Le

Ke nt

0

Figure 3.7  Representation of the different EngLaId periods across the fourteen test squares within the case study areas (clean data). Test square names printed in capitals are classed as ‘upland’.

As a first step in comparison, we looked at England-wide patterns in the occurrence of evidence against that seen in the fourteen test squares. On an England-wide level (using un-cleaned data, including earlier Bronze Age records such as barrows), 41 per cent of records include1 Roman evidence, 29 per cent uncertain, 11 per cent Iron Age, 11 per cent Bronze Age, 11 per cent early medieval, and 10 per cent generic prehistoric. Figure 3.7 charts period representation for the fourteen test squares (where the data had been cleaned), also revealing an immediate dominance of Roman records and thereby confirming that this is not an artefact of working with unclean data. There are modern regional effects. The strong 1  As records can include more than one site type and/or period, these numbers will not add up to 100 per cent.

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64  English Landscapes and Identities peak of Roman data in the Isle of Wight is the result of the enormous success of the PAS, which has recorded large quantities of Roman coins and other portable material culture. Conversely, the peak in uncertainly dated records in Oxfordshire also reflects working practices, with many uncertainly dated records coming from small-scale excavations in the small towns in the area. The main exception to the Roman dominance are some of the test squares to the right in Figure 3.7, where undated, generic prehistoric, and in some cases Bronze Age monuments are more common. Unsurprisingly, this pattern is clear in the areas at the edge of Roman influence, such as Northumberland, Shropshire, Devon, and the Lake District (but, sur­ prisingly, not Cornwall). Thus there are no Roman villas in these upland test squares, nor are there large quantities of culturally Roman objects. Given the importance of upland and lowland divisions within English archaeology, the test squares were broadly ranked on the basis of the maximum height above sea level (Figure 3.8). These test squares were—because of their limited size—more influenced by terrain than the case study regions as a whole, which often incorporated highland and lowland elements. When looking exclusively at the test squares, location seems more important than rela­ tive height above sea level, as Derbyshire, one of the most upland test squares, does have a strong Roman element, as it is an upland area within the sphere of Roman influence. The Lake District square fitted the northwestern archaeological signature of little Roman evi­ dence extremely well, but the entire Cumbria case study area, which contains part of Hadrian’s Wall, tells a very different story, including large quantities of culturally Roman objects and no less than a quarter of all Roman inscriptions in Britain (see Lake District 10 km × 10 km inset for further archaeological detail on Cumbria). A well-known pattern is that upland areas preserve upstanding earthworks, more rarely found in lowland areas (Figure 3.9). For example, the North Northumberland case study m OD 600

500

400

300

200

100

0 Kent

London Norfolk Cornwall

I.o.W

Humber

Oxon.

Leics.

Somer. Northum. Shrop.

Devon

Derbys. Lake Dist.

Figure 3.8  Relative height of the fourteen 10 km × 10 km test squares. A (somewhat artificial) line was drawn at 300 m OD to separate lowland from upland areas. Upland areas are generally (but not always) characterized by relatively large numbers of generic prehistoric and uncertainly dated records.

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Patterns in the Data across England  65 Nationwide

400000

Isle of Wight

400 350

Finds

300

350000

Other (no finds)

250

300000

Defensive

200

Communication and transport

150

Industrial Architectural forms

100

Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

50 Finds

Br on ze

Ag e

Other (no finds) Defensive Communication and transport Industrial

200000

Humber

400

Architectural forms

150000

Ag e Ea Rom rly an m ed ie v Pr al eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

0 Iro n

250000

Domestic and civil

350

Religious, ritual, and funerary

300

Agriculture and subsistence

250

Finds Other (no finds) Defensive

200

100000

Communication and transport Industrial

150

Architectural forms 100

50000

Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary

50

Agriculture and subsistence

Early medieval

400

Prehistoric

Uncertain

Leicestershire 400

350 Finds

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300

Other (no finds)

250

Defensive

Ag e

Oxfordshire 400

350

Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Roman

Kent

Iro n

Iron Age

Br on ze

0 Bronze Age

Ag e

0

Finds

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Other (no finds)

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Defensive

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Communication and transport

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Industrial

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Industrial

150

Industrial

Somerset

Norfolk 400

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Finds Other (no finds) Defensive Communication and transport Industrial

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Architectural forms

Br on ze

Ag Iro e n Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

0

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

Other (no finds) Defensive Communication and transport Industrial Architectural forms

100 50 0

Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

Ag Iro e n Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

50

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Finds

Br on ze

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Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0 Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

0

Domestic and civil

50

Iro n

Agriculture and subsistence

Architectural forms 100

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

50

Br on ze

Br on ze

Ag Iro e n Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

0

Domestic and civil

Ag e

Religious, ritual, and funerary

50

100

Br on ze

Domestic and civil

Ag Iro e n Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

100

Architectural forms

Ag e

Architectural forms

Figure 3.9  Representation of the EngLaId database categories across the time periods, showing the nationwide and seven local distributions similar to the national pattern. With the exception of Somerset (which is a borderline case) these are mostly lowland areas (see inset for more archaeological detail on Somerset).

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66  English Landscapes and Identities area is relatively empty, with only 17 per cent of 350-m hexbins defined for that case study area containing any data at all and these are concentrated on the edge of the upland zone of the Cheviots, where it was suitable for human occupation and where subsequent agriculture has not destroyed upstanding earthworks. The situation in Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley (with 18 per cent of 350-m hexbins containing archaeological data) is similar, with much evi­ dence found on the elevated Dartmoor plateau. In both areas, the lower-lying terrains towards the coast have relatively little evidence. A similar upland bias can be discerned in the Humber Estuary, where evidence is clustered in the more elevated terrain of the Yorkshire Wolds, while Holderness is much emptier. These three areas also witnessed substantial antiquarian research and have good preservation of upstanding earthworks in the higher terrains. The situation in Kent is the reverse. Here 21 per cent of 350-m hexbins contain data, but the bestrepresented area is the coastal chalk outcrop of Thanet, while the higher terrain of the North Downs has less data, due to a combination of the poor visibility of cropmarks and the inten­ sity of developer-funded archaeology in the built-up area of Thanet. In terms of thesaurus categories, finds dominate the graphs for all periods. Evidence for defensive activity is scarce, but most common in the Iron Age and Roman periods. Peaks in the ‘Communication and transport’ category on the one hand reflect the Roman invest­ ment in the construction of formalized roads, and on the other hand the difficulty of dating roads and trackways, which were often long-lived arteries through the English landscape (with many still in at least partial use today). The same can be said for industrial activity, which focuses mainly on the Roman period, but with another relative peak amongst uncer­ tainly dated records. Settlement activity—represented by the overlapping categories ‘Architectural forms’ and ‘Domestic and civil’—is probably most constant, increasing grad­ ually from the Bronze Age to the Roman period and dropping off again in the early medi­ eval period, which may reflect changes in population density as well as variations in the visibility or recognizability of certain architectural forms (Green et al.  2017; Blair  2018). ‘Agriculture and subsistence’ activity follows a similar pattern, with the amount of evidence in the uncertainly dated category, reflecting the challenges of dating ancient field systems. Finally, the Bronze Age ‘Religious, ritual, and funerary’ category is over-represented in the national graph because we have not removed many early Bronze Age barrows. In Figures 3.9 and 3.10 the distribution of the thesaurus categories across the different EngLaId periods are graphed for all fourteen test squares, and compared to the national pattern. The distribution falls neatly into two halves. Figure 3.9 compares the test squares that are similar to the national pattern and Figure  3.10 compares those that differ. The nationwide pattern is characterized by a dominant peak in the Roman period. During the Bronze and Iron Ages, there is a slight upwards curve in the amount of evidence, which after the Roman period drops again to comparable levels to the late prehistoric period. Generic prehistoric records hover around the same mark, and uncertainly dated records represent the second most common category overall, after Roman. Some regional differences stand out. The huge dominance of finds evidence in the Isle of Wight and Humber reflects the success of the PAS on the one hand, but—as stated ­previously—this also reveals an underlying reality. It is of course not incidental that both of these test squares are located on the coast in areas of high connectivity, at the mouths of important riverine entry points. The Humber test area falls within the ‘Arras-culture’ zone, mainly characterized by burials. This style of burial is not found elsewhere in England, but occurs more widely in continental Europe, again underlining the importance of connectivity in affecting archaeological change (see Humber 10 × 10 inset). Kent does not appear to con­ form to a similar profile, but this is partly because of the large relatively blank area of the Weald. Here there is a peak in burial activity during the Roman and early medieval periods.

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Patterns in the Data across England  67 Nationwide

400000

London

400 350

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Finds

Communication and transport Industrial

150

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Defensive 100

Communication and transport Industrial Architectural forms

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

Ag e Ea Rom rly an m ed ie v Pr al eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Br on ze

Ag e

Domestic and civil

200000

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0 Iro n

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400 350

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Cornwall 400

350 Finds

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Communication and transport Industrial

150

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Domestic and civil

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

50 0

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Ag e

Devon 350 Finds Other (no finds) Defensive Communication and transport Industrial

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Architectural forms

Br on ze

Ag Iro e n Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

0

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Ag Iro e n Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

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Ag Iro e n Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

50

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Other (no finds)

250

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Ag e

Shropshire 400

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Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Uncertain

Iro n

Prehistoric

Ro Ea rly man m ed ie v al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Northumberland

Early medieval

Ag e

Roman

Iro n

Iron Age

Br on ze

Ag e

0

0 Bronze Age

Figure 3.10  Representation of the EngLaId database categories across time periods, showing nationwide and seven distributions which differ from the national pattern. With the exception of Cornwall and the London, these all include upland areas.

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68  English Landscapes and Identities For the early medieval period at least, this is influenced by a strong tradition of burial involv­ ing grave goods that show similarities to continental fashions (Harrington and Welch 2014). The areas least like the national pattern also fall into two groups. London and Derbyshire show a drop in evidence between the Bronze and Iron Ages; in Derbyshire, finds are underrepresented. The complex of factors needed to understand the partial archaeological records from London can be understood better by looking at the Lea Valley case study, at the end of this chapter. There is little aerial photographic evidence from London, with most information coming from chance finds or excavation. In the other five examples finds only make up a small percentage of the evidence. Northumberland, Shropshire, the Lake District, and Devon furthermore have relatively large quantities of prehistoric and uncertain records, although in Cornwall the dominant periods are the Bronze and Iron Ages, and to a lesser extent the Roman period. Most strik­ ing perhaps is the overall paucity of early medieval records, which is much more pronounced than on a national scale. If the areas that are similar to or different than the national pattern are mapped, they fall into the broad north/west and south/east zone (Figure 3.11). 300000

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Figure 3.11  Distribution of the test squares similar to the national pattern (yellow) and those that differ from it (red).

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Patterns in the Data across England  69 The nature of the broad north/west–south/east divide in English archaeological data was tested further by looking at the relative occurrences of the EngLaId monument categories for entire case study areas which were graphed and compared to the nationwide pattern. This was automated, using the 1 km × 1 km grid squares. Two datasets were excluded al­together: Bronze Age barrows, as these were mostly pre-1500 bc; and findspots, because their overall dominance (largely due to the PAS) obscures finer detail in the remaining cat­ egor­ies. The area-normalized data was used to create Figures  3.12–3.16. The order of the case studies follows that of their test squares in Figure  3.8, ranked broadly according to maximum height above sea level. Figure 3.12 combines different periods in one graph. No clear patterns emerge at this level, although certain groupings can be identified, largely related to differences in investigative methodologies. Field systems are represented in greater than average pro­ portions in Cornwall, Dartmoor, and the Tamar Valley and North Northumberland, but also in the Avon–Thames–Avon Transect, whilst defensive structures are most prevalent in North Northumberland, Cumbria and the Marches. These are all areas with many non-intrusive investigations (see Figure 3.5). Evidence for industrial activity is aboveaverage in central to southeastern parts like Kent, the Lea Valley, the East of England Transect, the Isle of Wight, and Hoskins’ Leicestershire, all of which have relatively little non-intrusive survey, emphasizing the importance of excavation to reveal such

All periods

100% 90% 80%

Other

70%

Defensive Communication and Transport

60%

Industrial Architectural forms

50%

Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary

40%

Agriculture and subsistence

30% 20% 10%

Ea st

Le

aV all

Ke nt

of En ey gla nd tra ns ec t Co rn wa ll Isl eo fW Av Hu igh on m t be Th re am stu es ar Av y on Ho tra sk M in n s en sL ec di t eic ps es an ter dS sh om ire er se No tL rth ev els No r th Da u m r tm br ia oo ra nd M ar th ch eT M es id am En ar gla Va nd lle y EW tra ns ec t Cu m br ia Na tio na l( all )

0%

Figure 3.12  Graph of different monument types across case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution (all periods).

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70  English Landscapes and Identities activities. It is also worth noting that the relative occurrence of ‘Other’ records (excluding finds) varies between case studies and is most prevalent where small-scale investiga­ tions are present or records derive from survey, indicating the large amount of low-level evidence across England that can only be understood through large-scale excavation and proper dating, if at all. Regional patterning remains apparent when the data are broken down into periods. Figures  3.13–3.16 graph and map the Bronze Age to early medieval periods. We have ­chosen to map one category from each main period to give a sense of the possibilities of our data. Again, patterns can be identified, such as different regions with above-average evidence for Bronze Age trackways, Iron Age hillforts, Roman industrial activity, or early medieval burials, but not always explained. Some of the patterns here are both predictable and well known, such as the prevalence of hillforts in hilly areas in the west. Other maps raise more questions. Bronze Age trackways are well known in Somerset, the Humber, and River Lea, but less so in the Marches. Similarly the prevalence of Roman industrial activity in the Lea Valley and the Midlands might bear further inves­ tigation, as could the areas with a great incidence of early medieval religious sites and finds. Such maps do not produce answers in themselves, but raise questions for further investigation (some of which we have undertaken in the rest of the volume). More importantly, unexpected patterns can shake our often rather fixed sense of what hap­ pened where and when.

Bronze Age

100% 90% 80% 70% 60%

Other Defensive Communication and Transport Industrial Architectural forms Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

ey tra ns ec t Co rn wa Isl ll eo fW Av H um on ig ht be Th re am stu es ar Av y H on os tra M ki ns en ns di Le ec ps t ice an ste d r So sh ire m er se N tL or th ev els N or D th ar um tm oo br ia ra nd M ar th ch eT M es id am En ar gl Va an lle d y EW tra ns ec t Cu m b r ia N at io na l( all )

Ea st

d

an

of E

ng l

Le

aV all

Ke nt

0%

Figure 3.13  Monument types across all case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the Bronze Age.

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Patterns in the Data across England  71 Iron Age

100% 90% 80% 70%

Other Defensive Communication and Transport Industrial Architectural forms Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

Ke Ea nt st Le of aV En all gl ey an d tra ns ec t Co rn wa Isl ll eo fW Av H ig on um ht Th be re am s es tu ar Av y H on os tra M ki ns en ns di e Le ct ps ice an ste d rs So hi m re er se N tL or th ev els N or D th ar um tm br oo ia ra nd M ar th M ch eT id es am En ar gl V an a lle d EW y tra ns ec t Cu m br N ia at io na l( all )

0%

Figure 3.14  Monument types for all case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the Iron Age. Roman

100% 90% 80% 70% 60%

Other Defensive Communication and Transport Industrial Architectural forms Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

ey tra ns ec t Co rn wa Isl ll eo fW Av H ig um on ht Th be re am stu es ar Av y H on os tra M ki ns en ns di Le ec ps t ice an ste d rs So h ire m er se N tL or th ev els N or D th ar um tm br oo ia ra nd M ar th ch M eT es id am En ar gl Va an lle d EW y tra ns ec t Cu m br N ia at io na l( all )

Ea st

d

ng lan

of E

Le

aV all

Ke nt

0%

Figure 3.15  Monument types for the case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the Roman period.

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72  English Landscapes and Identities 100% 90% 80% 70%

Other Defensive Communication and Transport Industrial Architectural forms Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

D ev Ke on Ea nt st Le of aV En a lle gl y an d tra ns ec t Co rn wa Isl ll eo fW Av H i on um gh t Th be am re stu es ar Av y H on os tra M ki en ns ns di ec Le ps t ice an ste d rs So h ire m er se N tL or th ev els N or D th ar u tm m br oo ia ra nd M a t he rc M he Ta id s m En ar gl Va an lle d EW y tra ns ec t Cu m br N ia at io na l( all )

0%

Figure 3.16  Monument types for the case study areas compared to the nationwide distribution for the early medieval period.

Differences across England Looking across all the evidence we have drawn together there is a clear set of differences between the south and east and the north and west in terms of the density and type of archaeology in each broad area. The dividing line between the two areas is more or less that recognized by Fox between highland and lowland Britain (see Chapter 1), although we do not see the key differences as topographical, as we will explain here. The differences we perceive are emphasized through variations in the types of investigation (Table 3.2), with more survey in the latter area and more excavation in the former. However, the differences are not created through varied modes of investigation, but made to stand out more clearly because of them. When looking at individual periods and thesaurus types, patterns are much more complex. Variations in the archaeology indicate variability in the forms of life in the past with con­ trasting cultural logics. This certainly does not mean that all areas on one side of the line had the same ways of life and historical trajectories. Rather we are looking at varied forms of cre­ ating regional differences. If anything (and this is a statement arising from a feeling about our data, not something that is empirically demonstrable), there is more variability in ways of life in the north and west, with each major block of upland—for instance, Dartmoor, Cumbria, the Yorkshire Dales, the north Pennines, and the Cheviots amongst others—going their own way. There is clear variability further south—the Upper Thames has no fields prior to the late Iron Age compared to the middle Bronze Age systems of the middle Thames—but there is still a degree of commonality. We now need to think a little more about why patterns in the archaeology might have been different in terms of variability in how people lived in the past.

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Patterns in the Data across England  73 Table 3.2  Differences in archaeological work across England The south, east, and east Midlands

The north and west

More development in these areas than elsewhere leads to more excavation (large and small). More archaeologists in commercial units, local authorities, HE/EH, and universities. A disproportionate number of large infrastructure projects with landscape scale excavation (over 1 km2). More of the larger archaeological units leads to greater uniformity of investigation, analysis, and reporting. More metal-detecting in places with greatest finds—e.g. Isle of Wight and East Anglia. This area has most sites, most artefacts, the biggest projects, and most secure dating. This area tends to dominate in England-wide discussions of archaeology, and has come to seem the norm from which other areas deviate.

Less development and lower levels of excavation, which are often smaller in scale. Greater levels of non-intrusive work, from aerial photography and surface survey. Fewer finds make sites more difficult to understand and to date. More smaller developer-funded units leads to greater variety in investigation, analysis, and reporting. Fewer finds and more out-of-bounds areas (national parks, etc.) means less metal detecting. Reasonable spatial understanding of sites, but role and dating less well understood. These areas are less emphasized nationally, play less of a part in broad syntheses, and appear as a deviation from the southern and eastern ‘norm’.

The Distinction between the South and East and the North and West: Two Broad Modes of Land Use Some of the regional differences in archaeology and archaeological investigation can be linked to landscape character patterns that date back to before the start of the EngLaId period. Marked regional differences can be seen particularly in patterns of woodland clear­ ance and settlement (we address the clearance history of England more fully in Chapter 4). We feel that the picture for the south and east of England, for early clearance resulting in fairly open landscapes from the Neolithic and perhaps earlier, has been unhelpfully gener­ alized to England as a whole. In many areas of the west Midlands and the north pre­dom­in­ ant­ly forested landscapes existed until the start of the first millennium bc and open landscapes of the sort we see today did not come into being until the a few centuries before the Romans arrived. We will think more about these differences in Chapter 4. Although we have not wished to identify well-defined regions, we do see two tendencies operating in different parts of England, which then give rise to a shifting and varied set of ways of life. The south and east pattern is better known, but we do not believe it has been spelt out in this manner previously. Northern and western patterns have been recognized by regional specialists, but not more generally and might need more empirical work to ground them.

The South and East The new field systems that start to emerge from at least 1500 bc onwards sometimes, although not always, have settlement attached. Where settlements do occur from the mid­ dle Bronze Age onwards they are characterized by middens, pits, and ditches where ma­ter­ ial is deposited and redeposited. Pits are found from the middle Bronze Age (and, of course, earlier), but these are not as large and prone to rich deposits as they become from the late Bronze Age onwards. As Brudenell and Cooper (2008) discuss for the later Bronze Age

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74  English Landscapes and Identities settlement at Broom, Bedfordshire there has been much concentration in British archae­ ology on deposition and whether combinations of bone, artefacts, and soils can be seen as evidence of placed, special, or structured deposits. While not denying that such deposits exist, they make the point that we should think in a more rounded way about the cycles of production, consumption, and deposits that lead to material ending up in the ground (Brudenell and Cooper 2008: 30–3). Mixtures of pottery and burnt bone deposited in pits in Broom showed that material had been collected in middens, perhaps adjacent to houses, and then used to fill pits, sometimes in conjunction with deliberately placed ma­ter­ial, such as quern stones or pots. The key link or cycle is that between the house (the centre of pro­ duction and consumption), the midden where material was kept for an indefinite length of time, probably with the intention to deposit it, and cut features, filled with a range of ma­ter­ ial which might include human bones in a smashed and burnt state. Deposition in pits derives from the Neolithic period, where it is more prevalent in some areas of the country (such as East Anglia) than others (Garrow 2007). In this period no houses or middens are preserved, but many pits look as though they were dug specifically to receive middened rubbish, which included charcoal-rich soil: even those dug in sand show no evidence of erosion and hence were not left open for any length of time (Garrow 2007: 14). Garrow (2007) makes the point, which we echo here, that it is impossible to understand deposition in pits in isolation, but that surface scatters and more considered deposits in tombs or monuments also need to be taken into account. Middening probably starts in the middle Bronze Age. In some later instances midden material could be kept for a substantial length of time. The hillfort at White Horse Hill had its eastern entrance blocked in the fourth century bc, but using midden material with All Cannings Cross pottery in it that was by then several hundred years old and may have dated from the time of the entrance’s original construc­ tion. Whether or not it was a coincidence that midden material was used that could be connected with the original construction (and constructors) of the entrance we cannot now know (Lock et al. 2003: 85–94). One further place that midden material could be deposited was in fields. As we will see in Chapter 6 emerging isotope evidence shows the nature of manuring from the Iron Age onwards, which would have included both animal manure on its own and middened ma­ter­ial from settlements and elsewhere on the landscape. Returning middened material to fields closes the circle from the production to consumption and back to production again, making fields repositories of matter connected with older generations of humans and animals in order to produce new generations. We will also question in Chapter  7 whether the earliest fields had all the associations we now connect with fields, many of which are to do with ownership and pragmatic elements of production. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 6, in the Bronze and Iron Ages houses, where they occur, are abandoned more rapidly than is necessary for structural reasons (Sharples 2010: 222–35). With suitable repairs a wattle and daub house can last many generations. However, many seem to be abandoned within one generation, leading to the thought that this might be on the death of a significant inhabitant. We wonder too whether the large number of Bronze Age fields might be explained in this way, leading to landscapes of change and shifting circumstances. In Chapter 7 we also explore the possible importance of orientation from the middle Bronze Age onwards. The nature of the house is crucial to relations on a small scale, providing the origin and impetus for a series of circulations of matter and energy that we are hard put to understand. The modern house is hygienic, purging itself regularly of waste, both human and

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Patterns in the Data across England  75 artefactual rubbish. Notions of cleanliness are deeply engrained in us and our houses are central to those. The later prehistoric house in the south and east accumulated waste, much of which we might find confronting, as, for instance, parts of human bodies in various states were obviously present on ground surfaces and middens, as well as buried in pits and ditches. Notions of waste and rubbish are culturally loaded and similar words may not have existed in the vocabularies of the time. Curation seems a more accurate term for the mid­ dens and deposits of settlements from the middle Bronze Age onwards. Curation makes us think of museums, where old and valuable items are kept and displayed. This may be a more accurate concept, as the group kept its historical residues close, to then place them with care in pits, postholes, and ditches, and on fields. Such deposits might have helped guarantee fertility, not necessarily invoking ideas of flows of nutrients, but rather using the power of past generations of people, plants, and animals to help sustain those to come. Whatever is the case, we need to give more attention to the whole cycle of production, consumption, and deposition, rather than focusing so much on the final term. What does seem clear is that a complex landscape of metal deposition was set up across the whole country, which has been best explored by Richard Bradley (most recently Bradley 2017). Little metalwork is found on settlements, suggesting that casual loss is not a big factor and most items were deliberately deposited. ‘[I]n Britain most of the metalwork of this period [1600–1100 bc] was deposited according to strict norms. . . . The British evi­ dence suggests . . . there was also a link between the composition of these collections and the places in which it was considered appropriate to deposit them’ (Bradley et al.  2015: 2008–9). All metalwork deposits should be considered as interlinked, so that grave goods, artefacts in rivers, and single finds and hoards on land were all interconnected and as the numbers in one sort of deposit went up, they went down in another mode of deposit. From the middle Bronze Age the first causeways into wetland areas were built, as well as bridges. From these metalwork was deposited, probably together with remains of the dead, although this is not well substantiated. Water influenced deposits even on dry land, so that hoards were regularly placed near springs, streams, and rivers. Such patterning suggests that the cosmological characters of individual places were important, with metal items perhaps invoking and placating the spirits of place. Deposits of metalwork might well have been the most formalized and now most archaeologically visible end of a spectrum of deposits ran­ ging between those of the house, byre, and field to a hoard of bronzes near a spring. We would echo the sentiment that all these forms of circulation and deposition need to be thought of as a whole, as they may well have been by people in the past. This world existed with regional variants and changes over time from 1500 to 150 bc in south and east England. In the pre-Roman period some elements of this relationship towards the world and its powers changed fundamentally and others were reinforced. Reinforcement came through a massive revival of older field systems, which in some cases were greatly extended, but also the practice of creating fields spread such that is found across the Midlands and northeast in the late Iron Age and Roman periods. The imposition of structure across large areas of the countryside was also part of settling down, such that houses wandered less and were more seldom rebuilt. Permanency of dwelling is much more obvious in the Roman period, not just with stone-built rectangular architecture of villas and farms, but also in instances where circular houses continued in use to be built partly in stone. From the late Iron Age onwards the pit complex changed. Pits were dug after ad 43, but as time went by they became more functional and fewer, so that although deposits were made with care within pits and ditches this was a less important part of people’s lives. For

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76  English Landscapes and Identities the first time the concept of rubbish emerged, as dirt and polluting material to be got rid of. It may well be that villas and other settlements also created a new relationship with the matter the household generated, so that it became rubbish to be disposed of, and not curated to then be buried with care. Varied patterns existed here, with some settlements carrying on older attitudes to matter in tension or connection with newer notions of dis­ posal. What did continue, but in changed form, was the deposition of metal in deliberate ways and with other types of material. Things were still thrown away in rivers or placed in bogs, but from the late Iron Age onwards, this was joined by the creation of shrines and temples, where offerings were made in some numbers. Coinage became common in the late Iron Age and from this period was deposited in hoards, which are found in very large numbers in the Roman period. Many hundreds of hoards are known, some of which con­ tain thousands of coins (sometimes beyond the level at which recovery of a pragmatic deposit hidden from interlopers could be considered practical, e.g. the late Roman hoard from Frome, Somerset2 (Moorhead et al. 2010)). The distribution of coins and their hoards is concentrated in the south and east of England, continuing and reinforcing the patterns of artefact use deriving from the Bronze Age. Furthermore, from the late Iron Age more bur­ ials are known from across the region and some of these have grave goods, so that there is a deposition of whole human bodies which is historically unusual, placed also with a range of artefacts. From the late Iron Age onwards there is also a greater fixity of people in places. This is true of the dead as well as the living. Matter generated by settlements started to be seen as rubbish and may have become separate conceptually from the more formal deposits in ­rivers, temples, and burials. For the first time from the late Iron Age metalwork was depos­ ited on settlements, perhaps as a result of casual loss as well as deliberate deposition. Some metalwork, some of the time, became rubbish, while much was still deposited in a more formal manner. Transactions were still key, but were more formalized. Coins can provide a leitmotif here. Iron Age and Roman coins had carefully controlled metal content and weight, so that coins of the same denomination were directly comparable, allowing for a standard of value, indicating that they had many of the features of money. The regular use of coins as offerings indicates that they were not only money in our terms; they were used for transactions with the divine, as well as between humans. Fixity of place is connected with the defined nature of value and the transactions it guaranteed. Together with these more formalized systems were older or other modes of relationship unfolding through looser rules of transaction. And in all periods there were some rules of relationship, but also experiment and novelty. Differences across the country derive too from clearance histories. As Rippon et al. (2015) have emphasized there is considerable continuity in landscape use in the post-Roman period, with little evidence of reforestation and the possibility that some Roman field sys­ tems stayed in use. What does change is the level and nature of artefact production and use, with a reduction in material culture found across the south and east in the fifth century (although this may partly be a consequence of the conventional dates assigned to objects in typologies), with levels picking up from the sixth century onwards (Figure 1.1). A radically new form of place-making occurred in some parts of the south and east with the creation of villages of the living, but also of the dead, once churchyard burial becomes common.

2 https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/387181

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Patterns in the Data across England  77 It may be that in the early post-Roman centuries something similar to the prehistoric ­curation of matter re-emerges, along with deposits in pits and ditches, but also found in parallel with burials (inhumation and cremation) with pots and some metalwork. If this is true, waste was considered as a positive by-product of human action, to be used wisely. The links between the matter generated by houses and fertility were renewed, regenerating some late prehistoric ideas. In the Roman period mass manuring of fields obviously took place, although the links to domestic spaces is now less clear. The older depositional system in rivers and bogs carried on in quite a remarkable fashion, although metalwork was being deposited on settlements as it was in the Roman period.

The North and West Lower levels of modern development in these areas mean less excavation. The higher moorland areas have seen little modern arable agriculture and ploughing, so are better pre­ served archaeologically than say the chalklands of the south. Upland landscapes have been recorded through aerial photography and other forms of survey, but with relatively little excavation. Metal detecting is not as common as in many more southerly areas, so that there is lower recovery of metalwork and other items. However, even when bearing all these factors fully in mind the areas from the Marches, the Cheshire Plain, Cumbria, the Pennines, and the Cheviots all appear to have long-term histories different from the south and east, but bearing considerable similarities to the southwest. Lower levels of artefacts are found in all periods from the middle Bronze Age to the Norman Conquest; it is likely that landscapes had many more trees than the south and east down to the end of the first mil­ lennium at least (Chapter  4); field systems are smaller and constructed of stone, as are settle­ments and a range of monument types, such as cairns, not found elsewhere in England exist, as is also true of forms of cultivation like cord rig. It is very likely that these areas share much in common with the long-term histories of adjacent areas of Wales and Scotland, but this unfortunately is beyond our purview. Transactions between humans and cosmological powers are less evident and the house–midden–pit cycle does not seemed to have existed in the same form as in the south and east, although the formal deposits of metalwork in water and dryland occur, as in the south and east, but with some differences—Iron Age swords are not found in northern rivers, for instance (see Figures 3.17–3.20). Lesser amounts of pottery and other find types are also found compared with the south and east, although digital datasets are less full than those for metal. It may be that in these areas there was less emphasis on building social relations through the use and exchange of material things and hence the lower levels of production of arte­ facts of all types. It may also be that a long-term and complex relationship with landscapes was important. The forms of houses and small fields are unusually early and occur in a number of different types. Pope (2015) notes three main forms of houses across Scotland and into northern England: ring bank houses supported by banks of stone, earth, or turf; post-built structures; and polygonal ring grooves. These were first constructed in the later third millennium bc with continuity through to the later Bronze Age and with some vari­ ation through into the Iron Age (Pope 2015: 179–80). During the middle Bronze Age there is most marked regional variation in house types and a variety of associations with other features. This represents a precocious development of houses and possibly also the extended

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Figure 3.17  The distribution of metalwork in the Bronze Age showing a broad divide between the south and east and the rest of the country. Numbers of records are relatively low and some of the larger numbers in the northwest are possibly due to individual detectorists and individual productive sites. The map shows the number of records and not the number of objects (one PAS record can represent more than one object), as this would be skewed by individual hoards. Data from the PAS.

family structures that occupied them. Passmore et al. (2012: 180) show that, in contrast to settlements in the south, houses were directly constructed on the ground plans of their predecessors and this may well have involved the replacement of earlier timber-built houses with those made of stone, such as at Houseledge, Green Knowe, and some very early dates of around 2000 cal bc from Kinglandlee Dean. House and settlement continuity provides contrast with the south, as does the situation with the digging of pits and the deposits they contain. Pits between houses are few or absent in settlements of the second and first mil­ lennia bc, the more usual pattern in the Cheviots being a single internal pit to the left of the house as one enters through the doorway, such as is found at Cheviot Quarry North (Passmore et al.  2012: 182, Figure  13.2). Such pits contain large amounts of pottery and

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Figure 3.18  The distribution of metal finds from the Iron Age showing the number of records and not the number of objects, as this would be skewed by individual hoards. The distribution includes coin finds. Data from the PAS.

other domestic debris. In many northern areas agriculture on initially rich, but ultimately fragile, soils is common in the second millennium bc up to a height of 400 m, demonstrat­ ing more intensive and higher use than in any subsequent period (Passmore et al. 2012: 184). The exceptions were a small number of large settlements, such as Yeavering Bell, where 125 hut circles have been identified within a stone enclosure on the top of a hill that slopes steeply down in all directions. Whether all the huts were occupied at the same time is unknown, although this looks to be a difficult place to live for a large community for any length of time and it is possible that Yeavering either had a small population at any one time, or it acted as a periodic place of refuge for a larger community. The rubbish cycle is different to the south and east. Few pits are known from any period, so that deposits in pits are rare. Complex and poorly understood forms of deposition hap­ pen in and around cairns, terraces, and field boundaries, many of which seem to have long histories. Although dating is still poor, the fields of Northumberland, the Derbyshire Peak,

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Figure 3.19  The distribution of metalwork in the Roman period showing the number of records and not the number of objects, as this would be skewed by individual hoards. The distribution includes coin finds. Data from the PAS.

and possibly Cumbria may be as early as any in the country, with seemingly reliable dates from the early second millennium bc. Division is an early feature. A cultivation terrace at Plantation Camp, Brough Law has a date of around 1750 bc and may still have been in  use at ad 150, although this use is not necessarily continuous (Frodsham and Waddington  2004: 181). Cairns can have complex structures which may result from ­various episodes of building and rebuilding, incorporating a mixture of human bones and other episodes of burning (Frodsham 2004: 28–31). Field boundaries, terraces, cairns, and houses can all be built in stone, giving them a different set of temporal dynamics than those built in wood (timber round houses are also known). Building in stone makes pos­ sible connections to early periods by those living at the end of prehistory and into historic periods. Some of these landscapes have origins in the Neolithic period and their complex temporalities will need careful and sustained work to tease out.

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Figure 3.20  The distribution of metalwork in the early medieval period showing the number of records and not the number of objects, as this would be skewed by individual hoards. The distribution includes coin finds. Data from the PAS.

There was some building in stone in the Roman period, but this was relatively rare, with buildings large enough to be called villas almost absent. Round houses continued and it was possible that cord rig was still used for agriculture. The nature of burial changed, with cemeteries emerging or burial mounds being constructed. Clearance increased during the Roman period and pollen evidence indicates arable agriculture, which continued into the seventh century ad. The early medieval period saw the reuse for occupation of a number of sites, with the complex at Yeavering from around ad 600 in the vicinity of an earlier henge, burial mound, and cemetery being most well known. The practices of the north and west are found over large areas of England (and beyond) and need more empirical work and thought before we can understand them. They seem to involve small, possibly autarchic groups, making and using small numbers of inorganic artefacts and living in a dispersed manner across a landscape largely covered in trees until late in prehistory. These treed landscapes are probably not wildwoods, but were managed

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82  English Landscapes and Identities to allow for animal grazing in open woodland and arable in cleared areas. Crucially, both the formal deposition of objects and the more informal waste cycle are less evident than in the south, with pit and ditch deposition much more rare. It is likely that complex and repeated actions were carried out through cairns and field boundaries, which had a long use from the Neolithic into the Roman period and possibly beyond.

Summary Neither the north and west nor the south and east formed discrete regions, but rather exhibit different tendencies. In both areas of England forms of life shifted and moved, so that in the south and east the Midlands emerged in the Roman and early medieval periods as centres of larger, more aggregated settlements, although Roman villas did not have exactly the same distribution within the Midlands as early medieval villages. The north and west show considerable differences between lowland and highlands in landscape use and distributions of finds, and each of these vary within themselves. We hope to have empha­ sized that there are fascinating differences in the north and the west that have not been brought together into a single consideration previously and which are importantly different from the south and east, which have provided the standard model for English prehistory and early history. In the chapters that follow we will pursue, critique, and nuance this broad distinction and look more fully at some of the regional differences within each broad area. One recurrent explanation for the differences between the north and west and the south and east is often framed in terms of the highland/lowland distinction. We will tackle this issue in Chapter 4, as well as consider more broadly the mutual influences between people and a changing climate and ecology. The distinctions across these two areas of England possibly formed different ground plans for identity. The south and east saw more emphasis on the production and use of material things, as well as creating features, such as pits and ditches, in which material could be deposited. Production caused groups to coalesce in specific ways, as probably did use, while the deposition of objects brought in more human relations, but also connections to cosmological powers, who were seen as the recipients of such deposits. As a result, much larger numbers of artefacts are found in these regions than in the north and west. In the north and west the long-term relationships with houses, walls, cairns, and relatively small cleared areas, as well as much larger areas of managed woodland (as we will see in Chapter 4), structured people’s sense of self and other, as well as concepts of history. People living in England (and indeed Britain) in any period would have been aware of these broad differences in how things were done, but never attempted to emulate the contrasting cul­ tural logic. All more local ways of life were nuanced forms of these two broad differences. We end the chapter by presenting a series of 14 case study areas, each based on one 10 km × 10 km square in a different part of the country. We have divided these into those that fall within the north and west (seven case studies) and those in the south and east (also seven case studies).

Comparison of Case Study Areas As some attempt at controlled comparison across England as a whole and using our case study areas, we analysed 14 10 km × 10 km squares, one in each case study. Ideally we

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Patterns in the Data across England  83 would have chosen an area within each case study at random, to minimize human bias. In the event a series of factors made this impossible. We wanted each square to fit within the area covered by a single HER, so as to minimize issues of comparison between HERs. We also wanted them to be located within the boundaries of a case study area. In some cases this pretty well determined where the square could be located. In one case, that of Kent and Canterbury, we choose two HERs to make some comparison between them. We were also mindful of the density of data, wanting not too little and not too much. In areas of less dense archaeology (e.g. Northumberland) the 10 km × 10 km square was placed in an area of high local density, whereas in parts of the country with more archae­ ology (e.g. Northamptonshire) the square was placed in an area of relatively low local density to make the time taken for analysis realistic. The effect of these choices might have been to equal out some of the differences between case study areas, but differences still show up. In the presentation of the squares that follows we have divided them into those located in the north and west (running roughly north to south) and those in the south and east (running roughly south to north) with half the case studies falling on each side of the line between Torquay and Whitby.

The North and West

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84  English Landscapes and Identities The 10 km × 10 km square in North Northumberland straddles the igneous southeast Cheviots to the west, and adjacent lowland parts to the east continuing to the opposing Fell Sandstone ridge, between 56 and 335 m OD. No major towns are located in this area. Two main rivers flow through the study area, the rivers Aln and Breamish. Two Roman roads intersect within the square; the Roman road from High Rochester towards Learchild, and the Devil’s Causeway. As a result of its location on the edge of a National Park, archaeological investigation in the area is largely characterized by non-intrusive survey combined with targeted research excavations, including several long-term landscape projects such as the Ingram and Upper Breamish Valley Landscape project and the subsequent Breamish Valley Archaeology project as well as the South East Cheviots project, and low levels of developerfunded archae­ology. The area is characterized by a near-absence of portable material culture. The 355 spatial records from this square, including records classified as Bronze Age, Iron Age, prehistoric, Roman, early medieval, and uncertain, are clustered towards upland areas, reflecting a relatively good survival of earthwork remains and a lack of investigation in lowland areas. Overall their distribution is low. Bronze Age records consist predominantly of cairns, related to clearance and in some cases perhaps burial activity, as well as unenclosed roundhouses and unspecified fea­ tures, plus a handful of finds. The Iron Age is in many ways the most spectacular period, with a large quantity of enclosed settlements and small hillforts and associated cord rig field systems and trackways, as well as linear boundaries (cross-dykes). Funerary activity is nearly absent. With the exception of the aforementioned Roman roads, in comparison with many other areas, Roman records are under-represented, which can be explained by the square’s location north of Hadrian’s Wall. However, the term ‘Roman’ is used as a chronological indicator for records of the period c. ad 43–410 here as well, and to this period belong the so-called scooped settlements, constructed in scooped-out hollows on the hills. There is a decline in fortified sites compared to the Iron Age, despite the militarized nature of Roman activity in this northern region. The early medieval period witnesses a decline in activity on all fronts except religious and funerary, which consists of two sites recognized by metal-detected finds (grave-goods from the plough soil) but no structural remains. The lack of recognizable early medieval evidence is exacerbated by an absence of pre-Norman Conquest documentary material for this region, resulting in an absence of information about early medieval landholdings and definite pre-Conquest place names. The possibility that morphologically ‘prehistoric’ settle­ ment forms continued into the early centuries ad, as suggested by Blair (2013), should be tested through more widespread excavation.

Cumbria Case Study (Lake District HER)

The Lake District 10 km × 10 km grid square is positioned in the southwestern corner of the Cumbria case study, within the Lake District National Park. The grid is placed across the Southern Fells between the rivers Duddon to the east and Esk to the north and west, with Devoke Water located in the north. The grid is placed over Ulpha Fell, Whitfell, and Bootle Fell, with the highest peak at Whitfell measuring 573 m. The ridge connecting these fells

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Patterns in the Data across England  85

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runs roughly north to south through the grid square, effectively dividing the study area into eastern and western zones. There are no major towns within the grid, and there has been very little intrusive arch­ aeo­logic­al research, with no records in the AIP falling within the EngLaId time period. The HER overlaps with 81 per cent of NRHE records; there are no PAS data for this region. The archaeology of the region is characterized by prehistoric activity: Bronze Age and prehistoric records account for 44 per cent of the material, while records of uncertain date account for a further 53 per cent. The Iron Age, Roman, and early medieval periods are poorly represented. Cairns and cairn fields are the most common monument type, with 199 records (156 by period, 43 uncertain). The amount of uncertainty present in this area, shown in the high number of generically dated prehistoric or uncertain records, comes as a result of the lack of intrusive investigation and a lack of portable material culture, meaning that there is very little firm dating evidence. The AIP records show 50 per cent desk-based assessment, while post-determination, building recording, and estate management account for the rest. Excavation is sparse. The distribution of sites within the 10 × 10 grid indicates a strong influence of the land­ scape, particularly at the high elevations of the fells. Identified sites cling to the slopes of the fells, typically below elevations of 300 m. As a result, the sites in this grid square are mainly found on the lower slopes of the Duddon River valley in the east or on the lower slopes towards the coastal plain in the west. Ultimately, the peaks of the Lake District were not the most habitable landscapes in the region, and better opportunities were afforded at lower elevations in the river valleys and coastal plain.

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86  English Landscapes and Identities

Mid-England Transect Case Study (Derbyshire HER) 360000

380000

400000

420000

440000

460000

320000

340000

360000

380000

400000

420000

440000

460000

409000

410000

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480000

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520000

540000

560000

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560000

380000 360000 405000

406000

407000

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480000 412000

500000 413000

520000 414000

415000

416000

381000

Record density: High

382000

404000

379000 378000 377000 376000 375000 374000 373000 372000 371000

Defensive

200

370000

250

150

369000

Other (no finds)

372000

300

371000

375000

Finds

350

370000

374000

400

369000

373000

376000

377000

378000

379000

380000

Low

380000

381000

382000

360000

380000

400000

340000

400000

320000

100

Communication and transport Industrial Architectural forms

50 404000

405000

406000

407000

408000

409000

410000

411000

412000

413000

414000

415000

416000

Domestic and civil Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed iev al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Ag e

Iro n

Br on ze

Density

0 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0

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300 Elevation (m OSD)

400

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The 10 km × 10 km square is positioned centrally within the Mid-England Transect case study area, in the Peak District National Park, Derbyshire. The spa town of Buxton forms a contemporary focus for activity. The area straddles a marked topographical junction between the limestone plateau of the southeastern Peak District and the peat-covered grit­ stone moorland to the north and west. The river Wye rises just to the southwest of the square, traversing it from west to east. The archaeology of this area has been investigated since at least the mid-nineteenth ­century. Many of the Bronze Age round barrows were investigated by antiquarians. More recently small-scale excavations (mainly across sections of Roman road and within the Roman settlement at Buxton) have been balanced with extensive upland earthwork surveys (e.g. Bevan 2005) and metal detecting. Only two sites within the area have been excavated in detail: the Roman settlement and fields at Chee Tor (Thomas  1962) and at Staden (Makepeace et al. 1987). The 162 sites relating to the study period are distributed mainly on the limestone plateau to the south and east of the test square, with a slightly higher concentration around Buxton. A broad range of evidence is represented—findspots and fragmentary features (ditches, enclosures, etc.) dominate (making up 28 and 26 per cent of monument types, re­spect­ive­ly);

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Patterns in the Data across England  87 however, records for farming, religious and settlement activity, and routeways are also fairly commonplace. By contrast, the spread of evidence through time is uneven: the vast majority of records relate to Roman activity. There is little evidence to suggest that any locations were occupied persistently. One possible exception is the site at Chee Tor—the earliest feature here is a potentially Bronze Age cairn. While the settlement is Roman in date, the surrounding fields may be prehistoric in origin. Dating uncertainty is a significant issue in this area; features of unknown origin include unex­ cavated earthworks and cropmarks of enclosures, trackways, fields, and buildings. Stone is an important element of built features in this area (cairns, round barrows, fields, enclosures, buildings, etc.) throughout the study period. Beyond two round barrows that included potentially later Bronze Age finds and cre­ mated bone, the later Bronze Age is represented mainly by findspots: single finds of spear­ heads, palstaves, an axe, a rapier, and a gold bracelet. Evidence for the Iron Age is notably scant; only a single enclosure and a field system at Chee Tor potentially date to this period. Conversely, evidence for the Roman period is abundant and diverse. The small Roman settlement and spa at Buxton, possibly associated with a temple and an auxiliary fort, form clear foci for activity. Three major roads extend from here to the upland Roman forts at Melanda to the north, Brough to the northeast, and Little Chester to the southwest (all beyond the test square). The footings of a Roman bridge were located close to the stream at Duke’s Drive and milestones have been recovered from various locations. The Roman rural landscape is also well represented. Beyond Buxton itself, eight settlements comprising enclosures, building platforms, and fields are recorded, including the excavated sites at Chee Tor and Staden. Apparently isolated Roman fields have also been identified at a fur­ ther ten locations. More specific to this area are the four records of caves and rock shelters occupied in the Roman period. Antiquarian excavations in the cave at Thirst House pro­ duced a wealth of material relating to domestic activity as well as funerary remains and metalwork deposits. Evidence of religious activity includes votive deposits probably associ­ ated with the Roman spa at Buxton and occasional burials in early Bronze Age or newly constructed Roman round barrows/cairns, at Chee Tor settlement and at Thirst House cave. An early Bronze Age round barrow at Fairfield Low also produced an entire Roman pot. Stray finds of Roman material are relatively sparse and include metal, stone, and ceramic objects; mainly coins, stone quern fragments, and pottery sherds. Evidence for early medieval activity is, once again, scarce. Three undated field systems are thought potentially to date to this period; early medieval burials have been identified at one Bronze Age round barrow and at three newly constructed early medieval barrows. Additionally an early medieval stone cross base was recovered from the roadside at Martin Side. Five manors were recorded in this area in the Domesday Survey.

Marches Case Study (Shropshire HER)

The 10 km × 10 km square for the Marches case study lies in the southern Shropshire Hills, 22 km SSW of Shrewsbury. This is an area of upland, intersected by river valleys, its highest point 441 m OD and its lowest point 104 m. It includes the southern tip of the Long Mynd, one of a series of ridges running across the region. Modern settlement is in scattered villages and hamlets, and most of the area is now pastoral grassland or under arable cultivation. In archaeological terms, this appears a relatively low-density landscape, with 193 spatial records in the 10 km × 10 km square. However, its pastoral and arable terrains have been conducive to earthwork and cropmark visibility, respectively, and the Marches generally

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337000

338000

339000

340000

341000

342000

343000

344000

345000

346000

Low

340000

360000

320000

340000

360000

350

240000

286000 240000 285000 284000 283000

260000

280000

287000 288000 289000 260000 280000

286000 285000

400 Finds

282000 281000

200

280000

150

279000

Communication and transport

282000

Defensive

281000

Other (no finds)

250

280000

300

279000

283000

284000

287000

288000

289000

320000

320000

336000

300000

335000

290000 291000 292000 300000 320000

334000

Record density: High

290000

291000

292000

88  English Landscapes and Identities

100

Industrial Architectural forms

50 334000

335000

336000

337000

338000

339000

340000

341000

342000

343000

344000

345000

346000

Domestic and civil Ag e Ro Ea m an rly m ed iev al Pr eh ist or ic Un ce rta in

Ag e

Iro n

5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

Br on ze

Density

0

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0

100

200

300 Elevation (m OSD)

400

500

600

have benefited from fairly intensive aerial reconnaissance since the 1970s, resulting in detailed cropmark recording programmes in the 1980s (Whimster 1989; Baker 1992) and an NMP survey of earthworks and cropmarks in the 1990s (Stoertz and Small 2004). The square also fell partly within the coverage of the 1990s Marches Uplands Survey, a ground-based survey project (Dinn and Edwards 1999). Due to these productive investigations, cropmarks and earthworks account for 54 per cent of the spatial records in this square, the earthworks predominantly in the highest areas and cropmarks on the margins of the uplands and in the valleys. Artefact finds account for a further 41 per cent of the data, falling mainly into two categories: chance finds of over 100 prehistoric flint flakes and cores in the river Clun region, recovered during the first half of the twentieth century; and recent PAS finds, which are mainly concentrated in a known area of Roman activity around Craven Arms. There has been very little developer-funded archaeology in this rural region, and only six sites (3 per cent of the spatial records) have seen any excavation; two of these were research excavations. All of the six excavated sites have received only partial investigation. The paucity of excavation accounts for the high proportion of sites assigned an ‘uncer­ tain’ or a generic ‘prehistoric’ date. Thirty-nine per cent of these vaguely dated or undated sites are finds, and a further 28 per cent are small-scale enclosures, which have been detected as cropmarks in some numbers, but few of which have subsequently been investi­ gated on the ground—research excavations have tended to focus rather on Iron Age hill­ forts and Roman military or urban sites. These small enclosure sites are assumed to be mostly later Iron Age and/or Roman settlements, based on the few examples in the Marches that have seen excavation, including at Craven Arms (Ferris  1991), as well as on known patterns elsewhere in the country.

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Patterns in the Data across England  89 The virtual absence of sites datable to the middle or late Bronze Age is symptomatic of the Marches more generally. Funerary activities probably continued at some of the exist­ ing barrow monuments in this landscape (Chapter 10), but this is usually only detectable through excavation. The only definite later Bronze Age site in this square is a hoard of bronze weapons recovered near the river Onny. Settlements, meanwhile, are virtually unknown. Hillforts are the most prominent surviving feature of the Marches’ Iron Age landscape, mostly easily detectable as earthworks. Of these, Burrow Hill Camp (near Kempton), Billings Ring (near Edgton), and Norton Camp (near Craven Arms) fall within the square. This monument type has dominated Iron Age research in the Marches, though few sites have been extensively excavated or published, and their functions are still debated. However, the discovery via aerial photography of numerous small, enclosed settlements (see the earlier section ‘The North and West’), plus palaeoenvironmental evidence for extensive early Iron Age land clearance in the broader region, offer a broader context for these monuments and hint at a busier Iron Age landscape here (Wigley 2002). There is a relative paucity of Iron Age pottery in the northern Marches, which exacerbates the prob­ lem of identifying sites of this period; only one site in the square has produced definite Iron Age ceramics (Burrow Hill Camp). A few metal finds (mainly coins) in the square are pos­ sibly attributable to the later Iron Age. The Roman period is the best represented in the archaeological record here, as in much of England. Roughly half of the sites in this square are the widely distributed enclosures, identi­ fied as cropmarks and earthworks. But most can only be tentatively dated and it is unclear what degree of continuity there actually was in the settled landscape between the Iron Age and Roman periods. Excavation of two enclosures at Craven Arms has produced Roman pot­ tery (see above), but no evidence of preceding Iron Age activity; Roman pottery has also been recovered at Billings Ring hillfort, but this may have followed a hiatus in use. In the Roman period specifically, this was a rural landscape, away from the urban centre of Viroconium (modern Wroxeter) 20 km to the northeast and small town of Bravonium (modern Leintwardine) 6 km to the south. Evidence is consistent with the findings of the Wroxeter Hinterland Project, of low levels of Romanization (e.g. villas and Roman pottery) in the rural hinterland beyond Wroxeter and its suburbs (Gaffney et al. 2007; White et al. 2013). Roman military presence is possibly attested in the environs of Wistanstow, Cheney Longville, and Craven Arms, where the three identified Roman roads of the area intersect, as several en­clos­ ures have been identified morphologically as possible military marching camps or forts, though none have yet been definitively dated by excavation. The remainder of the Roman evidence in this square principally comprises small finds of coins and brooches. There is no definite early medieval evidence. The five sites tentatively identified consist of a ringwork, possible settlement fortifications at Clunbury and Lydbury North, a ridge­ way down the Long Mynd, and a possible settlement recalled in a place name. As in much of the case study area, early medieval material culture is elusive. Overall, the past landscapes that are archaeologically visible are predominantly those of the Iron Age and Roman periods. This is due to a combination of factors: principally, the visibility of the monumental Iron Age hillforts, the fact that Roman finds are relatively easy to date, and, perhaps most importantly, the detection of numerous enclosure sites, apparently of late Iron Age and/or Roman date, by aerial survey. A combination of prospection techniques is now needed to complement the impressive contribution of aerial survey, including targeted geo­ physics and excavations, in order to nuance our understanding of the Iron Age and Roman landscapes and to reveal the poorly understood later Bronze Age and early medieval periods.

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90  English Landscapes and Identities

346000

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352000

353000

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355000

356000

340000

360000

156000

160000

345000

157000 160000

344000

Record density: High

154000 153000

140000

152000 140000 151000 150000 149000

360000

400 Finds

350

147000 146000

Communication and transport

200

145000

Defensive

150

144000

250

147000

Other (no finds)

146000

300

145000

148000

151000 150000

340000

144000

148000

149000

152000

153000

154000

155000

Low

155000

156000

157000

Mendips and Somerset Levels Case Study (Somerset HER)

100

Industrial Architectural forms

50 344000

345000

346000

347000

348000

349000

350000

351000

352000

353000

354000

355000

356000

Domestic and civil Ag e Ro Ea m rly an m ed iev al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Ag e

Iro n

Br on ze

Density

0 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0

100

200

300 Elevation (m OSD)

400

500

600

The Somerset 10 km × 10 km test square is positioned on the western end of the Mendips and Somerset Levels case study region, spanning both the Mendips and the Levels, with the former running diagonally across the square on a northwest–southeast line from Cheddar in the north to Wells in the southeast. The river Axe flows north through the square, and a small piece of the Cheddar Reservoir is included in the northwest corner. There is relatively low overlap between datasets, with only 52 per cent of NRHE records and only 2 per cent of the PAS included in the HER. AIP records show 41 evaluations and 68 post-determination, with few desk-based surveys, environmental impact assessments, or geophysical surveys. The Bronze Age is mostly represented by finds, including a middle Bronze Age hoard near Rodney Stoke. There are two possible Bronze Age earthworks, but these are not securely dated. In the Iron Age, two banjo enclosures are found on the southern Mendip escarpment. In addition, Iron Age activity has been noted in thirteen caves in the Mendips, and three add­ ition­al settlements are known, including a round house near Wookey Hole, and four field systems positioned along the southern edge of the Mendip. The Roman period sees a dra­ matic increase in material, with substantial increases in activity on both the Levels and the Mendip, including settlements, burials, field systems, and four new roads. The increased activity in the region under the Romans is surely linked to lead mining at Charterhouse on Mendip, as well as improved conditions for settlement/farming in the Levels as a result of wetland draining.

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Patterns in the Data across England  91 The early medieval period is poorly represented, and much of the evidence is inferred from documentary sources. Unlike previous periods, most of this evidence comes from the Levels. There is little evidence for multi-period site continuity in this area. Only five sites show clear evidence for continuity, and four others might do the same. Three caves have longterm use prior to the early medieval period, with one showing evidence for use in the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Roman period. Two other sites seem to have been inhabited from the Iron Age into the Roman period, with a roundhouse at Hole Ground, Wookey Hole being occupied from the first to fourth century ad. Further evidence found along the Roman roads is suggestive of Iron Age–Roman continuity, but in each case the dating of field systems hinders clarity.

246000

247000

248000

249000

250000

251000

252000

253000

254000

255000

256000

260000

280000

260000

280000

80000

60000

79000 60000 78000

40000

77000 40000 76000 75000 74000

150

69000

72000

Communication and transport

71000

Defensive

70000

250

72000

Other (no finds)

71000

300

200

69000

Finds

350

70000

73000

76000 75000

400

73000

240000

74000

77000

78000

79000

80000

Low

240000

80000

245000

81000 82000 80000

244000

Record density: High

81000

82000

Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley Case Study (Devon HER)

Industrial

100

Architectural forms

50 244000

245000

246000

247000

248000

249000

250000

251000

252000

253000

254000

255000

256000

Domestic and civil Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed iev al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Ag e

Iro n

Br on ze

Density

0 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0

100

200

300 Elevation (m OSD)

400

500

600

The square in Devon clips the southwest corner of Dartmoor and at its opposite end extends towards the tidal limit of the river Tamar, with the land lying between 38 and 465 m OD. The river Tavy, which flows into the mouth of the Tamar at Plymouth, runs across the middle of the square, lending its name to Tavistock, the only major settlement in the area. No evidence for substantial roads or routeways has been recognized, but the area does include a number of surviving stone-built prehistoric linear earthworks known as contour reaves. The 332 spatial records are distributed extremely unevenly across the area, clustering mainly on the edge of Dartmoor, whose surviving upstanding prehistoric earthworks have

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92  English Landscapes and Identities been the focus of archaeological investigation since the nineteenth century. Developerfunded archaeology is limited, however, and no AIP records that yielded data relevant to the EngLaId project fell within the square. Portable material culture is almost absent, with PAS finds limited to a single object of uncertain date (the remainder of the finds are anti­ quarian discoveries). Thus the database consists almost entirely of HER and NRHE records. The area stands out for its unusually high number of Bronze Age records compared to other periods. Data consist predominantly of roundhouse settlements (enclosed as well as unenclosed) and field system reaves. The generic prehistoric period is also well represented, which seems a common feature of upland areas with low finds densities and significant amounts of non-intrusive investi­ gations. Although the data largely seem similar to the Bronze Age records, this may go some way towards explaining the near-absence of securely dated Iron Age records. The only definite evidence for the Iron Age consists of two hillforts. Roman records are also significantly under-represented. Early medieval records are few, but unusual in that they are more common than both Roman and Iron Age records; this would be further emphasized if the nine Domesday records that fall within the square were added. The evidence includes a number of inscribed stones (ogham and Latin), reflecting a broader ‘Celtic’ tradition as well as continuing prac­ tices from the Roman period onwards.

Cornwall Case Study (Cornwall HER) 181000

182000

183000

184000

185000

186000

120000

350

180000

200000

220000

240000

140000

160000

180000

200000

220000

240000

100000 80000 60000 40000 20000

120000

Finds

42000 41000 40000

Communication and transport

150

39000

Defensive

200

42000

250

41000

Other (no finds)

40000

300

39000

43000

160000

0

51000 47000

48000

49000

50000

Low

140000

120000 400

52000

46000 47000 48000 49000 50000 51000 52000 20000 40000 60000 80000 100000 120000

180000

45000 0

179000

44000

178000

43000

177000

46000

176000

45000

175000

44000

174000

Record density: High

100

Industrial Architectural forms

50 174000

175000

176000

177000

178000

179000

180000

181000

182000

183000

184000

185000

186000

Domestic and civil Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed iev al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Ag e

Iro n

Br on ze

Density

0 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0

100

200

300 Elevation (m OSD)

400

500

600

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Patterns in the Data across England  93 The test square is located just southwest of the centre of Cornwall. Truro is the main town within the area. The key topographic features are the Falmouth estuary in the southeastern corner and its tributaries (the Allen, Kenwyn, Calenick, and Carnon). The entire square is situated on upper Devonian sedimentary rocks (mainly sandstone and slate). The loamy soils are overlain by alluvial patches around the creek heads at Truro and Calenick. Beyond extensive aerial photographic recording, few sites within the test square have been examined in any detail. Most of the investigations have been small in scale even recently, comprising watching briefs, trial trench investigations, or geophysical and metal detecting surveys. With one exception—a recent pipeline-related investigation— most of the excavations have targeted known/upstanding Iron Age/Roman rounds: a form of enclosed settlement that is specific to Cornwall (e.g. Johnson 1979; Gossip 2005, forthcoming). The 145 records dating to the study period are distributed widely. Slight concentrations are evident around the current settlements at Truro and Threemilestone (key areas for recent construction projects) and along the Kenwyn Valley. Just over half (56 per cent) of the records relate to settlement activity—from both settlement sites and specific architec­ tural forms. Evidence relating to stray finds and fragmentary/nonspecific features (e.g. enclosures) makes up the bulk of the remaining records. A significant majority of the evidence relates to Iron Age–Roman activity—the later Bronze Age and early medieval periods are poorly represented. Unsurprisingly, therefore many sites that were occupied in the Iron Age period endured into the Roman period. Uncertainly dated evidence is relatively rare, mainly comprising undated cropmark enclosures. Excavated evidence suggests that earth, stone, and timber were all important building materials in the Iron Age and Roman periods—stone was used in the matrix and facing of earthwork enclosures, a possible turf (cob) wall was excavated at Shortlandsend and groups of quartz chips were recovered from the gullies surrounding timber Iron Age round houses at Mount Pleasant. Many Iron Age–Roman settlement sites and field sys­ tems persist as earthworks. Later Bronze Age activity is represented only by findspots including six possible bronze axes, a chisel, and pottery sherds. Most records relating to the Iron Age and Roman periods are Iron Age–Roman settlement sites, mainly rounds. Other recorded settlement forms include a hillfort at Bishop’s Wood and a cliff castle at Roundwood. In six cases the settle­ ments are associated with field systems. It is also worth noting that 47 per cent of the settle­ment sites, including one fougou—subterranean stone-built structures that are, once again, unique to Cornwall—are identified only on the basis of documentary evidence—a significant proportion. Iron Age and Roman findspots are relatively rare. They include four single finds of imported Iron Age coins, a single first century bc brooch, and six Roman coin finds, three of which are hoards. The only proven early medieval evidence is the base of a ninth–twelfth century ad cross from Truro. Other sites of this period are postulated based on documentary evidence. These include early ecclesiastical foundations (lanns, churches, chapel) and a well. Additionally Truro was purportedly founded on an early medieval settlement at Newham. Perhaps surprisingly therefore, eight manors were recorded in the area in the Domesday survey.

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94  English Landscapes and Identities

The South and East

447000

448000

449000

450000

451000

452000

453000

454000

455000

456000

457000

460000

440000

460000

94000 95000 100000

440000

Low

93000

80000

92000 80000 91000 90000 89000 88000 86000

Communication and transport

85000

Defensive

84000

250

86000

Other (no finds)

150

83000

Finds

300

200

83000

928

350

85000

87000

90000 89000

400

84000

87000

88000

91000

92000

93000

100000

446000

96000

445000

Record density: High

94000

95000

96000

Isle of Wight Case Study (Isle of Wight HER)

Industrial

100

Architectural forms

50 445000

446000

447000

448000

449000

450000

451000

452000

453000

454000

455000

456000

Domestic and civil

457000 Ag e Ro Ea rly man m ed iev al Pr eh ist or Un ic ce rta in

Ag e

Iro n

Br on ze

Density

0 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

0

100

200

300 Elevation (m OSD)

400

500

600

The test square is positioned centrally on the Isle of Wight and includes the main town at Newport. The area includes at least three distinct landscape zones. A chalk ridge running from west to east across the lower half of the square divides an area with light greensand soils to the southeast from one with mixed clayey soils to the north. Palaeoenvironmental studies suggest that while the upland chalklands were cleared of forest gradually from the Bronze Age onwards, the heavy clays to the north were probably forested for much of the study period (see Tomalin et al. 2012). Two major estuaries—Medina Estuary and Wootton Creek—cut into the northern part of the square. The elevation ranges between 0 m OD at the coast and 164 m on the chalk ridge. The area has been surveyed intensively by metal-detecting, field walking, and geo­­ physic­al and aerial photographic investigations. However, relatively few sites have been excavated and these investigations were typically small in scale (but see Tomalin et al. 2012). The 1,446 archaeological records from the study period are widely distributed but with clear clusters on the chalk ridge—especially close to the Roman villas at Clatterford and Combley—and along the two main estuaries. The evidence is dominated by findspots— these make up 84 per cent of records (see Basford 2007; Robbins 2013). Due to the dom­in­ ance of finds evidence (which provide good dates) there are relatively few uncertainly dated records.

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Patterns in the Data across England  95 Both timber and stone were employed architecturally during the study period for building round barrows, settlement structures, villa buildings, or churches. However, timber was the main building material in prehistory; from the Roman period onwards, diverse local and imported stone types were used (Chapter 9). Over one hundred sites produced evidence for multi-period activity. Many of these sites were assigned to the late Iron Age–Roman transition: numerous find scatters have produced both Iron Age and Roman material and four of the excavated late Iron Age settlements also produced Roman finds and features. Later Bronze Age activity is varied, including the reuse of early Bronze Age round bar­ rows, metalwork finds, and two timber structures in the intertidal zone at Fishbourne. Additionally, extensive undated field systems and trackways have been recorded, mostly on the chalk uplands, some of which are likely of Bronze Age origin. Two Iron Age burial sites (one cremation, one possible inhumation) fall within the square, but settlement remains are fragmentary, mainly comprising isolated cut features and midden material. A middle to late Iron Age settlement at Havenstreet was associated with iron-working and salt-making fragments. A post alignment along the foreshore at Fishbourne spans the Iron Age–Roman transition. Roman villas are distributed on or just to the north of the chalk ridge. Four—at Newport, Clatterford, Combley, and Carisbrooke—have been investigated in detail. Another—at Chawton—was identified by field walking. The surrounding landscapes have produced a wealth of material including significant numbers of Iron Age and Roman coins (these make up c.80 per cent of the metalwork assemblages for both periods) and other metal objects. Other evidence for Roman occupation includes middens and scat­ ters of pottery and building materials. More substantial later Roman occupation evidence including pottery kilns and evidence of metalworking was excavated recently west of Chillingwood Copse. A large cremation cemetery at Hunny Hill was investigated in the nineteenth century. The burh at Carisbrooke forms the centrepiece of early medieval activity; this may have been built on the ruins of a Roman fort. There are early medieval elements in at least one upstanding church and a significant ‘productive site’ is located south of Carisbrooke (Ulmschneider 2003). Funerary activity included the reuse of Bronze Age round barrows. The early medieval metalwork assemblage is more diverse than that from earlier periods, including coins and a range of personal decorative items, toilet items, horse fittings, house­ hold items, and weaponry. Twenty-two manors were recorded within the area in the Domesday Survey.

Kent Case Study (Kent HER)

The 10 km × 10 km test square in Kent is situated to the north–northeast of Canterbury. It straddles the low-lying Thanet Beds and London Clays that characterize the north coast of Kent, between the northern outskirts of Canterbury (which sits on an outcrop of chalk) and the built-up areas of Whitstable and Herne Bay, between 0 and 73 m OD. This is an area of high connectivity: the main riverine route into this area is the tidal river Stour, and the two main Roman roads crossing the square are those from Canterbury to Upstreet and Canterbury to Reculver. Watling Street and the road from Canterbury to Richborough run just to the south.

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Communication and transport

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Architectural forms

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96  English Landscapes and Identities

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

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Portable material culture is abundant, and all periods are dominated by finds. As a result of the inclusion of part of the Canterbury district within this square, the area is further­ more characterized by relatively high numbers of developer-funded interventions. The 679 records in this square are unevenly distributed, with a clear cluster in Canterbury and other occupation areas. Bronze Age records are least well represented, although the separate dataset provided by David Yates (Chapter  2) added a further eight Bronze Age field systems to the existing datasets. The only Bronze Age settlement in this test square is enclosed, reflecting the early history of enclosed settlement in the southeast (Chapter 8). Settlement and agricultural activity continues into the Iron Age, but the real change seems to have occurred in the Roman period. Settlement and agricultural activity intensi­ fies, and funerary and religious/ritual activity increase significantly. There is also evidence for industrial activity (mostly kiln sites and quarries) and the construction of roads and routeways across the study area. This region stands out for its relatively high proportion of early medieval records, which can be explained by the inclusion of part of Canterbury in the study area, including evi­ dence for religious establishments from the seventh century ad onwards, after the arrival of the Augustinian mission. Another factor is the high proportion of pre-Christian fur­ nished burials in Kent dated to the fifth to seventh centuries ad, displaying clear links with the Continent in terms of their material culture, a result of the close connections across the Channel (Harrington and Welch  2014). The Domesday dataset furthermore records four holdings within this 10 km × 10 km square.

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Patterns in the Data across England  97 Generic prehistoric records are relatively under-represented compared to test squares with upland tracts; however, there are comparatively high numbers of field systems of uncertain date.

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Lea Valley Case Study (Greater London HER)

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

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The 10 km × 10 km square for the Lea Valley lies towards the southern end of the valley within the present-day areas of Chingford, Enfield, and Leytonstone, at 1–91 m OD. The bedrock, as it is in most of the valley itself, is London Clay overlain by sand and gravel. The latter has been the subject of extraction from the nineteenth century onwards, result­ ing in a number of older reservoirs from the area, from which badly reported finds and settle­ments stemmed. The square sits currently within the built-up area of Greater London. Before the growth of London over the nineteenth century the historic villages of Tottenham, Enfield, and Waltham Cross were found in this area. The river Lea rises in Luton and flows into London at Edmonton and then, via Hackney, Stratford, and Bromley-by-Bow, into the Thames. Until the middle nineteenth century this was a rural area with some light industry along the river valley and, especially, a series of water mills from the early medieval period onwards. From the nineteenth century onwards the marshes of the valley floor were reclaimed by drainage, canalizing the river Lea and dumping material into the marshes (see Corcoran et al. 2011 for an account of the sedi­ mentary history of the lower Lea).

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98  English Landscapes and Identities This is an area of potentially very rich archaeology, from at least the Bronze Age onwards with field systems, crannog settlements, and metal finds, often in water. However, there has been very little extensive archaeological work in the post-war period, mostly limited to small interventions, with a lack of open-area excavations. This has resulted in a patchy and poorly known archaeology, a frustrating glimpse of what might well have been a well-settled and used area. In addition, much of the archaeology is deeply buried either by alluvial deposits from the river Lea and its tributaries or from made ground deposited in the construction of north London. In terms of the sources of evidence, the vast majority of the records come from the HER, with limited overlaps with other sources, such as the AIP and PAS. There are relatively high numbers of Bronze Age sites and (especially) finds. This results in part from the deposition of Bronze Age material in rivers and from a number of possible pile dwellings, sometimes described as crannogs. At least three pile dwellings or crannogs are noted and each may have started in the Bronze Age, but saw use into the Iron Age or Roman period. These include the Lower Maynard reservoir in Walthamstow (excavated 1869), the Warwick reservoir (1894 and more recent observations) and the Banbury reser­ voir (1901). Modern investigations would be needed to reveal more of the nature and date of these structures. More recently, an impressive dryland Bronze Age site was found near Tupelo Road, Waltham Forest, This was a large ditched enclosure c.35 m in diameter which may have had an internal bank, with associated features and finds datable to the tenth–ninth ­centuries bc. This is thought to be an aggrandized or Springfield-style enclosure (Yates 2007). There is surprisingly little evidence from the Iron Age period. The crannog settlements probably carried on, but few other settlements are known, with much of the evidence com­ ing from stray finds. The Roman period is dominated by finds of coins and pottery, with numerous antiquar­ ian reports of Roman roads and burials which are more or less reliable. There are some tantalizing indications of grander structures, as well as farmsteads and possible villas. For instance, the part of the HER entry for a site named Leyton Grange  E.  (HER pref. ref. 061650/00/00) in Waltham Forest reads ‘The enlargement of the garden of the Grange, Leyton in 1718 revealed “several old foundations with Roman bricks and medals. In digging a horse pond were discovered a huge foundation c. 6 ft underground, a large gate with mouldings & a portal to a large gate 9–10 ft high and 5–6 ft wide”. Stukeley noted that “a great quantity of oak timber, some 18” square and mortised together” was found with Roman coins.’ This might have been some later construction with which Roman finds became mixed up, or an indication of a monumental Roman structure. Only further inves­ tigation would allow us to choose between these alternatives. Like that for the Iron Age, the evidence for the early medieval period is sparse. It is ­possible that some of the crannog dwellings were used in this period and that at least one decent-sized settlement was found, but other than that the period is represented by a scatter of finds across the area. There are some interesting juxtapositions—the Edmonton IKEA, just south of the North Circular, provides some evidence of prehistoric and Roman habitation, raising the image of a drastic contrast between the rural prehistoric landscape and that of lorries and massshopping in the twenty-first century.

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Patterns in the Data across England  99

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Other (no finds)

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Defensive

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Finds

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Iro n Ag e E a Ro rly m m an ed i Pr eva l eh ist o Un ric ce rta in

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Avon–Thames–Avon Transect Case Study (Oxfordshire HER)

Industrial Architectural forms Domestic and civil Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

The Oxfordshire test square is positioned on the eastern edge of the Avon–Thames–Avon Transect case study region, located within the Cotswold hills north of Burford and Witney. The Wychwood Forest is included in the square, located in the northeast corner, south of the Evenlode River. The Windrush River flows through the southern part of the square, and both rivers feed the Thames. The landscape is mostly formed of sandstone bedrock overlain by loam and clay. There is relatively poor overlap between datasets, with only 61 per cent of NRHE and 1 per cent of the PAS data included in the HER. AIP data show an area dominated by excava­ tions, accounting for 24 out of 43 records, with evaluations accounting for a further 14. The remaining five records are split among desk-based assessments, environmental impact assessments, and geophysical survey. There is very little Bronze Age activity in the region; while some barrows show evidence of middle or late Bronze Age activity, most of the evidence is from findspots of flint or pot­ tery, with one palstave. The Iron Age material is again dominated by findspots, mainly of pottery but also coins and other scattered metalwork. A section of Grim’s Ditch runs along the eastern section of the square. The Roman period sees the development of the region as part of a wider villa landscape, with thirteen such sites developing within this square. This period also sees the construc­ tion of roads, with Akeman Street cutting across the square on a SW–NE line. The early medieval period is once again characterized by findspots, mainly pottery scatters, but also two spearheads and a spur. Finds from this period tend to cluster along the rivers, but it seems that Akeman Street is still a focus of activity. The Domesday manors data contain records for 20 sites within the hundreds of Shipton, Barrington, and Bampton, including the villas of Burford, Minstor, Milton, Wychwood, and Shipton.

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100  English Landscapes and Identities A high number of uncertain records are related to the nature of archaeological investiga­ tion carried out in this region. Small towns like Burford and Minster Lovell on the Windrush River and Milton under Wychwood, Shipton under Wychwood, and Ascott under Wychwood on the Evenlode are each concentrations of uncertain archaeological remains, while those that can be placed into firmer categories are more dispersed across the square. This uncertainty obscures our understanding of the chronology of settlement within this area.

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Hoskins’ Leicestershire Case Study (Leicestershire HER)

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The 10 km × 10 km square is located to the northwest of Leicester with the suburb of Glenfield lying within the square. Leicester was an important late Iron Age and Roman centre, so that the distribution of material within the square was influenced by this proxim­ ity. Greater numbers of finds and features are found in the southeast of the square. The underlying geology is comprised of glacial till and mudrocks, with some small patches of igneous rocks in the centre and northwest. The soils are predominantly loam, especially in the northern half of the square, with loamy clay further south. There are some patches of clay in the southwest. There has been interest in whether the clay was as used and densely settled as other soil types and there appear to be sites and finds of all periods on the clay. There is a change in elevation from northwest to southeast: the highest point is Bardon Hill at 278 m (which is also the highest point in Leicestershire), with the small rivers in the area draining towards the Soar Valley in the south and east. Land use today is a mixture of arable and pastoral with some woodland, especially through the central area and to the

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Patterns in the Data across England  101 west, and there are a number of small villages. In all, it is a pretty average sample of the English Midlands. The southeast, approaching Leicester, is most built up and some archaeological evidence has been produced due to housing projects. The M1 runs north–south through the area and some archaeological work has resulted from development connected with the motorway, especially around Junction 21. Overall, however, there has been relatively little development and hence no large-scale excavation. It is notable that no archaeological work is recorded when the M1 was initially constructed (largely in the 1960s here), with some work due to later slip roads and facilities. The building of the early motorways added little to our archaeological knowledge. Most evidence is recorded within the Leicestershire HER and the PAS, with smaller numbers of records from the AIP and the NRHE. The AIP records are useful as they pro­ vide some more detail on excavations and conclusions. Much of the NRHE record was either of findspots or of enclosures of unknown date. More notable sites or finds within the square are few. Excavations at Kirby Muxloe just west of Leicester revealed Roman industrial activity, including kilns and also earlier Iron Age finds which demonstrated use of the claylands and were important for helping refine understanding of the Scored Ware element of the Ancaster–Breedon pottery group. Excavations and survey in 2009 and 2012 at Glenfield, Blaby revealed a middle Iron Age site, with a number of roundhouses and evidence of metalworking and two rare metal caul­ drons. Two decorated Iron Age linchpins were found in Ratby and reported to the PAS. The distribution of evidence between categories and periods is slightly surprising. The least surprising aspect is the number of Roman finds, which make up over 40 per cent of the occurrences within the square. However, the relative lack of evidence for agricultural and subsistence activity is notable across all periods especially the Roman. Roman roads and industrial sites exist in fair numbers, but other categories are sparsely represented. There are a number of enclosures of unknown date, which account for many of the 19 occurrences under architectural forms. In terms of period representation, early medieval evidence is sparse, with the Bronze and Iron Ages not being plentiful. Beacon Hill hillfort, towards the north of the square, has seen some examination and produced a number of finds. The Roman period and its finds are the overwhelmingly large category. Groby Castle, Norman in date, may have earlier antecedents. Overall, for an area which falls within the Central Belt of the Roman Rural Settlement Project and the Central Zone of Roberts and Wrathmell this square was relatively poor in finds and features. Much could be learned here of all periods by more concerted investiga­ tion through survey and excavation.

East of England Transect Case Study (Norfolk HER)

The Norfolk 10 km × 10 km square is situated on the Breckland—a distinctive area of heath­ land—at the northeastern edge of the East of England Transect case study area. The under­ lying geology is chalk overlain with sands, clays, and loams. The river Wensum rises close to the northeast corner of the square; three dry valleys cut into the eastern half. Numerous aerial and metal-detecting surveys and a small number of field-walking investigations have been carried out within the area. Only four sites have been excavated and all of these interventions were small in scale. Three known sites were targeted in the mid-twentieth century (the round barrow at Anmer Minque, Two Oaks Roman Villa, and a major Roman finds concentration); one site was investigated by trial trenching in 2009.

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350

Finds

321000 320000 319000

Communication and transport

200 150

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Defensive

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Other (no finds)

319000

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Industrial Architectural forms

50 573000

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102  English Landscapes and Identities

Religious, ritual, and funerary Agriculture and subsistence

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As many as 238 archaeological records relating to the period 1500 bc to ad 1086 are located within the area. These sites are widely dispersed; a distinct concentration in the southeast corner of the square relates to an intensively metal-detected zone. Findspots make up 78 per cent of the records. Overall prehistoric evidence is scant. The vast majority of records relate to Roman and early medieval activity. Fifty-three archaeological features are uncertainly dated. Most of these are cropmarks of fields, enclosures, and trackways. Four undated flint mines attest to the local importance of this material. Indeed locally procured flint was a common element of built structures throughout the study period: it was central to the makeup of burnt mounds, was incorporated in round barrow mounds, and formed a core component of the single Roman villa. Beyond this, structural features are rare: timber and earth were almost certainly key building materials. There are relatively few multi-period sites within the square (less than 40). Of these, sites that produced both Roman and early medieval archaeology are most common. There are also several finds scatters that include Iron Age, Roman, and early medieval material, suggesting that some locations were returned to repeatedly. Bronze Age evidence includes one early Bronze Age round barrow that produced later Bronze Age pottery sherds, and isolated metalwork finds: a couple of socketed axes, a dirk, and a spear. The Iron Age period is represented mainly by findspots, including metalwork finds of coins, horse fittings, personal decorative items and a tankard handle, occasional pottery sherds, and a puddingstone quern. Seven sites associated with burnt stones—burnt mounds and burnt stone pits or hearths—are assigned a prehistoric date; at least one is also associated with Roman material. Roman findspots are varied—they include coins, personal ornaments (brooches, pins, bracelets etc.), domestic items, and pottery scatters. These frequently occur in multi-period

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Patterns in the Data across England  103 find scatters and in four cases the density and range of finds are suggestive of Roman settle­ ment. One villa at Two Oaks has been investigated to a limited extent, producing third- to fourth-century material. Two further potential villa sites are recorded based on cropmark and finds evidence. Two possible Roman roads have been postulated but neither has been investigated in detail. Key features of the early medieval period are a late Saxon window in the upstanding church at West Rudham, a settlement site at Weasenham All Saints (yet to be excavated), and a moot at the Anmer Minque Bronze Age round barrow. Additionally three early medieval inhumation cemeteries have been identified based on finds evidence. Silver coins and early Anglo-Saxon brooches form substantial components of the early medieval finds assemblage for the square. Four manors were recorded in the Domesday Survey.

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400

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541 Finds

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Communication and transport

150

444000

Defensive

200

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250

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Other (no finds)

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Humber Estuary Case Study (Humber HER)

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Industrial Architectural forms

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The test square cuts across the Yorkshire Wolds and the northwest part of Holderness, to the southwest of Driffield. Between the chalk outcrops of the Wolds and the low-lying superficial drift deposits of Holderness, the height above sea level of the study area ranges from 9 to 156 m OD. There are no major rivers cutting through the area. Woodland clearance seems to have taken place from an early stage (Stoertz 1997) (also see Chapter 4). Developer-funded investigations are limited, although antiquarian excavations focusing on barrows took place during the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries (Chapter 10). The area has also seen significant amounts of metal detecting, reflected in the high number of PAS records.

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104  English Landscapes and Identities The 786 records are fairly evenly distributed across the test square. Bronze Age records are least well represented after the predominantly early Bronze Age records were removed from the database. The remaining evidence consisted predominantly of finds and funerary activity, but settlement evidence was absent. The southwestern quadrant of the test square furthermore contains two of the so-called Wolds Entrenchments, extensive linear earth­ works of Bronze Age (or generic prehistoric) date, thought to represent land divisions and regulate movement. Iron Age evidence consists mainly of unspecified cropmark enclosures and earthworks, some relating to field systems, so-called ‘ladder’ settlements, and trackways, as well as finds. Noteworthy as well are relatively high numbers of records in the ‘Religious, ritual, and funer­ ary’ category, mostly represented by the regional tradition of square barrow construction. The most obvious aspect is the very high number of Roman records, almost entirely dominated by finds, although settlement evidence and trackways also occur, many showing evidence of continuity from the Iron Age. A stretch of Roman road runs northwest from Bainton towards Malton. A total of 14 Domesday manors were located within the test square; otherwise, early medieval activity again consists mainly of findspots. Uncertain records form the second-highest category, following the Roman period. The generic prehistoric category is relatively under-represented compared to other areas.

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SECTION II

THE E X PLOR AT ION OF BROA DE R PAT T E R NS

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4

Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology Tyler Franconi and Chris Gosden

One of the important issues confronting our project was how to model the effects of the landscape on people without slipping into environmental determinism. It has long been seen that temperature, rainfall, and soils varied across Britain due to latitude, altitude, and geological history; it was thought that less settled, more pastoralist ways of life developed in the higher, wetter areas of the north and west, which also have soils which are more difficult to work, as compared to the south and east. As we have seen, the classic statement of the highland–lowland division is that of Fox (1932) in The Personality of Britain. We cannot ignore the effects of physical differences, but nor can we see them as simple causes with straightforward effects. Instead, we emphasize complexity of interactions and develop a notion of landscape force, which is one force among many. We will continue here the discussion from Chapter 3 concerning differences in the archaeological evidence between the north and west and south and east of England, focusing here on physical factors. This chapter links discussions of regional variation in physical factors to patterns of regional differentiation of human life through time and space. A multi-proxy model of humans in their worlds is needed, and we combine climatological, sedimentological, and hydrological datasets in order to better understand how society and landscape have influenced each other during the EngLaId period. Similar approaches have recently been used to interpret patterns of deforestation (Fyfe et al. 2004, 2013; Woodbridge et al. 2014; Fyfe et al. 2015) and agricultural land use, with Rippon and his team gathering together a mass of pollen records for the Roman and early medieval periods (Rippon et al. 2015). The accumulation of palaeoenvironmental proxy records are often discussed at the scale of the Holocene (or subdivisions thereof) and are very rarely connected to human action except for where various elements of climatic downturn are thought to have caused social collapse. However, from the Neolithic period onwards, human activity has had a significant ecological impact. When environmental specialists talk about Holocene environmental change without explicit and detailed consideration of those people who lived through it, they are only telling part of the story. And the same is true of archaeologists who discuss social development without discussing physical changes to landscape. We seek to understand the impact that people have had on the landscape, shown here through a national-level model of soil erosion susceptibility. We must also understand the opposite as well: how the landscape influenced human activity. Within the context of river basins, one of the most prevalent environmental factors is water and—especially troublesome for settlement—water in excess quantities. Thus we develop a second model to understand how floodplains and ground water levels affected the ways in which we see

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tyler Franconi and Chris Gosden. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0004

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108  English Landscapes and Identities human activity spread throughout a river basin. These two different perspectives are set out as distinct, but they are of course closely intertwined: humans cause soil erosion, soil flows into rivers, rivers deposit alluvium on flood plains, alluviation and flood activity damage or alter human settlement, and then settlement moves or changes. There is no start and end to this cycle, but understanding the different factors at play at all stages helps clarify the ways that people both affected and were affected by their environment from 1500 bc to ad 1086. We will model various physical parameters at a national level, before focusing on two regional case studies—the Thames and Eden river basins—which will allow for a discussion of more detailed factors. It is only in more recent periods of extensive canal construction that we see the divisions between river basins being broken down and their individual biomes linked. In pre-modern periods, river basins were much more self-contained en­vir­ on­mental systems, influenced by both human activity and climatic activity, evidenced by geomorphological markers.

Environmental Determinism While wanting to take physical factors into account we will argue against any form of determinism. The dichotomy of ‘anthropogenic’ and ‘natural’ worlds is a false creation that lies deep in a Western distinction between a realm of nature to be investigated by science and culture as the subject of humanities and social sciences (Cronon 1996; Messerli et al. 2000; Walsh  2008). This is untrue now and was certainly untrue in the past. Studies of people and their world have often split between two extremes. On the one hand, ‘en­vir­on­ mental sociology’ privileges the notion of ‘human exemptionalism’ (Murdoch  2001: 113): the idea that people stand outside the natural world and social forces develop in­de­pen­ dent­ly of the world around them. This school of thought tends towards seeing the en­vir­on­ ment as a passive backdrop for social development with no active role in its trajectory. On the other hand, we see the extremes of environmental determinism (e.g. Diamond 1997, 2006; Fagan 2008) prominent particularly in modern geography, which sees social change as the end result of climatic and environmental forces that society cannot control (see Judkins et al.  2008; Radcliffe et al.  2010; Livingstone 2012 for overviews and criticisms). Instead, we must understand that humans exist as one part of the world, in complex interaction with it. Such interactions are dynamic, changeable, and involve multiple aspects. There is a long history to the study of these topics in British archaeology, reaching back at least to Cyril Fox’s 1932 work The Personality of Britain, which stands as one of the earliest twentieth-century investigations of the influence of the environment on past societies across the British Isles. Fox highlighted a difference in settlement patterns between the south and east and the north and west of Britain, which he largely attributed to an upload–lowland division in the physical environment (Fox 1932: 28–32). This distinction in geographical zones influencing cultural development depended on a number of factors, including access to the sea (especially sea lanes connecting to Europe), climate and especially precipitation, the distribution of mineral resources, permeable soils, dampness, and elevation (Fox 1932: 86–9). All of these factors contributed, Fox argued, to a ‘greater unity of culture in the Lowland Zone, but great continuity of culture in the Highland Zone’ (1932: 88). In essence, Fox argued that the lowland zones of southern and eastern Britain were more hospitable to social development and, since the Neolithic period, supported a more complex series of cultures, whatever that might mean.

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  109 Fox’s study had an important influence on the development of British landscape archaeology. While the quantity of archaeological material has increased dramatically since the 1930s, the division between patterns seen in the north and west versus what are seen in the south and east is still evident, as we saw in Chapter 3. But are the reasons Fox gave for such differences still acceptable? Many scholars have tried to bridge the gap by reframing the core disagreement and doing away with the culture–nature divide. Murdoch (2001: 129) proposed a continuum of ‘ecologies’ with one end dominated by social forces and the other end by natural forces, stating that most situations fall somewhere in the middle and are acted upon by both spheres. Walsh (2008: 561) built upon this continuum to highlight how Mediterranean archaeology and specifically geoarchaeology repeatedly highlights how social and natural forces interact throughout the past, and that ‘asymmetric views of society and nature’ are misleading. Brown (2008a) has argued for a similar perspective from British geoarchaeology, arguing that records of past human relationships with the physical world are heterogeneous as a result of mutual adaptation and dynamism between society and its surroundings, a stance that has been echoed since by Lewin (2010) and Edgeworth (2011, 2014) in their own investigations of the British environment. Part of the problem has been an implicit or explicit distinction between culture as some­ hysic­al thing mental or ephemeral and nature as a set of physical forces. The mental and the p seem incommensurate forms of cause and effect, with the latter always likely to overwhelm the former. Nature is not an external force to an internal culture. Rather there is a continuity of forces through all the relations composing the world, including humans, who add their own element and dimension. People have intelligent bodies, rather than disembodied minds, which work in close relationships with the other material aspects of the world. Relations in the plural also seem preferable to environment in the singular. An en­vir­on­ment is composed of many things—sheep, hills, wheat, rivers, rain, and woodland—each with their own ­internal structures and external connections. When considered as this heterogenous group it is hard to know how an environment can be seen as de­ter­min­ant. It is hard to see how variations in altitude or rainfall could have singular and predictable effects and we instead would want to emphasize a complexity of relations at any one time that also changes continually. Having argued against determinism, we would want to incorporate palaeoen­vir­on­ mental data into archaeological discussions, looking at the mutual influence of people and a changing world (Coombes and Barber 2005; Dearing et al. 2006; Livingstone 2012). Yet we must be careful in how we interpret them. Recent views on ancient climate change (Büntgen et al.  2011; Büntgen et al.  2016), for example, have used annually resolved ­dendroclimatological data to argue that climate change was the main driver of multiple ­historical events throughout the past 2,000 years. These studies make clear the fashion of ­neo-en­vir­on­mental determinism in big data approaches to past environments and cultures. Such approaches have been strongly criticized by some members of the archaeological and en­ vir­ on­ mental communities and labelled as ‘neo-catastrophist’ (Marriner et al.  2010; Marriner and Morhange 2013). A focus on catastrophic events in human history prioritizes rare occurrences over daily life, and it is important not to lose sight of the fact that as ter­ rible as some events may have been, their effects are difficult to chart. The EngLaId project is well placed to address the question of past human–environment relationships as we have archaeological evidence stretching over 2,500 years which can be matched with palaeoenvironmental information. As discussed in Chapter 2, the arch­aeo­ logic­al data have fairly coarse chronological resolution, but we can still understand general trends through time. As we shall see, the climatic and other environmental information is variable in quality and covering varying timescales, posing some challenges to synthesis.

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110  English Landscapes and Identities

Characterizing the English Landscape Before discussing the specifics of either human or environmental change in our study, it is important to lay out the basic elements of the English landscape in which our study takes place. The elements discussed here are very similar to those emphasized by Fox in the early twentieth century, focusing on elevation, ruggedness, geology, soil composition, climate, and hydrology in order to better understand the character of England.1 If we first consider variations in elevation, we can see significant differences between the lowland zones of the southern and eastern parts of the country versus the upland zones of the west and north. By comparing elevation and ruggedness (Figure 4.1), we see that the highest and most rugged landscapes are located in Devon and Cornwall, along the Welsh Marches, and then from the Peak district through the Pennines in the north, with the Yorkshire Wolds in the east and the Lake District Fells in the west. The northernmost region of Northumbria contains parts of the Cheviots. The south and east are largely made of lowland plains with discrete sections of hillier terrain, especially along the chalk ridges of the North, South, and Berkshire Downs, the Chilterns, and the Cotswolds. Moving beyond simple differences in height, we can also see significant differences in shallowest geology and in soil deposits (Figure  4.2). A large percentage of northern and eastern England is made up of superficial glacial till (a mixture of soils and stones deposited by glacial movement) laid down during previous ice ages. This till can be contrasted to the deposits of mudrocks that curve from the southern Peak District down to Cornwall and also in the Weald of Kent. These deposits are interspersed with several large chalk ridges running from the south-central point of England north towards East Anglia and south to the Channel. Lesser coverages of other geologies are found in the more rugged regions of the Pennines and Lake District, while the Fens are mostly characterized by peat and alluvial deposits owing to their marshy past.

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Figure 4.2  Shallowest geology (left) and soil conditions (right) of England.

The soil conditions that overlay these geological deposits mostly divide between the clayey soils of the Midlands and the loamy soils of the north and west. Both large groups are interspersed with loam deposits, especially south of the Berkshire Downs and Chilterns, and also in Essex and Kent. Much of the Pennine ridge is now covered in peat, and probably has been since the end of the Bronze Age (see more on this below). Very generally speaking, these soil conditions are the result of glacial coverage during the last ice age, which saw much of the north and west under ice and much of the south exposed. While exposed, the region of the Thames Valley in particular received significant deposits of wind-blown sediments known as loess—also called brick earth—which now typifies much of the southern English landscape. This physical landscape is subject to various climatic systems that mainly manifest in temperature and precipitation, with significant regional variation. While the modern temperature model in Figure 4.3 shows clear signs of influence from the modern urban centres of London, Manchester, and Southampton especially, the national pattern shows warmer annual temperatures in the south and cooler temperatures in the north. Likewise, the precipitation model shows much less rain in the south and east while the west and north are much wetter. The moors of the southwest, the Pennines, and the Lake District all receive significantly higher amounts of rain each year than the rest of the country. These differences in temperature and rainfall result in variable hydrological conditions across England, represented here as (modern) surface wetness,2 and are also divided by river systems (Figure 4.4). Higher rainfall and lower temperatures mean that the northern, elevated regions of the Pennines that are covered by peat are much wetter, generally speaking, than the low-lying, clayey soils of the south. This surface wetness is partially influenced by the numerous river systems of England that show significant regional variation (Figure 4.4). Very generally speaking, the rivers of England divide into three main groups: those flowing east into the North Sea, those flowing south into the Channel, and those flowing west into the Atlantic and/or Irish Sea. The eastern-flowing rivers that empty into

2  Based upon a mixture of modern precipitation data, modern data on wet and seasonally wet soils, and simulated flow accumulation based upon terrain (also see Chapter 5).

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the North Sea represent most of the longest in the country and are also contained within the largest basins. The Thames is the longest river contained entirely within England, and also has the largest river basin (discussed in section ‘The Thames Basin’). The Trent, Nene, Great Ouse, and Yorkshire Ouse are also each large and significant rivers that drain from the central spine of England to the east. These rivers tend to be slow moving, with low gradients of flow and relatively low velocities. The rivers of the south and west are, generally speaking, much shorter with smaller basins. The Severn is an exception, draining much of the western Midlands and the Welsh Marches south into the Bristol Channel and the Atlantic. Smaller streams are typified by much more diverse gradients and elevations, often flowing out of the highest topographies of the country; these tend to have more power and also more seasonal diversity as they are differentially affected by winter rains and snowfall (see Lewin 1981 for more detailed descriptions of regional variation). If we look more directly at the distinctions that exist within Fox’s highland and lowland zones, we certainly see contrasts, but not exactly those Fox specified. The most obvious point to start with is elevation. Here we can see that most of the lowland zone is below 300 m, but that the same is true of the highland zone, with the exception of a long tail (on the graph) reaching up to the highlands (Figure 4.5).

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  113

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We also mapped modern land use against altitude. While it is tricky to make any direct correlation between land use today and that in the periods of interest, it will give some sense of what is possible or preferred at various altitudes (Figure 4.6). Some minor oddities are apparent—bog is most common in higher altitudes in the highland zone and in lower heights in the lowlands. The immediately striking contrast between the two areas is the much greater variety of use possible in the highland zone. In both areas pretty well all ar­able farming is found below 300 m, as one would expect, but there are considerable areas of grassland in the hills of the highland areas and forest cover of various types. In the lowland zone grassland competes with arable land, with possibilities afforded by altitude for grazing areas. Our conclusion would be that the highland zone allows for greater variety of approach. There are still very considerable areas of modern arable, but these are complemented by grassland and forest in ways less common in the south and east of the country. In a sense, the lowland zone is more pressurized and homogenous, with different elements of land use competing for the same land. Life might be more constrained, channelled, and determined in the lowlands than the highlands, where greater variety of response is pos­ sible, along with the development of difference. As we also saw in Chapter 3, there was a much greater emphasis on the house–midden–pit complex in the south and east, where keeping and depositing household rubbish was important, perhaps as a cosmological reflex of worries about fertility, which was probably a constant preoccupation.

The English Climate, 1500 bc to ad 1086 Along with changes in human relations and the landscape were changes in the climate of England. While climatic factors do feature in some historical narratives of development, it is true that many more climatic data have become available since much of this

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114  English Landscapes and Identities (b) “Lowland” zone

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arch­aeo­logic­al work was written, and not all conclusions have been reassessed in this light. Palaeoclimatology is a rapidly developing field in which progressively larger datasets are being generated, using palaeoenvironmental proxy measures in order to reconstruct changes in temperature and precipitation over time. The sources of data vary and include ice cores, lake and ocean floor sediments, peat bog sequences, dendrochronology, and speleothems (stalactites and stalagmites), as do their temporal accuracy (Charman et al. 2006, 2009; Charman 2010; Charman and McCarroll 2010; Manning 2013). Some of these methods, such as dendrochronology, can provide annual resolution while others, like peat sequences, rely on periodic radiocarbon dates that are then averaged out to provide longer sequences. Some of these studies have chosen to focus on the climate of the Holocene—the past 12,000 years since the end of the glacial period—or some significant portion of this period. The coarse resolution of many models of this timespan, often accurate at the centennial scale, is very difficult to link to human history. More closely dated climatic records, such as those provided by tree rings, are more limited in the time periods that they cover in England. Despite a high number of dendroclimatological sequences present in southern England, these only reliably stretch back to the ninth century ad (Cooper et al.  2013; Wilson et al. 2013; Figures 4.7h and 4.7i). The peat bog records of northern England and Ireland show a very long history of climatic changes but with a very low temporal ­resolution. Thus, when considering proxy measures from England alone, we are limited either to long-term, coarsely resolved records or short-term, annually resolved records from just over the past millennium (Figure 4.7). The study by Charman et al. (2006) used peat sequences from bogs at Coom Rigg Moss, Butterburn Flow, and Longbridge Moss in Cumbria to reconstruct ground water levels in northern England since 4,500 cal BP (Figure 4.7a). They used a series of radiocarbon dates within some of the peat sequence to model the rest of the sequence on a 100-year average. The resulting curve, here cut down to the EngLaId period, is thus more of an estimation of annual values rather than accurate datapoints and shows how the water table influences bog development. The graph shows fluctuation of the water table over roughly two metres during this time period, with a substantial drop evident over the Bronze Age, a subsequent rise followed by another, smaller decrease during the Iron Age, that then rises again into

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  115 (a)

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the Roman period. A drop at the end of the Roman period then rises again into the early medieval period in the later fifth and sixth centuries, which then stays consistently higher until c. ad 1100. These bogs can be compared to sites in Ireland (Swindles et al. 2010, 2013) (Figure 4.7b). While the English data were graphed as change above and below a mean, the Irish data are

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116  English Landscapes and Identities graphed in absolute water table heights. The pattern here is smoother, with a generally high water table during the Bronze Age, a significant drop at the start of the Iron Age that then gradually levels out to the Roman period, and then a very gradual decrease over the course of the early medieval period. There are some correlations with the English peat bogs, especially the high point in the early Roman period and the low point in the tenth and eleventh centuries ad. The fluctuations within the Bronze and Iron Ages, however, are not apparent in the Irish data, owing both to the methods employed in collection and analysis and to the influence of micro-climate fluctuation. The English climate is closely tied to broader conditions across northern and western Europe, depending upon the region’s exposure to solar radiation (Steinhilber et al. 2009; Esper et al. 2012; Luterbacher et al. 2012). Solar radiation, the amount of power from the sun that comes through the atmosphere, has direct effects on temperature patterns, with higher levels of radiation generally equalling higher temperatures that in turn can influence levels of precipitation through evaporation. Levels of solar irradiance can be influenced by orbital cycles of the Earth (Steinhilber et al. 2009; Esper et al. 2012; Manning 2013) but also by volcanic events that propel enough dust into the air to block the sun (Sigl et al. 2015; Büntgen et al. 2016). The climate of England is also controlled by the sub-atmospheric circulatory pattern of the NAO (Hurrell 1995; Hurrell et al. 2003). The NAO determines patterns of cloud cover and precipitation across western Europe, as westerly winds blow moisture in from the Atlantic Ocean (Hurrell  1995; Hurrell et al.  2003). These winds are influenced by a lowpressure system around Iceland and a high-pressure system around the Azores that ebb and flow in relative influence. When these winds are strong—it is referred to as a high index year—then summers are cool and winters cold and wet. When the winds are less forceful, winters are colder across northern Europe with storms more common across the southern Atlantic façade, into the Mediterranean. Recent data from ice cores taken from both the northern and southern hemispheres have illuminated the past 2,500 years of volcanic eruptions across the globe (Sigl et al. 2015). The authors of the study argue that these eruptions caused significant climatic fluctuations as a result of their interference with solar radiation, causing decreases in temperatures and changes to precipitation patterns. The chronology of eruptions that fall within the EngLaId period is shown in Figure 4.7j, and highlights how common these eruptions, mainly coming from the equatorial zone, actually have been. Most of these eruptions have been relatively minor, though eruptions occurring during the late Iron Age and throughout the Roman period are more severe. These do show some correlation in both temperature and precipitation records derived from other proxy measures, especially for the more severe eruptions. It has also been suggested (Büntgen et al. 2016) that eruptions in the sixth and seventh centuries ad were directly responsible for a worsening climate of the period. While the authors of these studies wish to be provocative in their interpretations, it is not at all clear which eruptions actually had clear climatic consequences, and more work must be done to clarify this relationship. Because much of northern and western Europe is subject to these same forces, the climate of the region shares broad similarities. Therefore, there is value in comparing climatic proxies from northern and western Europe with England in order to fill gaps in the climate sequence and improve resolution. Of particular relevance is the dendrochronological record of eastern France, western Germany, and Switzerland (Büntgen et al. 2011), where over 8,000 oak tree ring chronologies have been used to reconstruct changes in June–July– August temperature fluctuations since 499 bc and April–May–June precipitation trends

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  117 since 398 bc. The reconstruction of summer temperatures (Figure 4.7c) shows a range of variation of about 6°C, where the later Iron Age sees fairly stable temperatures outside of a drop c.350–300 bc, and then another c.25 bc–ad 50. The Roman period is generally warm up until the early fourth century, when temperatures drop and stay low until about ad 700, when they then level out for the rest of the EngLaId period. The patterns in precipitation (Figure 4.7d) from the same dataset show a fluctuation of about 300 mm over the course of the period 398 bc to ad 1100. The Iron Age period holds steady at about 225 mm before dropping slightly into the Roman period where it remains fairly constant at around 150–200 mm until roughly ad 350 when there is a substantial increase for about 150 years, finally lowering again c. ad 500 and then increasing slightly c. ad 700. The data from Büntgen et al. (2011) can be compared to a more recent reconstruction of European mean summer temperature variation (Luterbacher et al. 2016) that uses the same oak chronologies from central Europe in addition to others from Scandinavia and the Mediterranean dating back to 139 bc (Figure 4.7e). There is general agreement between the datasets for the two studies, though Luterbacher et al. (2016) show a starker increase in temperature in the early Roman period. The other patterns generally hold: a cooler late Roman–early medieval transition and then a warming early medieval period. Recent research has taken the climatic data from these dendrochronological studies on precipitation and temperature and created a European-wide model of drought history from 1 ad to the modern day (Cook et al. 2015). This study converted these climatic data into the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), which is a scale of dryness running from 12 (very wet) to -12 (very dry). Values at 4 and above indicate severe wetness, while values at -4 and below indicate severe drought. The study by Cook et al. (2015) used data from 109 tree ring chronologies to reconstruct this index across Europe, creating spatial and chronological models of drought and wetness. We converted these cartographic displays to a graphical display, the mean values of which are shown here in Figure 4.7. This graph shows a trend of increased mean wetness in the periods ad 250–300 and ad 400–450, with periods of increased drought evident ad 75–125, ad 300–400, and ad 450–600. The period from c. ad 600 onwards is relatively stable, though with a period of increased drought from ad 900 to 1000. There are certainly limitations to the creation of PDSI values (Alley  1984), as critics argue that it is poorly suited for detecting brief periods of change. For our purposes here, this is unfortunate but not disabling. More important for our study is that while the entire European drought atlas was compiled based on 109 sites, only 37 of these start before ad 1100, and only 9 go back to the start of the Roman period. Therefore the model of the first millennium ad is not as robust as that of the second, and the data sources it is generated from are still basically the same used by Büntgen et al. (2011) and Luterbacher et al. (2016) in central and northern Europe. Separating out the ‘English’ values of this geospatial study therefore only presents a model extrapolated from the continental data that is very closely similar to the European mean (Figures 4.7f and 4.7g).

Summary These climatic reconstructions give some idea of the meteorological aspects of the world in which people lived between the middle Bronze Age and the medieval period in England. Each proxy measure, whether from England or from a nearby region, shows significant

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118  English Landscapes and Identities fluctuation in climatic conditions during this period. All of these individual patterns are summarized in Figure 4.7, with the relevant EngLaId periods of the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman period, and early medieval period indicated for ease of reference. This makes several things clear. First, the Bronze Age and early Iron Age are very poorly represented, with only very coarsely resolved peat studies to give any indication of what was going on. Various societal changes in the late Bronze Age have been attributed to climatic downturn (Brown 2008b; Turney et al. 2016), but little support for this idea comes from these peat studies. From c.400 bc onwards the resolution improves, but we still must reconstruct the climate of England based on records from neighbouring areas until the tenth century ad. Within these series, we see some recurring trends across the EngLaId period that cor­re­ spond to increasingly well-defined climatic episodes across Europe. It may well have been cooler and wetter in the late Bronze Age, but then warm temperatures prevail in the middle of the first millennium bc and from roughly ad 1–200, the Roman Climatic Optimum is evident as a period of warmer and more consistent temperatures across western Europe (Büntgen et al. 2011; McCormick et al. 2012; Manning 2013; Luterbacher et al. 2012, 2016). This is followed by increased fluctuation in later centuries, with a period of drier conditions over the fourth century ad giving way to the very wet fifth and sixth centuries. This period of climatic downturn, evident not only in the dendrochronology of western Europe but now also in the eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia (Büntgen et al. 2016) has now been labelled as the Late Antique Little Ice Age, and extends over much of the northern hemisphere during the period ad 536–660. This period corresponds to increased volcanic activity (Sigl et al.  2015) as well as a period of substantial social unrest and political conflict (McCormick et al. 2012). This was followed by a period of recovery that in northwestern Europe is evident from roughly ad 700 onwards, eventually leading into the period known as the Medieval Warm Period, running between ad 950 and 1250. After reviewing these various chronologies and datasets, the question remains: what can we conclude on the basis of this evidence? There is a recent trend to interpret climate changes in an extremely deterministic light, arguing that a shifting climate has been behind every major societal collapse in history (Büntgen et al. 2011, 2016; Sigl et al. 2015). While we cannot doubt that periods of climatic decline, whether in the Late Antique Little Ice Age or its more recent and better known parallel in the Little Ice Age from ad 1300 to 1850, caused significant disruptions to settlement, population, and agricultural traditions, it is less clear what effect smaller scale and more general climate fluctuation might have on day-to-day life. It has been argued that climate change led to a substantial decline of the European Bronze Age (Weiss 1982) but it has also been argued that it did not (Armit et al. 2014). The discrepancies in data as well as in their interpretation do nothing to help solve this matter. As others have made clear, however, no society simply collapses from climate influence without having other socioeconomic reasons (Coombes and Barber  2005; Dearing et al. 2006; Judkins et al. 2008; Knapp and Manning 2016). We should try to move beyond catastrophic interpretations of climate change and look for more subtle effects (Marriner et al. 2010; Marriner and Morhange 2013). It has recently been argued that historians should focus on weather rather than climate, as the first is perceptible on a daily basis and the latter requires a longer-term view to appreciate (Pillatt 2012). The author goes on to show, however, that people can rarely offer an objective view of their weather patterns prior to the introduction of instrumental monitoring in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and therefore ‘weather’ is a tricky thing to assess in the past. The scale of investigation, however, is finer grained, allowing a view towards the actual interactions between people and their surrounding environment.

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  119 Others have suggested that we might look for the influence of climate change in the landscape in order to better understand the tangible elements of changes to the natural world, and that geoarchaeological investigations, particularly in fluvial contexts, are a prime means of investigating the issue in England (Brown, T. 2002; Brown, A. G. 2008a; Macklin et al.  2012). This can be accomplished at the scale of sites (Brown et al.  2001; McKinley  2004; Howard et al.  2008; Parker et al.  2008), catchments (Robinson and Lambrick 1984; Robinson 1992; Howard 2005; Booth et al. 2007; Lambrick et al. 2009), or at a national level (Macklin 1999; Lewin et al. 2005; Macklin et al. 2005; Johnstone et al. 2006). We do not believe that climate has had large-scale catastrophic effects in a place like Britain. However, changing temperature and rainfall have had an effect on human life over the millennia of interest to us, and the best means of perceiving those effects is by weaving in the climate data to our considerations below of patterns of clearance, of soil erosion, and a more detailed examination of river valleys. In fact, given the complexity of factors to be taken into account it might be at this most local level that the effects of climate are most easily perceptible. The differences in climate across England are not in themselves enough to be the cause of differences in lifestyle and we need a more subtle appreciation of the interaction between human life and its physical settings.

The English Landscape and Its Clearance History The story we are developing is one emphasizing the complexity of the relationships between people and the world in which they lived. Such complexity emerges most starkly over long time scales. Archaeologists tend to work in period blocks of hundreds or thousands of years. Relevant studies carried out by natural scientists tend to focus on much longer time spans. This has made it hard to bring together ecological change and human cultural forms. In the hope of developing a more integrated discussion we will look first at human clearance or alteration of forest and then at patterns of erosion. In both cases, humans and the world they live in each act alternately as cause and then effect, so that it is impossible to see one side as primary cause. Patterns of human clearance are important to our story. There is considerable methodological discussion and advance around understanding the main proxies for past vegetation and landscape use, the most important of which is pollen. Both Fyfe et al. (2013) and Edwards et al. (2015) have surveyed the recent literature and have developed means of modelling to generate maps of vegetation change in the past by collating the evidence from pollen across Britain, and indeed Europe as a whole. In undertaking such modelling it is necessary to understand the rates of pollen production by different plants, how far these will be transported and the sizes of the areas of deposition, whether large lakes which will preserve a regional sequence or small mires which will reflect local vegetation. Fyfe et al. (2013: 132) use pollen from 73 sites across the British Isles and note their bias towards upland and wetland areas, so that drier, lowland England is less well represented. Dark (2006), when considering the impact of climate change in human settlement in Britain from the late Bronze Age and Iron Age, uses a rather larger group of sites. The basic conclusions from a range of studies are that modelling using a reasonable number of pollen sites produces interesting and generally reliable results, but that short-term and very local effects cannot be easily picked up, nor is it possible so far to distinguish wild woods from more managed kinds (Edwards et al. 2015: 118; Rippon et al. 2015). An interesting study, using multiple lines of evidence including snails, soils, and pollen for the Upper Allen Valley on

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120  English Landscapes and Identities Cranborne Chase (French et al. 2007, 2012) provides a very detailed local picture for vegetation change under human impact, making the point that, while generalization is possible, each valley system might have its own history. We will return to the importance of local studies later, but some broad generalizations do seem possible. From the late glacial onwards there is a sequence of vegetation types, as the climate warmed, from open conditions with large migrating herds of animals, to more closed birch woods and smaller groups of red deer, elk, and aurochs within a millennium of the start of the Holocene at around 9700 bc. Pine and hazel replaced the birch forests, creating ecosystems quite different from anything seen today. By around 6000 bc these were replaced again by deciduous woodlands of oak, lime, and elm. But by this time, of course, Mesolithic groups were clearing some areas of the woodland, creating clearances for wild cattle and deer, as well as more edible plants. The main point to make is that the ecosystems of Britain have always been dynamic due to a range of climatic and human factors, so that it is hard to see true climax vegetation that lasted for any length of time. By the m ­ id-Holocene, human impact had become more evident, in ways that led to the late Holocene landscapes of interest to us. Fyfe et al. (2015) argue that across Europe during the Holocene one can just detect the impact of farming on tree cover from about 4000 bc, with clearance intensifying at around 2200 bc and with modern-day patterns of landscape openness being ­established by about 1000 years ago. The intensification of clearance in southern England in the late Neolithic predates the establishment of fields in Britain. Beneath these broad changes there is much regional variability and England is a good example of local vari­ ations with quite different forms of landscape emerging during the last two millennia bc. In Britain the decline in woodland cover began at least by 4000 bc and by around 500 bc many areas of the country were predominantly open, with stands of woodland in particular topographic zones (Fyfe et al.  2013: 144). French et al. (2007) argue on the basis of soil development that areas of the chalk, in southern England at least, may never have seen full climax Atlantic period forest and even before human clearance there may have been open woodland, which made animal grazing, human settlement, and clearance easier. Against this brief outline of a general story we can start to focus in on regional variability over the past four thousand years, starting with the second and first millennia bc. Looking first at the history of vegetation throughout southwest England, broad simi­lar­ ities seem to be present, although the exact balance of woodland and grassland varied locally, as did sequences of clearance and regeneration. For instance, a detailed study on Dartmoor (Fyfe et al. 2008) concentrated on Shovel Down and Kestor in eastern Dartmoor, an area with large-scale field systems varied in type. They show that there was a mild and stable climate from 2000 to 1500 bc, which improved further until the late Bronze Age when conditions became colder and wetter (Fyfe et al.  2008: 2251). There seems to have been a predominantly oak and hazel woodland, with alder in wetter areas. The first evidence of clearance is in the early Neolithic around 3630 bc, which contrasts with the record from Tor Royal Bog on Dartmoor, albeit far from any field system, which shows little alteration of vegetation prior to 2000 bc (Fyfe et al. 2008: 2257). A further contrast is with Bodmin Moor and Exmoor, where burning is seen in the Neolithic; on Dartmoor itself there is no evidence of clearance through burning. Clearance established a species-rich grassland excellent for grazing. There was some regrowth of the forest in the early Bronze Age between 1800 and 1400 bc and then two episodes of clearance between 1480 and 1080 bc and 530 and 100 bc, between which there was a lesser use of the moors, possibly due to climatic deterioration. In all periods there is little evidence of cereal pollen, with a main emphasis on grazing (Fyfe et al.  2008: 2257). Elsewhere in the general region there are

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  121 houses and fields found in lowland Cornwall 1500–1000 bc and middle Bronze Age field systems in east Devon. In all cases, quite what was the relation between the use of upland and lowland areas is unknown, but there is the possibility that the uplands were used for grazing and the lowlands for arable. As mentioned earlier, French et al. (2007) studied the Upper Allen Valley, comparing it with the Avon Valley and Durrington Walls area (French et al. 2012). In both areas there was rather open woodland that was progressively cleared from the late Mesolithic onwards. The uplands appear to have been open grassland from the Neolithic onwards, with localized woodland, maybe on hill slopes, with alder carr and sedges in the flood plains. Although middle Bronze Age field systems are found in the area these did not result in mass erosion and sedimentation, which was first seen between 800 and 500 bc when the area was more thoroughly cleared of trees. This might indicate that the use of the Bronze Age fields was different to that in the Iron Age. In many other areas good, directed studies of clearance and soil erosion are less common (and we shall take up this theme later), but all the indications are that open country existed widely across this zone from the Neolithic onwards, although with complex local variations and sequences of regeneration (Bradley et al.  1994; Fowler 2000; English  2013). We can note, for instance, the apparent contrast between the relatively open Marlborough Downs with evidence of Bronze Age field systems and the possibly more forested Berkshire Downs, which may only have been extensively cleared in the late Bronze Age (Miles et al. 2003: 252–5). There are particular local environmental conditions within both the Thames Valley and the Fens; in the latter the everchanging relationships between wet and dry land is regionally specific and crucial to understanding human habitation (Evans and Hodder 2006). The large strip of land from Shropshire to Lancashire in the west seems to have been one in which tree cover was considerable through the second millennium and into the first (Mullin 2003; Watt 2011). Round barrows are known from the early second millennium bc, but there is no reason that some or all of these might not have been constructed in clearings in the forest. Few settlements or land divisions are known before the early Iron Age and even then traces are somewhat sparse. Wigley’s (2007) work on pit alignments argues for an early first millennium date for many of these, such as the Four Crosses complex (Wigley 2007: 122). Dating is still poor, relying mainly on orientation of alignments on barrows, or respecting first millennium bc enclosures. Pollen evidence indicates more open conditions from the early first millennium bc, reinforced by the greater alluviation found in the upper and middle Severn Basin (Wigley 2007: 127). In many areas burnt mounds are present, but it is unclear what they were used for and many may have been located within forests. Kemerton has ditched trackways and some fields, although these are not well dated, but probably fall within the Iron Age, with linear trackways also noted at Childswickham (Watt 2011: 117). The first substantial clearance and evidence of mixed farming occurs in Merseyside in the early first millennium bc (Leah et al. 1997). Cowell and Philpott (2013) have argued that large field systems are absent in the northwest because of the poor soils in the region: largely loams with extensive pockets of peat. Here environmental differences did not determine relationships to woodland or more open country, so that we suspect that cultural differences were at work. Open landscapes only definitely appear during the later first millennium bc and there is very little evidence of large-scale fields at any time in prehistory. In many ways the Midlands and northeast is the most puzzling area: there is evidence it was cleared of trees to the same degree as further south, but with little evidence of field systems prior to the middle of the first millennium bc. We have to bear in mind that there

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122  English Landscapes and Identities is relatively slight pollen evidence from this broad area. Across the lowlands of the Midlands and Yorkshire there is very scant evidence of field systems or indeed of much evidence of settlement before the middle Iron Age (Roberts  2010; Knight and Spence  2013: 13). In upland areas, notably of the Yorkshire Wolds, the late Bronze Age saw the laying out of linear ditches and pit alignments on a large scale to form territorial boundaries which helped define later field systems and other aspects of life (Stoertz 1997). Some areas of upland in the north of England developed small field systems from the early Bronze Age onwards: this is our second area with early field systems. These contrast with the large coaxial systems of the south in that they are generally small and with less overall alignment. It is likely that these fields were constructed within small clearings in the forest. By around 6000 cal bc there was a mixed woodland with elm, oak, birch, and hazel as the dominant species, with some pine at higher altitudes and alder in the valleys (Tipping 2010: 157). Places like the Cheviot Hills in Northumberland saw small-scale clearance and barley cultivation from the Neolithic onwards (Passmore et al. 2012: 195). Woodland clearance continued through the Bronze Age, creating heather moorland, but in the context of a fairly heavily wooded landscape, with similar occurrences in the lowland, where drier terraces were cleared for a mixture of animals and cereals, but within extensive woodland (Passmore et al.  2012: 195). ‘Spaces in the woodland, created naturally or through grazing, were small, isolated and ephemeral’ (Tipping  2010: 176). Cord rig, composed of narrow raised rows, was found between sea level and around 400 m OD. Its earliest occurrence may be in the Neolithic, although most is assumed to be late second and first millennium in date (Tipping  2010: 181). Localized clearance continued into the early first millennium bc, but it is only with the middle and especially the late Iron Age that major episodes of clearance were seen throughout Northumberland and the Borders, with agriculture then at high and low altitudes (Passmore et al.  2012: 230). This sudden opening up of the landscape may have occurred from 250 bc, with the pace of clearance picking up after 150 bc (Tipping 2010: 183). Not only are there dramatic reductions in tree pollen, but there is also evidence of considerable soil erosion. The Derbyshire Peak has a different history with a possibly more open environment prior to human clearance. Once again small aggregate field systems are common across the Peak on limestone and grit-stone, probably starting in the early second millennium bc. A pollen core taken from a bog adjacent to a field system at Stoke Flat started in the late second millennium bc and showed open woodland and arable from that period onwards (Long et al. 1998: 512). Pollen from a field boundary within the Stoke Flat system showed cereal pollen prior to the construction of this area of the field system, as well as a change from open woodland to open moorland (Long et al. 1998: 514). It is thought that some of the field boundaries, now showing up only as stone, might have been further defined by hedges. At an interestingly similar time to the deforestation of the Cheviots there is evidence of tree decline at the end of the first millennium across the Peak District. This is attributed not so much to clearance as such, but rather to the breakdown of managed grazing within the woodland through the second and first millennia bc, with unrestricted grazing leading to the loss of trees (Long et al.  1998: 518). The coincidence in time with other northern areas is of great interest: whether the mechanism posited for the Peak District is true for both here and other areas needs further investigation. It does, however, raise the possibility of integrated systems of small fields and larger areas of managed woodland throughout the northern uplands which broke down in the later Iron Age. By the late Iron Age in many areas of Britain, the landscape had a similar degree of openness to that found today. This does not change through the Roman and early medieval

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  123 periods. The pattern of intensive landscape exploitation that started around 100 bc con­ tinued through the Roman period, and though the Roman Empire introduced new ­methods of agricultural exploitation and new market and taxation systems to encourage higher productivity, the Romans found that there was not much new land to expand agriculture into (Dark and Dark 1997: 14; Dark 2000: 79). There are exceptions, mainly enabled by Roman hydrological engineering that allowed for the drainage of large parts of the Somerset Levels and Cambridgeshire Fens that began in tandem with dropping sea levels (Dark and Dark 1997: 22–4; Dark 2000: 128–9; Rippon et al. 2000; Rippon 2007; Van de Noort 2011a). Over the following four centuries, Roman rule would see intensive ex­ploit­ ation of the landscape, not only through agriculture and the development of the villa economy, but also through mineral and resource extraction including stone, lead, tin, and gold (Mattingly  2006). Deforestation continued in some areas, most notably in the Hadrian’s Wall corridor from the Solway to the Tyne (Dark 2000: 128), and the demand for timber for both fuel and building material must have been massive across the province of Britannia. Alluviation increased along many of the large rivers, notably the Thames (Booth et al. 2007). The climatic issues that coincided with the end of the Roman period, discussed earlier, brought about a colder and wetter period from the fourth century onwards, and this is probably also reflected in the hydrological activity of most rivers (Macklin 1999). The end of the Roman period saw a reduced, institutional impetus to both extensively and intensively exploit the landscape (Rippon et al. 2015: 337–8). While it was once thought that large parts of the agricultural landscape were abandoned in the face of political collapse and widespread migration, it is now clear that there was substantially less change in human exploitation of the early medieval landscape across much of the southern, eastern, and central parts of the country (Rippon et al. 2015). A survey of the pollen evidence from the fifth and sixth centuries also shows very little, if any, reforestation: reversion of the countryside to wilderness after ad 410 can no longer be countenanced (Rippon et al. 2015). As many as two-thirds of known field systems from the post-Roman period show signs of continuity from the Roman world, though many of these farms may have changed strat­ egies of production—changing from arable to pastoral schemes in some cases (Rippon et al. 2015: 315). Greater pastoralism apparently ameliorated some of the environmental stresses present in the later Roman period, as alluviation slowed on the Thames and elsewhere (Robinson and Lambrick 1984; Robinson 1992; Booth et al. 2007). The ninth century saw substantial social change as settlement once again started forming nucleated centres, but now in a new system of open fields (Hall 2014 ; Rippon et al. 2015: 335; ten Harkel et al. 2017). This new settlement system of communally worked field systems operating in church-centred village clusters saw a renewed impact on the landscape, and from this point onwards human influence continued to increase to the present day (Macklin et al. 2014). This pattern is most typical of the south and east, and different agricultural practices of Scandinavian groups in northern England saw different results (Williamson 2013). The upland regions of Cumbria, for instance, saw an increase in pas­tor­ al­ism on barely wooded hillslopes, causing a higher amount of environmental damage than any period previous in the region (Harvey et al. 1981). Over the two and a half millennia of interest to us, people cleared the land and (as we shall see in more detail in Chapters 7–8) imposed a variety of land divisions on it, against a background of variation in climate and vegetation across space and over time. We have tended to make a distinction between areas with trees and those without, although it seems very likely that forested landscapes exhibited much variety, being often managed landscapes and not wild wood. Neither a human nor an environmental determinism is

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124  English Landscapes and Identities possible to discern, although the effects of all are visible in complex ways. Overall we see a greater complexity and variety in the north, both in the physical conditions of life and in life styles. An important topic through which human and landscape effects have been explored is that of soil erosion, itself closely linked to the patterns of clearance we have just considered.

Clearance and Soil Erosion The progressive expansion of field systems across England from the middle Bronze Age onwards came at the expense of forest cover. The removal of forest and subsequent clearance of land for agriculture, whether for arable fields or grazing lands, has a direct relationship to the stability of soils being used. The loss of stability provided by the forest encourages an increase in soil erosion, and this increase can be amplified by subsequent tillage or animal grazing. Thus, the expansion of agriculture across England brought an increased susceptibility to soil erosion as well as changes in drainage and riverine activity. Measuring past levels of soil erosion is not a straightforward task due to the large number of variables involved. Approaches to estimating and modelling modern erosion can be adapted to give an idea of the susceptibility of a landscape to change as a result of human activity in past environments. We next explore the various factors that contribute to soil erosion and ask how we can project these susceptibilities back in time. The resulting model of soil erosion susceptibility is a significant step towards understanding the ways in which human action affected the environment.

Soil Erosion and the Hydrological Cycle Soil erosion is part of the hydrological cycle, which is the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the land surface (Davie 2008). The central feature of the cycle is that water evaporates, condenses, precipitates, and flows constantly. Precipitation as either rain or snow creates surface runoff as it falls on the land. Runoff is directed into river basins by slopes and eventually into the sea. Water also evaporates and can be further removed by vegetation and human use along the way. If vegetation is reduced through clearance, less water is abstracted, creating an increase in the volume and intensity of runoff. At various points in this cycle, soil can be eroded by precipitation or by fluvial activity (bank and bed abrasion). The soil is then moved as part of a river’s sediment load. Stream load capacity is determined by the volume, velocity, and slope of a river, with larger, steeper rivers carrying a higher quantity of sediment. Sediment can be carried varying distances, and will typically deposit along riverbanks, on floodplains, or in deltas and estuaries. Changes to the amounts of soil going into river systems, whether through long-term changes in climatic patterns and anthropogenic influences or through short-term changes such as flash floods will change the nature of a river’s stream, and can cause channel al­ter­ ation (for instance, from single, deeply incised meanders to multiple, shallower braided streams) and channel movement (Lewin 2010: 272). Unlike water, soil movement is in one direction, referred to by some as a sedimentary conveyor belt (Thompson et al. 2016), and therefore soil eroded from the higher points of a landscape is not easily returned. Likewise, eroded soil that is re-deposited throughout the river system as alluvium is not often removed.

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  125 Soil and water are linked, and both must be considered jointly to understand the full picture of changes to erosion and hydrological activity (Owens and Collins 2006). In geographical terms, the hydrological cycle is divided between river basins. Individual basins form distinct units of analysis—everything within the basin is linked into a single system, separate from neighbouring river systems. If we are to understand the impact that the spread of agricultural landscapes had on the English countryside, we must understand both sediments and river systems.

Measuring Soil Erosion Soil erosion is not consistent through space or time as it depends on land cover, vegetation type, slope, and precipitation patterns. It is important, therefore, to take account of as many factors as possible when measuring or estimating soil erosion. We use a model known as RUSLE, that combines six factors to look at soil erosion in modern Europe (see Appendix 1 for more detail). Together, the six variables in the model each contribute to soil erosion. These values are each calculated based on modern, observable data and therefore can only be extrapolated to past environments with care. Different factors in the RUSLE equation have different lifespans. Some, like measurements of slope and soil type, have not changed substantially in the past millennia. Others, like wind and rainfall, are dependent on climatic circumstances that may oscillate over the long term. The climatic histories discussed earlier give some idea of the scale of oscillation during the EngLaId period, and this provides param­ eters within which to reconstruct past erosion. Still others, like land cover and management practices, are very modern and cannot be extrapolated to earlier time periods.3

Soil Erosion Susceptibility 1500 bc to ad 1086 The RUSLE formula is not a perfect tool, but helps model susceptibility to soil erosion through isolating important variables: rainfall, slope, soil erodibility, and wind. The raster data for these factors was downloaded from the European Soil Data Centre4 and then cropped from the European scale to England. This national model is supported by 601 sample sites out of the total of 19,000 in the Land Use and Coverage Areal Frame Survey5 database, with a fairly even distribution across the country. Across England rainfall has a higher influence on soil erosion in the northwest and southwest, particularly the Lake District and Pennines, along the fringes of the Marches, and then through the upland reaches of Cornwall and Devon. Much of the south-central and southeastern areas of the country are, on the other hand, relatively unaffected by ­rainfall-driven erosion (Figure 4.8a). The soils of England, in general, are not easily eroded,

3  Despite widespread international use in Europe and elsewhere, the RUSLE method has not found universal approval amongst soil scientists (Kinnell 2005; Evans 2013), and the ESDAC method outlined above for Europe has found opponents that object to the coarse resolution of the model. British soil scientists have objected that models of soil erosion do not match observable conditions in the field (Evans and Boardman 2016a, 2016b). The point of a model is, however, not to exactly predict every observable instance, but rather to provide a backdrop against which to test observations (Panagos et al. 2016). 4 https://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ 5 https://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/content/lucas-2009-topsoil-data

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126  English Landscapes and Identities (a)

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with only select parts of the southern coast, the Thames basin, Norfolk, and Yorkshire showing significant quantities of highly erodible soils (Figure 4.8b). The influence of length of slope shows the highest values in the north and northwest across the Lake District, Pennines, and Cheviots. Again the Welsh border and southwest also show elevated levels, as do the southern chalk ridges. The Yorkshire Wolds also exhibit reasonably high values (Figure  4.8c). Wind influence has a very different distribution across England from the other three factors. Soils are more susceptible to wind erosion along the North Sea coast, the Thames Estuary, the Solent, and around the Mersey (Figure 4.8d). This susceptibility is largely dependent on sandiness, as coastal regions of England have more sand than inland regions. The low density of sandy soils makes them easier to blow away. Once these data were cut down to England and assessed on individual levels, they were then combined into a single model meant to account for all of the different influences on a national level. The raster layers for each factor were normalized to values ranging from 0 to 1 and were then multiplied to create a single model of landscape susceptibility to erosion. This model

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  127 integrates the influences of soil type, slope length, rainfall, and wind but discounts modern factors of ground cover, land use, and management practices. The resulting image shows varied conditions for erosion (Figure 4.9). By accounting for each erosive factor equally, we see very intricate differentiations across England, with upland regions being particularly susceptible (the Lake District, the Pennines, the Cheviots, Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Yorkshire Wolds). Mid-range values exist across much of the central and southern part of the country, notably along the chalk ridges and South Downs, the Trent Valley, and the Cotswolds. Only two regions show concentrations of particularly low values, the Cambridgeshire Fens and the Lower Eden/Solway Plain; both notably flat regions where soil would be more difficult to erode. This new model shows susceptibility to soil erosion across England. It does not take into account variability in rainfall that undoubtedly fluctuated over time (see earlier discussion of climatic reconstruction). In substantially wetter phases of history, the effects of rainfalldriven erosion would have been felt more broadly, and the opposite is true in substantially drier periods. However, if we take this model to show the average influence of rain, wind, slope, and soil type, then we understand the baseline factors influencing erosion susceptibility. 100000

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128  English Landscapes and Identities Objections have been raised against RUSLE modelling, particularly that models do not match observable conditions on the ground. To this we can now pose two responses. First, this model of erosion susceptibility looks similar to those based upon field observations created by Boardman and Evans (2006) and Morgan (1985) since the 1980s (Figure 4.10). Considering these authors’ own objections to the ESDAC modelling, these similarities are important indicators that our model has some worth. Second, observations of modern conditions do not necessarily match what would have been the case in past times, so we must seek to verify the accuracy of this model through another means. At the national level, we can test the accuracy of this model of soil erosion susceptibility against archaeological features that clearly indicate erosive forces. One of the clearest cat­ egor­ies of features are lynchet fields, formed from a distinctive accumulation of soil on the downslope of a hill. The EngLaId database does not count lynchet fields as a separate thesaurus category, so the 2,392 records were located by free-text search and are dependent on the availability of descriptions that specify the term. There could, therefore, be more lynchet fields in England that are not explicitly recorded as such in the database, though we have a substantial number. It is unclear whether lynchet fields were formed by intentional activity—the creation of an earthen berm meant to stop soil from eroding—or whether the berms were created solely by eroded soil accumulating. In all likelihood, lynchets were both accidental and intentional, as they have a very long history in the English landscape and any one explanation is insufficient. However, lynchet fields show the physical remains of soil erosion as a result of agriculture, and their distribution closely matches the distribution of soils more susceptible to erosion (Figure  4.11a). Lynchet fields are particularly common in the Cheviots, the Lake District, the Pennines, the Yorkshire Wolds, the Peak District, the Berkshire Downs, Salisbury Plain, the South Downs, Exmoor, and Cornwall, all areas of high susceptibility to erosion. When compared to the distribution of all 34,692 records of fields in the EngLaId database, the concentration of lynchets on erodible ground becomes even clearer (Figure 4.11b). Moreover, lynchet fields register a consistently higher median score for soil erodibility than the average field (Figure 4.12), except in the Bronze Age (and unspecified 300000

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  129 400000

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prehistoric records, many of which will be Bronze Age) when most surviving field systems were presumably lynchet-based. The correlation between lynchets and high erosion susceptibility suggests that our model can lead to verifiable field observations that test its accuracy. If this model is an accurate estimation of susceptibility to soil loss, then we can use it to understand how activity might have shaped the landscape through time. By plotting all of the EngLaId records by period over this map of susceptibility, we can begin to understand changing patterns in how human activity interacted with the potential for erosion in various parts of the landscape. Figure 4.13 shows the distribution of soil erosion susceptibility by period and reveals uneven activity across different soil types through time. Each period shows a substantial range of values, with the early medieval period and Iron Age having the lowest maximum values (0.413 and 0.414, respectively) and generic prehistoric and undated records having the highest maximum values (0.553 and 0.619, respectively). The Bronze Age shows the highest median value (0.030) while the Roman period the lowest (0.014). It is surprising that the Roman period, accounting for over 40 per cent of the total data, is not the period with the highest-ranking activity on erosion-prone lands, suggesting some desire to limit the amount of soil erosion. With the pattern of soil erosion in mind, we can turn to data collected by other re­searchers on the periodicity of alluviation in river basins across England (Lewin et al. 2005; Foulds and Macklin 2006; Johnstone et al. 2006; Macklin et al. 2010; Macklin et al. 2014). This work is based on a database of 844 14C-dated sediment samples, 130 of which can be firmly linked to human rather than climatic activity (Macklin et al. 2014: 30). The chronological patterns of these data across Britain are shown from 6000 BP to the present day (Figure 4.14). The authors note that while agriculture took hold in the Neolithic, there was a substantial lag before alluvial responses became evident in the early-middle Bronze Age. There was a second peak in the early Iron Age before the Roman period registered lower activity. The end of the early medieval period saw the start of what would become a significant increase into the modern period and the authors relate this to the development of open field systems (Macklin et al. 2014: 33). They further note that peaks in

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130  English Landscapes and Identities

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alluviation do not match peaks in dated cereals, nor do they match peaks in the deposition of sediment in lakes, and cite the need for further data to ascertain the cause of these discrepancies (Macklin et al. 2014: 32–3). This study of alluvium relies on sedimentological data to tell a human story. These broad patterns of alluviation bear a resemblance to the pattern of soil erosion we identified (Figure 4.14) with considerable erosion in the Bronze Age, slightly lesser levels in the Iron Age, dropping again in the Roman period, and starting to rise in the early medieval phase. These general patterns are influenced by the existence of lynchet fields, most common in areas of highest erosion. It is harder to see any link between erosion and periods of higher rainfall, so that it may be that changes in rainfall intensity were not enough to substantially affect the movement of soil. The following sections approach these issues through two regional case studies which will both highlight regional diversity in England and look at complex factors at a more local scale. River systems have been chosen because of the discrete nature of hydrological divisions—river basins are entirely contained systems that may share characteristics with neighbouring basins but are, in fact, isolated. These riverine case studies are related to the

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  131

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EngLaId project’s regional case studies, with the Eden River basin falling entirely within the Cumbria case study and the Thames River basin falling partly within the Avon–Thames– Avon Transect, the Lea Valley, and a small sliver of the Kent case study area. The Eden case study is smaller than the overall Cumbria region, though the Thames is much larger than any of the three case studies with which it intersects. This case study dissonance was accepted because of the fact that, for this particular subject, the ‘natural’ boundaries of different regions were significant, and river basins must be considered in their entirety if we hope to understand individual sub-basin regions.

River Systems and Human Life River systems offer a key insight into past human relationships with the hydrological system. River systems both record and respond to changes in their surroundings, whether the

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132  English Landscapes and Identities result of anthropogenic or climatic forcing. The records of these changes can be found in palaeo-channels,6 oxbow lakes,7 sequences of alluvium,8 and delta progradation.9 The fluvial responses that are generated by these changes can be found not only in environmental records, but in human settlement as well. Changes to a river system do not occur in isolation, and have direct impacts upon those living within their basins. Therefore, studying rivers as vectors in a great range of environmental changes allows us to understand how humans interacted with a nexus of forces. Before getting into specific river case studies, however, it is important to explore the ways in which rivers respond to climatic and an­thropo­gen­ic forces. Rivers are a physical manifestation of climatic conditions both within their basin and at a supra-regional level (Arnell  1994; Belz et al.  2007; Bravard  2008; Macklin et al.  2012). Changes to inputs in precipitation and temperature have systemic effects on river basins, influencing the volume of water, path of channel, and seasonality of flow. Instrumental records from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and predictive models for the coming century show that a 1°C increase in temperature can reduce annual water volume by up to 15 per cent, caused by an increase in evapotranspiration and a decrease in precipitation. Seasonal extremes are typical in warming scenarios, with more severe winter floods and summer droughts. Warmer winters will replace winter snowfall with rain, and glaciers will recede. The combined effect of higher winter rainfall and increased glacial melt water will cause an increase in winter flooding. Higher temperatures in the summer will then increase the risk of drought, and a lower annual precipitation rate will reduce hillslope erosion, therefore reducing the sedimentary load in the river. A decrease in sediment input will increase the likelihood of meandering channels in a floodplain rather than braided or anastomosing10 channels. A decrease in temperature by 1°C, on the other hand, will increase precipitation across the year, increasing the volume of water in a river system and increasing the likelihood of flooding throughout the year, especially in spring and autumn. Drought conditions in the summer will become less common, and the increased precipitation will increase sediment loads in the river. The increase in sediment will affect channel activity, causing previously meandering streams to braid and anastomose as sediment builds up in the riverbed, forming point bars and islands in flood plains. This will also see an increase in overbank alluviation during flooding, meaning that floodplains will build up new layers of sediments, changing elevation and topography over time (Brown 1997; Boardman 2010; Lewin 2010; Macklin et al. 2012). An increase in sediment transportation will also cause river deltas to prograde, increasing the dynamism of distributary streams and coastal sedimentation rates (Morhange et al. 2014). Yet these changes do not happen in isolation. Climatic changes affect landscapes as well as those living within them; thus while there may be natural responses to these changes, there will also be human responses in some measure. Anthropogenic influence is of course not limited to responses to climate change, but manifests itself in many different conditions.

6  Old river channels that were cut off and filled with sediment. 7  Cut-off river meanders that remain in the landscape as horseshoe-shaped lakes or ponds. 8  River-deposited sediments. 9  The expansion of a river delta due to the progressive deposition of sediment at the river mouth. 10  Multiple shallow parallel branches with interspersed sandbars.

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  133

Comparing River Basins Two contrasting river basins have been selected for study: the Thames in the south and the Eden in the north (Figure 4.15). These two rivers offer insight into the divisions between the southern lowlands and northern uplands. Differences in landscape largely stem from different glacial histories—the Thames basin developing south of the Devensian ice sheets (c.110,000–12,000 years BP), while the Eden basin was directly shaped by these (Gregory 1997). The windblown sediments of the south can be contrasted to the glacial till of the north (Figure 4.2). The lowland rivers are characterized by low velocity and sinuous courses through gravel terraces, formed beyond the reach of the ice sheets, where loess soils could be deposited across their landscape. The more rugged landscapes of the north and west were formed by glaciers, carving steep valleys with powerful river flows capable of moving large amounts of debris and sediment along their course. These distinctions made by the last ice age had long-lasting effects on the shape and nature of river systems in Britain, leaving the long and sluggish streams of the south as distinct entities from the shorter but more powerful upland catchments in the north and west.

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134  English Landscapes and Identities The rivers that we see today are not those that would have been seen in the early medi­ eval period, and medieval rivers were also markedly different from those of the Bronze Age (Brown et al. 2001; Howard 2005; Brown 2008b; Lewin 2010; Edgeworth 2011). People have been changing river systems by accident or design: fortifying river banks, constructing bridges, diverting channels, and digging canals, for example, have influenced earlier systems of waterways. River basins contain all aspects of the hydrological cycle: rain falls, sediment erodes, water flows, sediment is deposited, and water evaporates. What happens within one basin is distinct from all others. To understand the environmental history of an individual basin, it must be studied as a whole, as more limited views will miss key developments upstream or down. To understand how the rivers influenced society and how society influenced the rivers we examine the distribution of EngLaId records throughout each river basin to see where activity takes place by period, and what sorts of activities and archaeological records fall within different categories of natural features within the basin. We were interested in the relationship between archaeological sites and finds with hydrological aspects of rivers systems, such as soil type, wetness, and susceptibility to erosion. The relationships are best revealed through the distributions of archaeological evidence against soil type and topography. The spatial binning method (Chapter 2) was not used, as the bins obscure the distinctions between different soil types and their topography. Because we are relying on point data, it is important to not have overlaps between datasets that will skew our numbers. For this reason, only the HER data have been used in each case. This has reduced numbers, but the data presented here are nonetheless statistically significant. Finally, the regions of the river case studies that fall outside of EngLaId case studies have not had their records cleaned of earlier and later records (Chapter 2).

The Thames Basin The Thames River is the longest wholly within England, with a total length of 340 km, flowing from west to east from its source near Cirencester in the Cotswolds at an elevation of 300 m to its estuary into the Channel, draining a basin of over 13,400 square km (Figure  4.16). Along its course the river drains the Cotswolds, the Berkshire Downs, the Chilterns, the North Downs, and parts of the Weald, with the largest southern tributaries being the Wey that joins at Weybridge, the Mole at Molesey, and Kennet at Reading; and with the largest northern tributaries being the Lea that joins at Bow in London, the Thame at Dorchester, and the Cherwell at Oxford. The Thames is currently affected by tides up to Teddington Lock to the west of London, though the tidal head has shifted through history: in the Roman period it may only have reached London Bridge (Milne et al.  1997; Milne 1985). The river basin is typical of lowland systems in England in that it has very little slope and is therefore fairly sluggish, falling only 300 m over its entire 340 km length. The region is one of the driest in England, with current annual rainfall only 690 mm on average. Rainfall is still the most important driver of annual flow variation, with peak levels in the winter months, and low flows common in the summer, so that the volumetric discharge of water at the river’s mouth is fairly low, with a modern average value of only 65 cubic metres per second.

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  135 400000

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The modern river has been heavily modified by locks and canalization, as well as the growth of towns along its banks. Moreover, both gravel extraction works and the creation of reservoirs have significantly altered parts of its basin. These alterations affect the nature of the river, and the modern discharge is probably substantially lower than it would have been in the past when the river was less constricted by human interference and had less water abstracted from its basin for use in urban and rural communities. The soils of the basin are composed of a variety of types (Figure 4.17). Loam is the most common soil type, covering 29 per cent of the basin, with clays (28 per cent) and loam/clay (22 per cent) covering the majority of the basin, while peat, sand, and silt cover the rest. At a very general level, some 56 per cent of the basin has soils containing an appreciable amount of clay, and 44 per cent do not. The clayey soils are most common in the Cotswolds, around the tributaries of the Upper Thames, and then again within the Lea basin north of London. Deposits of mixed loam and clay are present across the southern faces of the Berkshire Downs and Chilterns, along the Kennet, and on the North Downs. The Thames basin has extensive stretches of floodplains in which ground water is higher, floods are more prominent, and the deposition of alluvium is more common (Figure 4.18).

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136  English Landscapes and Identities 400000 Simple soil type:

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The elevated parts of the basin are fairly dry—the Cotswolds, the chalk ridges of the Berkshire Downs, the Chilterns, and the North Downs—accounting for some 64 per cent of the basin. The lower elevations are wetter on a seasonal basis, and these floodplains account for 35 per cent of the basin’s area, including the Upper Thames between Lechlade and Goring Gap, the Middle Thames and the Kennet from Reading to Staines, and then the Tideway from London to the sea. Large areas of land north of and around London are subject to seasonal wetness. Slope, rainfall, soil wetness, and soil type all play a role in determining the susceptibility to erosion within the basin (Figure 4.19). The Thames basin has a fairly low erosive potential when compared to national values (see Figure 4.7), but still shows significant local variation, with highest values along the northern slopes of the chalk ridges, the Coln, Leech, and Windrush rivers and north of London both sides of the Lea. Soils with highest erosive potential are typically dry and silty. Alluvial deposits cover roughly 900 km2 of floodplain, mostly concentrated on the Upper Thames and Cherwell above Oxford, along the Middle Thames between Slough and Staines, and along the Lea Valley and Thames Tideway between London and the North Sea (Figure 4.20).

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  137 400000

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Anyone who knows the Thames today would find it hard to imagine its appearance at the start of our period in the Bronze Age. The Devensian gravels filled the valleys and were cut into by the river and its tributaries as the ice melted creating an uneven gravel surface by the early Holocene covered with a thin brown soil. The cessation of melt waters left a series of dry palaeochannels. The palaeohydrology and sedimentology is known best for the Upper Thames (see summaries in Booth et al. 2007: 17–20, Lambrick et al. 2009: 29–34 for later prehistory and the first millennium ad, respectively). From the middle Bronze Age water levels started to rise, most likely due to forest clearance on higher ground, and by the late Bronze Age the palaeochannels started to refill, with rising water also due to greater rainfall. Evidence from insects shows a clean and unmanaged river with relatively little silt, but this started to change in the Iron Age, as flooding increased, along with alluviation. In this period there may have been clearance of remaining trees on the gravel terraces, and then on the upper slopes of the Cotswolds. The increase of alluviation seen in the late Iron Age may have been due to a greater intensity of ploughing. Water levels rose through the Roman period, with alluvial deposits due to inundation of the flood plain and this is most marked in the Middle and Lower Thames. By the late Roman period even the Upper

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Thames was experiencing flooding and alluviation, with some evidence of barriers being built to hold back flood waters. There was a cycle here, as the greater loads of sediment in the water slowed flow and exacerbated the risk of flooding. At the start of the early medi­ eval period, prior to ad 650, alluviation decreased but rose again later. Deposits of alluvium did not again reach levels seen in the late Roman period until after ad 1000. This may have been due to a decrease in plough-induced alluvium. It should also be noted that a greater incidence of bridges and water mills from the start of the Roman period onwards would have had important local effects on water flows.

EngLaId Records in the Thames Basin

The Thames basin was a constant focus of human activity throughout the EngLaId period (Figure 4.21). We take here a view focused on the sedimentary and hydrological conditions; broader analyses of the Thames Valley are to be found in future chapters. Bronze Age activity is most apparent in the western regions of the basin, notably the Cotswolds and Berkshire Downs, with lesser amounts focused on the Thames near the Colne confluence at Staines and then scattered throughout the rest of the region in smaller amounts. The Iron

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Age continued this pattern in the west, though with more focus on the chalk ridges and along the river. The Roman period sees an explosion of activity across the entire basin as stretches of the river were developed as part of a broader transport network (see Chapter 5 for further discussion). The development of major towns both on the main river and within its basin (London, Silchester, Verulamium, Dorchester, Cirencester) made the Thames basin a zone of significant urban and rural settlement. The end of the Roman period saw a return to pre-Roman levels of activity, however, with a completely different distribution. The Thames very clearly remained a focus of activity throughout the period, especially as new towns developed at places like Abingdon and Oxford. The distribution of human activity within the basin was clearly influenced by the pedological and hydrological features of the basin. Looking at the EngLaId records against soil type, we see an average distribution of two-thirds of all records on non-clayey soils. Considering that non-clayey soils account for only 44 per cent of the area of the basin, the continual concentration of human activity through time on soils with lower clay content is significant.

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140  English Landscapes and Identities 8000

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Figure 4.22  Distribution of EngLaId records on dry and seasonally wet soils in Thames basin.

Similar preferences are obvious when considering soil wetness, though this reveals a more interesting change through time (Figure 4.22). The Bronze Age shows a significant concentration of activity on dry soils, accounting for 79 per cent of the evidence from the period, the Iron Age and generic prehistoric records show slight increases of activity on seasonally wet soils, but it is the Roman period that shows a significant departure, as over half the records are found on seasonally wet soils. The foundation of London accounts for a part of this activity, and other towns such as Staines and Dorchester add to this increase, but more grazing in the summer on flood plains also played a part. Roman hydrological engineering, particularly land drainage techniques, substantially improved conditions in floodplains (Rogers 2013), at least for a time. The early medieval period shows a continued tolerance of seasonal wetness, as only 56 per cent of activity is concentrated on dry soils in this period, still substantially higher than prehistoric periods. The expansion of human activity throughout the basin meant changes to the shape and structure of the landscape. The erosive potential of much of this landscape is very low, but we see that changes in human activity through time had an impact on the potential for erosion (Figure  4.23). The median value of sites plotted for erosion potential does not change much over time, but the full range of values does. The Bronze Age and Iron Age

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ranges are similar and increasing in the Romano-British and early medieval periods. This might imply that human activity was gradually pushed onto soils that were more easily eroded. The accumulation of alluvium over time is not possible to quantify fully, but it is interesting to document how activity in different periods interacts with areas of substantial alluviation (Figure  4.24). Prior to the Roman period, only 6 per cent of records are located within alluviated areas, but this then jumps to 10 per cent under the Romans and falls slightly to 8 per cent in the early medieval period. These are small percentages, but since alluvium covers roughly 6 per cent of the basin area, we again see a disproportionate amount of activity on floodplains in the Roman and early medieval periods. Alluvial soils can be fertile, so we might be seeing people in the Roman period taking advantage of areas unintentionally enhanced by human action. On the other hand, these might be areas most prone to flooding and activity there was a sign of pressure for land. We will now turn to consider the Eden and then compare the two rivers.

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142  English Landscapes and Identities

The Eden River Basin The Eden River is 145 km long, with its source near Black Fell Moss, Mallerstang in the Yorkshire Dales at an elevation of 670 m OD. The river flows north, draining sections of the Dales and the Pennines to the east and the Lake District to the west (Figure 4.25a). The Eden is fed by the Croglin Water and the river Irthing from the east and the rivers Lyvennet, Eamont, Petteril, and Caldew from the west. The river Eamont drains Ullswater and Haweswater in the Lake District, joining the Eden near Penrith. The Eden empties into the Solway Firth, draining a basin of 2,100 km2 in total, with few large modern settlements aside from Penrith and Carlisle. The Vale of Eden is bounded by steep slopes to the east and west, from which mountain streams can deliver torrents in the wet season. Northwestern England is the wettest region in the country, with an average annual rainfall of over 2,800 mm in some areas. Despite its relatively small size, the Eden thus has a relatively high mean annual discharge of about 52 cubic metres per second, with peak flows possible in winter reaching up to 1,700 cubic metres per second. Due to a lack of substantial settlement, modern or otherwise, along its banks, the Eden has not seen as much human interference as the larger systems of southern England. Carlisle is an exception, as the location of the town at the confluence of the Eden with the rivers Caldew and Petteril has made the town susceptible to damaging floods. Much of the rest of the system remains largely untouched. The glacial origins of the basin are made clear in both topography and soil composition. As the glaciers receded at the end of the Devensian, a thick layer of till was deposited over most of the Vale of Eden, a type of heterogenous sediment formed by the erosion and entrainment of material by glacial movements. In the Eden basin (Figure 4.25b), this till is mostly composed of loam, which covers 67 per cent of the basin. There is virtually no clay within the basin, and peat and sand make up an additional 14 per cent and 11 per cent of the area, respectively. The sandy deposits are most prominent between Penrith and the confluence of the Eamont and Eden, and also to the east of the main channel of the lower Eden in front of the Pennines. Peat is most common in the upland fringes of the basin, in both the Lakes and the Pennines. 360000

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  143 Conditions of rainfall, river incision, and peat distribution make soil wetness in the Eden basin quite different from that of the Thames (Figure 4.26a). The wettest regions are on the margins of the basin in the upland headwaters of the streams that feed the river. The driest areas are found in the south around Kirby Stephen, near Penrith, and then flanking the lower Eden to its confluence with the river Irthing on the northern end of the basin. It is notable that, unlike on the Thames, the main towns were founded on dry land normally out of the reach of seasonal floods. The seasonally wet floodplains are located along the middle Eden around Appleby-in-Westmorland, the courses of the river Irthing, and between the rivers Petteril and Caldew. The combination of high rainfall and steep slopes encourages erosion on both the eastern and western sides of the basin. The areas most susceptible are found west of Ullswater and Haweswater, and then along the Pennines east of Appleby-in-Westmoreland. This is no doubt mitigated by the development of peat in many of these areas from the Bronze Age onwards. The Vale of Eden ranks relatively low in susceptibility as it flattens out to the valley floor (Figure 4.26b). The distribution of alluvium is related to the areas with high erosive potential but also to the location of these regions relative to the western lakes (Figure 4.27). Alluvium is most obvious along the upper and middle reaches of the Eden, coming down off the hills, and having a substantial presence past the confluence with the Eamont. The lakes west of Penrith trap a large part of the sediment that would otherwise flow into the main river system, and it is notable that the area of highest erosive potential is not directly fronted by significant deposits of alluvium. The area around Carlisle shows the other significant sediment sink, where the confluence of the Eden, Irthing, Petteril, and Caldew cumulatively deliver sediment to the lower reach of the river.

EngLaId Records in the Eden Basin

The Eden basin, and Cumbria in general, has far fewer archaeological records than other parts of the country for the reasons discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. In total, only 867 sites are considered here (HER records without finds or multi-entry records of roads). These records show a very sparse prehistoric record, with more activity in the Bronze Age than in 360000

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the Iron Age, and an active Roman period followed by relatively sparsely represented early medieval period (Figure  4.28). Bronze Age, Iron Age, and prehistoric activity clusters mainly along the southwestern edge of the basin and along the river Irthing in the north. The Roman period sees increased development along the road coming north through the Tebay Gap in the south and the road coming from the east from Catterick through the Yorkshire Dales. Both routes met at Penrith and then headed north to Carlisle, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Cumbrian coastal defences. Despite the boom in activity in this period, it does not stray far from these main routes. The early medieval evidence shows the same pattern but in greatly reduced form, indicating that the roads are still important (see Chapter 5). Human activity focuses, unsurprisingly, on the loam deposits within the basin (Figure 4.29). The number of Bronze Age and prehistoric records preserved in peaty regions is suggestive of activity that predates peat formation after the Bronze Age. Roman and early medieval activity on sandy deposits east of the Eden occur along Hadrian’s Wall. Soil wetness and floodplain location play a less obvious role in Eden settlement patterns than in the Thames (Figure  4.30). There is a clear preference for dry soils in the

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Figure 4.30  EngLaId records by soil wetness in Eden basin.

Bronze Age, though this then drops through time; already the Iron Age shows much more activity on the seasonally wet plains of the valley, and this pattern holds basically throughout. We do not see the same increase in activity on more erosion-prone soils in the Eden basin. Instead, Figure 4.31 shows variable activity through time, with the Bronze Age and unspecific prehistoric activity occurring more often on soils likely to erode than in any other period. This is true for both mean erosive values and the range of values. These differences are a result of the amount of activity taking place in the prehistoric period at higher

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elevations, where Roman and early medieval activity is almost entirely restricted to the roadways running along the valley floor. There are so few records occurring on alluvial deposits that it is difficult to discern any meaningful pattern from the evidence. Only 18 of 867 records are found in areas with alluvial deposits, indicating that either these areas were intentionally avoided in most periods or, more probable, the river itself was never a focus of activity through history.

The Thames and the Eden Compared The differences between the Thames and Eden basins are considerable; this is unsurprising as these basins were chosen to highlight the degree of landscape variability across England. The Thames basin had far higher numbers of archaeological records than the Eden, a fact that is certainly suggestive of much higher populations in all periods. This population initially chose to stay mainly on dry, loamy soils with a low susceptibility to erosion, but eventually grew to occupy many wetter soils with higher clay content and higher erosive potential. As the landscape was farmed, soil conditions began to change, eroding off hillslopes, flowing into rivers, and being re-deposited in floodplains. It may be that there was less erosion in the Eden Valley because of a relative lack of clearance until the late Iron Age. Erosion in the Thames began already in prehistory (Lambrick et al. 2009) and reached a peak in the later Roman period (Booth et al.  2007). The Thames has a much ­better-understood sequence, partly due to the amount of developer-funded work there, with rising river levels from the middle Bronze Age onwards due to increased clearance and intensity of land use. From the late Iron Age onwards a well-integrated system of arable and grazing on the flood plain developed. Our work provides support for previous general surveys (Robinson and Lambrick 1984; Robinson 1992; Booth et al. 2007; Miles et al. 2007; Lambrick et al. 2009). We see development of field systems in the Middle Thames from the middle Bronze Age onwards, whereas these only appear from the late Iron Age in the upper Thames. Later on in the Upper Thames, at sites such as at Cirencester (Rogers 2013) and Claydon Pike (Miles et al. 2007), we find increasing efforts at drainage and flood management to combat rising water levels, most obviously seen on sites where alluvial deposits fill or seal Roman features, such as at Bowmoor, Farmoor, and Yarnton (Booth et al. 2007). Increasingly common flooding and alluvial deposition throughout the Roman period is evident at Dorney and Staines on the Middle Thames (McKinley 2004; Parker et al. 2008). Work in London has shown efforts at

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Long-Term Interactions between Society and Ecology  147 land reclamation and drainage on both banks of the Thames (Rogers  2013). In addition, excavated harbour infrastructure suggests a falling tidal limit that had to be met by progressively extended quays that reached out to the deepest water in order to maintain depth for ships (Milne 1985; Milne et al. 1997). This activity slowed into the post-Roman period, suggested to be a result of a drop in population (Robinson and Lambrick 1984), but now perhaps needing reassessment in light of results of the Field of Britannia project (Rippon et al. 2015) that shows less population decline but rather a shift from a concentration on arable to greater pastoralism. The fact that early medieval records still show relatively high levels of activity on soils susceptible to erosion suggests continuity between the two periods, although a lesser prevalence of erosion in the latter. The Eden basin tells a very different story. Its archaeology is much more poorly known. Activity in the basin fluctuated more through time, both in absolute numbers and in distribution. Some periods, such as the Iron Age, are difficult to recognize in the evidence overall. An early preference for higher ground, long hypothesized, can now be documented, and the high erosive values for these early periods certainly corroborate the story of soil degradation and increase in peat growth. It does not, however, necessarily match the story of climate change forcing people out of marginal environments, as it is equally possible that leached and depleted soils occurred as a result of farming. The environment was fragile and hence susceptible to human impact. Later periods had a much lower impact as they kept to the fairly flat and stable valley floor, where glacial till was less erodible than southern loess and also less fertile. The smaller size of the river, despite its torrential potential, meant that the Eden was less of a magnet for settlement, especially when the Roman road network would bypass most of it entirely. Evidence in the lakes of Cumbria suggests later influence from Scandinavian grazing economies in the upland portions of the region (Harvey et al. 1981), though this is not easily seen in the very sparse early medieval archaeological record of the Eden basin. The river Eden itself was part of the landscape, but not necessarily a focal point of settlement in any period. In each case, activity within the basin largely depended on the extent to which a river was used as a transport or communication corridor, but also a source of power—mills seem more common on the Thames than on the Eden. It is clear that the Thames served such a purpose from at least the Roman period onwards (discussed further in Chapter 5), but that the Eden did not. The value of larger rivers for movement justified the risk of living alongside them (Leveau 2005; Allinne 2007; Blouin 2014; Franconi 2017b), hence the settlement of London in the middle of a major floodplain with serious risk of flooding and alluviation (e.g. the Thames Barrier was closed an exceptional 41 times in 2013–1411 to reduce the effect of combined tidal/fluvial flooding in the city).

Discussion The two river basins represent contrasting environments. The more benign environments of the Thames attracted activity and settlement. But in each case people altered the landscape through clearance, creating greater run-off and flooding, especially in the Thames. However, there was soil erosion along the Eden, despite lower levels of human activity there. These are not simple stories of either the environment or human groups shaping the other, but a subtle interaction between physical forces and the nature of human activity. 11 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-thames-barrier

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148  English Landscapes and Identities The very long-term geological history of the British Isles, which resulted in harder volcanic rocks in the north and west, combined with the slightly more recent Ice Age processes to create a more varied topography in the north and west than existed in the flatter south and east. The altitude of the northern and western regions further combined with prevailing winds to create a gradient of rainfall, which is higher in the west than in the east. It is easy to see why Fox combined these factors to create his highland–lowland distinction. But the contrast between the north and west which is high, unyielding, and wet as opposed to the softer, lower, drier south is easily overdrawn. We would see a difference, but that this is more to do with the greater variety of topography, altitude, rainfall, and soil in the north and west compared to the somewhat more homogenous south and east. Variety encouraged a range of human lifestyles, which must have often linked the use of higher and lower areas in ways we do not yet understand. Our lack of understanding is hampered by the way archaeology presents itself in the north and west, with well-preserved remains of field systems, settlements, and cairns often found in upland areas which are mapped but very rarely excavated. Lowland areas of the north have also seen comparatively little excavation, especially on a large scale, and we know all too little of the human history of places like the Eden valley, especially in comparison with the Thames. Lower levels of artefacts in the north and west (Chapter  3), together with the complexity of sequences, exacerbate this ­situation. Climate has subtle effects, best understood at the local level: at the moment it is hard to see ebbs and flows of settlement in relation to changes in temperature or rainfall. In other areas, human choice or development of a trajectory seems more evident than the effect of topography or climate on people. The clearance history of England varied around a line roughly from Torquay to Whitby, with much more treed landscapes west of that line until the late Iron Age. Variations in clearance history had an impact on soil erosion, along with topography, but this impact is not clearly patterned geographically. Cumulative change can be seen: the rising river levels of the Thames are due in part to the greater build-up of alluvium in the valley bottom, as time goes by. We can also see vari­ ations in the intensity of land use, which peaked predictably in the Roman period, but saw high levels of ploughing and sowing from the late Iron Age through to the Norman Conquest. In areas such as the Eden Valley we are hampered by our relative lack of know­ ledge, with some periods still very poorly known and more detailed sequences of change in hydrology and soil lacking. In this chapter we have presented largescale modelling for England as a whole, combining data from archaeology, with information relevant to soil erosion. Such models are the start of thinking at a broader scale and not the last word. We hope to have contributed to questions concerning people and the environment, partly by providing data at a new scale. How people lived with forest or more open country would have influenced how they felt about themselves and about the world, which we might gloss as identity. We are attempting to replace an emphasis on determinism with a stress on complexity, looking at the mutual cause and effect of people and the world around them, where all elem­ents are shifting and mobile. A particular lifestyle in the north and west, which we started to explore in Chapter  3, is apparent in its clearance history, but there is no clear cause in terms of climate or topography. Chapter 5 complements this one by considering further the topographical structure of England and the implications this had for movement, before looking more directly at evidence for movement by land and water.

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5

Movement Tyler Franconi and Chris Green

Movement is one of the more difficult topics we tackled, given both the poorly theorized approaches to how people and things move and the nature of the data we have been using. In this chapter we take a different approach from many who consider movement. Ours starts from the landscape rather than with the people, animals, or objects that moved. With techniques that characterize materials, and the analysis of things like strontium isotopes for people and animals, it is possible to know something of the places whence individuals and things originated and where they ended up. Knowing what routes they took and in what sorts of numbers is much more difficult. We are interested in how patterns of movement might have unfolded over land and water, as this can throw light on connectedness and isolation, both of which inform us about regional differences and identity. To be highly connected is to have a very different sense of self and other than when a group is relatively isolated. We have investigated routes and movement by using or developing three main sources of evidence: modelling cost surfaces of the ease or difficulty of movement across England; comparing these cost surfaces with archaeological evidence from our main periods on the rather bald assumption that more evidence means greater connection; lastly, seeking direct evidence for routes and infrastructure involved in movement by both land and river. Our use of large-scale distributions of material makes our approach different to those of others who have often concentrated on particular types of artefact to identify patterns of trade and exchange, indicators of human movement, or looked at areas or sites thought to have been centrally involved in trade. Alternatively, people have concentrated on the evidence for trackways, roads, and river transport or crossings, when these have left physical evidence or historical indicators. By concentrating on the physical costs of travel and the physical means of overcoming these costs, we have taken a somewhat functionalist stance. Elements such as land or water held a changing series of values for people in the past, as indicated by, for instance, regular deposits of artefacts and human bones made from the Neolithic to the medieval periods on land and in water (Bradley 1990, 1998a). The world did not present itself to people in the past in terms of the energy budgets needed to move across it. We are also concerned with the more phenomenological question of how time and space were shaped and regional worlds constructed by people in the past. This chapter starts with a brief overview of the current views on movement and mobility and then moves on to modelling movement at an England-wide scale based on several factors—terrain ruggedness, soil wetness, visibility, and the density of archaeological ­ records by period. These models provide a basis for comparison with the various sorts of evidence for mobility that is then analysed in the following sections, focusing individually

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tyler Franconi and Chris Green. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0005

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150  English Landscapes and Identities on movement on land, river, and sea. Once the models and evidence are considered, some thoughts about institutional influences of mobility, mainly concerning oversight by the Roman state, are considered as well as the place of mobility within identity formation. Overall, this chapter shows how we are able to talk about mobility in the past from human and environmental perspectives, and how this mobility helped shape society through time.

What is Movement? Taken at face value, the term ‘movement’ is quite ambiguous. People, things, and ideas could all move, and therefore it is important to clarify our terminology used to describe different scales and intentions in moving. Following Quast (2009: 1), we define four different types of movement that are discernible to some degree in the archaeological record: communication, trade/exchange, mobility, and migration. These four terms are not, of course, mutually exclusive, but do help identify the different and complex social processes at work behind the distribution of archaeologically visible evidence. Movement always required human agents. As Kristiansen (2005: 77) writes, ‘Knowledge, objects and ideas do not move by themselves. They are always carried by people.’ This is a simple truth, but it highlights the core necessity of human movement: people must be simultaneously motivated and able to move in order for connections to occur. Motivation could also be through the individual or group, with the migrations of the early medieval period offering a clear illustration of the impact of the latter. Although some communities did not move much, if at all, this was probably rare, so that there is something of a myth of the agrarian community tied to the land, with the narrowest possible horizons. The ability to move is a closely related matter, and this is influenced by three important factors: landscape, technology, and institutions. The form of the landscape is the most basic: all other things being equal, it is easier to move on flat, dry land than it is over steep mountains or through wetlands. We explore this issue later in modelling movement through the English landscape based on a series of landscape traits in order to understand better how top­og­ raphy both encouraged and restricted movement. Movement is strongly influenced by technology: infrastructure, such as trackways, roads, or harbours improved the ability of people to move, and improvements to vehicular design helped as well. The development of horseback riding from c.4000 bc doubled or tripled the distance a person could move in a day (Anthony and Brown 1991: 36), and this was augmented by the creation of the wheel and the development of wheeled traffic pulled by animals from about the same time (Johannsen and Laursen 2010). Movement by animal or cart on prehistoric tracks was significantly improved by the creation of the Roman road network, where over 12,000 km of well-maintained surfaces increased the ease of movement, leading to what Haynes referred to as Britain’s ‘first information revolution’ (2002: 112–13), as movement became markedly more efficient and the province became much more integrated, both internally and within the wider Roman world. The preservation of this road network in the early medieval period and, in some cases, up to the modern day is a testament to its efficacy (Cole 2013; Blair 2018). On water, a variety of simple options for movement were available early on, including floats, rafts, and boats (McGrail  1987a: 5). Floats—buoyancy devices that were held by ­people as personal flotation aids—were not of great use in northern Europe where water was often too cold for any prolonged period of time, unlike in the Near East where these are commonly depicted in early Mesopotamian artwork. Rafts had a long life in northern Europe, and were mainly suited for local use as their structural instability was not ideal for

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Movement  151 long-distance movement. Early boats were simply hollowed logs, a technique that ­con­tinued to be used into the early medieval period because of its relative simplicity, though various improvements were made on the design through time (McGrail  1987b: 343). Other boat building techniques developed that involved plank-built ships especially for sea travel from c.1500 bc onwards, with sewn ships present early on, treenails from 1100 bc, and iron nails from 230 bc (McGrail 1987b: 344). We explore the archaeological evidence for both land- and water-based movement in sections that follow in order to better understand how the EngLaId dataset can contribute to our knowledge of technological improvement to movement through time. These technological developments improved the ability to move, but these did not exist within a vacuum nor was their progressive development guaranteed. At an institutional level, this means that movement needs to be legal, secure, and relatively low cost (Dietler 1989: 131–2; Scheidel 2011: 23–33). It is more difficult to move through a politically fragmented landscape where permissions or treaties are required than it is within a unified political entity where the threat of violence or predation is greatly reduced or extinguished. In developing this dichotomy, we must also make careful distinction between scales of movement—a traveller on foot may go unnoticed, while a ship moving slowly upstream may well draw unwanted and dangerous attention. Cultural biographies of objects and their travels (Hahn and Weiss 2013) are crucial elem­ ents in understanding the mobility of not only objects but also people and objects, as they highlight the multifaceted life of objects that were produced, moved, used, and eventually deposited in the archaeological record. We most often interpret these objects as simple commodities, but we must not lose sight of the fact that these commodities had a significant and, often, dynamic cultural context. As Hahn and Weiss (2013: 6) write: ‘Culture is constituted by the local transmission of traditions, inherited knowledge or regional specificities that, through exchanges and transnational relations, were often constituted by commodities traded over long distances.’ The cultural significance of objects is less a focus of this chapter than the routes of travel through which they move, but these emic values should not be forgotten. It is very clear that people and things moved over long distances throughout the EngLaId period, but is also clear that the intensity and volume of this movement fluctuated heavily through time. To what degree was this intensity of movement linked to the different cultural and political organizations of different time periods? Are we able to answer these questions based on archaeological evidence alone? These are crucial questions concerning an understanding of movement in the long term and the factors that influence the degree to which people chose (or were forced?) to move, both within England and farther afield.

Modelling Movement In order to start examining people’s ability to move within England, we must understand the different topographic features that influence movement within the landscape. To address this question, we develop a series of GIS models to view the English landscape from two perspectives. First, we seek to understand how factors like terrain ruggedness, surface wetness, and visibility differed across the landscape and how these factors perhaps made some areas easier to travel across than others. We then turn the question around and examine the density of archaeological material by period as the physical evidence of past movement, the assumption being that things moved in order to be deposited in the

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152  English Landscapes and Identities arch­aeo­logic­al record, and a higher density of things equals a higher degree of movement. This approach creates a series of period-specific cumulative cost surfaces, providing an alternative view to movement determined solely by landscape.

Background and Methodology Modelling movement is one of the most common tasks undertaken by archaeologists who use GIS (see Herzog 2014 for extensive discussion of the methods). Generally speaking, the end goal of the vast majority of such analyses is the generation of one or more so-called ‘least cost paths’ between fixed points. Also, the vast majority of studies use the angle of slope of the ground surface to determine the cost of travel. The major problem with this type of analysis is that it is very reductive (in that it defines a single line of travel between two points) and oversimplified (insofar as people do not make routing decisions based purely upon how steep the ground is). However, this is not to say that we should abandon attempts to model movement using GIS. There are, in fact, useful and informative methods that we can apply. As part of the process for generating a least cost path, one always must first generate a ‘cost surface’ which is a gridded (raster) dataset defining the cost of travel from an origin point to any location on the surface. This cost surface is then usually not reported on, other than perhaps as a way of defining zones of travel time around, say, a settlement. If we wish to study movement within the landscape more broadly, however, we can do so by defining a whole series of cost surfaces from a large set of points (ideally one point for every cell on the cost surface grid) and then summing them together to form a cumulative cost surface. This can then begin to give us a sense of how easy it was to travel across different parts of the landscape (Figure 5.1a).

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Movement  153 There are two main problems with this type of analysis: 1. Processing the data is very intensive in terms of computer time/power; 2. There will be an inevitable bias towards low costs in the centre of the map and high costs towards the edges, due to the greater density of points in the centre and the fact that maximum travel costs from the centre to the edge will be lower than maximum costs from edge to edge. The first problem can be reduced by using a relatively coarse grid for the analysis (all ana­ lyses presented here used grid resolutions between 150 m and 600 m)1 and by generating fewer surfaces by using an even lower resolution point pattern for the journey origin locations (all analyses presented here used the central points of each cell in a hexagonal grid,2 a total of 6,023 points). The second problem can be alleviated by subtracting3 the values of a cumulative cost surface generated using a single cost of travel (i.e. 0 or 1) for any cell on the map (Figure 5.1b). The end result of this process is a model that presents the relative travel cost of movement across different parts of the landscape. From this, we can begin to visually pick out the routes that people might have taken through the landscape, but we will not then generate least cost paths as we do not wish to restrict our imaginary past people in the routes they may have wished to have taken. This could be viewed probabilistically, in that people in the past could be seen as more likely to choose to travel through lower cost areas, but they would not always have done so. All of the models that follow are presented in the form of z-scores to aid cross-comparability: that is in units of standard deviations above (positive values) or below (negative values) the mean (zero). Positive values are conceived of as higher cost and negative values as lower cost.

Modelling Terrain-Based Movement The first factor modelled was the ruggedness of the ground surface, using the Terrain Ruggedness Index (TRI) defined by Wilson et al. (2007).4 TRI was preferred over the more conventional slope due to three factors: 1. The relatively coarse resolution grids used meant that any slope calculations would have been unrepresentative of conditions on the ground in reality and so calculating precise slope-based energy costs would have been meaningless. 2. Shallow downhill slopes possess a lesser energy cost than flat surfaces and, as such, when creating cost surfaces based upon slope one has to take into account direction of travel. In the TRI model, all shallow slopes and flat surfaces fell within the lowest cost value and, as such, direction of travel could be ignored.

1  An initial attempt to run a model using the native 50-m resolution of the source DEM dataset resulted in a predicted runtime for the model of over 24 days. Runtimes encountered using finalized data varied between c.12 hours and c.3 days. 2  It is 5 km from a corner on the hexagon to its second neighbour (see Chapter 2). 3  The two surfaces will both need normalizing to make this work by dividing each by its maximum value, so that both then vary between 0 and 1. 4  Essentially, the mean difference between a cell on the DEM and its eight neighbours.

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Figure 5.2  Terrain Ruggedness Index (TRI)-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as z-scores of values above (red) or below (blue) the mean, in units of standard deviations.

3. Humans do not make most path-finding choices based upon an appreciation of energy cost, as they only become aware of differences in energy cost when encountering relatively steep slopes. As such, energy-based models are overly reductive and mechanistic, as there are many values attached to a landscape beyond the difficulty of climbing a hill. TRI was calculated using the Ordnance Survey’s PANORAMA 50m DEM dataset and then reclassified5 to create a cost allocation surface with values from 1 (lowest TRI = lowest cost) to 8 (highest TRI = highest cost). This was then aggregated out to 150-m resolution cells in order to make the algorithm runtime reasonable. The model produced (Figure 5.2) shows a largely expected result of much higher than average travel costs in most of the north of England and in the southwest, somewhat higher than average travel costs in the Marches and in Wessex, and then lower than average costs across most of central and southeastern England. The most surprising result is probably the much lower than average costs associated with western and northern Cornwall. Both 5  Using natural breaks (Jenks 1967).

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Figure 5.3  Wetness-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption.

Roman and major modern roads tend to follow the locally lowest cost routes across the model where possible, which suggests that the results are reasonably robust, at least (or especially) for wheeled transport. This model provides us with a baseline of terrain traversal difficulty from which we can build and also compare the further models presented in the following. Naturally, the ruggedness of the ground surface is not the only element that might have had an effect upon mobility of people in the past. Another element that we modelled was the amount of moisture in the environment (Figure  5.3), which is particularly relevant when using wheeled transport. This model is based upon a mixture of modern precipitation data,6 modern data on wet and seasonally wet soils,7 and simulated flow accumulation based upon terrain. All of these data are based upon current conditions and, as such, will not perfectly reflect conditions in the past. This will particularly be the case for periods when the climate was drier (see Chapter  4). Nevertheless, the model is still useful and

6 http://www.worldclim.org/ 7 http://www.landis.org.uk/data/nmvector.cfm

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156  English Landscapes and Identities demonstrates high costs associated with wetness in western England (particularly Lancashire and Cumbria) and around the Wash. Another terrain-based, but more conceptual, factor that might have influenced movement in the past is the visual openness of the landscape. This is intended to reflect the potential desirability of being able to see long distances when travelling across the landscape (and potentially of being able to be seen from a long distance). There is a tacit assumption here that anyone for whom this was a desirable routeway characteristic would be somebody who would want to see potential trouble coming or who would want people to know they were coming themselves. Naturally, a converse model for people who want to stay hidden could also be built, but this has not been done here. To create this model, a frequency/cumulative viewshed was constructed for England based upon peaks and pits as observer locations.8 This was then used to build a cost allocation surface. The end result (Figure 5.4) shows a starkly contrasting picture to the previous models, with the upland 200000

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8  Ideally a total viewshed would be created (Llobera 2003; Conolly and Lake 2006: 228; also see Chapter 7), but this would have been far too computationally intensive. A 250-m resolution DEM was used to also reduce the processing time.

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areas being largely lower ‘cost’ than the lowland ones (as, despite what one might think, you cannot see very far at all in flat landscapes). As a final model of terrain-derived movement potential, we combined the cost allocations for TRI (double weighted to make it most important), wetness, and visibility into a single model (Figure  5.5). This shows a very clear division of England into two zones: a zone of higher overland movement cost in the north and west of the country, and a zone of lower overland movement cost in the south and east. Of particular interest is the corridor of lower movement cost through the Trent valley that links the Yorkshire lowlands to southern England. This corridor will be seen again in the culturally oriented models described later.

Modelling Movement Using Archaeological Remains as a Proxy for Activity Levels in the Past Just as people today do not entirely base their travel decision-making on differences in the structure of the landscape, people in the past would also have taken further elements into

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158  English Landscapes and Identities consideration when deciding how to travel between one point and another. In an attempt to ‘complete’ the Roman road system for Britain to enable the application of network ana­ lysis methods, Orengo and Livarda (2016) used the density of archaeological remains (largely the NRHE and the PAS) as the basis of cost surfaces to generate least cost paths between locations where they would have expected a now-lost Roman road to have run. This is an interesting idea and one worthy of further exploration using our larger dataset, but from the perspective again of studying relative travel ‘cost’ across the landscape rather than any attempt to define specific routeways. In this case, ‘cost’ is defined as being low where there is a greater density of archaeological records and high where the density is lower. The idea behind this is basically that more archaeological remains ought to mean that more people were engaged in more settled ways of life in these areas, with the result that transport through these areas ought to have been easier to arrange (more tracks/roads, more places to find food/water/rest, more control against banditry, etc.). Obviously, this ignores any possibility of control of movement, but the models are not invalidated by this. Even where movement into or out of regions was controlled, movement within those regions would still be necessary and governed by some mix of the factors discussed in this chapter. The first model produced was for Bronze Age data (Figure 5.6), which also incorporated unspecified prehistoric material at a half weighting. Essentially, this shows a zone of much higher travel cost in the Midlands and north of England (with the exceptions of Northumberland and East Yorkshire) and a zone of much lower travel cost across most of the south of the country (with the exception of the North and South Downs and Weald). Another notable aspect is the low travel costs through the Cornwall/Devon peninsula, which appears much less accessible in later periods (see below). Clearly, people travelled all over England during the whole of our time period, but what this model begins to suggest is where they might have travelled more regularly and more easily: in other words, areas of greater connectivity. The next model produced was for Iron Age data (Figure 5.7), which again also in­corp­­ orated unspecified prehistoric material at a half-weighting. The pattern is fairly consistent with the preceding Bronze Age model, but with an opening up of more of southern and central England to regular travel, along with an increased cost associated with crossing Dartmoor. We also begin to see the stronger appearance of more obvious corridors of movement, of which there are also some hints in the Bronze Age model. Of particular note is the aforementioned Trent route through Lincolnshire/Nottinghamshire, as that also appeared in the terrain-based model (which is particularly notable as that is a model based upon entirely different input data). The Roman model (Figure 5.8) is quite striking for the obvious influence of the Roman road network. In part, this is of course because the network is built into the model, but this is not the whole story as the road data is not a particularly large proportion of the dataset. Demonstration that information on the Roman road network is not shaping the model as a whole is found in the fact that corridors of movement appear where no Roman roads are recorded and also along some river valleys (particularly noticeable in the northwest). It is clear, and uncontroversial, that the Roman period was the era within our timeframe where travel through England was easiest (least contested) and probably most intensive. The early medieval model (Figure  5.9) is striking in its own way in that some of the Roman roads still appear as corridors of lower cost, most obviously Ermine Street as it travelled alongside the Trent Valley. This is a particularly useful result as the Roman roads were not included within the dataset for this model, which lends support to the idea that

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Figure 5.6  Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—Bronze Age.

the appearance of the roads in the Roman model is not purely just due to their inclusion in that input dataset. The picture here is of a still strongly connected eastern half of England, with much costlier movement conditions now in the north and west. On a national basis, these are probably the best models we could currently hope to prod­ uce of relative overland travel cost in England during our time period of interest, using the data that we possess. Clearly, these models are not intended to be a perfect representation and many other factors will have come into play in the movement of people in the past, most obviously the use of sea and riverine transport (although these factors ought to be represented within the record density models through the deposition of material in and by rivers/coasts, if they truly were important). Nevertheless, they provide an important first step in trying to understand movement in England between the Bronze Age and the early medieval period. For the Roman (Figure 5.10a) and early medieval periods (Figure 5.10b), we can compare the archaeologically derived models against the road networks and major towns. The Roman model works very well, with the roads running through lower cost areas and the major towns largely surrounded by haloes of reduced travel cost. The early medieval

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Figure 5.7  Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—Iron Age.

relationship to towns and roads is less clear, but that is unsurprising as some of the roads will have gone out of use and as the towns are those considered important at the very end of our time period of interest. However, with the exception of the south coast (where perhaps marine transport was more important), the major towns do still largely appear within areas of lower travel cost, as do the Roman roads of central/southern/eastern England. When we compare the values on the combined terrain-based model (double-weighted TRI plus wetness plus visibility) for movement against the four period models (Figure 5.11), we can see quite a strong correlation between the values for the Iron Age and Roman ­periods, a lower degree of correlation for the early medieval period and a poor correlation for the Bronze Age. This suggests that the affordances provided by the landscape for movement had the strongest influence on where people travelled (and thus deposited archaeology) from the Iron Age and through the Roman period. Before that travel was less structured by those affordances and, to a lesser extent, afterwards too. Thus, we see broad similarities between the two approaches used here to model movement in GIS. The shape of the landscape favours movement through dry, lowland zones and valleys and most periods show a broad correlation to these topographic proclivities.

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Figure 5.8  Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—Roman.

Important nuances are teased out of the period-specific models, however, as we see lack of movement in the northwest, for instance, changes subtly over time. This is particularly evident in the southern extent of this region, around Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and Cheshire, where the Bronze Age evidence suggests a dearth of movement that gradually improves until it seems to be well incorporated by the early medieval period. Dartmoor offers a strong contrast, where more people appear to have traversed the region in the Bronze Age than any other period. These regional changes are striking when considered against the discussion of forest clearance, agricultural expansion, and soil degradation discussed in Chapter  4, as the increased movement through the southern extent of the northwestern region correlates well to the narrative of gradual forest clearance, while the decrease in movement in Dartmoor corresponds well to the abandonment of agricultural exploitation in this region at the end of the Bronze Age. It must be remembered that these are models, and therefore they need to be tested against specific evidence for movement in order to understand their validity. The sections that follow will look separately at evidence for movement on land, on river, and by sea in

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Figure 5.9  Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surface, expressed as detailed in Figure 5.2’s caption—early medieval.

order to better understand how the different factors discussed above may or may not have played into the movement intensities of different periods.

Movement on Land Methods Moving on land was the most basic option available, requiring nothing more than the ability to walk. Walking was fine for short distances and for those moving without any significant baggage, but for longer journeys it was preferable to take an easier mode of transport, either on an animal or using a vehicle. Horses were domesticated for riding during the Neolithic, and by the middle Bronze Age were widely available, relatively speaking (more on this later). As the recent discovery of a fully preserved wheel at Must Farm, Cambridgeshire demonstrates, wheeled vehicular traffic was also in use from at least the late Bronze Age onwards. For efficient movement over the different landscapes discussed

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Figure 5.10  Archaeological record density-based cumulative cost surfaces plotted against transport networks: (a) Roman, including major Roman towns; (b) early medieval, including major towns as of ad 1086 (after Reynolds 1977: 35).

earlier, some sort of developed trackway was preferred to a terrain full of obstacles. Moreover, developed tracks helped guide people along their way towards their destination and, in a world without ready access to maps, provided a marked course through the landscape. Dirt tracks were an improvement over nothing, but paved roads of the sort laid down by the Romans in many places made movement significantly easier as they improved the quality of the path and were less-easily washed out. Paved roads required maintenance of course, and while this is attested periodically through the Roman period by milestones that record roadwork, it became less obvious later in time. From the Roman period onwards, we know that these routes were ‘mapped’ and described in various media that may have been more or less distributed in society (Jones and Mattingly  1990: 16–42). The first of these media are actual maps. The Roman world very clearly had maps, though we only have later copies preserved. The Peutinger Map, a thirteenth-century ad copy of what was probably a fourth- or fifth-century ad map that had its origins as early as the Augustan period and showed the entire Roman world, is one such example (Talbert  2010). The map is not fully preserved, and ends before most of Britain is fully displayed. The extant version shows the southern coast of England, including the Thames estuary and marks the towns of Camuloduno (Colchester), Ratupis (Richborough), Dubris (Dover), and Lemavio (Lympne), and Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter) with the coastal roads marked out, as well as two roads probably heading towards London. Beyond the Peutinger Table, several other documentary sources describe the transport network and settlement landscape of Roman Britain, and these also have some value to the study of the early medieval period as well. The most detailed is the Antonine Itinerary, a probable third-century ad description of over 225 major roads in the Roman Empire (Jones and Mattingly 1990: 23–9). Some 15 different routes are described for Britain, recording over 100 place names and giving an idea of the roads that official imperial visits may have used (Figure  5.12). Notably, major towns and major roads, like the Fosse Way, are absent from this itinerary, so the evidence is not meant to be taken as an accurate map of Britain in the third century. The important detail to note on both the Itinerary and the

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164  English Landscapes and Identities 3

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Peutinger Table is that travel is conceived of as a series of way stations, marked in both cases by major towns, rather than natural landmarks or topographic features. Other sources, like Ptolemy, the Ravenna Cosmography, the Notitia Dignitatum, and milestones reflect the same pattern, where navigation is marked out as distances between two cities, hinting that the cognitive map of the Roman world was, at least officially, simplified to progression through a series of major settlements. The everyday experience of travellers that surely relied more on topographic features and local knowledge than any sort of centrally produced map is now lost to us. These maps and itineraries focus exclusively on roads and ignore other modes of travel. Roads, no matter what their construction, often intersected with waterways at many points along their course, and this required some kind of adjustment based on the size of the road and the size of the river. Some rivers could simply be forded, if the stream was low enough and not too powerful. Fords were numerous (discussed later), but rivers could be bridged. Bridges were present already in small numbers in the Bronze Age, but were rare. It is not until the Roman period that the vast majority of bridges were constructed together with the new road network. There is the chance that these Roman bridges obscured earlier

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evidence of prehistoric bridges, but it is true regardless that the Roman period saw an un­pre­ce­dent­ed development of river crossings. Many of these were in use into the medieval period, when others also continued to be built. Finally, there is the option of ferry crossings for larger rivers, and these are difficult to detect archaeologically. Place name evidence, to be discussed in the later section ‘Place Name Evidence’, sheds some light on the topic for the early medieval period, and we may infer that such crossing means were also present earlier. For the sake of discussion here, roads and rivers are separated in order to discuss the evidence pertaining to each. Although the division between roads and rivers as two sep­ar­ ate kinds of transportation is common throughout literature, they were often integrated and complementary means of transport (Adams  2012; Campbell  2012; Franconi  2013; Franconi 2016). Opportunistic travel might mean switching between land- and water-based movement. Longer journeys could also have included sea travel, of course, so while this discussion views each separately, the ancient realities were, of course, more complex. A fit person can walk up to 45 km a day at a fairly strenuous pace. The Roman army was expected

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166  English Landscapes and Identities to have been able to march 20 km a day in full kit (Scheidel et al. 2013: 6–7). We might therefore assume a median value of about 30 km a day for an average person on foot wanting to cover as much distance as is comfortable. A horse-riding messenger using the Roman official road network, the cursus publicus, could cover an estimated 67 km a day (Scheidel et al.  2013: 11–12), but this speed is only sustainable over many days if fresh horses are ­supplied. Vehicular traffic was slower—an ox-drawn cart could carry a load, but only moved 12 km a day (Raepsaet 2010). Cost is less straightforward. First and foremost, any sort of monetary cost of movement will be socially derived, and therefore evidence from Roman or medieval sources will have little applicability outside these specific periods (Scheidel et al.  2013). For instance, even when dealing with the best preserved Roman evidence, Diocletian’s price edict of ad 301, there is little agreement over whether the charges for land, river, and sea-borne transportation have any applicability to the real world (Roueché 1989; Arnaud 2007; Franconi 2014). Costs must reflect local conditions first and foremost, because prices derived from one set of customs and logistical features will not, in economic terms, easily transfer to another context. Thus the recommendation of an imperial edict in fourth century ad Asia Minor has little to tell us about the reality of the price of transport in second century ad Britain, let alone the eighth century bc. The archaeological evidence discussed in the section ‘EngLaId Evidence’ is poorly suited for discussing cost in any case, as it really only shows where people and things moved, not what it cost to get there.

EngLaId Evidence We will examine the evidence for land-based movement in England from prehistory through to the eleventh century ad, taking account of tracks and roads, bridges and fords, and evidence for horses and wagons. Land movement was impeded by water barriers and so for each period we started by identifying the places where roads intersected with waterways. This was done simply by running an ‘intersect’ tool in GIS with the two datasets and specifying the output mode to point data, thus creating a dataset for each time period of river crossings. It will become obvious that these crossings are not all the river crossings that ever existed, as our data are limited to major roads and major rivers. The next stage was to identify how many of these river crossings had any actual evidence for how this was accomplished. To do this, the evidence for bridges (thesaurus category 06F) was mapped by period. Once these points were put into the GIS, we ran the nearness tool in order to determine how many bridges were located at or near the identified crossing points, using incremental distance measurements of 500, 1,000, and 1,500 m radii to account for any small margin of error in the location of data points. We determined that anything outside of a 1500-m radius was probably not simply an error in recording and therefore a different site entirely. The EngLaId evidence for Bronze and Iron Age land-based movement is scant compared to later periods (Figure  5.13), and much of it is only generally dated to the prehistoric period. While Bronze Age sites have preserved trackways and other elements in wetland environments such as at Flag Fen in Cambridgeshire (Pryor and Bamforth 2010) or in the Somerset Levels (Coles and Coles 1986; Brunning and McDermott 2012), these remains are only very locally preserved. While many of these structures served utilitarian purposes and helped make wetlands more passable, they were also relatively monumental constructions for their period and perhaps were not purely functional (Brunning and McDermott 2012: 376).

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Figure 5.13  Bronze Age (left) and Iron Age (right) evidence for communication and transportation networks mapped against each period’s movement model. Generically dated ‘prehistoric’ records shown in the background of each.

The Iron Age evidence is more extensive, but is still largely restricted to wet environments of the south and east, particularly along the Upper Thames, in Norfolk, and in the Humber/ Yorkshire region. Interestingly, there were significant routeways and connections that did develop across England early on, and these deserve some consideration. The major prehistoric routes are located along the ridges of southeastern England, one along the North Downs, running from Wessex to the channel coastline in Kent, the Icknield Way running from Wiltshire to Norfolk along the Berkshire Downs and Chiltern Hills, and then the Jurassic Way from the Cotswolds to the Humber Estuary in Lincolnshire. Fragments of another path along the South Downs are also apparent, as is another spur heading south through Lincolnshire from the Humber Estuary. Together, these routes cover some 1,782 km across England. Mapped against the models of movement described earlier, it is clear that these routes opted for the paths of least resistance across the landscape and, due to the prominence of the ridgeways, paths also provided good visibility across the landscape. There obviously must have been other routes in the landscape, but these are only preserved in very small sections, if at all. These paths intersect with 53 rivers along their course. There are only 10 prehistoric bridges (as classified by our input datasets) recorded in the EngLaId database, six from the Bronze Age, two from the Iron Age, and two that were generically prehistoric (Figure 5.14). Only one of these bridges is located on the three major prehistoric routes: that built in the Bronze Age over the River Thames at Wallingford where the Icknield Way crosses from the Berkshire Downs to the Chilterns. The other bridges are mainly located on the Thames, with others on the River Test, Itchen, and Chelmer. These bridges are indicative of other prehistoric routes that have not left archaeological traces, though the effort taken to build a bridge certainly suggests that these routes were used enough to justify this. It is noticeable that activity clusters in the south and east, despite the fact that more activity, relatively speaking, is noted for this period in the northwest and southwest than any other time. There is some indication of a broader integration of travel routes, but constructions that linked the rest of the country to the southeast is simply not preserved.

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Figure 5.14  Prehistoric evidence for roads and river crossings mapped against (a) the Iron Age movement model and (b) major river ways. On the maps, ‘crossings’ (points) represent the intersection points between rivers and routeways, whereas ‘bridges’ (hexagons) represent anything recorded in one of our input datasets as a bridge.

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Figure 5.15  Horse gear from the (a) prehistoric period and (b) Roman period.

An examination of the distribution of prehistoric horse gear adds depth to this picture (Figure 5.15a). The distribution of horse gear is obviously not a direct proxy for the distribution of horses, but it can act as some measure of where horses were used. We must also remember that metal finds recorded by the PAS are subject to a series of affordances discussed in Chapter 2, perhaps most importantly that they cannot legally come from scheduled sites, which excludes many hillforts. Horse gear is unevenly distributed through time; only 20 records come from the Bronze Age, while 1,112 are from the Iron Age, and 12 generically prehistoric. There is no strong correlation of the findspots with prehistoric routes, instead showing a much wider distribution throughout southern and eastern

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Figure 5.16  Roman roads, river crossings, and bridges mapped against (a) Roman movement model and (b) major river ways. On the maps, ‘crossings’ (points) represent the intersection points between rivers and routeways, whereas ‘bridges’ (hexagons) represent anything recorded in one of our input datasets as a bridge.

England, reaching much farther north as well, into Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cumbria. The southwest is still poorly represented even with these far more numerous data. Moving into the Roman period, the difference from the prehistoric situation is apparently striking (Figure 5.16). Over 12,159 km of roadway was constructed during the Roman period, linking the western tip of Cornwall to the northernmost reaches of Northumbria, and from the Solway Firth to the Channel coast. These roads crisscrossed the lowland zones of the south and east and made use of most valleys through the upland zones of the west and north, crossing through the Marches into Wales, the Peak District, the Pennines, and the Lake District in many places. These roads were, first and foremost, military infrastructure and were intentionally developed for the rapid deployment of troops, fast communication of information, and easy transportation of supplies (Haynes 2002; Bishop 2014; Orengo and Livarda 2016). However, in many cases, these roads probably formalized preexisting routes that have otherwise left no evidence (quite possibly because the Roman roads obliterated anything earlier), and thus give an idea of where earlier routes connecting, say, the North to the Midlands may well have run. Because of the topography of the upland zones, there are not many options available to either travellers or road builders, so this seems likely. These roads crossed 566 rivers. There are 199 records of Roman bridges in the EngLaId database, but only 58 river crossings have a bridge within 500 m and only 74 have a bridge within 1,500 m. Many bridges, therefore, fall outside these major river crossings identified using GIS, and many river crossings did not have a bridge at all, suggesting either that there are many more bridges to be discovered or that fording was a much more common practice than bridge building. Roman horse gear is widespread, with 2,289 find spots recorded in the PAS across the country (Figure  5.15b). The same caveat of the effect of scheduled monuments on metal detecting finds applies here, as almost the entire Hadrian’s Wall corridor is absent from this map, despite the fact that thousands of cavalry troops were stationed at forts like Stanwix

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Figure 5.17  Early medieval roads, river crossings, and bridges mapped against (a) early medieval movement model and (b) major river ways. Black lines represent Roman roads still in use as evidenced by place names studied by Cole (2013); red lines represent Roman roads probably still in use based on modern use of the same routes. On the maps, ‘crossings’ (points) represent the intersection points between rivers and routeways, whereas ‘bridges’ (hexagons) represent anything recorded in one of our input datasets as a bridge.

and Chesters throughout the imperial period. That said, the density of horse gear across much of the rest of the country is striking, particularly in the east and in Yorkshire. If finds from excavations could be included here, many more settlements across the country would similarly pop from the map.9 Finally, the early medieval period utilizes much of the Roman infrastructure and therefore did not need to build many new elements (Figure 5.17). Many, but not all, Roman roads stayed in use through this period (Cole 2013; Blair 2018). Cole estimates that some 8,200 km of Roman road stayed in use based on place name evidence. It seems probable, however, that the many modern roads that follow the exact course of Roman roads today were still in use in the early medieval period as well, though they may not have been noted in place names; thus, Figure 5.17 marks out these probable survivals in addition in red. These additions bring us back closer to the 12,000 km of Roman road networks, even if some went out of use (and also bring Cornwall back into the fold). It is also worth noting that the place name evidence used by Cole to reconstruct routes does not extend into Cornwall, thereby biasing her model to the availability of this evidence in the rest of England. Early medieval roads crossed 403 rivers across the country. In addition to a number of Roman bridges still in use, 91 new early medieval bridges are recorded. Only six fall within 500 m of an identified river crossing, and this only grows to eight if we increase the radius to 2,000 m. It is noteworthy from Figure 5.16 that many of these bridges do not fall directly on the Roman roads, and many are either adjacent or completely

9  Data in Allen et al. (2015) suggest c.11 per cent (399 out of 3,652) of excavated Roman rural sites featured horse equipment in their assemblage; this should be taken as a minimum estimate as they did not record full finds data for all sites. Data in Fulford et al. (2018) records horse equipment from 14 out of 23 excavated defended Roman small towns.

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separate. This is most notable near the Cornwall/Devon border, along the upper Severn, and within the Yorkshire Ouse basin. There are some 1,153 pieces of early medieval horse gear recorded in the database, with a predominantly eastern distribution (Figure 5.18). There is very little evidence in the north or the west, and the main clusters are found in the Midlands, Kent, and East Anglia. This distribution follows neither the main roads nor the major settlement distribution, and thus is difficult to interpret. To summarize, the archaeological data for land-based movement in the EngLaId database only allows specific kinds of investigations into the development of transportation infrastructure through time. Comparing the datasets we can see continuity and changes. There is an emphasis on long-distance movement in the prehistoric periods and it is pos­ sible that there was a better network of roads and paths from the Bronze Age onwards than we now have evidence of. Overall, there is considerable similarity in the areas of the country that were well connected and those which were not. There is, of course, a higher level of overall activity in the Roman period than in those before and after, with a greater

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172  English Landscapes and Identities variegation of the transport system. How far the Roman road network was a formalization of earl­ier routes is a question that requires more investigation.

Movement by River Movement by river is less straightforward to analyse. In the first place, it always requires a craft of some kind, whether a float, raft, or boat as outlined earlier. These first two cat­egor­ ies are less useful than the third, and therefore any kind of regular movement by water required a significant overhead investment in securing a craft for use. Once on the river, movement was not so straightforward as simply going with the stream or paddling against it. Rivers are incredibly diverse and variable in their flow regime, and different reaches behave very differently. Therefore, in order for river travel to be anything other than a ­haphazard and dangerous trip downstream, moving on water requires a very high degree of  knowledge and skill (Blair  2007; Rossiaud  2007; Schmidts  2011; Franconi  2016; Franconi 2017a). England is a wet country, with thousands of rivers flowing across the landscape (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of their morphology). One was never too far from a river, and many of these were indeed navigable in some way. Navigability is difficult to define, because it depends on numerous qualities of both the river and the vessel in use. For example, the ability to navigate a canoe on a river is not the same as being able to navigate a 100-tonne barge, and different reaches of a river provided different navigational possibilities based on channel width and depth, stream velocity, and the presence of obstacles such as overgrowth, boulders, rapids, and waterfalls. Navigability is therefore a mutable concept that relies on very specific circumstances of landscape and technology that cannot easily be modelled on a broad scale. The means of navigation are also not straightforward and are directly tied to techno­ logic­al developments in ship design, propulsion method, and riverbank infrastructure. The tendency for English rivers to flood in winter and spring and then drop in summer and autumn means that these seasons would need to be carefully negotiated based on the size of ship and cargo. Langdon (1993: 6) has argued that the Thames was most efficiently used in winter, precisely when travel by road was made more difficult by inclement weather. In addition, since many rivers of England empty into tidal estuaries, knowledge of the tides and especially tidal bores (common particularly in the northwest, see Edmonds 2007: 23) was crucial for navigating the lower reaches of English rivers. The importance of specialized knowledge of river systems is evident in the scant details preserved about a unit of bargemen from the Tigris River (numeri barcariorum Tigrisiensium) at South Shields on Hadrian’s Wall in the late fourth or early fifth century ad (Notitia Dignitatum xl.22), or a similar organization of lightermen and watermen on the Thames at London from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. For the Roman period, extensive evidence of fluvial shipping companies exists from numerous provinces of the empire, especially Gaul (Schmidts 2011). These groups were responsible for the navigation of these river systems and ensured the safe delivery of cargo and, if the early modern ex­ample of the guild of lightermen from London is indicative, went through significant training to be trusted with such a task. There is significant difference in riverine travel with or against the current. Downstream movement is relatively easy, and on the major rivers of Europe distances of 80 km a day were not unheard of with sailed or oared vessels. Travel upstream was markedly slower,

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Movement  173 especially if a vessel relied on towing rather than rowing. A barge being hauled by either animals or people on the riverbank could make between 6 and 10 km a day, depending on the velocity of the current (Franconi 2016), and a rowed boat may make as much as 20 km on a slow-moving river (Franconi 2014). If a boat needed to be hauled upstream, it required the maintenance of some kind of towpath, especially if animals were used. Obstructions to this towpath would pose a serious problem for both the haulers and the ship. The difficulties of towing heavy cargo ships upstream is well illustrated by an account of the Thames in the eighteenth century when a team of up to 12 horses was required to haul a 70-tonne barge from Stadbury to Lechlade, a distance of some 70 miles in perhaps as many as 10 days (Thacker 1914: 178–9). It is probably due to these complexities of water transport that scholarship is immensely divided over how important riverine transport was in England’s past. For prehistory, Sherratt (1996: 211) has claimed that ‘before the coming of railways, rivers were the principal means of transporting goods’, and attributed the amount of prehistoric evidence in Wessex to its location near the headwaters of the Wiltshire Avon and the Thames, in add­ ition to access to the Severn, concluding that ‘prehistoric geography is a fluvial geography’ (1996: 226). If this is true, then it is at odds with the circumspect way that Booth et al. (2007: 317) assess the use of the Thames in the Roman period, citing a lack of evidence upstream of London for navigation or transport. No remains have been found, for example, at the Roman town of Dorchester on Thames of anything resembling a harbour, despite its location on the north bank of the river. However, remains interpreted as harbour structures have been found on the River Churn at Cirencester (Gloucestershire HER UID 134653) and others on the Thames at Cricklade (Radford 1972) suggest that this view needs reassessing. Blair (2007) explores the extensive, mainly documentary, evidence for river- and canalborne trade in early medieval and medieval England, arguing that rivers became more important than the Roman road network for long-distance movement (2007: 17). Blair’s illustration of the relative importance of waterways (which he himself describes ‘perhaps rash, certainly broad-brush, and speculative’ (2007: 17)) highlights the impressionistic importance of the Thames, Severn, Great Ouse, and Humber system in the centuries following the Roman period (Figure 5.19). River-borne transport is difficult to discuss without written evidence. Few wrecks have been found and we have little idea of cargos, both due to the fact that riverine wrecks were easier to recover and salvage than ships lost at sea. Our evidence is strongly weighted towards later periods where either written records from within England or comparative evidence from other countries in northern Europe (especially toll records) can fill in archaeological lacunae.

EngLaId Evidence These caveats to the study of river trade aside, the EngLaId database is able to map the distribution of both watercraft and harbour structures for our time periods, indicating the distribution of evidence for riverine transport. The prehistoric period presents 13 ‘port’ structures, of which four are Bronze Age, eight are Iron Age, and one is prehistoric. These installations cluster along the Thames and its estuary, along the southern coast, and in Lincolnshire. These ports are clearly both riverine and coastal, and show evidence of the development of maritime connections from an early date.

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Figure 5.19  Schematic model of water transport in early medieval England with impressionistic indications of relative traffic levels and direction of travel (adapted from Blair 2007: Figure 5).

Prehistoric watercraft are more numerous, with 34 Bronze Age vessels, 24 Iron Age boats, and 15 prehistoric examples. These have a much wider distribution along the waterways of England, with some known from all parts of the country. Clusters are especially evident in the Thames basin, around the Humber Estuary, and around the rivers that flow into the Wash (Figure 5.20). The Roman period has evidence of 105 ports located on both rivers and the coastline. The Thames is particularly developed, as is the Humber Estuary. The southern coast has a large number of port sites, a testimony to the importance of links with Europe, especially in Kent where the first Roman contact occurred (see Frere and Fulford 2001; Sauer 2002 on the Roman invasion). The Kentish coast up to the Thames estuary and to London remained Roman Britain’s major connection to the continent, linking across the channel to Boulognesur-Mer in France, but also to the mouths of the Rhine and Seine with the connections provided further inland (Morris 2010). These ports were developed along similar lines to sites seen elsewhere in Europe, with London building extensive docks and quays to accommodate a high volume of trade (Milne 1985; Brigham and Hillam 1990; Milne et al. 1997).

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Only 34 ships survive from Roman England, mainly located within the Thames basin and along the southern coast, but some also within the Severn and Mersey basins. The most spectacular remains come from Blackfriars in London, where the Blackfriars I ship was found in 1962 during the construction of embankments along the Thames (Figure 5.21). The early medieval period has 50 new harbour structures, again clustered along the southern coast and the southwest, but also along the eastern coast as well. Several river ports developed along the River Cam at Burwell and Cambridge and along the Great Ouse at Clapham. London and the Lower Thames continue to be important foci of activity, while the Severn, outside of the granting of market and port rights to Evesham from ad 1055, does not preserve significant evidence. A total of 52 early medieval ships are known, and these are notably clustered on the southern and eastern coasts. Not all of these are preserved as shipwrecks, as 19 of our records are actually for ship burials in the style of Sutton Hoo, dating from the sixth to ninth centuries. A higher percentage of the vessels are seagoing during the early medieval than in other periods, giving strong evidence of the development of the North Sea system (Van de Noort  2011b) and the involvement of Saxon, Danish, and Norse seafaring

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traditions in this period. There are not significant numbers of early medieval shipwrecks elsewhere in England; however, this should not be taken as evidence of a lack of movement by water. Shipwrecks are, of course, evidence of failed transportation, and their absence in the archaeological record may well indicate highly successful shipping as opposed to a lack thereof. This is true for all periods discussed here, but is particularly salient in light of the written sources discussed by Blair (2007) and Langdon (1993) that show significant levels of inland water transport in the early medieval period (Figure 5.22). The archaeological evidence of movement by water is difficult to interpret due to its inconsistent preservation in the archaeological record. It is clear that there was movement by water in all periods, both overseas and on inland waterways. We see significant investment in the engineering of inland waterways only from the Roman period onwards, but this might be due to the more substantial nature of the evidence. Significant written evidence of waterborne movement really only comes from the early medieval period. Comparative evidence for the Roman period from continental Europe shows that England saw relatively low levels of investment in hydrological engineering (see papers in Franconi  2017a), which is in direct contrast to the extensive investment in road

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infrastructure seen in the new province (Margary 1973; see Laurence (1999) for discussion of roads elsewhere in the empire). Within this boom of infrastructural development under the Romans, there are still un­even experiences across the country. The close analysis of interaction with the Thames and Eden Rivers discussed in Chapter  4 demonstrated that there were significant differences in the way that Roman settlements interacted with each river system. The Thames was densely settled and evidence points to significant use of the river for transportation, supported not only by physical remains of riverside infrastructure, but also by the amount of heavy goods like stone, brick, and tile that must have been shipped along its course. The Eden, on the other hand, was generally ignored: settlements were located away from its banks and the road network avoided closely following the river. These differences became even starker in the early medieval period, where the Thames remained an important transport corridor in the south, but the Eden showed little activity. The analysis of remains in this chapter further supports this division: the Thames repeatedly shows more evidence of riverine transportation than any other basin in the country.

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178  English Landscapes and Identities The comparison between the Thames and Eden is intentionally contrasting, but it helps emphasize an important point: we cannot infer that all rivers in England were important transport corridors in all periods just because the Thames was. Expanding further, we must be very careful not to apply our own modern impression of river navigation back into the past. A millennium of significant hydrological engineering, especially canal construction, has irrevocably changed the appearance of British rivers, and it is important to assess archaeological and historical data in their own historically appropriate context. Thus while rivers are often expected to serve as attractive and efficient transportation routes, the reality is that they very often did not, and the evidence discussed in this section supports the idea that while many rivers in England could have been used for transportation (and peri­od­ic­ al­ly were), they were not necessarily the dominant mode of movement in any of our time periods.

Place Name Evidence Considering the relative dearth of archaeological evidence relating to movement, especially by river, it is worth noting that from the early medieval period onwards features such as roads, bridges, and fords were preserved in Old English place names. We collected and analysed the place name evidence for seven different EngLaId case studies (Chapter  8): Devon, the East of England Transect, Humber, the Isle of Wight, Kent, the Lea Valley, and the Marches. Together, these case studies preserve 1,738 place names recorded as Domesday estates (sourced from Palmer 2010), indicating that these were probably important settlements in the eleventh century. We separated out place names that specifically related to elements of road and river transportation. A total of 113 place names from these case studies related to roads, while 323 related to waterways. Table  5.1 breaks these place names down by both general and specific categories, particularly emphasizing the diversity in water-related infrastructure such as fords, ferries, and bridges. The road category was formed by combining references to ‘street’, ‘ford’, ‘bridge’, ‘ferry’, and references to wagons. The water category was formed by combining references to ‘sea’, ‘estuary’, ‘river’, ‘spring’, ‘stream’, ‘pool’, ‘ditch’, specific names of rivers or attributes of rivers (example: ‘the loud one’), ‘ford’, ‘bridge’, and ‘ferry’. There is clearly overlap between the two datasets, especially for the spots where roads would cross over rivers (bridges, fords, ferries); this overlap is intentional and our figures here are meant to be inclusive rather than divisive. These place names are shown by category in Figure 5.23.

Table 5.1  Place names relating to transportation infrastructure from seven case studies Case study

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180  English Landscapes and Identities This selection of data cannot be immediately generalized nationally, but it does tell us something about naming patterns in the specific case studies. In these seven regions, it is clear that place names preserve more evidence for water features than those associated with roads. It is not clear, however, that these directly relate to transportation or movement, but rather mark out certain characterizing features of a place. This relationship between aquatic landscape features and the conception of place shows many similarities to the evidence preserved in charter boundaries, discussed in Chapter 8, and supports the conclusion that water was a key topographic feature in early medieval England. A consideration of Romano-British place names shows that this is not an isolated or period-specific tendency, but rather highlights the longevity of a habit of naming places after local water features that goes back at least to the Iron Age (see Rivet and Smith 1979). In the Marches, many place names relate to tributaries of the river Severn, which was a defining landscape feature of this case study. In the Devon case study, many place names are related to the numerous streams that flow to the southeast out of Dartmoor to the southern coast. It is notable that the larger rivers of eastern England do not, in these case studies at least, preserve as many instances of places named after specific rivers in Domesday Book, suggesting there are local preferences at play to some degree. Large rivers, like the Thames or Trent, may have in fact been too large to associate directly with individual places. Instead, we see that the smaller rivers and tributaries of the west feature more prominently, while in the east watery features like springs, streams, and fords are more prominent. The evidence for road-based movement preserved in names of roads, bridges, fords, and ferries are more readily relatable to the questions at hand. The evidence from Kent, the Lea Valley, the East of England, and the Marches corresponds well to the known network of early medieval roads discussed earlier, and many of these places that maintained names related to roads were located directly on the course of major Roman roads that continued in use. The Humber, Isle of Wight, and Devon, however, preserve a number of place names related to roads that do not fall neatly onto a known road network, and therefore go above and beyond the archaeological evidence of road networks and suggest lesser-known, local roads and paths. Evidence of fords is much more numerous in these case studies through place names than any other sort of data, especially considering the very spotty mention of fords in the EngLaId database as highlighted earlier. The place name evidence for fords is much more evenly distributed through these case studies, suggesting, as we might expect, that this was a very common means of river crossing and was important enough to attach to specific settlements. The distribution of bridge place names shows a similar pattern, as these sites augment the records of the database and make clear that the archaeological traces of early medieval bridges do not tell the entire story (Figure 5.24). Thus, place name evidence complements the archaeological material discussed earlier and, in most cases, increases the number of sites that had some role in the maintenance and functioning of the national transportation network in the early medieval period. Place names indicate a cognitive geography and specifically how the means of moving round the landscape, or indeed barriers to movement across major rivers, may have influenced ­peoples’ constructions of their world. The associations attached to water had a number of dimensions, some more practical and others less so, from the Roman and early medieval periods, but also earlier. Roads and trackways were important, but may have held less of a cognitive load. We feel there is considerable potential in the methods we have used here, linking place name evidence and archaeological information. A wider analysis would allow us to see trends across England, but also both regional differences and contrasts over time.

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Figure 5.24  Comparisons between place name evidence and EngLaId data for (a) rivers, (b) roads, (c) fords, and (d) bridges.

Discussion Movement is only partly about the tyranny of distance and the friction created for t­ ravellers by various sorts of land and water. It also brings in the cultural values attached to time and space generally and to water, land, and routeways more particularly. Water and land held cosmological values. Human bodies were regularly deposited in them in all periods, as well as a range of materials from stone to metal and probably beyond. In Chapter 7 we will see that directions were important in laying out fields, with some continuity between the middle Bronze Age and the Roman period. Cosmologically charged directions might also have been important to travellers too. The broad history of movement in Britain gradually shifted from travel across an unenclosed landscape in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age to the first enclosed landscapes in the middle Bronze Age with the earliest archaeological evidence of trackways. There was a new pulse of archaeologically visible enclosure in the late Iron Age when trackways also proliferated, becoming formalized in the Roman period, when also new centres of gravity emerged, in the form of towns. How far the road network of the Roman period developed

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182  English Landscapes and Identities on older routeways is a question of considerable interest, but one that is hard to answer. The old routes on ridgeways which existed from the Iron Age period, if not before, carry on into the present, but from the Roman period onwards they were not incorporated into built road structure, remaining as rural trackways. The cellularization of the Anglo-Saxon landscape through parishes and nucleated villages created a new structure to the landscape, reinforced by ridge and furrow with novel dominant directions (Chapter 7). However, the Roman roads still created arterial routes through the landscape, so that maybe the ghost of prehistoric movement still animated this novel early medieval landscape. Long-distance movement must have taken people across territory foreign to them, so that the history of travel is also the history of hospitality (or lack thereof). We know of Roman mansios and roadside settlements, but whether there were any formalized means of accommodating travellers in earlier times we do not know and possibly people were given the status of guests within a domestic setting. One slightly surprising result of our modelling is the broad continuity not just in the relative costs of travel from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period, but also in the routeways that emerged to facilitate movement (Figures 5.6–5.9). Means of overcoming the relative difficulties of movement in the west, northwest, and to a lesser extent the southwest were most developed in the Roman period (Figure 5.8) when many more people and things moved through a greater infrastructure of travel. However, a precursor of the Roman system can be seen in the Iron Age (Figure 5.7), particularly the routes from London up through the south Midlands, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and into Yorkshire. There is indeed a broad comparability between the Iron Age and early medieval pattern, once the exaggerated connections of the Roman period had died away. The Romans have been described as ‘hodological’, loving roads and paths, but even in this period the mechanics of travel are debated. The Peutinger Map and Antonine Itineraries (Figure 5.12) describe and depict movement from one centre to another, which reflects the experience of travel, rather than a more Cartesian model of space on a scaled map, for which there is currently no evidence (Laurence 2001). There is also a discussion as to whether mobility created towns or towns created mobility and here our broad model of travel costs and the routes which emerge to overcome these will be of use, in tandem with the archaeological evidence of routes and roads. Our approach has been holistic, only partly because the evidence for movement needs work to extract from the information we have. It is necessary to combine a consideration of land- and water-based travel, as well as to think about how the two intersect or one hinders the other. It is also necessary to think about the manner in which the process of enclosure influenced routeways, the latter becoming more defined as enclosure increased. Also, of considerable interest is the history of travel. From the Roman period onwards, people travelled partly for reasons we understand—war, trade, pilgrimage, visiting relatives, or at the behest of officialdom. Bronze Age travel clearly did not have all of these motives, or not in the same cultural mix. Perhaps what we now label pilgrimage, travel for sacred or cosmological reasons, was more of a motive for movement in prehistoric periods. This would explain why the first constructed trackways in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, preserved only in wetlands (and thus with clear taphonomic implications regarding unusually rich preservation), are often associated with depositions of bronze, human body parts, and animals. Boats deliberately sunk in rivers during the Bronze Age may also indicate actions beyond the pragmatic. In sum, it is possible that there is considerable continuity in routeways through the whole of the time period we are interested in, but also real changes in why people passed along them and what they did as they moved. It is this combination of continuity and difference that makes the history of travel and movement so interesting.

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6

Substances and Cycles Sarah Mallet and Dan Stansbie

When considering landscape and identity, the growing and consumption of food are crucial. We are what we eat. Conversely, the plants and animals that become our food are the landscape in new forms. The growing, preparation, and consumption of food are all central to practices of identity, ways to make obvious self and other. This chapter presents the first consideration of the direct evidence for food on a large scale (bones, charred plant remains, and pots), but also the influence of diet on human bone chemistry through isotopes, looking also at the isotopic values of animals and plants. We will use a very considerable amount of information on animal bones, charred plant remains, and pottery from a range of sites in various parts of the Thames Valley and Kent (deriving from Stansbie 2016), complemented by the first England-wide survey of isotopes deriving from animals and humans (deriving from Mallet  2018). The evidence from bones and seeds indicates that there were varied food cultures even in different parts of the Thames Valley. These, in turn, indicate probable cultural differences, given the centrality of food to many areas of life. Isotopes need to be thought about in temporal terms, as people are part of broader cycles of carbon and nitrogen through local ecologies. In thinking about such cycles we will link back to discussions of the house–midden–pit cycle in Chapter 3 and broad ecological changes through clearance and other human influences discussed in Chapter  4. In both cases the ecologies in which people lived were in complex mutual interaction with the people themselves. In this project as a whole we have been influenced by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), as well as the work of Manuel De Landa, who takes inspiration from them. We make most explicit use of a broadly Deleuzian framework in this chapter—see Harris and Cipolla (2017) for a discussion of Deleuze, De Landa, and archaeology. The issue here, as for the project as a whole, is how to combine elements such as climate, soils, and topography with thoughts on the patterns of human work needed to produce food or sociability that might derive from its consumption. In a variety of works, Deleuze and Guattari refused to make any distinction between what has been called nature and that delimited as culture. Here we concentrate on the mineral elements of human life, looking at the bones of humans and animals, either in terms of the chemistry or of how far the proportions of different species tell us about what was grown and eaten. The same is also true of both the deposition of charred plant remains and their chemistry (this last is a relatively new field). The combinations of temper and clay that we call pottery are also of interest, as the changing proportions of various forms may tell us about how food was prepared and then consumed. We start from the physical aspects of past life and attempt to think in more cultural terms. Deleuze and Guattari developed their own sets of terminology and one important phrase is the Body without Organs (BwO) to indicate the combination

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Sarah Mallet and Dan Stansbie. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0006

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184  English Landscapes and Identities of the organic and inorganic that make up the flow of life. For the purposes of analysis they also came up with the term the abstract machine, which could look at various combinations of forces, flows, and materials that make up delimitable aspects of the world, such as an agricultural system or a city, both of interest here. We will use such terms as a spur to our thought, where we are interested in the flows of energy and matter through various systems and the varying modes of dynamism these take on. Focusing on isotopes is important here. There has been a shift in the past few years in archaeology from seeing a fairly straightforward relation between what people ate and the chemistry of their body tissues, primarily bones and teeth. The extent to which particular isotopes of nitrogen and carbon are taken up by the human body can only be understood by looking at their flows through ecosystems as a whole, of which humans are but a part. Much more emphasis is put now on the combined analysis of plants, animal, and human bones as this will give a more complex, dynamical picture of ecosystems, or at least socalled food webs. This requires more analysis and is more complicated to model, but will allow a much fuller and sophisticated understanding of a mass of relationships, including importantly climate and soil. Over the timescales we are interested in, humans have influenced the soil chemistry and possibly also the climate (Chapter 4). Consequently there are no factors that are just causes without being also effects, with a series of feedback loops operating between all important elements of the landscapes. Excitingly from our point of view, long-term human effects on things like soil can be detected in our data in ways which are compelling, but also require further analysis. Before considering the data, let us look a little more at the theoretical underpinnings of this work, which will inform our narrative.

A Theoretical Model of Food Production and Consumption Any intellectual project that aspires to do more than describe aspects of the empirical world needs a theoretical framework and in the project as a whole we are trying to work across the traditional divide between the social and natural worlds. In doing so we draw on the work of three philosophers (Deleuze and Guattari, and De Landa) whose work itself is an empirical/theoretical attempt to bridge this divide. The following section attempts a brief summary of their work. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) were interested in the flows of energies and materials that conjoined in the world and the nature of differentiation into various forms and types. They provide four key concepts (‘strata’, ‘deterritorialization’, ‘reterritorialization’, and the ‘abstract machine’), which are taken up by De Landa. Strata are relatively stable assemblages of material, which constitute substantive elements of reality; they always articulate with other strata. Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 553) distinguish three major strata: the physio-chemical, the organic, and the anthropomorphic. Deterritorialization is the process by which strata are dissolved, with their constituent elements becoming separated and relatively free (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 559). ­ Reterritorialization is the process by which these relatively free elements are reincorporated into new strata (ibid.). Flows of matter and energy through an ecosystem are manifested as plants and animals transformed into foodstuffs and incorporated in human bodies (De Landa 1997: 104): De Landa (1997) argues that food and the circulation of ‘flesh’ in food chains can be seen as a flow of organic materials between the organic stratum on the one hand and the anthropomorphic stratum on the other. The food chain could then be viewed in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology as a ‘machinic-assemblage’ deterritorializing plants and animals on the organic stratum, and reterritorializing them on the anthropomorphic

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Substances and Cycles  185 stratum. In this way, the food chain can be said to be articulating the two strata. De Landa has attempted to understand the history of Europe from ad 1000 to ad 2000, including ‘biological history’ (De Landa 1997). Medieval cities in De Landa’s view are a particular type of ‘machinic assemblage’ situated on the interface between the organic and the an­thropo­morph­ic strata; they can be seen as islands in an ecosystem, at the centre of food webs, and using domesticated animals as biomass convertors in order to transform food webs into food pyramids. De Landa elaborates a vision of a simultaneously social and biological history incorporating both human and non-human actors in complex non-linear systems. Clearly the work of the philosophers cited above should be taken as a stimulus to thought, rather than the origin of a rigid scheme to be imposed onto archaeological data. As has been widely observed the nature of archaeological evidence is distinctive and its material qualities often make theories derived from other social scientific disciplines difficult to apply (Lucas 2012). From c.1500 bc until c.ad 1086 in England, food production and consumption can be seen as a series of regional assemblages linking landscapes, field systems, crops, animals, humans, and ceramics and expressing the same ‘engineering diagram’ in De Landa’s (1997) terminology. These food production and consumption machinic assemblages should be conceived as interlinked, capable of transferring materials from one to the other, and operating on a series of scales. These complex, non-linear systems displayed patterns of a cyclical nature, at times expressing relations of division and ranking in landscape and human communities, as in the late Iron Age–Roman period and at others expressing relations of solidarity, as in the early and middle Iron Age. These complex systems also displayed regional effects, which both persist and shift over time.

Our Evidence and Analyses Our evidence takes two forms: first, direct evidence of production and consumption in the form of plants, animals, and pottery which can inform on variability over time and space in the sources of food and indications of how it was consumed; secondly, indirect evidence from the chemical analysis of animals and people which can tell us about their place in foodwebs and the nature of changes in these webs over time. When analysing isotopes we have attempted to pull together all the isotopic analyses carried out for our periods across England. There is such a huge mass of evidence for bones, seeds, and pottery that some synthesis was only possible on a regional scale. The first set of evidence is analysed on the assumption that the relative abundance of various species will indicate their importance in the agricultural and dietary systems of the time. Although there are many taphonomic complexities involved in taking this assumption too literally (and we will deal with some of these here), we work from a similar premise. Isotopes need a little more explanation. An ecosystem can be understood as a series of flows of chemicals through it, influenced by a whole range of biochemical processes. One way of charting such flows is through measures of the amounts of important stable isotopes, such as 15N and 13C, which inform on the nitrogen and carbon cycle respectively, as these move between the atmospheric, the marine, and the terrestrial systems. The ecosystem can be divided into a series of trophic levels, each made up of organisms of a similar function, from plants to herbivores, to omnivores and then carnivores, where humans are one of the omnivores. Nitrogen, or more specifically the heavier isotope 15N, shows at which trophic level an individual is feeding, generally indicating the balance of plant or animal food or the amounts of leguminous plants. Isotopes are calculated as ratios against a standard and are

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186  English Landscapes and Identities given as parts per thousand (permil, represented by the symbol ‰). It is reckoned generally that there is a shift of 2–3‰ of nitrogen with each trophic level from soil to plants to ­herbivores (Hedges and Reynard 2007). More recently it has been realized that the levels of nitrogen in the soil vary greatly from one place to another, influenced by a range of en­vir­ on­men­tal factors and human interventions, such as manuring. These inputs of nitrogen can be transferred to plants—so that analyses of charred grains may indicate manuring regimes (Bogaard et al. 2013)—and then further up the food chain as the plants are consumed by people or animals, so that manuring regimes show up in shadowy chemical form in human tissues. Carbon indicates the photosynthetic pathways of plant foods eaten or the amount of seafood in a diet. A high nitrogen and low carbon signal in the bone indicates a diet of meat and grain; that of high nitrogen and high carbon indicates a diet rich in fish and shellfish (Richards and Hedges  2003). Collagen, which is the main structural protein of bone, is the chief source of isotopic evidence from human or animal skeletons. Collagen remodels regularly so that it is thought that bone mainly gives an estimate of diet over the last 10 years of a person’s or animal’s life. Teeth are laid down in adolescence, so that isotopes in dentine will provide a dietary signal from that stage of life, which can be compared with the signal from bone in mature adults to look at dietary change. Collagen turnover rates, especially in animals, are poorly understood. It is generally thought that the shorter the life span of the species, the quicker the turnover. Isotope studies are changing rapidly. It is common to use animal species as a baseline from which to calibrate for local variations in carbon and nitrogen cycles when looking at data from humans (see, for example, Casey and Post  2011) and this is what we do here. However, ultimately we need to look at the full combination of plant, animal, and human isotopes, which will allow for an holistic understanding of ecological relations (although few regions have isotopic data for plants and animals and people as yet), because we acknowledge that the processes determining isotopic signatures are a lot more dynamic than most previous models suggest. Indeed, soil chemistry is becoming seen as a vital influence and the soil itself is obviously changed by people, deliberately or inadvertently. Instead of considering a linear relationship between plants, herbivores, and humans, it may be more accurate to think of a complex nexus that can be both symbiotic—where all three elements are interconnected—and exclusive—where two of the elements are linked but not the third one, as shown in Figure 6.1. All of these relationships affect the isotopic values at each level of the process. The case is made here that plants are at the centre of this network, influenced by soil chemistry, wetness, and heat, as well as the influence of herbivores and humans. Rather than identifying stable baselines, we are in fact attempting to understand dynamic changes in which humans were a key element. As it happens, this combination of dynamic cultural factors and changing ecosystems fits neatly with the ideas of Deleuze, Guattari, and De Landa. The data we consider are extensive by previous standards. Two databases were constructed. One was a database constructed for the ceramics, animal bones, and charred plant elements of the project. This comprises 1,588,338 records, including information on 582 sites, 145,302 contexts, 2,192,345 sherds of pottery, 503,507 animal bones, and 20,519 en­vir­ on­men­tal samples. Because of the large amount of information we considered a relatively small area within England, made up of a transect along the Thames Valley and then in a dog-leg down the route of the High-Speed 1 railway in Kent. The other second database is a compilation of isotopic evidence including much of the published and unpublished data from across England as a whole. We had hoped this would cover the full temporal range of

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Substances and Cycles  187 ATMOSPHERE

Rainfall Drought

Light Temperature

ISOTOPIC SIGNATURES DETERMINED BY Environmental factors Agricultural processes Diet

Figure 6.1  Proposed model of dynamic isotopic processes (illustration by Zoé Mallet).

the EngLaId project, but in the event it turned out that there were very few samples prior to the Iron Age. Nevertheless, this represents the compilation of all English isotopic data between the Iron Age and the early medieval period. This dataset had not previously been systematically compiled and compared, raising a number of questions as to how isotopic data are produced and how data from different sources can be compared. Therefore, this work can be understood as a review of the state of isotopic research in British archaeology. There are 3,629 isotopic values used here, both human (n = 2,127) and animals (n = 1,502). The samples come from 96 different sites. The dataset is roughly balanced between unpublished (n = 1,619) and published (n = 2,010). More detail on the bones, charred plant remains, and pots can be gained from Stansbie (2016), where the Deleuzian framework is also worked out, and on the isotopes in Mallet (2018). As it happens, the information on isotopes has a broader geographical range, whereas that on plants, animals, and pots has a longer temporal scope.

Modelling Food Production and Consumption: Three Case Studies We first consider the interlocking relationships between plants, animals, and pottery through three case studies located in the Upper Thames Valley, the Middle and Lower Thames Valley, and the route of the so-called High Speed 1 railway linking London and the Channel Tunnel in Kent (Figure 6.2). This study involves considering two sets of past human practices that were intimately bound together: the growing and eating of cereals, and animal husbandry for meat or milk consumption. They stand apart to a degree from pottery that provided a set of containers for cooking and eating which followed its own trajectory. Understanding the growing of crops is complex, as a number of species were grown in combination, and samples are still relatively few despite 20 years of sampling and flotation;

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188  English Landscapes and Identities 450000

500000

550000

600000 300000

300000

400000

Upper Thames Valley sites HS1 sites

250000

250000

MOLA sites

200000

200000

Upper Thames Valley

150000

High Speed 1

100000

100000

150000

Middle/Lower Thames Valley

0 400000

450000

500000

550000

20

40

60 km

600000

Figure 6.2  The location of the case study areas used in the study of plants, animals, and pottery.

taphonomic problems are also considerable, as grain is only preserved when waterlogged or charred: as such, data were analysed on a presence/absence basis per site (‘ubiquity’). However, there were regional differences in cereal cultivation between all three case study areas, as well as continuity and change across time (Figure 6.3). The differences between regions in the plants grown are subtle and in reality a large number of plant species were probably grown and used, unlike the mono-cropping of much modern farming. In summary, the major trends detected are as follows. In the Upper Thames Valley late prehistoric sites see a preponderance of barley, with wheat (most probably spelt); these ratios are reversed in the late Iron Age and Roman periods, with spelt more common than barley and in the early medieval period free-threshing wheat is most common, followed by barley oats and rye. In the Middle and Lower Thames in later prehistory wheat (both spelt and emmer) predominates over barley; in the late Iron Age and Roman periods wheat (probably spelt) is most common and then oats, barley, and emmer wheat; in the early medieval period oats are most common, with bread wheat and rye, but barley is found in small amounts. Finally in Kent in late prehistory oats and then wheat (predominantly emmer) are most

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Other barley

Hulled barley

Indeterminate wheat

Free threshing wheat

Emmer or Spelt wheat

Einkhorn wheat

Spelt wheat

Emmer wheat

Barleys

Wheats

Oats

Rye

Substances and Cycles  189

N = 48 Upper Thames Valley

N = 90

N = 29

N = 29

Middle/Lower Thames Valley

N = 3044 N = 514

N = 65

Kent

N = 21 N=2

Later prehistoric Presence Absence Late Iron Age-Roman Presence Absence Early medieval Presence Absence

Figure 6.3  The frequency of cereal species by period and case study area.

common, with barley and rye as a minor crop; in the late Iron Age and Roman periods wheat ­predominates (emmer and some spelt) and then barley; in the early medieval period there are too few data to come to any conclusions. The greatest difference between regions was found in the later prehistoric period and the greatest similarities in the Roman period. Given the paucity of much of the early medieval charred grain data a regional comparison of early medieval cereal grain cultivation in all three case study areas is not very reliable. Broad continuities between later prehistory and the late Iron Age–Roman period can be seen and the most profound change occurs in the early medieval period, a change that is backed up by other recent archaeobotanical work on the period (McKerracher 2016, 2018). This may well be because of a change in field type, with the open fields starting in the early medieval period, as we shall consider in more detail in Chapter 7. The differences between the Upper Thames Valley and the other two regions in terms of barley-to-wheat ratios in later prehistory do not seem to be influenced straightforwardly by environment, as although the soils of the Thames gravel terraces may have been more suited to barley and the North Downs to wheat (Rippon et al. 2015) this cannot explain the Middle–Lower Thames Valley pattern, especially given that the majority of those sites were situated on the gravel terraces rather than the London clay (Figure 6.2; see Chapter 4). Other differences, for example in the occurrence of emmer wheat and oats between the Middle–Lower Thames Valley and Kent regions on the one hand and the Upper Thames Valley on the other, may have been more influenced by culinary practices than by soils. The contrast in the ubiquity of oats between the Thames Valley and the Kent region may be interpreted as supporting Champion’s (2011, 2014) argument that porridge or potage was an element of cuisine in the southeast, as the common oat is a grain that lends itself to wet

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190  English Landscapes and Identities foods, perhaps more than emmer wheat. Spelt, emmer, and bread wheat are suited to making bread, with barley and rye also useful for beer brewing. The shift towards more clearly wheat-dominated cereal regimes in all three regions in the late Iron Age–Roman period indicates an alignment of the economic regimes of the three regions around a set of staple crops, possibly centred on bread consumption, with spelt wheat becoming more important in Kent and in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley. However, subtle regional differences and temporal continuities persisted, with the amounts of emmer wheat and oats continuing to be slightly lower in the Upper Thames Valley than in Kent and lesser levels of emmer wheat persisting in the Thames Valley generally. One possible way of interpreting these late Iron Age–Roman changes to cereal cultivation regimes is as an expansion of later prehistoric Middle–Lower Thames Valley practices to the other two regions via the mechanism of the expanding Roman economic system; in turn, the expansion of Roman economic practices can be seen as the expansion and in­tensi­ fi­ca­tion of later prehistoric regionally specific practices. Although a regional comparison of cereal cultivation is not possible for the early medi­ eval period for all three case study areas, questions of temporal continuity and regional difference can be addressed using the Middle–Lower Thames Valley and the early and middle Saxon settlement of Yarnton as a proxy for the Upper Thames Valley. In many ways the early medieval period sees the most dramatic changes in cereal cultivation, with large increases in some species, both at Yarnton and in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley. In both case studies although the occurrence of free-threshing or bread or club wheat rose sharply in the early medieval period it was already present in the Roman period, suggesting that changes in agrarian regimes arose from the emphasis of elements that were already present, but playing a minor role. The changes seen in the cultivation of rye, oats, and bread wheat in this period have been associated with the shift to an Anglo-Saxon food culture, paralleling wider shifts in the use of certain animal species (see section ‘Animal Husbandry and Meat Consumption’) and in material culture and architecture more generally (Hamerow 2012). These changes cannot be explained by variations in soil type and therefore must be related to shifts in humanly influenced agricultural and urban systems, which together with the soils and other environmentally influenced systems constituted a series of regional production/consumption systems. A decline in surplus production engendered by the transformation of the Roman economic systems (Faulkner 2001: 137–49) might account for the changes, at least partially, to longer-term processes and even continuities. Indeed, Hamerow (2012) links continuity in food and agricultural systems in the fifth to ninth centuries to continuity in some segments of the population, contrasting with changes in ma­ter­ ial culture and architecture which may have been introduced by less numerous immigrant groups (ibid. 147). In one respect, however, such continuities are not substantiated by the results of this chapter. Hamerow (2012), following Banham (1990), argues that bread wheat predominated over rye in English contexts and that this contrasts with the pattern elsewhere in Northern Europe (Hamerow 2012: 149). However, the results discussed above support those of McKerracher (2016) which call this pattern into question. The analysis of cereal cultivation carried out for this project has shown regional differences in preferred species that were maintained over the long term. In later prehistory there was an east–west division which manifested itself in stronger preference for emmer wheat in Kent, and which contrasted with a stronger preference for spelt wheat in the Upper and Middle Thames Valleys. This division continued in a diluted form into the Roman period. In the early medieval period there were more significant changes in terms of species

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Substances and Cycles  191 preference with an increase in the cultivation/consumption of bread wheat, rye, and barley, although these changes did not become well established until the later part of the early medieval period and it is clear that all of these newly popular species had been present since later prehistory.

Isotopic Analyses of Grains The chemical compositions of grain tell a story of the soils in which they were grown, which may provide indications of where they were grown and whether the soil had been modified through manuring or other means. Isotopic analyses of grain have been conducted at only one site for the periods investigated by the EngLaId project. Thirty-four samples of barley and bread wheat were taken from the Ceramic Phases 3 and 7 of Danebury hillfort (on the Wessex chalk, south of the Upper Thames Valley), corresponding roughly to the early and late Iron Ages (Lightfoot and Stevens  2012; revised chronology from Cunliffe 2013a). The ∂15N of grain has been compared to the ∂15N of cattle from the same region and period. Figure 6.4 shows that the barley and cattle distributions from southern Britain in the Iron Age are extremely close. Wheat is the most different from both barley and cattle. It

δ15N (‰-AIR)

6

4

2

Barley

Cattle

Wheat

Figure 6.4  Boxplot distribution of the charred grain and cattle ∂15N values in the Iron Age. All the data are from the Ceramic Phases 3 and 7 of Danebury and nearby settlements of similar dates (Lightfoot and Stevens, 2012; Stevens et al. 2013a). Barley ∂15N average: 3.82‰, wheat ∂15N average: 2.77‰.

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192  English Landscapes and Identities 10

Barley

9 8

δ15N (‰-AIR)

High Moderate

Iron Age: Danebury

7

Field experiment no manuring

6

Field experiment past manuring

5

Field experiment intensive manuring

4 Wheat

Low

3 2

Iron Age: Danebury

1

Field experiment no manuring

0

Field experiment past manuring

Barley

Wheat

∂15N for charred barley and wheat from Danebury (from Lightfoot and

Figure 6.5  Stevens, 2012) compared with data from long-term field experiments from England and Germany showing different levels of manuring (intensive, 35 t/ha per year; moderate, 20 t/ha per year; data from Fraser et al. 2011 and Bogaard et al. 2007).

can therefore be argued that a diet drawing its protein from barley would be virtually indistinguishable isotopically from a diet drawing its protein from beef. Furthermore, these results also give an insight into the diets of animals, as it is unlikely that cattle would have been foddered on barley considering how close their nitrogen values are: one would expect a difference due to fractionation between plants and animals. Fractionation refers to the relative abundance of isotopes, which shift between trophic levels, such as between plants and herbivores. The implication of this possible similarity in isotopic composition between beef and barley—if confirmed by further studies—could change our understanding of past grains, as it is often argued that barley is grown mostly for brewing or foddering livestock. The reasons for the relatively high values of the Danebury grains are likely to be found in people altering the soil, most probably through the application of manure which is rich in nitrogen (Bogaard et al.  2007; Fraser et al.  2011; Bogaard et al.  2013). Figure 6.5 shows the Danebury grain data against data from a long-term field experiment in England. While it is true that the Iron Age grains do not plot near the intensively manured crops, barley clearly falls within the moderately manured range. Manuring is less obvious with wheat, but it nonetheless shows variation within the sample, with some grain displaying high ∂15N values. We will return to the issue of manuring below. Isotopic analyses of grains are still rare, but those from Danebury produced an indication of manuring, which links plant and animal husbandry (as manure is generally formed of animal dung1). It is to the evidence of animals that we now turn. 1  The effects on isotopic values of grain caused by fertilization through what is euphemistically known as ‘night soil’ would also be interesting to test in the future, as it forms an obvious source of nutrients that past people would possibly have been less squeamish about using than many modern people would be.

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Substances and Cycles  193 Later prehistory

Upper Thames Valley

599

122

Late Iron Age-Roman

510

608

Early medieval

838

360 Log total NISP

Middle/Lower Thames Valley

403

44

88731

7720

15120

888

High Speed1

1187

51

1980

452

829

493

3

Log total NISP

3

Cattle

Domestic fowl

Sheep/goat

Horse

Pig

Dog Wild

Figure 6.6  Major animal species (that is the percentage of the number of identified specimens or NISP) by period and case study area.

Animal Husbandry and Meat Consumption Unlike the charred grain dataset, animal bone assemblages from all three case study areas are extensive and derive from more than one site, so that a great deal of confidence can be placed in them. In all periods, the samples were largest from the Middle and Lower Thames. As with cereal cultivation there were regional differences as well as temporal continuities in all three areas and these continuities and differences seem to mirror those in cereal cultivation to a degree. Once again the greatest regional differences were present in the later prehistoric period and the greatest similarities in the late Iron Age–Roman period (Figure 6.6). In later prehistory the balance of major domesticates in the case study areas was quite different. The dominant species in each case seems to be influenced by the environment in the region. The Thames Valley saw a predominance of cattle throughout, but with significant numbers of sheep, which in the Middle–Lower Thames increase in the early medieval period. Sheep are most common in the early medieval period in Kent, with cattle the most common species during the late Iron Age and Roman periods. Temporal continuities within the Upper Thames Valley and Kent regions tend to show up in the consumption of minor and wild species rather than proportions of major domesticates (Figure  6.7). However, the reverse was true in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley and some combination of the three major domesticates remained dominant in all three areas through time. Environmental conditions have an influence (Chapter 4), but this is not always straightforward. The relative abundance of pigs seems to be only partially related to environmental conditions in later prehistory. Pigs were more common in the Upper Thames Valley than in Kent and very much less common in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley than in either of the other two regions. However, pollen sequences taken during the course of the Kent fieldwork suggest that in later prehistory there were extensive areas of woodland (Champion 2011), which would have been favourable for pig husbandry. Later prehistoric contrasts in minor and wild species seem to suggest that Kent was more favourable for game than the Thames Valley case study area, with wild species more common there, ­perhaps influenced by the presence of the extensive local woodland. Another contrast is the difference in abundance of dogs in the record, which would seem to relate to a specific cultural preference for the butchery and deposition of dogs in the Upper Thames Valley (Figure 6.6). In the late Iron Age to Roman period animal husbandry practices seem to have undergone a degree of homogenization similar to that seen in cereal cultivation, with cattle becoming dominant in Kent and remaining most common in the Thames Valley. Cattle

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194  English Landscapes and Identities Later prehistory

Late Iron Age-Roman

Early medieval

W = 48 kg

W = 376 kg

W = 1.5 kg

W = 1905 kg

W = 12,475 kg

W = 52 kg

Upper Thames Valley

Middle/Lower Thames Valley

Amphora % 0% 0–10% 10–20% 20–30%

W = 2.7 kg

W = 267 kg

W = 16.4 kg

High Speed 1

Log total weight 0.79 Jars Mortaria Eating vessels Drinking vessels

30–40%

40–50%

Figure 6.7  Ceramic repertoires by period and case study area.

husbandry requires a greater degree of organization than either sheep/goat2 or pig, which can be left to browse in woodland and on upland pasture more freely, and this hom­ogen­ iza­tion can therefore be seen as linked to the organizational properties of Roman economic systems, albeit operating within ecological conditions inherited from later prehistory. However, as in cereal cultivation, there was continuity among the more minor species, with wild animals continuing to be more important on the route of High Speed 1 in Kent than in the Thames Valley. This regional contrast in the prevalence of wild animals in the faunal record as well as relating to variations in woodland cover between the Thames Valley and Kent may also relate to variations in social status between the inhabitants, as wild animal remains are more commonly found at villas and military sites (Allen 2014: 177) and the majority of Thames Valley settlements within the case study areas are either relatively low status and rural or urban. Contrasts were also apparent in the early medieval period. The balance of the three major domesticates was subtly but significantly different in each of the three regions. In the Upper Thames Valley there was a significant shift from sheep/goat to cattle, with a very slight decline in pig, whereas in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley the shift between cattle and sheep/goat was in the opposite direction, while pigs increased slightly. In Kent there was a decline in sheep/goat, while the numbers of cattle appeared to remain approximately the same, but the increase in pig was much steeper than in the Thames Valley case study areas. An emphasis on cattle and pig in the eastern regions of England has been interpreted as the signature of specifically Anglo-Saxon eating habits (Holmes 2016). However, it may be better to think of the pattern as a result of the interaction of long-term production and consumption practices and the environment, with soils (Rippon et al. 2014) and woodland (Champion  2011) both playing a role. There was also subtle variations between the case study areas in minor and wild species with the Upper Thames Valley and Kent having high levels of horse and the Middle–Lower Thames Valley showing larger numbers of domestic

2  Sheep and goat are very difficult to distinguish archaeozoologically.

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Substances and Cycles  195 fowl than the other two. Numbers of deer and wild bird appear to have been greater in Kent and in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley. The importance of domestic fowl in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley relates to the growth of the town of London (see section ‘The Urban Abstract Machine: Roman and Medieval London’). The emphasis on wild animals toward the east of the study region reflects a pattern similar to that seen in the late Iron Age–Roman period and is again likely to relate to a mixture of factors including environmental ones, although in this period differences in the status of settlements would not seem to be so pertinent. We have a sense of a complex set of interactions between animal husbandry, arable farming, topography, and vegetation. Cattle produce large amounts of manure, but require more care than sheep or pigs and are happiest in valley areas where grass is abundant and water nearby. We will return to this possible inter-relationship later, once we have con­ sidered pottery which has a complex set of connections with foodstuffs.

Cyclical Variation in Ceramic Repertoires Like cereals and animal species, ceramic repertoires displayed both differences and similarities between case study areas and across time (Figure 6.7). We acknowledge at the outset that while pottery may have been necessary for cooking and eating food, vessels of wood and skin, and plates of dried bread could also be used. Pots would have been part of this repertoire, but rarely ever the whole. However, the strongest similarities were seen in the later prehistoric period, with the greatest differences in the late Iron Age–Roman period. Changes in ceramic repertoires seem to have followed a cyclical pattern indicating some structure to their use, with a return to similarity between the case study areas in the early medieval period. In later prehistory and to an extent in the early medieval period ceramic repertoires were dominated by forms best suited to communal cooking and serving of foods with a high liquid content, with similarities between the Thames Valley and Kent regions lending support to Champion’s (2011, 2014) argument for more porridge/pottage consumption in Kent. In the late Iron Age–Roman period all three regions displayed strong continuity from later prehistory, with dominant forms continuing to be related to communal cooking and serving. However, emphasis within the more specialized eatingand drinking-related forms was quite different between the case study areas, with the Upper Thames Valley producing a notably lower proportion of such vessels than the Middle–Lower Thames Valley and Kent and having a greater focus upon individual eating and food-processing vessels instead. In contrast, the Middle–Lower Thames Valley had a greater emphasis on drinking-related forms, particularly flagons and amphorae. This was even more marked in the Kent region with a greater emphasis on drinking-related vessels. The early medieval period saw a return to similarity between the regional repertoires (Figure 6.7), which were again dominated by cooking- and eating-related forms in all three areas, although ceramic repertoires in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley region also included higher proportions of flagons (jugs) and bowls and Kent shows higher proportions of cups. Similarities between the late Iron Age–Roman period and early medieval repertoires in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley indicate a partial exception to the pattern. Overall, jars are a standard part of all repertoires, indicating the importance of wetter foods and drink. Bowls are also common, which might also reinforce the importance of wetter foods and of communal eating. The eating of roasted meat and of bread may not find much evidence in the pottery assemblages.

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196  English Landscapes and Identities Throughout each period and across all areas, there is an emphasis on communal c­ ooking and eating through the combination of jars and bowls. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Roman period sees a greater emphasis on individual consumption, particularly in places like London and this continues to some extent in the early medieval period. There is not an obvious connection between the balance of animal species and the repertoires of pots. There is some hint that the spectrum of wet to dry drink and food is reflected in the pottery forms, with barley potentially made into beer, oats and rye into porridge or pottage, and the various wheats into bread. We will return to these complex relations later, after considering the isotopic evidence from animals and people.

Animal Isotopes Out of the 1,502 faunal samples investigated for this research, the great majority come from the main three domestic species: sheep, cattle, and pigs followed by deer, horse, dog, fowl, and aquatic species. Here, however, the focus will be on the isotopic results of cattle. Conventionally, faunal baselines are constructed using both the cattle and the sheep averages while pigs are excluded because they are too omnivorous to provide a reliable en­vir­on­ men­tal proxy (see, for example, Jay and Richards  2007). Here, however, the baseline consists only of cattle since there is a statistical difference between cattle and sheep across all periods, significant enough for these not to be treated together. Cattle were chosen as the main baseline for the simple reason that they were most common over both chronological periods and regions. This echoes Hamilton’s comments that the best data available are often cattle, maybe due to the better survival of cattle bones (2016: 75). The cattle values were therefore averaged for each period to provide the baseline, and each human value was compared against these cattle averages to create offset values, where offset values are measures of the differences human values display from the baseline, reported as ∆13Chuman–fauna or ∆15Nhuman–fauna. Ecologists have identified different isotopic signatures in plants according to varied photo­syn­thet­ic pathways, water efficiency, light, temperature, and altitude (O’Leary  1981; Farquhar et al. 1989; Tieszen 1991; Korol et al. 1999). All of these environmentally driven variations are then passed on to the consumers of these plants, allowing not only for the reconstruction of their diet but also, at least to some extent, of their ecology. Understanding variation in cattle is crucial and some of this variability is probably due to human action, through foddering especially. The reasons why values in cattle might vary might not be the same as why human values differ. Average cattle values cannot be seen as a straightforward result of ecological variability and we have to be aware that this is the best available baseline, not one without its own problems of interpretation. It was briefly mentioned above that different photosynthetic pathways affect the ∂13C ratios of plants. Crucial here is the distinction between C3 and C4 plants, which is important as there are no native C4 plants in Britain. The difference between C3 and C4 refers to variations in photosynthesis, with most C3 plants being found in temperate zones and include many of the cereals. Generally, C4 plants occur in the dry or humid tropics. Therefore, individuals displaying a C4 signal either are eating imported grains, such as ­millet, or are immigrants from a region with an abundance of C4 plants. Other environmental ­factors affect the isotopic ratios of plants. For example, plants grown under dry and warm conditions have overall higher ∂13C values than plants grown under wetter or colder conditions (Farquhar et al. 1989). This is particularly noticeable in the case of plants grown under

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Substances and Cycles  197 Iron Age Cattle

12

Roman Cattle

Medieval Cattle

–22 –21.5 δ13C (‰-V-PDB)

–21

δ15N (‰AIR)

10 8 6 4 2 0 –23.5

–23

–22.5

–20.5

–20

Figure 6.8  Distribution of the cattle isotopic data by broad time period.

a forest canopy, where lower ∂13C values are expected compared to plants grown in an open environment (Bonafini et al. 2013). This allows for some understanding of the feeding strategies used in animal husbandry in the past. It is important to consider the effect human activities have on soils. Indeed, manuring has been shown to raise the ∂15N values of the plants cultivated. These environmental factors must be taken into account as the variations they cause in plant chemistry are then passed on to the consumer. The relationship between the isotopic composition of tissue and diet is complex (see, for example, Lee-Thorp et al. 1989), but it is well accepted that each step of consumption results in an isotopic enrichment for the consumer compared to what they ate. Traditionally, an enrichment of ~1‰ is expected in the ∂13C values, while ~3–5‰ is assumed for ∂15N values, although this may have been underestimated (O’Connell et al. 2012). The variation within cattle (Figure  6.8) can be explained by a variety of factors: for example, foddering, climatic variation, the parts of the landscape in which these animals fed, and consumption of manured plants. Although it is sometimes argued that the time and expense of manuring would have been reserved for crops for human consumption, it is entirely possible that the waste from these crops, such as stalks or leaves, was used for animal feed, thus resulting in higher nitrogen ratios for animals. It is also worth considering that low ∂15N values (< 2‰) could be explained by the presence of pulses in the fodder of these particular animals. Changing climate (Chapter 4) could also have had an effect on isotope values. Cattle in drier periods had overall higher ∂13C values, and showed an enrichment in both carbon and nitrogen in warmer periods and those from wetter periods display a wider ∂13C range. However, it is hard to disentangle climatic influences from animal management practices. Cattle living under wetter climatic conditions might well need their feed supplemented by fodder, more so in winter, raising the issue of seasonality: a move onto wetter soils in the Roman and early medieval periods was also seen in Chapter 5. A recent isotopic investigation of faunal remains included an extensive review of the animal profile at the time of death, looking at whether these animals were raised for meat, traction, or secondary

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Figure 6.9  Boxplot comparison of the cattle data by broad period (Iron Age n = 206, Roman n = 99, early medieval n = 138).

products such as wool or dairy (e.g. Stevens et al. 2013b), although this information could not be integrated here. We can see considerable variability across the results, which is unsurprising given the range of influences listed above. More samples come from cattle than any other species in all three periods and from the most regions, and the overall patterns visible in the cattle data are echoed in the rest of the domesticated fauna. Figure 6.9 shows that while the medieval cattle have the most varied ∂13C ratios, there is a group among the Roman and Iron Age cattle that have 15N-enriched values compared to the rest. A possible explanation is that these animals were younger individuals retaining a suckling signal, although this is hard to assess given patchy information on age. It would also be surprising if the medieval faunal record did not contain any young animal remains. While there are no statistical differences between the broad periods, it is worth considering the data at a higher chronological resolution (Figure 6.10). Here we see the boxplot distribution of the cattle data from the early Iron Age to the late-Saxon/Norman period and the red line shows the weighted quadratic least squares regression used to smooth the data. This plot confirms what was visible in the broader data: there is a decrease in 13C over time and a 15N peak in the Roman period. However, Figure  6.10 allows us to show that the 15N peak has both a sharp increase and decrease before and after the Roman period. The reason for this could be dietary, with cattle grazing

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Figure 6.10  Boxplot distributions of cattle ∂13C (left) and ∂15N (right) values across all sub-periods (early Iron Age n = 74, middle Iron Age n = 53, late Iron Age n = 49, latest Iron Age n = 16, late Iron Age/early Roman n = 3, early Roman n = 12, middle Roman n = 56, late Roman n = 13, early Anglo-Saxon n = 61, middle Anglo-Saxon n = 10, late Saxon/Norman n = 10). The less well-dated samples have been excluded (Iron Age n = 14, Roman n = 15, Anglo-Saxon n = 57). The red line is a LOESS regression, which is used to plot a smooth line through a series of data points by weighted quadratic least squares regression.

or foddering on manured cereals with elevated ∂15N values, or it could be environmental if confirmed in the other domesticated fauna. The middle Anglo-Saxon period shows low values of 13C compared to all the other periods. Looking at the data regionally reveals variations (Figures 6.11–6.13), which probably indicates localized husbandry regimes. Overall, there is much more regional variation than is usually assumed. Differences between sites in one area, in this case around Danebury, have been shown by a previous study (Stevens et al. 2013b), and our results confirm that animal management practices probably differed on a local level, with individual sites specializing in particular plants and animals, perhaps then exchanging their products. Sites were not independent, but tied into complex webs of reciprocity. For instance, cattle and sheep in the early medieval period from Hampshire and Suffolk show a difference, with the latter displaying higher ∂13C values than the former (Figure 6.13). The samples might date to different phases within the early medieval period, so that it is hard to distinguish change in diets over time from regional differences. Sheep in the early medieval period show the same distinction between Hampshire and Suffolk as cattle, with those from Hampshire relatively depleted in both isotopes (Figure 6.14), perhaps indicating sheep husbandry varied regionally and possibly also that of cattle.

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Figure 6.11  Boxplots of the regional distribution of cattle ∂13C and ∂15N in the Iron Age.

Human Isotopes There are large numbers of human isotopic results, providing possibilities for understanding variability between regions and over time. Each human value was compared to the cattle average of its own period to obtain a ∆human–cattle value reflecting the differences between various human groups and their respective baseline. This was an attempt to ­minim­ize the effect of change in climate and ecology as opposed to change in dietary practice, as this was the main focus of our interest. Chronologically, this is undertaken at quite a coarse level to allow the use of the whole dataset. Because some samples have only broad date ranges we divided them into broad periods. Figure 6.15 shows the differences human values display compared to the baseline. The values are organized chronologically, as far as possible. For carbon there is a good match between humans and the baseline, providing some evidence that people’s ∆13 values were responding to environmental variability. The Iron Age displays ∆13Chuman–cattle difference of between 1 and 2‰, which is one trophic level. This suggests little or no seafood was eaten— except maybe in the case of the few individuals who plot above that 2‰ trophic level. The

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Region Gloucestershire Oxfordshire Yorkshire

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Figure 6.12  Boxplots of the regional distribution of cattle ∂13C and ∂15N values in the Roman period.

Roman data are generally enriched in 13C compared to the baseline, with some samples displaying ∆13Chuman–cattle values above 5.5‰. These individuals display somewhat average ∆15Nhuman–cattle values (between 3 and 5.15‰), so this enrichment is likely to be evidence of C4 grains in their diets (Müldner et al. 2011; Pollard et al. 2011). Some of the samples showing evidence of enrichment in both isotopes could indicate an increase in marine protein consumption in the Romano-British period. However, overall, the Roman data seem to show the lowest ∆15Nhuman–cattle enrichment compared to the other periods, showing that the 15N peak in the fauna is not matched in the human data. The early medieval samples show the most consistent enrichment in both isotopes compared to the baselines, which may also be evidence of increased fish consumption. The dip in the baseline ∆15Nhuman–cattle values from the middle Iron Age onwards, when human bones show lower levels of 15N, suggests that the human diet may have included more pulses which are low in ∆15N, while the cattle might have grazed on the remains of manured crops raising their values. It is also interesting to note that the enrichment relative to the baseline in both isotopes occurs in the middle Anglo-Saxon period, rather in the early Anglo-Saxon period, suggesting that changes in the agricultural regime or diet did not occur immediately after the end of Roman Britain. By the middle Anglo-Saxon period, the enrichment in both isotopes in relation to the baseline suggests a change in diet or increased arable farming.

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Region Hampshire Suffolk Yorkshire

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Figure 6.13  Boxplots of the regional distribution of cattle ∂13C and ∂15N values in the early medieval period.

This pattern of difference between the main archaeological periods is consistent with suggested changes to agricultural regimes over time, starting with a more pastoral system in the Iron Age, followed by a change towards a more arable economy in the Roman period and a return to a pastoral system following the end of the Roman administration. The isotopic data broadly support the hypothesis that humans may have relied more on animal products in the Iron Age and the earliest medieval sub-period (Banham and Faith 2014: 39, Rippon et al. 2015), while the Roman diet was primarily grain-based, with a smaller contribution of terrestrial and marine protein. The data enriched in 15N in the later period, when associated with enrichment in 13C, indicate that fish became an important dietary staple, causing the expansion of fisheries in the North Sea at the turn of the eleventh century (Barrett et al. 2004; Barrett et al. 2011). In many ways, the mass of collated data fits in with our broad expectation of change over time. However, there are some surprises within the results, as well as considerable regional variation. Nitrogen values are consistently higher than might be expected, with many samples more than one trophic level higher than the baseline. This pattern of high ∂15N values has already been noted by previous researchers, suggesting explanations such as consumption of meat enriched in ∂15N (e.g. omnivorous animals, such as pigs, or younger animals—Jay and Richards 2007) or consumption of fish (Müldner 2013). However, here, rather it is the possibility of manured cereals that will be examined. We must seek some extra source of

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Figure 6.14  Boxplot comparisons of the sheep data by regions in the early medieval period (Hampshire n = 80, Suffolk n = 76, Yorkshire n = 15).

nitrogen and the most likely addition would come from the systematic addition of ­nitrogen-rich animal manure to the fields, which would raise nitrogen values in plants eaten by animals and then people (Bogaard et al. 2007, 2013). This practice has been observed to result in an increase in the ∂15N value of soil, primarily due to bacterially mediated reactions where the lighter 14N is preferentially lost, leading to 15N enrichment (Fraser et al. 2011). Bogaard’s pioneering study in 2007 showed that manuring cereals crops could raise ∂15N values by up to 8‰ compared to the non-manured fields at the same sites, with grain ­virtually indistinguishable from herbivore values. While there seems to be little doubt that manuring occurred from the Roman period onwards, and probably earlier, questions of its scale and intensity remain. One of the most common arguments against manuring is that large flocks or herds would be needed to maintain a high level of input (Hull and O’Connell 2011). In modern farming moderate amounts of manure are considered to be between 10 and 15 tons per hectare per year. A cow will excrete about ~30 kilograms of waste (urine and faeces) per day, which means that, theoretically, even a household owning a single cow would have access to around 10 tons of manure per annum. Of course, cows in the past were smaller and waste excreted is relative to size, and not all dung may have been collected for manure. However, it must also be remembered that manure is not necessarily composed entirely of animal waste, but could

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Figure 6.15  Diachronic evolution of the human data (early Iron Age n = 20, middle Iron Age n = 135, late Iron Age n = 62, early Roman n = 21, middle Roman n = 610, late Roman n = 49, late Roman/early Anglo-Saxon n = 87, early Anglo-Saxon n = 651, early Anglo-Saxon/middle Anglo-Saxon n = 12, middle Anglo Saxon n = 107, late Saxon n = 68, late Saxon/Norman n = 51). Samples dated less precisely, i.e. dated only to a broad period (‘Iron Age’ n = 79, ‘Roman’ n = 61, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ n = 111), and also the single ‘latest Iron Age’ sample have been excluded. The red line is a LOESS regression, which is used to plot a smooth line through a series of data points. The left-hand side of the graph shows carbon values, those on the right nitrogen.

also include ash from human activities such as cooking or harvesting and human faeces (‘night soil’). It is therefore possible to argue that moderate amounts of manuring, which are enough to explain the human nitrogen enrichment here, can be achieved without large herds. It is also likely that there was some contribution from meat with higher ∂15N values than beef, such as pork, fish, or chicken. It is interesting to note that the nitrogen enrichment of the human data appears lowest in the Roman period (possibly due to movement of farming onto previously uncultivated and thus non-enriched soils—see Chapter 4) and the early medieval period shows the highest enrichment (Figure 6.16). It may be that there was a gradual build-up of nitrogen in the soil from long-term manuring that only became evident by the early medieval period, so that the effects of large-scale Roman manuring have a lasting effect. Classical authors, such as Pliny and Cato, described the practice and extolled its virtue, while even Virgil wrote verses about it: ‘Yet shall thy lands from pleasure rear Abundant harvest each alternate year If rich manure fresh life and nurture yield And ashes renovate th’exhausted fields’ (Virgil, Georgics, Book 1, trans. Sotheby 1808, also Jones 2012: 6)

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Figure 6.16  Distribution of the data according to the different levels of enrichment.

Whether the practice was common earlier in Britain is more difficult to assess. Large ­middens in southern England in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age, such as Potterne or All Cannings Cross, indicate that animal dung was gathered and stored (Waddington 2012: 44, 48). Ordinary settlements probably had middens too and from the Iron Age the link between the house, the midden, and the pit (and indeed the field) would have had all sorts of practical and cosmological entailments (see Chapter  3). While there is not much evidence for or against manuring in the later Iron Age, it can be argued without much doubt that fields are likely to have been manured in Roman Britain given the general intensity of cultivation. A considerable amount of work has been carried out collecting pottery scatters through field walking, which, it is assumed, result from spreading middened material on fields. Early medieval sources as well as place name evidence also suggests that manuring likely continued after the Roman period (Cullen and Jones  2012: 97–108; Jones  2012). Furthermore, long-term field experiment have shown historical effects, where cereals grown in previously manured fields demonstrated nitrogen enrichment even after a lull in manuring practices (Fraser et al. 2011). While, as pointed out earlier, diets are the result of many complex dynamic processes, plants—and more specifically cereals with a high nitrogen value—would have been an important contributor to human diets in the past. While the role of meat or fish is well attested in high-status diets (Richards et al. 1998), it remains likely that for the vast majority of the population, regardless of period or region, cereals were the dietary staple. It is therefore likely that the high nitrogen values in the human data might not be caused by the consumption of meat but by high nitrogen variation in the plants themselves. Further isotopic analyses of ancient grains are necessary to test this hypothesis. While overall, there is little variation between the three main periods investigated, the Roman period stands out due to its 13C-enriched values but generally 15N-depleted values

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206  English Landscapes and Identities compared to the baseline. This paints the picture of an economy turned towards agrarianism and away from pastoralism. Cities have a different isotopic profile in the RomanoBritish period, whether through the presence of non-native people or foods. This is in contrast with both the Iron Age and the early medieval period, during which populations seem to have relied more on animal products, though cereals were nonetheless likely to be the bulk of the diet. Regionally, the data suggest complex, local practices. Overall, the data show the dynamic interaction of both human and non-human agents, and the complexities of ancient subsistence.

The Urban Abstract Machine: Roman and Medieval London The emphasis of the EngLaId project as a whole was on the rural landscape. But a considerable amount of relevant data was available for London (within the Middle–Lower Thames Valley case study area) from the Roman and early medieval periods, allowing a brief consideration of city life and the effect of a major urban centre on the surrounding countryside. In order to define sites from within London the outline of the third-century landward wall of London, along with Southwark was plotted (Figure 6.17). Sites that lay inside the walls were then divided from those lying outside, and charred grain and animal bone data were compared according to whether they related to urban or non-urban contexts. In the late Iron Age–Roman period wheat was slightly more prevalent than barley in London, although the difference in ubiquity between the species was slight (Figure 6.18). Differences between London and non-London cereal production and consumption were more pronounced than similarities, or at least involved more different species. Interesting differences were evident, with London characterized by high quantities of free-threshing wheat, club wheat, and rye relative to non-London settlements. These differences in the ratio of free-threshing wheat to bread or club wheat may suggest differences in taphonomy or processing. However, the presence of rye within the city and its absence outside, and the higher incidence of free-threshing wheat within, indicates that the urban system drew in some crops (rye) from outside the immediate hinterland of the Middle–Lower Thames Valley and a disproportionate quantity of others (free-threshing wheat) from its immediate environs. For the early medieval period the data from within London derives from the late AngloSaxon period, whereas the non-urban data cover the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period.3 Barley was marginally more abundant within London than in the rest of the Middle–Lower Thames Valley and more abundant than wheat within the city, while being present in roughly the same proportion of samples as wheat in the countryside; however, the ratio of barley to wheat on non-urban settlements had been coming closer together over the long term, being closer in the early medieval period than it had been in either later prehistory, or the Roman period (Figure 6.18). In the early medieval period indeterminate barley was more abundant than hulled barley in both the city and the countryside, but this difference was much more pronounced in non-urban contexts. This suggests a similarity in production/consumption in the late Iron Age–Roman and early medieval period. Hulled barley seems less prevalent in urban contexts in both the Roman and early medieval periods. In the countryside hulled barley was 3  As the evidence suggests that the Roman city of London was largely abandoned after the end of the Roman period and not reoccupied until perhaps the seventh century.

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Figure 6.17  The outline of the third-century walls of Roman London used to define sites within and without the city for the late Iron Age–Roman and early medieval periods (after Rowsome and Burch 2011).

more common in the Roman period than in the early medieval period. This pattern may relate to the processing of barley into ale. Continuity between the periods was most pronounced in the urban animal bones (Figures 6.19 and 6.20). The proportions of all three major domesticates were particularly stable in London. By contrast change was particularly pronounced in the non-urban dataset, with a decline of 16 per cent in the proportion of cattle from later prehistory to the early medieval period and a corresponding increase in the proportions of sheep/goat and pig by approximately 11 and 7 per cent, respectively. Overall, sheep/goat was more important on the non-urban sites and cattle on the urban sites, with pig being important in both datasets and the location of the highest proportions of pig shifting over time. Temporal change was more evident in the minor domestic and wild animal assemblages, with a steep decline in the proportion of dog and an increase in the proportion of domestic fowl in the urban dataset from later prehistory to the early medieval period. Urban sites generally produced higher proportions of dog, domestic cat, and domestic fowl than non-urban sites. Deer was

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Later prehistoric Presence Absence Late Iron Age-Roman Presence Absence Early medieval Presence Absence

Figure 6.18  The frequency of cereal species by period in the Middle Thames Valley within and without the walls of third-century London. Londinium

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Figure 6.19  Major animal species (% NISP) by period in the Middle Thames Valley within and without the walls of third-century London.

more frequent on non-urban sites in the early medieval period and horse was more ­frequent in both the late Iron Age–Roman and early medieval period, but in general wild species were equally scarce between both kinds of site, supporting the idea that towns drew in specific fauna (De Landa 1997). The patterns of abundance seen in these two datasets are both the product of long-term trajectories in regional humanly influenced ecosystems and of more short-term change. However, one very significant difference between the Middle–Lower Thames Valley and Upper Thames Valley case study areas is the influence of urbanism on the dynamics of the system in the former, which seems to be very substantial. De Landa (1997) has developed a theory of medieval cities as being places creating their own ecosystems, comprising streets, buildings, animal species (including humans), microbes, plant species, and many other elem­ents, with the organic elements all generating and consuming energy conceived of as

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Domestic fowl Horse Dog Deer Bird Hare/rabbit Goose Duck Domestic cat

Figure 6.20  Minor animal species (% NISP) by period in the Middle Thames Valley within and without the walls of third-century London.

‘flesh’ or ‘biomass’. Certain features of the urban animal bone assemblage from late Iron Age–Roman and early medieval London can be explained using this theory, with the con­ tinu­ity of species abundance across period boundaries being interpreted as originating in the agency of the urban system itself, which worked to draw in animals, particularly cattle from its Middle Thames Valley hinterland, resulting in higher proportions of cattle across time within the urban system and declining proportions relative to sheep/goat in the rural system (as cattle are less likely to be consumed locally in the countryside when they can be sold for greater profit in the city). Additionally, high percentages of pig, domestic fowl, dog, and cat as seen in both late Iron Age–Roman and early medieval London are interpreted by Poole (2013) as being generated by affordances specific to the nature of urban systems, which favour species adaptable to small spaces and which can feed off scraps and recycled human food. In both these ways we can perhaps see the agency of urbanism imposing itself on the networks of humans and animals within the city and outside it, and overriding to an extent pre-existing regional and cultural patterns.

Urban and Rural Isotopic Variation The section ‘The Urban Abstract Machine: Roman and Medieval London’ showed that urban and rural systems had different grain and animal assemblages. This points to a difference in food production and consumption: it is thus useful to assess whether this difference is also present in the isotopic data. Figure 6.21 shows that the cattle data from both rural and urban settlements have similar ∂13C and ∂15N ranges. While the opposition between the ‘consumer’ and ‘producer’ city models has been abandoned in favour of a mixed model that takes on aspects of both more recently (Bowman and Wilson  2013), the faunal data here suggest that urban and rural populations might have drawn from the same pool of animals for food, or at least drew on animals that were living in the same environment. It should not be surprising that fauna in urban and rural sites should have the same isotopic values. While it is possible to keep some animals in urban settings, it is more likely that large animals such as cattle would

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Figure 6.21  Boxplot distribution of the cattle ∂13C (a) and ∂15N (b) values in the rural (orange) and urban (blue) data.

have been raised and possibly even slaughtered outside the city walls, leaving people in the city to deal only with the carcasses (Maltby 2016). Zooarchaeological evidence from urban sites indeed points towards the preference for smaller, mostly female, animals, maybe indicating that farmers supplied towns with animals whose productivity had declined, which suggests that they were sent to town mainly to be slaughtered but had spent their lives somewhere else (Maltby 2016). If it is correct to assume that there would be one herd from which both rural and urban settlements drew their animals, then no isotopic difference should be expected between the urban and the rural cattle. Figure  6.22, however, shows a clear pattern with the humans from urban settlements displaying a significant enrichment in 13C.  This is consistent with what previous studies have demonstrated, and this difference is shown here to be significant, regardless of subperiod and/or regions. Looking at the differences between the baseline and the human data, this is even more striking (Figure 6.23). This enrichment in 13C in cities has sometimes been explained by the presence of migrants, as cities are more likely to have attracted a diverse population (Chenery et al.  2011; Müldner  2013). Another possibility is harvested grains from other parts of the empire, which would have a different isotopic signature than that of crops grown in Britain. As ∂13C values raise with sunlight and latitude, there is a strong possibility that imported grains grown in Italy or in Anatolia would have higher ∂13C ratio than native British crops and thus raise the isotopic profile of the consumer. The concentration of larger ∆13Chuman–cattle differences in the cities might support this hypothesis, as urban centres are more likely to have been trade hubs, where exotic imports were more readily available.

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Figure 6.22  Boxplot distribution of the human (a) ∂15C and (b) ∂15 N values in the rural (orange) and urban (blue) data.

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Figure 6.23  ∂13C and ∂15N differences between cattle and humans from urban and rural sites.

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212  English Landscapes and Identities Alternatively, this might arise from higher levels of marine fish consumption, if such ­foodstuffs were more readily available to city dwellers than to the inhabitants of the more rural settlements.

The Abstract Machine of Food Production and Consumption We can identify two broad temporal cycles when we stand back from all the data. The first highly stratified/organized cycle (A) and the second more fluid/open cycle (B) (Table 6.1). We set out to bring together the various sets of evidence, for cereal cultivation, animal husbandry, ceramic repertoires, and isotopes. It is necessary to examine them holistically, treating food in England from 1500 bc to ad 1086 as a ‘total social fact’ in the way advocated by Appadurai (1981) and as the product of complex non-linear systems in the manner advocated by Deleuze and Guattari (1988) and De Landa (1997). We can think of both humans and ecological systems as creating and channelling flows of energy from the soil into various organisms, including people, and occasionally back into the soil. We will also bring out the regional inflections in the processes described earlier, in a more holistic manner than hitherto, based on the house–midden–pit cycle discussed in Chapter3.

Change Changes in cereal cultivation and animal husbandry through later prehistory, the Roman, and early medieval periods seem to be closely aligned with shifts in the proportions of cereal species, such as wheat and barley, and animal species, such as cattle and sheep/goat, occurring broadly in step with one another, as, for example, at the Iron Age–Roman transition. These alterations can also be seen in the carbon and nitrogen isotopic data, with an increase in the levels of nitrogen (in cattle bones) from later prehistory to the Roman period and then a decline in the early medieval period, which nevertheless did not reduce nitrogen levels to those seen in later prehistory. This increase in nitrogen may be linked to manuring fields, with the waste from the processing of manured crops then being fed to the animals as fodder, linking the production of cereals and meat (Cunliffe 2005). On the other hand changes in ceramics appear to have had a more cyclical character, with an oscillation between repertoires dominated by jars and bowls and those with more individual serving vessels such as cups, beakers, and flagons. There is then a sense in which changes in ceramic repertoires were somewhat divorced from changes in cereal cultivation and animal husbandry regimes, which goes back to the contrasting emphases on production and consumption in the different practices explored earlier in this chapter. Ceramics are tools for cooking, serving, and eating, but also for the construction of social differences of rank and hierarchy and for the construction of social solidarity. Ceramics are also an artistic medium and therefore a medium for the creation of territories (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Different ceramic forms can afford the differentiation of portions of food and drink by kind, by elaborateness of preparation, and by quantity, but they can also homogenize and bring together, mingling ingredients. Cereal cultivation and animal husbandry, on the other hand, are technological or nurturing practices, which produce the raw material for the production of food, but also mark and divide territories, for example, in the creation of field systems (Chapter 7). However, there is also a sense in which the isotope data indicate a connection between cereal and meat production/consumption and the oscillations seen in

 

MBA

LBA

EIA–MIA

Field Systems

Coaxial and aggregate field systems. Large-scale land boundaries

Hiatus in construction, Coaxial and aggregate Hiatus in construction. old field systems field systems. Old field systems possibly used. possibly used, large-scale land boundaries.

Settlement Enclosure Boundaries Houses

Domestic enclosures.

Coaxial and aggregate field systems cease being constructed in Wessex, but some constructed in Thames valley and southeast; others continue in use. Large-scale land boundaries. Domestic enclosures, middens and pits.

Ceramic Repertoires

Metalwork

Cycle A = Cycle B

Some small roundhouses but rare. Large jars, minimal decoration.

Large roundhouses, ringworks.

Metalwork deposited in hoards.

Metalwork deposited in hoards.

Diversity of forms, jars, bowls and cups, and decoration, possible alcohol consumption.

Open settlements, hill forts, middens and pits in both. Smaller roundhouses in MIA

LIA–Roman

Domestic enclosures, oppida. Fewer middens. Stone-built houses, villas.

EAS

Open settlements and middens.

MAS–LAS ‘Open fields’ develop at end of period, drove-ways and paddocks around settlements.

Farmsteads, middens, manorial complexes, and towns enclosed. Smaller longhouses, Larger longhouses, Grübenhauser. manor houses, monasteries. Simple jar- and Diversity of forms for Simple jar- and Diversity of forms for bowl-based repertoire. consumption of bowl-based repertoire, consumption of Saucepan pots highly alcohol and sometimes elaborately alcohol and individual decorated individual food decorated. food portions. portions. Metalwork reused and Metalwork deposited Elaborate metalwork Metalwork deposited recycled. in variety of ways deposited in graves. in hoards. including in hoards.

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Table 6.1  Cycles of social expression based on production/consumption in southern England, 1500 bc–ad 1086

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214  English Landscapes and Identities the ceramic repertoire. Cycles of intensification and de-intensification in production and consumption hinted at by the variation in ceramics can also be seen in the changing levels of nitrogen described earlier, which, being linked to manuring, may have also been linked to the presence of bounded fields.

Regioning The abstract machine of food production and consumption in the Thames Valley and Kent expressed continuities and divisions from east to west as explored in detail earlier in the chapter. In all three broad periods from prehistoric to early medieval the Upper Thames Valley had a distinctive trajectory: highly productive, but relatively lacking in stratification of uses of the landscape, settlement types, ceramic repertoires, or human communities. This remained largely the case from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period. By contrast in Kent, which was highly connected both with other areas of England and with the continent, stratification was more evident. Here there was stratification in settlement (villas), in land use between the north and south of the route of High Speed 1 and the North Kent coastal plain, and through the consumption of wild animals or more exotic animals such as fowl earlier in prehistory. Again this remained the case in many aspects from the middle Bronze Age until the early medieval period, although for some material types the evidence is less secure than for others. Connecting the Upper Thames Valley and Kent, the Middle–Lower Thames Valley also exhibited certain distinctive characteristics from later prehistory to the early medieval period. While the Lower Thames shared some of the hierarchical characteristics of Kent, the defining characteristic of the Middle–Lower Thames Valley after the end of the Bronze Age was a degree of emptiness. Large-scale field systems were not in evidence here and much of the settlement and agriculturally productive capacity of the valley was confined to the relatively narrow strip of gravel terraces flanking the river. The exception from the beginning of the Roman period was the city of London, followed by the middle AngloSaxon wic and the late Anglo-Saxon city. These urban forms seem to have drawn in food from the surrounding rural areas in remarkably similar ways in both the Roman and early medieval periods, creating a stable pattern of animal species and ceramic consumption and at the same time altering the production and consumption patterns in the surrounding settlements, so that certain animal species, for example, domestic fowl, and ceramic forms such as amphora were much more widespread in these settlements than elsewhere. These distinctive urban consumption practices in London are reflected in the broader urban isotopic data for England, which show elevated levels of carbon in the human population, possibly derived from eating greater quantities of imported grain or an isotopic signal built in a place where C4 plants where more abundant, which may also be represented in the greater abundance of rye and bread/club wheat from Roman London. The Middle–Lower Thames Valley was therefore simultaneously both highly structured in London and relatively unstructured elsewhere. The make-up of the production and consumption systems characteristic of the Thames Valley and Kent in terms of species of cereals and animals seems to have been influenced by the nature of regional ecosystems (Figures 6.3 and 6.6), and this regionality is also reflected in the isotopes. Differences in the concentration of carbon isotopes in cattle may indicate variations in the quantity of tree cover in the areas in which they were grazing, and this is also linked to regional variation in the presence of field systems. The Thames gravels seem

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Substances and Cycles  215 to have given a strong impetus to cattle husbandry over other animal species through later prehistory, the Roman period, and into the early medieval period. Similarly the chalk of the Downs and the probable extent of woodland on the route of High Speed 1 favoured sheep/ goat husbandry and pigs respectively, the latter regardless of time period, but the former being replaced with cattle during the late Iron Age to Roman period. Similarly, crop preferences may have been partly influenced by the nature of topography, woodland cover, and soils with higher ratios of barley to wheat in the lower-lying Upper Thames Valley and lower ratios of the same species in the more elevated environment of the North Downs, on the route of High Speed 1 in Kent. At the same time each region also displayed idiosyncratic forms of crop/animal consumption and production seemingly not closely linked to the specific nature of soils, sometimes with long-term continuities and other times being relatively short lived. Examples of these idiosyncrasies include a large number of dogs in the later prehistoric period in the Upper Thames Valley which might have been either eaten or used as working animals, which continued into the late Iron Age to early Roman period, a long-term preference for wild animals in all three periods in Kent, a preference for domestic fowl in the late Iron Age to Roman and early medieval periods in the Middle–Lower Thames Valley, and a preference for emmer in later prehistory in Kent, which extended into the late Iron Age to Roman period. Both the idiosyncrasies and continuities can be seen as the product of the operation of long-term regional systems of production and consumption, which expressed themselves in a synchronized way through cycles of highly stratified, highly connected organization on the one hand and more mobile, more fluid, less ­connected organization on the other. The apparent regional differences between food production and consumption systems in the Thames Valley and Kent regions may be set in the context of broader regional differences within England, which have been noted by many authors and persist through later prehistory, the Roman, and early medieval periods. Eastern England shows a greater degree of interaction with communities from northern Europe than in central southern England (Bradley et al. 2015). In the later prehistoric period Sharples (2010: 312) argues that groups in eastern England had a lot in common with the societies of the Continental Iron Age, contrasting this region with the insularity of Wessex (ibid. 311), of which the Upper Thames Valley could be argued to form a fringe; and similar arguments have been made about Kent by Champion (2011: 241). The persistence of this regional difference into the Roman period is noted by Cool (2006), although in this case the picture is slightly more complex, with internal differentiation within the eastern and central-southern regions and more ­connectivity with, and influence from, the Roman Empire. The regional division is perhaps most obvious in the early medieval period, for which it has become a particular focus of research around the nature of ethnicity and the geographical origins of the population (Hamerow 2012).

Discussion In bringing together the macro-remains of food and consumption with the chemical evidence from isotopes, we have encountered issues of scale, but also started to explore possibilities of these complementary types of evidence. There are hints of subtle sets of differences and similarities, but we have not created anything like a full picture. We can, however, start to think about what such a full picture would look like. Human bone collagen provides a snapshot of carbon and nitrogen cycles created over the past 10 years of life,

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216  English Landscapes and Identities providing information on the balance between plant and animal protein and the types of plants eaten. But the chemistry is interesting because it works in cycles, influenced by a whole range of factors, human and non-human, in a fashion with which Deleuze would have been comfortable. The links between soil, plants, animals, and people hold the possibility of a much more holistic view, not just of food consumption, but also understanding agricultural practices embedded within broader ecological processes. Soil, plants, animals, and people are chemicals given extra structure and form. In looking at bones and seeds we have moved up a level in scale and it is here that Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization and reterritorialization might be useful. Chemical cycles are instantiated in growing things, which are reincorporated into other beings or decay in the soil after death. Pottery is different again, being a combination of clay and temper formed through human hands and the effects of fire, into shapes which combine aesthetic and practical properties. In pottery, we can start to glimpse the human group, either eating and drinking as separate individuals or from communal bowls and platters. The things being eaten have their own affective properties; food and drink affirm the group or define individual status. These different territories, or maybe dimensions, of human life are all linked but also distinct in some ways. We can start with the nitrogen value of the soil or with the emotional content of food and eating, working between chemistry and human affect. The difference between these levels is hard to bridge, as much due to our theory as to our data. The sorts of thoughts that arise in a conversation about emotion and human relations are rather different from those on the carbon cycle, carried out by varied analysts in the present who are not always sympathetic to the other’s vocabulary and way of putting the world together. As ever, more data are needed, but what is really im­port­ ant is to start to bridge the science–social science–humanities divide. It is this that Deleuze and Guattari offer, but couched in philosophical terms and language off-putting to many. We hope to have offered some hints in this chapter—emotions are after all a chem­ ical matter. At a more substantive level, we can start to see differences, geographical and temporal. There is a long, slow cycle coming into view of altering soil chemistry through manuring and other additions to the soil. This is linked to people’s notions of rubbish, curation, and middening. As we started to explore in Chapter 3, there is a link between the productive house, the midden, and the deposit, whether in pits and ditches or on fields. These were cultural matters as much as chemical, as the remains of past generations of people, plants, and animals were kept and then disposed of, with a series of possibly historical and futureoriented entailments. It may be that some notion of fertility, deriving from the power of ancestry, fed through into the properties of the land to sustain plants, or animals, and with them, people. Notions of curation undoubtedly changed over the two and a half millennia we are looking at, but the effects on the soil are becoming clear, with the addition of nutrients from late prehistory and the Roman period still having effects in the early medieval soil. There are long-term regional patterns in the growing of plants and, maybe especially, animals. In the Thames Valley cows were always important and this is no surprise given their need for good pasture and water. Horses, too, are commonly found. Kent switched from sheep in late prehistory to cows, with pigs also increasing in importance in the early medieval period, with the well-known Anglo-Saxon combination of beef and pork common throughout the east of England. Nitrogen levels are relatively high in many human isotope samples, possibly due to manuring we have argued, but this may also be because of a reasonable intake of animal products throughout. There are interesting hints of regional

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Substances and Cycles  217 differences in minor species: in later prehistory in the Upper Thames people liked to eat dogs. There was a convergence across the regions in animal husbandry in the Roman period, partly because of the new demands of towns, especially London in the area where our analyses concentrated. Pottery is trickier to bring together with other forms of evidence, which is of interest in itself. Unsurprisingly, there are some indications of more individualized consumption in the Roman period than before or after. We have identified rather more hierarchy in settlement and social arrangements in Kent than in the Thames Valley, where settlements were generally small and similar throughout our long period. Field systems, those that leave an archaeological trace at least, came and went, with least evidence in the early and middle Iron Ages (Chapter 7). In the variegation in systems of growing and consuming food we can see local identities being created and maintained; these are most obvious in the contrast between the Upper Thames Valley and Kent, but with minor variations elsewhere. Further analyses of this type in areas in quite different parts of England would greatly expand our understanding of quite how farming, food, and drink were put together differently across England and the implications this had for group identities. Extensive though our information for food production and consumption is, it can only be more fully understood when placed within a context of the changing landscape. In Chapter 7 we turn to fields, their orientation and organization, moving from questions of local variability to the possibility of widespread patterns in the layout of the landscape.

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7

Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology Chris Green and Chris Gosden

From the middle Bronze Age to the Norman Conquest the physical shape of the landscape changed considerably, as we have seen in Chapter  4, with the erosion and deposition of sediment, the growth of bogs, the clearance of trees, and the spread of domesticated plants and animals. Against this changing background of heath, open land, woodland, and bog was the formal imposition of division and enclosure within the landscape. We will look at the enclosure of settlement and broader spaces in Chapter 8. Here we consider two sets of issues. First, as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, there are marked differences across England in the degree of clearance prior to the end of the first millennium bc. In some areas, such as the West Midlands, and the highland areas of northern England clearance was small scale before the late first millennium bc. Barrows, fields, and other features found here were probably within modest clearances within the forest, which accounts for their comparative rarity and their small scale. Large field systems with a predominant alignment (so-called coaxial fields) are rare and the whole treatment of the landscape is different from more open areas. We will consider the nature of these differences and their implications. The second and main point of the chapter is to present a series of methods for looking at the nature of field systems and their size, layout, and orientation. This works best on large, coaxial systems in cleared areas which existed mainly from Dartmoor in the southwest to Lincolnshire on the east coast during the Bronze Age. Dated field systems are fewer for the early and middle Iron Age when the nature of land division is less clear. Coaxial systems come again in the late Iron Age and Roman periods after a gap of some 600 years. The most marked change within our period of 2,500 years is in the early medieval period, when the earlier enclosed landscapes of ditches, banks, and linears were largely given up to be replaced by open fields divided into ridge and furrow. We present results from forty sets of field systems across England mainly dating between the middle Bronze Age and the Roman period. Before discussing our own results, we will survey older approaches, then consider England within a broader picture of Ireland and the near Continent, providing too some thoughts on the theoretical ideas that have underpinned our approach.

Earlier Work One of the great empirical discoveries in Britain during the past century has been the extent and time depth of what is often called the ‘organized landscape’. Anglo-Saxon landscapes were known from both documentary evidence and field observation, but it was something of a surprise, a shock even, when it became evident that there were considerable traces of prehistoric landscapes preserved today. Two articles in 1923 recognized that a

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Chris Green and Chris Gosden. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0007

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  219 series of small, gridded fields predated Anglo-Saxon ridge and furrow; these were named ‘Celtic’ fields to distinguish them from those of the medieval period (Crawford  1923; Curwen and Curwen 1923). This ushered in the realization that there was a long history to agriculture in Britain that could be investigated by empirical means, including a com­bin­ ation of aerial photography, survey on the ground, and occasionally excavation. A second pulse of discovery and synthesis took place in the 1970s since when the investigation of field systems has become a central topic in British archaeology, throwing light as it does on the general layout and use of the landscape. Initial impetus was given by research projects such as those on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988) or the Fens (Pryor and Barrett 2001) and also the early synthesizing work of Bradley (1978). The Dartmoor investigations showed a long history of human use of the moor back into Neolithic times at least, creating a range of monuments in wood and stone. Around 1700 bc larger land divisions, now known as ‘reaves’, were laid out as banks (or possibly hedges) which were later given even more solid form by low stone walls (Fleming 1988: 105). In all, a series of connected reaves were recognized, which might be divided into five different systems, each possibly the territory of a community and individually measuring some 2,000–3,000 hectares in extent (Fleming 1988: 55, Figure 30). Fleming’s interpretation emphasized the scale and organization of land div­ ision at this early date, with the main use of the reaves probably falling between 1700 and 1000 bc, when they were given up, possibly in the face of worsening climatic conditions (Chapter  4). Subsequent interpretations have questioned whether the Dartmoor systems were laid out as wholes or whether they may have developed more organically (Johnston 2005), and if it is useful to talk of territory or property in such situations (Wickstead 2008). These are important new interpretations, but at the time of their discovery and publication, the Dartmoor reaves had considerable influence in thinking about the nature of the evidence that might be available on the early history of the British landscape, not least because Fleming himself explored how far coaxial systems might be found in other parts of Britain (1988: Chapter 8). Many of the systems recognized in the 1970s were upstanding, being walls constructed of stone, clearance cairns, or lynchets. However, Pryor’s excavations at Fengate near Peterborough of a set of ditches showing up on aerial photographs and initially thought to be Roman demonstrated these were prehistoric (Pryor’s initial dating to the late Neolithic is now thought to be too early, with a start broadly contemporary with the Dartmoor reaves in the early part of the second millennium more likely) (Pryor  1984). The Fengate excavations revealed a series of complex ditched enclosures, often with multiple ditches and drove roads leading between the marshy fen and higher land, which Pryor thought might be for moving animals. One such drove road turned into a wooden causeway over the fen leading out to the island of Flag Fen; along the causeway and on the island metalwork and bones had been deposited in a deliberate manner (Pryor and Barrett 2001). Such systems combined the apparently pragmatic and the ritual through the keeping of animals on the one hand and deliberate deposition of various materials on the other. More recently, Evans (2009: 63–6) has questioned the dominance of an in­ter­pret­ ation of field systems based around the management of animals (also to be found in Yates’ 2007 synthesis of Bronze Age evidence for field systems), arguing that there are too few cross-droves for this to be a viable droving system and that the evidence for arable in many places is considerable. An emphasis on sheep in Pryor’s work is also belied by the greater number of cattle bones found in fenland excavations (Evans 2009: Table 6.3). It is the importance of Fleming and Pryor’s work in the later twentieth century that has led to further discussion and some reinterpretation. We should note here that large-scale projects

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220  English Landscapes and Identities such as those on Dartmoor and Fengate changed our perception of the English landscape and have led to much further work reinforcing the widespread evidence of land division and land use from at least the Bronze Age onwards. Much subsequent work has ensued, which cannot all be surveyed here. Important research on linears on Salisbury Plain, combined with a national survey of other work up to that date was undertaken by Bradley et al. (1994). Since the 1980s, projects leading into Historic England’s National Mapping Project (NMP) (including an aerial survey of Dartmoor) have led to the discovery of millions of previously unrecognized archaeological features, many of which are land divisions and have resulted in important synthetic publication, for instance the work of McOmish et al. (2002) on Salisbury Plain. We have worked with the NMP’s results up to 2011. Since PPG 16 our evidence base has increased massively, as in Cambridgeshire for example (for instance, see Evans 2009). Important recent work published on Northumberland (Passmore et al.  2012) and Cumbria (Quatermaine et al. 2012) has shown the complexity and longevity of evidence in some northern regions of England. It is likely that the clearance of stone in upland areas to create cairnfields may date back to the early second millennium, if not earlier, although stone cairns are inherently hard to date. In northern Northumberland there is evidence of minor deforestation at the end of the third millennium bc and some cereal pollen from that date (Passmore et al. 2012: 51) and possible early Bronze Age burial cairns with associated house platforms, with cairnfields followed by lynchets and later more regular embanked plots (Passmore et al. 2012: 68). These changes occur within a generally forested landscape. Earlier work stressed the spatial organization within systems and their widespread occurrence across the country. More recent findings contain important qualifications about time and the date of various forms of land divisions. Of particular recent significance has been the work carried out by Yates (2007) and Bradley and Yates (2007) that has led to rethinking of the dates of prehistoric fields. The name originally given to small rectangular or square divisions—Celtic fields—implied that the date of many, if not all, of these fell within the Iron Age. Bradley and Yates (2007) have argued for two bursts in the creation of ‘Celtic’ fields, the first falling in the middle and late Bronze Ages and the second from the late Iron Age and Roman periods. ‘In lowland England, the creation of “Celtic” field systems may have lapsed for several centuries’ (Bradley and Yates  2007: 96). These authors immediately acknowledge the difficulty of dating ditches that have been regularly recut and contain little artefactual evidence or material for absolute dating. It is likely that such a sequence works for southern England, but that more complex temporal patterns pertain in the north, something we will return to later. We can gather together the evidence of fields and land divisions in the following way, although we should also stress that developments in landscape are rarely straightforwardly sequential, or easy to generalize across regions. There is considerable variety in the construction of land divisions across time and, more especially, space. These include the use of stone in upland areas, such as found on the reave systems of Dartmoor, Exmoor, and Bodmin Moor, although some or all of these may have seen earlier divisions created by earthen banks and hedges. Smaller divisions created by the clearance of stone or the cre­ ation of relatively short stone walls are found in other upland areas, such as Northumberland. In many other upland areas, such as those on the chalk of southern England, field systems show up as lynchets: banks of earth that accumulated along barriers like hedges or fences due to the movement of soil down slope after ploughing or other cultivation. Lowland systems were often created through the digging of ditches, such as those seen at Fengate, which may have been complemented by banks and hedges to form less permeable barriers.

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  221 These small square fields may have been crossed-ploughed, although direct evidence from plough marks is scant. In the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, lengthy linear ditches were constructed in highland areas, sometimes cutting across earlier small fields. Linears display a broadly complementary distribution to those of pit alignments, which can also be of considerable length (Bradley and Yates 2007: Figure 2). Each means of land division had its own sets of labour requirements and in-built chronology. For instance, lynchets, as accumulative features, derived from regular ploughing which occurs in any case without the need for extra labour beyond that needed to make a small barrier against which soil accumulated. Ditches, on the other hand, need regular, possibly annual, cleaning out, representing a considerable investment of initial and subsequent labour on the part of a group. Scale is important here and a telling illustration is the comparison Evans (2009: Figure 6.9) makes between the field systems emerging though large-scale excavation in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire on the one hand and that known from the plotting of the Dartmoor reaves on the other. The ditched systems are considerably smaller than the areas enclosed on Dartmoor. Systems based on reaves/lynchets are large and required considerable amounts of labour to create and maintain, but this was an order of magnitude less than that needed for systems of ditched fields. Hints of a sequence are appearing, although more dates are needed to confirm or contradict almost all elements of this. The first formal fields started to appear in the early second millennium bc. Before that there are indications of cultivation, most obviously from the remains of domesticated seeds and bones in Neolithic and early Bronze Age contexts (Stevens and Fuller 2012). Also, as McOmish (2011: 7) points out, there are scattered, but convincing, indications of cultivation through the Neolithic, such as the ard marks beneath the long barrow at South Street and deposits of plough soils in the ditches of Neolithic long barrows, or indications of cultivation at the Hambledon Hill Neolithic complex in Dorset. Early fields dating from the middle Bronze Age on Plumpton Plain, East Sussex, have earl­ ier cultivation furrows stratified beneath a field bank and these earlier features might date to the Beaker period going back to 2500 bc (McOmish 2011: 7). The Bronze Age systems are often seen to be associated with cattle, whose exchange underpinned the acquisition, movement, and deposition of metalwork, thought to be the real basis of prestige in the Bronze Age (Bradley and Yates  2007: 97), although this is often not upheld by the bone evidence. The earliest fields may well have formalized, and indeed fossilized, earlier more fluid patterns of land use, perhaps even causing conflict between or within groups.1 As we have seen, the early fields in southern England may well have gone out of use by the early Iron Age, being regenerated or created anew in the late Iron Age and Roman periods. Recent archaeological work, especially developer-funded investigations, has greatly increased our knowledge of field systems and other land divisions across northwestern Europe (Bradley et al.  2015). What has emerged is a complex and paradoxical set of sequences which are intriguing and hard to understand. On the one hand there are similarities in land divisions in various areas of Europe either side of the North Sea. Løvschal’s work on three areas of Europe—Jutland, the Meuse–Demer–Scheldt (MDS) region southeast of modern Amsterdam, and Wessex—demonstrates that similar modes of division are found in all three areas, but that dates and sequences vary from one area to another (Løvschal  2014: 737, Figure 8). In Jutland there is sporadic early enclosure using fences, ditches, and other relatively ephemeral boundaries, but then from 700 bc onwards there 1  As happened in the 19th-/20th-century American west, when enclosure of areas that up until then had been used for open ranging of cattle caused a series of violent conflicts to take place, the so-called ‘Range Wars’.

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222  English Landscapes and Identities are field divisions, followed by an increase in pit-zone alignments, with enclosed farmsteads and villages in the final centuries bc. In the MDS area fenced divisions started early (c.1550 bc), followed by an absence of archaeologically visible enclosure, and succeeded by small ditched fields between 700 and 400 bc. Large-scale ditched systems and enclosures appeared at the end of the first millennium bc. In Wessex coaxial systems started c.1500 bc (and earlier in some areas of southern Britain) to be cut through by linear ditches and other earthworks between 1100 and 700 bc (Løvschal 2014: 737). In Britain ditched systems do not appear to come back into use until the late Iron Age and Roman periods. Elsewhere in northwest Europe, for instance on the north German plain and inland areas of France, field systems and houses are difficult to identify even through large-scale excavation, although here barrow building continues later than the areas just discussed (Bradley et al. 2015: 175). Few domestic sites are known in Ireland after 800 bc, where pottery is also very rare (Bradley et al. 2015: 216). Roundhouses are only widespread in Britain and Ireland, where rectangular structures are rare, in contrast to the near Continent where the reverse is true. Areas across northwestern Europe were clearly in contact with each other, sharing knowledge, practices, and materials, but on the other hand there were strong localizing tendencies creating local sequences and sense of place. Early enclosures, using ditches and lynchets in Britain or fences in the MDS area, would have been known about in other regions within a connected and travelled landscape (Chapter  5), but whether they were taken up was due to a series of local factors and pressures. From the middle of the second millennium bc onwards there was a move from open to enclosed landscapes. An increasing tendency to enclose the land was not linear, as there are periods of enclosure followed by times when archaeologically visible enclosure is not evident. However, by the late prehistoric period in many areas the land was enclosed to an unprecedented level, raising questions of why this happened and what sorts of cultural processes it represented. The distribution of fields bounded by ditches or lynchets increased in the late Iron Age and Roman periods, compared to earlier periods. However, unlike both earlier and later periods there has been relatively little work on Roman fields in Britain prior to the 1990s. The reasons for this are complex and are partly to do with an emphasis on the elements of life most obviously introduced into Britain by the Romans: military camps, towns (large and small), villas, and temples. The work of Haverfield in the early previous century was based around a notion of Romanization (also see Chapter  1), which stressed the benefits or coercions the Romans brought to existing groups within Britain (Hingley 2000: Chapters 9 and 10). The apparent benefits conferred by a ‘civilizing’ mission were best seen in the higher and more elite elements of Romano-British culture and not those of the small settlement or agricultural countryside. These interests were apparent not just in the ways evidence was interpreted, but through the manner in which it was generated. Hingley (2000: 150) makes a distinction between two classes of site: those seen as direct evidence of Romanization, such as villas, major towns, and military sites; and the small towns and non-villa settlements which might be evidence of the ‘native’ element of the population. He shows a shift in the emphasis of excavations whereby in 1921–5, 34 non-villa and small town sites were ­excavated, increasing to 136 in 1991–5, a change from 25 per cent of excavations to 32 per cent, with villa excavations down from 25 to 10 per cent of the total (Hingley  2000: Table 10.3). As Taylor notes, prior to the 1990s, ‘analytical, rather than descriptive, approaches to the wider landscape have been rare and field systems have not been a focus of study in the Roman period’ (Taylor 2007: 3). Over the past 25 years, a number of factors have changed this picture, not least the implementation of PPG 16, which has led to much more excavation of rural Roman sites and landscapes (collated in Allen et al. 2015).

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  223 The first survey of agriculture in Roman Britain (Applebaum  1972) was influenced by historical sources and drew on archaeological evidence gathered before 1950. Like much else of this period (e.g. Collingwood and Richmond’s 1969 The Archaeology of Roman Britain) it concentrated on the villa, about which much more was known than any other type, but which we now know only ever formed a minority of rural settlements. Archaeology became prominent, and with it a greater concern for the countryside, in Millett’s (1990) The Romanization of Britain. The most thorough recent treatment of Roman Britain, which has tried to complicate any division between Romans and ‘natives’, is Mattingly’s (2006) An Imperial Possession, in which his discussion of rural life revolves around a relationship between villa and roundhouse. His discussion of rural identities combined both elites and non-elites, emphasizing diversity both within and between regions. None of these treatments especially focused on, or problematized, fields. The most recent and widespread consideration of Roman rural dynamics is the project led by Holbrook and Fulford, which has surveyed the grey literature on rural settlement (Smith et al. 2016) and concluded, among many other things, that there was marked intensity of agriculture in their Central Belt. A range of projects with a regional focus have looked at the evolution of the landscape from the prehistoric into the Roman period (Stoertz 1997; Taylor 1999; Riley and WilsonNorth 2001; McOmish et al. 2002). Taylor carried out the first national survey using data from what were then Sites and Monuments Records (now HERs), the aerial photographic records of the then Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), the NMP, and a range of other sources, with the aim of making analytical use of this mass of data, but also to inform protection of sites and landscapes (Taylor 2007). Taylor noted differences in rural landscapes, with small systems of fields around dispersed settlements in the upland north and west of England, with unenclosed land beyond, and also larger sets of field systems, with trackways linking rural settlements into extensive networks with pasture between in the south and Midlands (Taylor 2007: Figure 7.2). These systems often had an origin in the late Iron Age, with some reorganization in the second century ad (Booth 2011a). Changes in field systems may be related to an economic intensification of agriculture (Van der Veen and O’Connor 1998), which is part of broader moves within the Roman empire as a whole (Bowman and Wilson 2013). In areas where earlier fields were found, new ones were also located, but often in greater numbers than previously. However, fields were now also located in places where they had previously been absent, such as the Upper Thames Valley where fields appear for the first time in the late Iron Age, with some considerable reorganization in the second century ad (e.g. Booth and Stansbie  2007). Rippon et al. (2015) provide an excellent and up-to-date survey of the fields of Roman Britain and the pollen evidence, as well as the succeeding early medieval period, arguing for a degree of continuity around ad 410, with little evidence of the regrowth of trees and shrubs that might indicate an abandonment of the countryside after the end of formal Roman rule. Attempts to understand medieval open fields have a very different trajectory to the study of fields of earlier periods, being based much more on the historical evidence concerning not just agriculture, but broader issues of politics and culture within an emerging feudal world. Histories of work on fields usually start with Seebohm (1883) and Vinogradoff (1892). The key features of the system are agreed upon. In many areas of England, and most obviously in the Midlands region, villages were surrounded by two or three large open fields which were divided into strips. Each strip was worked by an individual family and the holdings of the family were to be found across all the fields, so that they were dispersed.

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224  English Landscapes and Identities At any one time at least one field was in fallow, with cattle and sheep grazing the stubble, manuring the field in the process (Chapter 6). Seebohm (1883) described a ‘three-tilth’ system based on Hitchen, Hertfordshire, which he took to be a universal model and was accepted as such for some time afterwards. Vinogradoff (1892) felt that dispersed holdings had come about so that each family had relatively equal access to various qualities of soil, arable land and meadow, and so on. Gray (1915) classified the field systems of England into several types, with the Midland system showing the most obvious emphasis on two- and three-field systems, with more complex arrangements elsewhere, some of which may have been inherited from Roman or ‘Celtic’ fields and agriculture. There was considerable discussion of assarting—that is the process of bringing forested or waste land into cultivation, which brought up issues of ownership, so that newly cleared land might have been owned by the people who undertook the clearance, rather than the lord (Bishop 1935). Thirsk’s post-war work (e.g. Thirsk 1964) identified four essential features of open fields: subdivision of arable and meadow; rights of common pasturing over arable and meadow when crops were gathered; a common waste; and a village assembly (manorial court) to regulate the use of the land as arable and pasture.2 There are continuing questions of when and how the open field system originated, with Dodgshon (1980) arguing that it derived from the splitting of settlement. And there is also a question of how extensively the open fields and their villages started before the Norman Conquest or how extensively after. In the most recent authoritative statement, Hall (2014) feels that the morphology of Roman fields is so different from those of the early medieval period that there can be no link (although this would not preclude some elements of the Roman farming landscape being used) and that the principle of land division is enshrined in law in the early Anglo-Saxon period, with the earliest dated evidence for villages and fields being before the mid-ninth century, although the full expression of open fields may not have been found until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Hall 2014: 212–13). These observations work best for the Midland zone, so that different and more complex histories might exist for other areas. Recent discussions of medieval fields linked them to the emergence of key features of English life, such as the village and the church from the middle Saxon period onwards (Astill 1988: 37; Williamson et al. 2013; Banham and Faith 2014; Hall 2014; ten Harkel et al. 2017). Rippon et al. (2015) argue for greater continuity of layout of the landscape between the Romano-British and early medieval periods, while also presenting an important discussion of the evolution of coaxial landscapes, which they see, in some cases, at least, as developing from the development of things like parallel drove roads from highland to lowland areas, such as between the claylands of south Essex down to the marshy land near the Thames. They then layout a series of possible scenarios for the later history of these systems (Rippon et al. 2015: Figure 4.14). Using the methodologies employed here we see that generally the setting up of open fields represents a major change in the layout of the landscape, the nature of settlement, and the burial of the dead. Our analyses below are mainly of systems from the middle Bronze Age to the end of the Roman period, which have features of alignment and division in common, differing markedly from the open fields. Our def­in­ ition of coaxial is where strong axes of alignment are found, with fields ordered around a central ditch, drove road, or other barrier.

2  One of the very few villages in England to still operate a system of agriculture of this type is Laxton in Nottinghamshire.

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  225 We now know that fields exist for all periods from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period, although there might be some question as to what form they took in the earlier part of the Iron Age. By the late Iron Age they were found over much of England and were basic to large elements of the landscape and hence of people’s lives. However, we still know very little about how fields were organized and this includes questions about their alignment and topology, their relationship to landscape, and their modes of use for arable, pasture, and some possible integration of the two. We also have not thought much about how fields changed over time, except of course for the difference between the enclosed fields of prehistory and the Roman period on the one hand and the open medieval fields on the other. At a more interpretive level, we assume fields fit within the category of economy and are best thought about in terms of growing food, the technologies needed to do so, and the outputs resulting. Dividing up a landscape requires very considerable labour, but also a set of social commitments not just to other living people, but also to the ancestors connected with the land and to the productive powers of the universe, however these are viewed. These last are questions of cosmology and community, rather than economy. We cannot answer all these questions here, but wish to tackle questions of alignment and organization, which can lead on to some broader thoughts. One great advantage of the EngLaId project is that we can compare and contrast across long time periods in a manner that most other projects cannot. Before getting on to our empirical results a few broader theoretical remarks are necessary to situate our approach.

Some General Considerations The landscape is laid out on its largest scale through field systems. The divisions to create fields parcel the land up; trackways and drove-ways, where they exist, channel movement through the landscape (Chapter  5), and the relationships settlements and burial monuments have with field systems tell us about daily movement, as well as the interaction between the living and the dead. The capacity to direct and influence movement and action mean that field systems can potentially structure the nature of the community at a broad level, the nature of stability in community relations and their changes over time. This community includes not just people, but also plants and animals, all in patterns of mutual influence. Field systems make manifest sets of extended relations underlying many aspects of life in the past. Fields have also been seen to manifest a tension between the practical and ritual elements of life. Although the dichotomy between practical and ritual action has been much critiqued (for instance, Bradley 2005), there is still a tendency to generate sep­ ar­ate discussions on farming regimes and economic factors on the one hand and more cosmological relations on the other when thinking of fields. Important issues such as the emergence of property and ownership also feature here, often seen as an element of the economic relations underlying life. Analytically, there is a tension between mapping field systems in which their spatial aspect is dominant and an emphasis on change and dynamism whereby fields need to be set analytically within broader changes in the openness of the landscape due to vegetation clearance and regeneration, as well as soil erosion and deposition (Chapter 4), together with the movements of animals, people, and plants influenced by the transit of the sun and the moon across the sky. In what follows, we will play with this tension between the static and the dynamic. On an even broader temporal scale, landscapes have emergent properties, so that earlier states influence later ones, although often not in any straightforward or linear manner. Emergent

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226  English Landscapes and Identities properties lead to regional differences, as varied sequences emerge under the influence of topography, climate, clearance, the nature of features constructed by people, and their subsequent influences. We hope to provide a sense of regional variability at specific periods and over time. This is not just a sense that the arrangement of the landscape varied over space, so that the Peak District differed from the Fens, but that the nature of change and temporality varied across England due to the arrangements of landscapes. We also feel the need to emphasize the sheer difference of earlier cultural forms—maybe especially in the periods before the end of the first millennium bc, when human populations were very small and less obviously fixed to the land—and allow for the flow of people and ideas, in landscapes where the balance between the open and the forested was different and where land divisions, which we now call fields, were new. The deeper past is different, but might have profound influences on what came later, with possible axes of orientation in the landscape lasting many millennia. We are inclined to think of these engagements with land and other species in terms of intelligence, where there are multiple intelligences at work, with humans interacting with sheep, cows, dogs, deer, and wolves in complex but possibly structured manners. In general, in the interpretation of fields, there are those approaches that emphasize practical considerations of working the landscape and those focused on more cosmological or ritual. This is a false dichotomy in many ways, but we do not feel that people in the past operated with a purely functional logic, so that broader cosmological forces always shaped their lives in the process of making a living. We have divided our approaches to landscape layout into qualitative and quantitative aspects. Under the first heading we will look at regional differences in landscape histories from the middle Bronze Age onwards and whether these are paralleled in other differences, such as those in material culture. In the latter, we will explain and apply a set of methods for looking at landscapes in a larger and more systematic manner than hitherto, emphasizing the layout and topology of field systems over time. In the final discussion we will try to bring together the qualitative and quantitative aspects, returning to some of the points we have just made above.

Regional Patterns and Ecologies Field systems and land divisions emerged through the early part of the second millennium bc in a slow fashion, which gained pace after 1500 bc. There had been much emphasis on fields and the degree of clearance from the Neolithic onwards. Generally speaking we feel that the picture from southern England, of clearance from the Mesolithic and Neolithic onwards, with relatively open landscapes by the middle Bronze Age, has been generalized across the country and this has held back a broad comparative view and an appreciation of regional variability (Chapters 3 and 4). We feel that this has obscured a regionally varied picture in which large areas were not cleared of trees until late in the first millennium bc in the north and west, with other areas such as parts of the Midlands being cleared, but not seeing field systems until the end of the first millennium bc. These variations indicate quite different sets of ecological and cultural relations across England through the last two millennia bc, which had a continuing influence into the Roman and early medieval periods. There has been a feeling that only cleared landscapes were humanized, with the forest seen as wild wood relatively unaltered by human action. Although vital evidence is lacking from pollen, insects, and soil, there is the possibility that some and perhaps most of the

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  227 woodland was managed in some way, as much a part of the human realm as fields and downland. This is a point we shall return to later. Broadly speaking we can identify four areas of human action and ecology across England from 1500 bc, although below this generalization is a great degree of local variability. From Dartmoor in the southwest to Lincolnshire in the Midlands and encompassing an area taking in the chalk downlands, the Middle and Lower Thames Valley, parts of Kent and northward through Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and into East Anglia, is a set of coaxial fields all created during the middle and late Bronze Age (our recognition of this arc is an extension of the work of Yates (2007)) (Figure 7.1a). Secondly, from Somerset in a western strip running north and east across Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, across much of Yorkshire, and up to Tyneside, there is an area with few or no middle Bronze Age fields, but some parts of which were divided by linear ditches and pit alignments in the late Bronze Age. Here fields only appear in any number in the late Iron Age (Figure  7.1b).

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Figure 7.1  Presence of records of field systems (in red) in the EngLaId database for: (a) Bronze Age; (b) Iron Age; (c) Roman; and (d) early medieval. Non-specific prehistoric records shown in pink in (a) and (b). Records based solely upon place names or documentary sources have been excluded.

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228  English Landscapes and Identities Thirdly, there is a strip from Shropshire to Lancashire which is heavily forested, at least until the early first millennium bc and probably beyond. Here there is little evidence of settlement and few artefacts prior to the Iron Age, with little evidence of field systems (Figures 7.1a–c). Finally, there are the areas of northern upland, within the Pennines running from the Peak District to the north Pennines, the Lake District in Cumbria and highlands of Northumberland where smaller, aggregate systems of fields and houses are found from early in the second millennium bc. These latter two areas are often heavily wooded, whereas the Peak District may have been more open woodland. In all cases, there seems to have been mass loss of woodland in the centuries before the arrival of the Romans. It is ironic that both the presence and the absence of fields are seen to indicate pastoralism: where fields are absent it is thought that people were mobile pastoralists, where they are present more transhumant pastoralism is posited. We have provided a schematic rendering of these differences in Figure 7.2. Variations through time are obvious. There are relatively few fields from the Bronze Age probably due to their subsequent destruction and later reuse, with coaxial systems in the 100000

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  229 southern areas on the moorland, downs, and lowlands, together with smaller scale systems in the Peak District, the northern Pennines, Cumbria, and Northumberland. There was a spread of fields in the late Iron Age, with fewer fields visible in the early and middle Iron Age, which may have been because these were divided by less archaeologically visible features, such as hedges or fences. At the end of the Bronze Age, southern moorland systems were given up, possibly for climatic reasons, although this is debated (Chapter 4). In the north, there was a slow extension of field systems, terracing, and other landscape features through the first millennium bc as trees were cleared, with an extra emphasis on tree clearance in the few centuries before the Roman invasion. It is difficult to distinguish chronologically between late Iron Age and Roman fields: there is sometimes reuse of the Bronze Age fields in the late Iron Age and definite continuity in many areas between the late Iron Age and Roman use of fields. But there is also an increase in field systems in the Roman period, when fields are most common and probably most used at any time in the 2,500year span of the EngLaId period. The Roman landscape can be seen as a crescendo of forces that go back to the middle Bronze Age at least. Large coaxial systems are found where they were absent previously, that is from Somerset, through the Midlands, and up to the northwest coast and Northumberland. In our distributions the Central Belt defined by Smith et al. (2016) is barely seen, an interesting comment on the differences between databases, with concentrations also found in Yorkshire on our maps (Figure  7.1c). The numbers of Anglo-Saxon fields are underestimated in our records: many are given a date after ad 1086, when they could have earlier origins. Coverage is poor, so that divisions such as the Central Zone do not show up in our databases. We will start by considering the nature, orientation, and layout of coaxial fields, before looking at ridge and furrow from the early medieval period and onwards.

Analysing Coaxial Fields From early in the second millennium bc, but becoming more prevalent after 1500 bc, is a band of coaxial fields across southern England (Figure 7.2). As mentioned earlier, we see coaxial fields as those laid out along a single orientation and then with field boundaries at close to right angles from this. In order to get a stronger grip on the relationships between field system orientation, morphology, temporal and spatial distribution, and relationships to landscape, we undertook both a study of 40 areas of field system (Figures 7.3 and 7.4) alongside some analysis of national variation using the 1 km × 1 km spatial bins (see Chapter 2). For the purposes of this exercise, field systems were classified by period into four groups: • Bronze Age; • Late Iron Age and Roman: these periods were combined as they are assumed to be a common phenomenon starting in the Iron Age and peaking in the Roman period; • Unspecified prehistoric: these fall between the previous two categories, functioning in our datasets as largely a category for less precisely dated fields; and • Early medieval. The last time period has only been analysed on a national level and through some analysis of orientations seen in areas of ridge and furrow (see the section, ‘Understanding Orientation’), as only one small area of apparently early medieval field system appropriate

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230  English Landscapes and Identities ID key: 12 14 22 16 08 09 28 31 36 34 25 26 24 23 03 32 18 27 40 04 39 06 02 17

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for morphological analysis was discovered within the NMP (itself within a much larger Bronze Age field system on Dartmoor). The 40 field systems analysed morphologically (Table  7.1) were selected based upon a mixed criteria of various priorities: • Presence of good NMP coverage; • Records of ‘field system’ in our main database (or in the MORPH database previously used by Historic England/RCHME for recording the interpretative results of aerial survey work); • Priority given to field systems in case study areas; and • Priority given to field systems with other potential local dating evidence: excavations recorded by Bradley et al. 2015 or Allen et al. 2015; PAS findspots; published radiocarbon dates recorded in the OxCal database or recorded in the CBA Radiocarbon Site Index (Council for British Archaeology 2012).

Table 7.1  Basic details of the 40 field systems that form the detailed study Name given

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Longstreet Figheldean Milston Down Netheravon Maddington Orcheston South of Doncaster NE of Sedburgh Reaveley Hill Pitts Down Kelham Bridge St Patrick’s Wood Long Mynd Bradley Cross Maydensole Farm Cottage Hunstanton West of Retford Hotham Common Shaugh Moor Samson South Hill Terminal 5—Bronze Age Terminal 5—Roman Nanquidno Down Wetwang Mell Fell Tansor Grange Westbreck’s Farm Gravel Castle

Avon–Thames–Avon Transect Avon–Thames–Avon Transect Avon–Thames–Avon Transect Avon–Thames–Avon Transect None (Salisbury Plain) None (Salisbury Plain) None (near Mid-England Transect) Cumbria North Northumberland Isle of Wight Hoskins’ Leicestershire Lea Valley Marches Mendips and Somerset Levels Kent East of England Transect Mid-England Transect Humber Estuary Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley Cornwall None (chosen as excavated) None (chosen as excavated) Cornwall Humber Estuary Cumbria East of England Transect Mid-England Transect Kent

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152293 148830 144879 147371 143301 149729 395695 493811 618441 85855 311528 229781 287874 153053 148072 339687 380887 433660 62817 12465 175676 175789 28560 459989 521367 289884 380740 149667

146 126 124 108 121 143 18 267 267 126 135 121 251 138 75 23 33 7 246 12 22 22 88 71 302 26 5 96

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Lynchets Lynchets Lynchets Lynchets Lynchets Lynchets Brickwork Lynchets? Lynchets? Lynchets Brickwork? Unspecified Lynchets Lynchets Unspecified Ditched Brickwork Brickwork? Reeve Unspecified Ditched Ditched Lynchets Unspecified Banked Ditched Brickwork Lynchets?

649 518 72 146 447 449 1164 12 12 81 7 2 51 5 7 9 624 111 84 12 59 5 68 65 36 39 113 18

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ID

Smeardon Down Duxmore Farm Flodden Field Halfway House Wood Park Grounds Farm Cottages Poldowrian Pilsgate Lodges Holne Moor Morris Dancer’s Lodge Eastmanton Down Sharpridge Farm

Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley Isle of Wight North Northumberland Humber Estuary Cornwall Hoskins’ Leicestershire Cornwall East of England Transect Dartmoor and the Tamar Valley Mid-England Transect Avon-Thames-Avon Transect Avon–Thames–Avon Transect

252215 455740 389424 504952 209938 447982 174640 505398 267810 464865 433654 414420

78148 87390 635949 436894 79150 329476 17067 306754 71247 372462 183791 174378

299 99 144 6 202 29 66 19 315 46 196 207

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14 22 19 93 113 35 25 20 341 124 160 133

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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234  English Landscapes and Identities The first two criteria were essential in order to undertake any analysis, with the exception of the Bronze Age and Roman field systems at Terminal 5 (Framework Archaeology 2011). It proved possible to analyse at least one field system in each case study area, although that in the Lea Valley was very small in extent. A degree of bias exists in the set of field systems towards areas with particularly extensive evidence for such monuments, but this is in­ev­it­ able for this type of analysis. As can be seen (Figure 7.4), when plotted nationally, there is a strong tendency for the unspecific prehistoric and Bronze Age field systems to be in the western half of England (with the exceptions of Hunstanton (ID 16) and Terminal 5 (ID 21)) and for the Iron Age–Roman field systems to be in the east (the exceptions being in Somerset and Cumbria). This is in large part a consequence of the NMP being used as the source of the vast majority of morphological data (again, with the exception of Terminal 5), as this dataset does not cover many of the areas of known extensive Bronze Age field systems in the eastern half of England (e.g. in Cambridgeshire), due to the aerial prospection affordance patterns discussed in Chapter  2 (i.e. because of the lack of crop marks showing up on ­certain soils and superficial geologies). We carried out both a national 1 km × 1 km synthesis (Figure 7.5) and a more detailed analysis of the set of 40 field systems, In both cases field systems show a degree of bias towards upland (and more rugged) areas in the Bronze Age and for unspecific prehistoric sites, albeit with a strong presence in lowland areas in addition. Iron Age–Roman field systems show a pattern of elevations that is more biased towards particularly low-lying areas, but otherwise match the national pattern for elevation across England as a whole (and even more so for terrain ruggedness). Hence, field systems appear to become more prevalent in lower elevations over time, up until the Roman period (this may also reflect the destruction or wholesale reworking of earlier lowland field systems in the process of building new systems). Early medieval field systems can only be looked at in this way using the 1 km × 1 km synthesis, which shows a distinct bias towards moderately elevated areas, but the distribution of field systems of this date in our data is least extensive nationally (Figure 7.1d) and so the pattern is least robust. When examining the broad soil type, shallowest geology (meaning superficial geology where present or bedrock geology elsewhere), and modern land usage for the set of 40 field systems (Figure  7.6), a few patterns emerge. No Iron Age–Roman field systems exist on areas of peaty soils or on igneous rocks, and only a few Iron Age–Roman field systems exist on sandy soils. Further, field systems of those periods have a greater tendency to occur over superficial geologies. The starkest pattern, however, is the very large proportion of Bronze Age field systems that occur on calcareous grasslands and the very large proportion of Iron Age–Roman field systems that occur on arable (or, less likely, horticultural) land. This presumably means that field systems in our dataset that have been given a Bronze Age date occur largely as earthworks (or parchmarks perhaps), whilst field systems that have been given an Iron Age and/or Roman date occur largely as cropmarks.

Understanding Orientation A key point of our analyses, however, was to look at the morphological structure of the 40 field systems and see whether there were any patterns, whether between the various morphological attributes or across time or space. The various patterns seen through the

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  235 (b) 0.010 0.008 0.006

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ana­lysis of these metrics will be discussed later. The primary metric of interest for this study was orientation. The details of the methodology are presented in Appendix 2. As discussed already, coaxial systems are found in many areas from the middle Bronze Age to the Roman period. They appear in many cases to be terrain blind and impose an order on the landscape that does not derive from the structure of the landscape itself, indicating strong cultural forces were at work. Orientation was settled upon as potentially the most fruitful initial element of field system morphology for analysis due to its strong relationship to the regularity of field systems: one would expect a strongly rectilinear/‘coaxial’ field system to feature orientations obviously clustered around two approximately perpendicular bearings. In the most regular possible field system layout (a grid of square fields), these two orientation clusters would be of similar strength and narrow width (in terms of the span of bearings covered). Naturally, such a perfectly regular field system would be very unlikely to occur archaeologically (although modern field systems can be astonishingly regular when laid out using modern surveying techniques on flat previously uncultivated

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236  English Landscapes and Identities Soil type by period

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Figure 7.6  Modern broad soil type, shallowest geology, and land use classification of field systems studied as part of this exercise.

ground, as seen in centre-pivot irrigated fields3). Conversely, a very irregular set of field system boundaries would show more (or no) clusters in line orientation or varying strengths. In order to understand this better, we needed to come up with a way of calculating the number of clusters in orientation, their strength and their width (Figure  7.7); given in Appendix 2. In order to understand this regularity better, we devised an Index of Coaxiality based upon three assumptions: • That more regular (or coaxial) field systems have a strong central axis (P1), with further field boundaries laid out at right angles (P2) and these two primary orientations will show as peaks of orientation on our graphs; • That more regular/coaxial field systems should tend towards having first (P1) and second (P2) ranked peaks of equivalent strength; and • That more regular/coaxial field systems should tend towards only having two peaks and not more.4 We used these three measures to calculate an Index of Coaxiality, as described in rather technical terms in footnote 2—we were attempting to find ways of displaying the pre­dom­ in­ant orientations of the field systems on a graph, which then form the basis for the Index of Coaxiality. We hope this is a method that can be used and developed by others. Of the 40 field systems analysed in this way, 14 have two peaks in orientation, 7 have three peaks, 6 have four peaks, and the remaining 13 have five to ten peaks. In the majority 3  Extensively visible in satellite imagery of arid climatic zones, e.g. the Arabian peninsula. 4  These three indices were assigned values that varied between 0 (least regular: difference in angle between P1 and P2 close to 90°±90°; P2 close to 0 in rank; ten peaks) and 1 (most regular: difference in angle between P1 and P2 close to 90°; P2 close to 1 in rank; two peaks), and then summed for each field system. For the dataset at hand, the results were then normalized by their maximum and minimum values so that they varied between 0 and 1, from least ‘coaxial’ to most ‘coaxial’. For wider application, this system should be left to vary between 0 and 3.

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  237 Smoothed bearing

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Figure 7.7  Schematic rendering of metrics used to define and measure ‘peaks’ in field system orientation.

of cases, where a field system has more than two peaks, the third ranked peak was ­significantly lower ranked than the first two, with only 5 field systems having a third ranked peak of greater than 0.25 (relative to the strongest ranked at 1.0). Only one example (on Nanquidno Down in Cornwall (ID 23)) has a fourth peak (and indeed a fifth) ranked above 0.25. As such, we can be very clear that all of our field systems show a reasonable degree of regularity (with the singular exception of Nanquidno Down), even if that is not always apparent when staring at a plan. On the non-normalized coaxiality index, 28 out of 40 fields showed a reasonably strong degree of coaxiality (scores greater than 2.0 out of a maximum of 3.0), indicating they were laid out with some reasonably definite plan in mind. This leads us to ask what the implications of such a layout were. We need to think both how the fields were laid out and what was the nature of interaction within fields. In both cases, visibility was an important issue. Total viewsheds (Llobera 2003; Conolly and Lake 2006: 228) were constructed for each field system, based upon a 1-km buffer or boundary around the enclosed area and using a 20-m resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM), with a maximum view distance of 1 km. A total viewshed is a summed stack of viewsheds generated from every cell in a DEM. They are subject to problems with edge effects, but this was minimized through defining the area for analysis by utilizing a buffer set at the same distance as the maximum view distance: that is 1 km. Mean values were then extracted for the enclosed area of each field system. Effectively, here total viewsheds have been used as a way of classifying the visual openness of the landscape of each field system (i.e. how easy it is on average to see between two points within the enclosed area). When plotted against the Index of Coaxiality (Figure 7.8),

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238  English Landscapes and Identities Coaxiality index vs intravisibility

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Figure 7.8  Coaxiality against intravisibility.

it is very obvious that there is no relationship between field system regularity and landscape visual openness. This is important as it strongly suggests that regularity of a field system is not related to how easy it would be to lay it out in a regular fashion: in other words, people in the past did not lay out regular field systems only where it was easy for them to do so. Interestingly, when graphed, nodes in field systems (i.e. points where ‘lines’ changed direction or crossed) also do not seem to occur at particularly visible locations when compared to the rest of the field system’s enclosed area, which also suggests that intravisibility was not an important factor in the construction process. Some other set of factors was at work beyond what people could see when laying out the systems. Another element of landscape character that might be expected to have a potential influence on the orientation of regular field systems would be the aspect of the ground surface. The aspect values for each DEM cell within the enclosed area of each field system were extracted, binned into 15° slices (this means counting the numbers of cells that fell within each 15° band or bin) and graphed against the orientation of each field system (Figure 7.9). It should be apparent that a number of field systems show a tendency for their lines to run along and perpendicular to the slope of their local ground surface. Unsurprisingly, this is particularly the case where the field system has been constructed on a particularly steep

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  239 ID: 1–5:

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hillside (such as that on Mell Fell in Cumbria (ID 25)). However, it is also apparent that aspect is only one element that influenced the orientation of field systems in the past (and usually only a minor one), as fields were laid out with different principles motivating them. As may be apparent from Figure 7.10, there does appear to be a tendency within the set of 40 field systems for some to be oriented upon bearings in the region of 10°–40° and

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240  English Landscapes and Identities 100°–30°, which are roughly perpendicular. When plotting the highest value of the first and second ranked peaks in orientation this tendency is also apparent (Figure 7.10). The highest value tends to fall even more tightly into blocks around 20°–30° and 110°–20° (Figure 7.10a). The tendency towards these orientations is particularly strong in field systems with higher values on the Index of Coaxiality (Figure 7.11). The orientation on the 100°–30° block is also seen to be common across all field systems with lower levels of coaxiality, suggesting that this is the more important of the two sets of orientations, with the 10°–40° block only being important for its perpendicularity to 100°–30° when a field system tends towards regularity. (b)

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The question then becomes why this particular orientation? This is not generally related strongly to terrain aspect (except in maybe one case, the field system at Maydensole Farm Cottage in Kent [ID 15], although even in that case the degree of slope of the terrain is quite shallow), and the patterns seem to be unrelated to period (within the overall Bronze Age to Roman timespan). We will return to this. Does this orientation also occur in early medieval field layouts? To answer that question, we extracted orientation data for ridge and furrow from the NMP. This was only possible for later NMP projects where features were drawn in CAD packages and, as such, the spatial distribution of the data is sparse in many parts of England, with strong clusters along Hadrian’s Wall and in the northeast, in Yorkshire, and in the southern Midlands/Cotswolds (Figure 7.12a). There are small amounts of data across the rest of England (with the exception of the Isles of Scilly), but the conclusions drawn should only be given any weight in the regions just mentioned. In the NMP, ridge and furrow is drawn as an outline of the field with an arrow drawn showing the directions of the ridges/

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242  English Landscapes and Identities furrows (Figure 7.12b). These arrows were filtered out and the arrowheads removed using an automated process (which was imperfect, but appeared to delete the majority on visual inspection). The arrow lines were then processed in the same way as the field system boundaries, with their length and orientation calculated. A similar process was undertaken for field systems of prehistoric to Roman date for CAD-based NMP projects, albeit this time all lines (rather than just direction arrows) within an area defined as a field system in the NRHE had to be processed (as here we are interested in the orientation of field boundaries, not plough furrows). This inevitably means that lines have been included that do not form field system boundaries (due to being within the same area enclosed by the NRHE polygon defining the limits of the monument), but this was only intended as providing a degree of wider national patterning than could be achieved using the 40 field systems analysed in detail. The results for this, for the ridge and furrow, and for our 40 field systems were then collated by Ordnance Survey 100 km × 100 km grid square and plotted nationally (Figure 7.13).

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  243 Some interesting patterns emerge from this. Our 40 field systems show their characteristic 100°–30° orientation bias in particular in squares SX (including Dartmoor) and SU ­(including Salisbury Plain), although it is also present in other areas. The automatically extracted prehistoric to Roman field system data is very noisy, with biases in orientation showing up only in squares with small amounts of data. This suggests to us that the extraction process for this data was rather imperfect, but could also be taken as suggesting that perhaps the orientation bias seen in the 40 field systems is an artefact of their relatively low number and that the pattern might be less clear if the study was expanded out to more field systems. The orientation of ridge and furrow data in the southern half of England is also rather noisy, with perhaps a slight bias in orientation towards the cardinal points. Of greatest note, however, is the very striking bias in ridge and furrow north of the Humber towards a perpendicular arrangement of orientations on a NNW/SSE and WSW/ENE alignment. Hall suggests that the open field systems of Yorkshire were indisputably planned on a large scale at some point before the thirteenth century (2014: 53). He also mentions similar large systems in Northumberland and Cumbria. Hall’s argument is largely based upon the long length of the strips, but it is also apparent from the analysis presented here that the orientation of the strips was really quite strictly controlled. For this phenomenon, the NNW/SSE orientation looks stronger than its perpendicular relation. Moving backwards through time, we therefore see construction of open fields strongly oriented on NNW/SSE and perpendicular to that in the north of England by the thirteenth century. Probably prior to that, open fields were constructed on a variety of alignments south of the Humber over a period of perhaps 5–600 years (Oosthuizen 2011: 394). These fields may have been cardinally oriented when possible, but this does not seem to have been a particularly strong impulse. Prior to that, from the Roman period back to the Bronze Age, field systems could be oriented in many ways, but often favoured an alignment on 100°–30°. If laid out according to a more regular or coaxial pattern, these fields would also be aligned perpendicularly to that. Why 100°–30°? We will return to this question in the section ‘The Sun’. Orientation was sometimes governed by the aspect of the ground surface that a field system was constructed on, but usually only on steep slopes (unsurprisingly). Internal visibility characteristics of the landscape appear to have had little effect on how a field system was laid out in the past.

Considering the Division of Space We were also interested in the internal structure of field systems, basically looking at the size and shape of fields. This might tell us how fields were originally laid out, whether all at once or incrementally, adding new fields to existing ones, as well as patterns of use and of ownership. These are all very difficult issues, but we can start to throw some light on them. The way in which the set of 40 field systems divided up space has been examined through three simple metrics: length of lines per hectare, count of lines per hectare, and ‘nodes’ (that is the meeting of two or more lines) per hectare. Obviously, these three measures are interrelated, but they each speak of subtly different elements of field system structure: • More nodes per hectare imply more changes of direction (i.e. curvier lines) and junctions between lines (and by extension more field boundaries). • More lines per hectare also imply more changes of direction and more field boundaries. • Greater length per hectare implies more field boundaries (and by extension more changes of direction).

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244  English Landscapes and Identities When comparing these three measures (Figure  7.14), lines and nodes are most closely ­correlated (correlation coefficient r = 0.842), then length and nodes (r = 0.714), with lines and length least closely correlated (r = 0.596). We can also see that the majority of fields have both approximately 2–4 nodes and approximately 2–4 lines per hectare, with length per hectare being more varied but most likely to be between c.150 and c.225 m. The relative lack of correlation between line length and line count is quite interesting, as it suggests that we are seeing here some variation again in how regular/rectilinear the field systems were: this is because, in order to calculate orientation, what we would perceive as a single curved field boundary will consist (in its geometry) of a number of short line sections (one for each change of direction), whereas a straight field boundary of equivalent length would consist of only one line. Some of the variation seen in these three metrics will also relate to how complete the survival of the field system boundaries is archaeologically, as a more fragmented field system is likely to show more lines and less nodes/length. When analysing these three metrics against our Index of Coaxiality (Figure 7.14), we see very low degrees of correlation, but also some quite distinct clusters. More ‘coaxial’ fields seem to be especially prone to having approximately 2–4 nodes per hectare and also approximately 2–4 lines per hectare. The clustering seen when plotting length per hectare against the Index is largely just along the length axis (rather than on both axes), with many field systems having lengths per hectare of c.150–225 m but with great variation in coaxiality within that cluster (Figure 7.15). When plotting these metrics on a map of England (Figure 7.16), we can see that the field system on Samson South Hill in the Isles of Scilly (ID 20) is an outlier in all measures, being particularly divided up, ‘curvy’, and dense. The field system at Grounds Farm x

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  245 700000

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Cottages in Leicestershire (ID 34), southeast of the Peak District, is notable for having both a high number of lines per hectare and a high degree of coaxiality (see the section at the end of Chapter  3 for more archaeological detail on Leicestershire). The field systems of Cumbria and Northumberland are low on all three measures of nodes, lines, and length per hectare, although this will partly be due to their relatively small extents. Because the field systems were plotted as a series of grids of lines without filling in the gaps that would make the grids complete, it was somewhat harder to try to extract measures of the area of each individual plot. To do so, each line was put through a tool that attempted to extend it (up to 100 m) until it met another line (or an extension met an extension) to try to ‘complete’ the patterns that would once have existed when in use. Clearly this is an imperfect solution to the problem and some plots will have been created erroneously. Some plots will also be falsely large due to the intervening loss of internal di­vi­ sions since their creation or due to never having been treated as field system ‘plots’ in the first place. As such, to make the results somewhat more robust, plots of less than 500 m2 or

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246  English Landscapes and Identities

Figure 7.17  Example of polygons included or excluded from plot area calculations (pink are included, red excluded for being too small, and purple excluded for being too large)—ID 1.

greater than 50,000 m2 were filtered out (Figure 7.17), as were field systems with less than 49 polygons (as these are unlikely to produce reliable statistics). The plot area values were then graphed by field system as boxplots (Figure 7.18a) for the 21 field systems with sufficient data for the results to be worth study. Although this methodology is highly automated and thus less controlled than measuring plot areas manu­al­ly, the results appear reasonably robust. Overall, most of the field systems tend towards fairly small plot sizes on average, with the major exceptions of those from Wessex, which tend towards larger plot sizes, and Holne Moor (on Dartmoor) (ID 37) as well as the brickwork fields south of Doncaster (ID 7), which both show tendencies towards a very wide range of plot sizes, including some exceedingly large plots. What we would like to discern is the broad structure of the landscape, indicating uses to which it might have been put, for instance larger fields used for grazing animals, not so large fields for arable farming, and small fields for gardens, work areas, or penning animals overnight. However, there is no sense of specific groupings of plot sizes occurring regularly across all of the subset of field systems (Figure 7.18b), which would have suggested a repeated set of structures to the landscape. If that was ever the case, then it must have only have occurred at a locally specific level. Overall, the picture painted by these metrics is one in which field systems which score more highly on the Index of Coaxiality tend to be quite tightly clustered in terms of having approximately 2–4 nodes per hectare, approximately 2–4 lines per hectare, and c.150–225 m length per hectare (with the last cluster also including fields of less coaxial character). This could suggest that coaxial fields tend to be of similar structure in terms of their div­ision of space, with the pattern being repeated across time and space, as is found with the early medieval open field systems. For fields that score lower on the Index of Coaxiality, the picture is much more varied, with no obvious clustering or patterns. This is presumably as less coaxial fields were constructed in a way that took greater account of local needs and landscape character. Field systems which are not so strongly coaxial also tend to show either smaller average plot sizes or great variation in plot size.

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Wood Park

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248  English Landscapes and Identities Table 7.2  Approximate azimuths of sunrise and sunset at the solstices at latitudes within the north–south extent of Great Britain during the period 1500 bc to ad 500, assuming a ‘flat’ horizon (horizon angle = 0°) Latitude

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The Sun Returning to orientation, one possible candidate for the focus of many of the field systems studied on bearings (referred to as azimuth by astronomers) within the bracket 100°–30° was thought to be sunrise on the winter solstice. In England at the time in question, this occurred between approximately 129° (in Cornwall) and 136° (in Northumberland) where the horizon was flat (Table 7.2). As the position of the sun in the sky varies very slowly over time (due to the pivoting of the Earth on its axis over a period of around 26,000 years; Ruggles  1999: 57), today these values have only shifted to approximately 128° and 135°. Clearly this is at the upper end of the 100°–30° bracket seen in field system orientation, but close enough to warrant further investigation. Furthermore, winter sunrise is not the only potential solstitial alignment; the sun also sets on that day (as it does every day if one does not live at one of the poles) and also the summer solstice sunrise/sunset occurs diametrically opposite the winter solstice sunset/ sunrise. As such, there are four possible solstitial alignments which could be built into field systems (or any other linear archaeological phenomenon), with alignment on winter sunset being impossible to disentangle from summer sunrise (and vice versa) for linear phenomena without specified direction (i.e. they could be equally taken as oriented either way along the line), such as is the case with field system boundaries. This potential confusion is why modern celebrations at Stonehenge are largely focused on the summer solstice sunrise despite the monument being much more logically aligned on the winter solstice sunset. Purely based on azimuth, 13 out of the 40 field systems studied had either their first or second orientation peak within 10° of either winter sunset/summer sunrise or summer sunset/winter sunrise (and in one case, both: Shaugh Moor on Dartmoor (ID 19)), which is around 10 per cent more than one might expect for a random distribution (32.5 per cent (13/40) actual against 22.2 per cent (40/180) of the span of possible bearings). For a person

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  249 standing on the ground, a difference in azimuth of 10° is very little (until one starts to try to navigate). Eight of these are even within 5° of a solstice sunrise/sunset. However, these simple azimuthal calculations are ignorant of one important element: variation in the horizon from a viewpoint caused by variation in elevation of the ground surface. This can have a very large effect on the exact azimuth at which the sun rises or sets, especially in areas of rugged terrain. As such, the azimuthal bearings for each line need converting to a metric known as celestial declination (see Appendix  2 for details). Comparison can then be made to the known declination at which the sun sat in the sky on the solstices in the past (c.23.8° in summer and c.-23.8° in winter in 1000 bc; Ruggles 1999: 57). The summed length of lines for each field system for each degree of declination was calculated and the results subjected to the same smoothing algorithm as for the bearing data,5 showing many field systems were oriented on a particular alignment. Values were then normalized to vary between 0 and 1 by dividing by the maximum value across all dec­lin­ ations. Graphs of the results (a selection are given in Figure 7.19) can then show the proximity of peaks in declination in field system boundary orientation to the solstices. Between six and eight field systems studied show declination peaks very close to the solstices, with the two strongest cases being Longstreet (ID 1) and Figheldean (ID 2) on Salisbury Plain. This is a lower count than when looking simply at azimuth and suggests that particularly precise alignment of field systems on solstitial directions in the past did occur, but was potentially somewhat rare. In essence, what we have with the two measures used here is a potential contrast between precise alignment on solstitial directions (horizon-aware declination measure), which would require at the very least the laying out of the basic plan of a field system on the ground on the actual occasion of the relevant solstice on the one hand, and alignment on the general direction of a solstice sunrise/sunset (horizon-ignorant azimuth measure) based upon local knowledge of the approximate direction of the relevant event, which could take place at any time of year, on the other. Within the set of field systems studied for this exercise, the latter option based on a general understanding of where the sun rises and sets appears the more common. That being said, it should be borne in mind that in the case of relatively flat landscapes, these two possibilities are hard to distinguish, as horizon angle will have minimal effect. Other than the fact that the two most precisely aligned solstitial field systems are Bronze Age and exist in the same landscape, there is little sense of temporal or spatial pattern to this potential solar focus. One question would be whether earlier Bronze Age monuments featured similar biases in alignment. An obvious candidate to test this is linear barrow cemeteries. As such, we visually searched the NMP for approximately linear alignments of four or more barrows (as an alignment of three barrows could more easily be coincidental or an accident of preservation). We were able to find 36 cases, for each of which a line was drawn along the approximate axis of alignment and the celestial declination of each line calculated using the same method as previously. The count of barrow cemeteries for each degree of declination was then calculated and the results smoothed as with field systems. When graphed (Figure 7.19), peaks can be seen on midsummer sunrise/midwinter sunset and close to (but not precisely aligned on) midwinter sunrise/midsummer sunset. There 5  But using an 11° kernel in this case due to the wider spacing of degrees of declination (rather than the 21° kernel used for the azimuth smoothing).

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250  English Landscapes and Identities

Figure 7.19  Examples of field system orientation alignments on the solstices. Positive values on the y-axis relate to sunrise and negative values to sunset. The left-hand vertical line represents the declination of the midwinter sun and the right-hand vertical line represents the declination of the sun at midsummer. Field systems shown are IDs (clockwise from top right): 2, 10, 26, 14, 9, 1.

are also many barrow cemeteries aligned on non-solstitial alignments, but the vast majority of these fall between the two solstices. This suggests that there may have been a degree of solar focus in the laying out of these monuments, but that this was again not done in a precise way. The orientation of house doorways, from the middle Bronze Age through to the middle Iron Age, shows broadly similar patterns to those of fields (Figure 7.21). Round houses first appear in the middle Bronze Age at the same time as fields, with earlier houses generally rectangular, indicating a broad shift in orientation world view. However, there is considerable influence from early Bronze Age round barrow alignments on to newly round house structures, so that orientations in the world of the dead may influence those in the world of the living. Overall, solstitial alignments do appear to have been important in the laying out of a significant minority of field systems. This appears to have occurred over a long timeframe from the Bronze Age through to the Iron Age–Roman period, although later cases may

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  251 1.0

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Figure 7.20  Alignment of early Bronze Age linear round barrow cemeteries compared to the solstices. Graph set out as described in Figure 7.17’s caption.

reflect field systems laid out partially according to a pre-existing (but now hidden or lost) Bronze Age pattern. What this means is another question, although some cosmological explanation seems reasonable. On the whole, where solstitial alignments occur, they are rather imprecise, perhaps just focusing on the general direction in which a solstice sunrise or sunset was understood to occur on the basis of local knowledge. In a few cases, however, these alignments do appear precise enough to suggest that the field boundaries were laid out to accurately reflect the true position on the local horizon of the event in question, which probably meant this had to take place around the day of the event.

Discussion We have tried to set a consideration of field systems within the divisions and differences found more broadly in the landscape. Fields can be seen as adding new texture to the landscape, which was already variegated through areas of clearance, glades of woodland, and forest. The texture of the landscape varied across England, as we saw earlier in the chapter. In writing prehistories of England we have ignored the fact that much of England in the west Midlands, the northwest, Pennines, and northeast was forested through to near the end of the first millennium bc. There was an opening up of all of these landscapes from around 200 bc, for reasons that are ill-understood, but which might be due to the breakdown of systems of management for the forest, rather than a sudden and widespread desire for more arable land. The small aggregate field systems that grew up in forest clearings continue into these newly open landscapes, together with their dispersed systems of settlement. In areas to the south, in that band from Somerset to the Yorkshire coast and including the Midlands, the first large-scale fields date to the late Iron Age and continue into the Roman period.

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252  English Landscapes and Identities MBA

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Figure 7.21  Orientation of house doorways in Wessex from the middle Bronze Age to the middle Iron Age. Data taken from Sharples 2010 (Figure 4.5).

By the start of the Roman period there was a large zone of fields of both lynchet and ditched type from Wessex to Kent, extending north to the plains of Northumberland, with a concentration in what Smith et al. (2016) have named the Central Belt. Fields extend into new areas, indicating an intensification of the agricultural sector. However, our results provide a strong indication that there were more mixed motives in laying out the landscape. One of our most striking results is that the orientation of fields, broadly on the solstices, is found from their earliest occurrence in the middle Bronze Age to the end of their creation and use in the late Roman period (or indeed into the fifth and sixth centuries). Not only is a particular orientation maintained, but it is also, at present at least, hard to distinguish Bronze Age from Roman fields in terms of their broad organization. With the methods we used it is not possible to see new forms of regularity, field shape, or size in later periods. At least in the current state of our knowledge, continuity is much more obvious than real change.

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  253 Although the forms of fields do not appear to have changed radically over 2,000 years, we cannot help but wonder whether this was also true of the associations they held for the people that made and used them. Fields have a mass of associations in the present: we think of property, agriculture, organized labour, ordered landscapes. When they were new, however, not all these ideas would necessarily have been evoked by fields, which might have taken some time to gather these ideas to them. An influential interpretation of the evidence from the middle Bronze Age sees it as a dramatic change from the ritual landscapes of the Neolithic and early Bronze Age to a more pragmatic form of society in the middle Bronze Age (Barrett and Bradley 1980) stressing socioeconomic forces such as control of the production and exchange of bronze (Rowlands 1980; Yates  2007; and for Europe more broadly Kristiansen  1998). In these models the key factor was the exchange of bronzes as the basis for social prestige. Underwriting the production and exchange of bronze was seen to be agricultural intensification and here evidence for field systems, only just emerging when Rowlands wrote, became crucial, so that this model reaches its fullest expression in Yates’ work. Yates (2007) has certainly concluded that lowland fields represent an intensification of agricultural effort and production to create wealth in stock, primarily cattle, which can be exchanged for valuables travelling long distances, such as bronze and amber. Bradley (1998b: 147–9) has critiqued the idea of a shift from a ritual to a more secular society, seeing instead continuity from the early to the middle Bronze Age when the forms of houses in the later period echo the layout of earlier barrows. As we saw earlier, the orientation of fields has something in common with the doorways of houses, which raises the question of whether there could be other similarities between houses and fields. In understanding Bronze and Iron Age houses, a consensus is emerging (Brück  1999; Sharples 2010) that houses were replaced more often than they need have been for functional reasons. Experimental work on Iron Age houses, such as the reconstruction of the Pimperne Iron Age house at the Butser experimental farm, showed decay to be slow and not threatening to the structural integrity of the house (Sharples 2010: 223). Such houses could probably have lasted for generations, but archaeological evidence indicates that they were quickly abandoned, with rebuilding either on the spot or at some distance from the earlier house. Varying forms of history may have been at work in various regions, but in either case the number of houses may provide an exaggerated indication of settlement at any one period (Sharples 2010: Chapter 4). Quite why houses were abandoned before they needed to be is open to speculation; one possibility is the death of an important inhabitant or some other change in the circumstances of the family living there. Even given the regular abandonment of houses, there is still a discrepancy between the number of fields and the number of houses: fields radically outnumber houses. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Fields show up more easily on aerial photographs than houses do even in excavation and it is also possible that there were domestic structures in forms different to post-built roundhouses that are hard to see at all. Leaving such worries aside for a moment, it is worth comparing the total numbers of houses known in Wessex for the middle Bronze Age with the areas of Bronze Age field systems. As can be seen from our Table 7.1, the first six field systems on or around Salisbury Plain enclose an area of over 2000 ha between them and there are something like 85 houses known from the middle Bronze Age (Sharples 2010: 194), which may have been only in use for a short time. It is not clear that the whole of the field systems were in use during the middle Bronze Age, but there do seem to be far more fields than houses.

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254  English Landscapes and Identities 505000

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Figure 7.22  Bronze Age and Roman field systems at Perry Oaks/Terminal 5, alongside Bronze Age waterholes (after Framework Archaeology 2011).

The sheer number of fields raises the possibility that just as houses were regularly abandoned so were fields, possibly on the death of the person who created them. Fields might represent genealogy mapped onto the landscape and in axial cases there being a cosmo­ logic­al aspect through following important directions. Such accretive systems would fit with arguments, such as those of Wickstead (2008), against top-down planning of whole field systems at the behest of an elite. One of the best sets of evidence of the history of a system comes from Perry Oaks, where in excavations in advance of Heathrow Terminal 5 (our ID. 21 (Bronze Age)/22 (Roman)—see Figure 7.22), up to nine settlement areas and ten trackways were recognized, such that it is possible that the landscape was divided into blocks with one settlement in each (evidence on settlements is poor, with few sub-surface features remaining) (Lewis  2010: 135–6). The start of the laid-out landscape might have been Farmstead 3, possibly established 1700–1600 bc in a large D-shaped enclosure within a set of aggregated fields. Trackway 1 (connected to Farmstead 3) respects Neolithic monuments, passing through the gap in cursus C2, rather than cutting across it. Trackway 1 might have been a pathway in the Neolithic and there are hints that ditches defining this

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Field Systems, Orientation, and Cosmology  255 trackway might have originated in the Neolithic (Lewis  2010: 150). We must be wary of creating too disjunct a history, separating the Neolithic and Bronze Age radically. The aggregate fields in which Farmstead 3 sits may predate the coaxial systems to the east. These in turn seem to develop from south to north with trackways formed initially of interrupted ditches, becoming more continuous to the north (Lewis 2010: 139). Coaxial systems look singular, but it might be that repeated actions following particular directions give the eventual impression of a planned system. However, the digging of individual sections of ditch might commemorate special events, such as the death of individuals of some importance. Elsewhere and later in the history of the Perry Oaks fields, considerable evidence of change occurred, such as waterholes being dug through silted ditches and a palisade that might cut off part or all of a trackway (Lewis 2010: 140, 161). The creation of these field systems would fit within our notion of extended relations (see Chapter 1), whereby through group forms of labour the landscape is transformed, but the group and its values are also reinforced. These shared group commitments would exist in tension with the individualizing tendencies of bronze items which can condense a whole series of relations. Rather than seeing fields as an agricultural intensification underpinning new elite control of the production and exchange of bronzes, we would see the creation of fields and the making of bronze as two countervailing cultural forces in tension with each other. Equally fields emerged newly during the early second millennium bc, but it may well be that in their orientation at least they harked back to the construction and orientation of round barrows, which in terms of breaks in their ring ditches and distribution of finds often had orientations towards the south and southeast (Bradley  1998b: Chapter  10). We will look at the history of round barrow use more fully in Chapter 10. In the succeeding Iron Age in England all the ingredients for more intensive agricultural systems existed, with various forms of wheat, barley, rye, oats, peas, and legumes, as well as sheep, cows, pigs, and horses (Chapter  6). Short fallow systems with nitrogen fixing through plants and animal or human manure were entirely possible. Settlements existed, small and large, with houses, storage pits, granaries, querns, sickles, and plant and animal remains. But many of the fields went out of use or became less obvious. However, evidence of fields in the early and middle Iron Age is relatively slender (Bradley and Yates  2007). Fields most probably existed in all periods of the Iron Age, but early on they may have been constructed in a form more difficult to see archaeologically, perhaps using hedges and fences. Writing of the Iron Age of the lower Thames, Champion argues that (2016: 486): It is quite possible that many of the fields remained in use, perhaps marked by banks and  hedges, but used in a way that did not require clearance or re-cutting of the ditch or leave much in the way of settlement features. That certainly seems to have been the case at Heathrow Terminal 5, as suggested by the discovery of hedge plant remains and the location of the middle Iron Age site, respecting the earlier fields. (Framework Archaeology 2011: 206–10, 225)

Group labour may now have been expended on hill forts and other enclosures, where, in some cases at least (such as Danebury), there was a combination of the living community and the dead. In the late Iron Age, ditched field systems were renewed in some areas and dug for the first time in others. This might be seen as a further example of creating the group through joint labour, as had happened in the middle Bronze Age. Now, however, we need to exercise caution with this argument. In the last two centuries of the Iron Age condensed relations

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256  English Landscapes and Identities through small, valuable, portable artefacts become much more common. This might indicate social distinctions and divisions in the late Iron Age, a conclusion reinforced among other things by ascribed coinage in some areas of England (Creighton  2000). Labour may not have been under group control, but instead deployed by an elite in some places at least, so that we might think in terms of slavery or other modes of unfree labour as we know existed in the Roman period. The digging of field ditches may not now have reinforced the group as a whole, but been deployed by sections of the group for their own benefit. If this is true, and there is likely to have been regional variability in any case, then modes of economic intensification may have come into existence for the first time, with agricultural outputs rising to fund new amounts of material culture, consumption, and exchange. It is interesting that the late Iron Age also sees mass clearance of trees in the west and north of England, with more small aggregate field systems emerging there. A more analytical mindset may also have been emerging. This conclusion, however, is counterbalanced by the fact that the alignments of field systems broadly on solstices were maintained, indicating that there were other values at play, of a more broadly magical type (ten Harkel et al. 2017). Individuals and subgroups were differentiated through objects and houses, the latter true in the Roman period at least. What is obvious from these other analyses is quite how different the early medieval period was, indicating a new cosmology was taking over, sometime in the middle AngloSaxon period. As far as we have been able to tell through large-scale analyses of digital records of ridge and furrow orientations, field strips were more likely to have been on the cardinal points, a pattern most marked in the north. How far this derives from Christianity is not clear, but the east–west orientation of churches may have had an influence. These changes go along, in the central area of England at least, with a shift to nucleated villages and a community of the living arranged around their dead in the church cemetery. New cosmologies went along with new notions of genealogy and the manner in which the group was held together, despite its various forms of divisions and hierarchies. Chapter 6 considered food, bringing out variations in its production and consumption, concluding that the reasons for these variations must have been broadly cultural in nature. Here we have shifted our attention to a more cosmological dimension, showing that fields were laid out over large areas to generally similar alignments with probable links to the heavens. We can only wonder how the power of the sun, the major influence on these alignments, was felt to be manifest in food and how far the broader energies of the cosmos entered people’s bodies as they ate. Similarly, such powers might have been curated through the middening of rubbish and its subsequent careful deposit on fields and in pits or ditches. In dividing up our consideration of the worlds of the past for analytical convenience, we have done some violence to those worlds, making seem separate aspects of life, thought, and feeling which were originally more whole. At the moment, we are just getting to grips with the data and its variability across time and space, but should not forget that some broader comments and conclusions may eventually be possible. We hope in this chapter to have taken a mass of evidence on field systems and developed new methods for large-scale analysis which can now be further refined and applied to other currently known examples and to newly discovered fields. These new methods, allowing for large-scale analysis, are as important as our conclusions. This will encourage us all to think more on the organization of fields, as well as their changes through time despite some striking elements of continuity in orientation. In Chapter 8 we turn to finer divisions of the landscape and their long-term histories.

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8

Identity, Naming, and Division Letty ten Harkel and Chris Gosden

In Chapter 7 we looked at how fields were laid out with respect to cosmological issues, such as movements of the sun. These large-scale orientations were manifestations of broad and long-lasting cosmologies, which in turn influenced how people moved through the landscape on a day-to-day basis. In this chapter we turn our attention to how landscapes are divided and variegated at a small scale. We live now in worlds that are intensely known and densely named. Woods, fields, rivers, settlements, and perhaps individual houses are given names, making them part of cognitive maps of human and material relations. Across England today there must be many thousands, possibly even millions, of local names. This was also true back as far as the early medieval period, of which we have good place name evidence, and was almost certainly also true of the Roman and pre-Roman periods. The naming of a landscape is linked to its differentiation and division. It is only possible to apply names to parts of the landscape if they are differentiated in some way. This may happen through division which is given physical form—fences, banks, ditches, or walls— but it can also occur through remembering or recording divisions, which may make use of non-human features of the landscape. From the middle Anglo-Saxon period onwards written records of the landscape were created, which represented a new technology of power, as we shall see. These record how rivers, roads, trees, and topographic features became the basis for human divisions of the landscape. It is likely that the features that helped define charter bounds were used in earlier periods, perhaps back into the late Iron Age. However, it may also be that earlier prehistoric periods divided the landscape in a less detailed manner. Modes of dividing the landscape had considerable implications for the identities of individuals and groups, so that possibly in periods such as the middle Bronze Age the landscape was named and divided in a much broader way, with concomitant implications for the nature of local groups, which might also have lacked a fine and detailed set of differentiations. The history of the small-scale division of the English landscape is yet to be written. In the Mesolithic period, as far as we can tell, there were few, if any, structures to divide up the landscape. The late Mesolithic line of posts at Stonehenge is an isolated occurrence which little altered people’s sense of place and space. The landscape was distinguished through vegetation types on a spectrum from woodland to grassland. As the Neolithic progressed, isolated henges, causeways, stone circles, cursuses, and barrows set up some sense of inside and outside, as well as channelling movement around the landscape. It is difficult for us now to place ourselves within these differently differentiated spaces, where topography, vegetation, paths, and occasional constructed features would have provided a radically other set of cultural geographies for the relatively small and sparsely distributed human groups who settled and moved (Chapter 5) around what we now call England. How places

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Letty ten Harkel and Chris Gosden. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0008

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258  English Landscapes and Identities were named, directions given, histories generated are all mysterious to us, as we take for granted a modern countryside of fields, roads, and houses, with occasional wild places, almost always in higher and/or less accessible spots. A group’s sense of self rests on a ma­ter­ ial basis, with divisions within society depending partly on the structure of the landscape and these cultural ecosystems are useful reminders that ours is an historically unusual way of life. We must become aware of how unusual our perception and sense of identity is in order to grasp what much of the past was like. What we want to trace in this chapter is the long-term history of enclosure and division, attempting to defamiliarize ourselves from current notions of how group and landscape work. By the early Bronze Age southern England was increasingly clear of trees (as we saw in Chapter 4), Neolithic structures were becoming ancient and round barrows a major feature of many areas, requiring effort on an unprecedented scale. Overlapping in time with the construction of round barrows were the first land divisions that we would call fields, starting in the early second millennium bc but becoming more common from around 1500 bc. These, as again we have seen (Chapter 7), became the first common enclosure of the landscape, possibly creating a sense of inside and outside, such as we are familiar with and often now think of in terms of possession. We will look at how the landscape was divided up in a detailed manner in some areas from the middle Bronze Age, with larger divisions often evident in the later Bronze Age giving way to a complex picture through the Iron Age and then seeing a burst of new physical enclosure from the late Iron Age through the Roman period, with some continuity of fields and roads in the immediate post-Roman period and quite new forms of division in the centuries before and after the Norman conquest. In these last periods, the archaeological evidence of division is joined by that of place name evidence. The history of naming the countryside is poorly understood: that is the process by which local names are attached to topographic and human features. From the end of our period we have a dense record of early medieval place names, which has long been the subject of study (e.g. Ekwall 1960; Watts 2004; Higham and Ryan 2011; KEPN; Mills 2011). We might call the Anglo-Saxon period the Great Renaming, as it is quite different from the situation at the start of the Roman period and the Norman invasion, where in both there is much continuity from preceding periods. Around 500 place names are reasonably reliably known from Roman Britain, about 50 of these are Latin or with obviously Latinate roots. The majority are Celtic/British names or lightly Latinized versions of these (Rivet and Smith 1979; Mattingly 2006: 42). Such continuity of names almost certainly derives from the fact that the majority of people in Roman Britain were descendants of the Iron Age inhabitants. This network of names (undoubtedly much greater than those that have come down to us today) was almost completely replaced in the post-Roman period. The vast majority of place names from the early medieval period are Germanic and the same is also true of surnames from within England (Ekwall 1960; Watts 2004). This renaming is linked to the considerable landscape change—in particular processes of dividing the landscape— that emerges from the middle Anglo-Saxon period, especially in central England. A second phase of renaming is visible in the north and east in the later ninth and tenth centuries during the Scandinavian settlement, although this seems to broadly fit in with existing processes (e.g. Townend 2000). Names are best viewed as processes in any case, continually shifting in spelling and meaning even when they retain a single root. Many modern names derive from their Anglo-Saxon versions, but have quite different spellings and significances. It is also possible that there were earlier renamings, prior to the Roman period. The considerable changes in people’s relationship to land that occurred in the early second ­millennium bc saw land divided up in new ways, which would also have affected attachment to land and movement through the landscape: these basic shifts could well have been ac­com­pan­ied

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Identity, Naming, and Division  259 by new names being applied to the landscape, but these are now long lost, erased in the main by subsequent processes of naming. The relationships between the names of ­people and those of places are fascinating, but beyond our scope here. We will concentrate in the first half of this chapter on the evidence the EngLaId database contains for enclosure of the landscape. Distinct fluctuations can be identified. The first peak was the laying out of extensive field systems in the middle Bronze Age, followed by an increase in enclosed settlement forms during the early Iron Age. The late Iron Age and early Roman periods witnessed another period of investment in field enclosures but also enclosed settlements. Finally, after a hiatus in the early Anglo-Saxon period, the middle to late Anglo-Saxon period saw an increase again in the construction of settlement bound­ar­ ies, whilst documentary evidence can provide insights into systems of territorial division that left no archaeological trace. We will then move on to documentary evidence from the early medieval period. The fullest documentation of the Anglo-Saxon landscape comes from the Norman period, through Domesday Book. Produced in ad 1086, Domesday Book forms the endpoint of the temporal span of the EngLaId project, because it provides such a detailed snapshot of much of early medieval England, which can allow us to think back in time from a relatively well-known endpoint. Due to the long-term perspective of the EngLaId project, it is clear that the process of enclosing space was neither constant nor continuous. Marked regional variety exists in the creation and continued modes of dividing up the land, with the south and east of England looking different to the rest of the country. The case study areas of Northumberland, Humber, Kent, and Devon are crucial (although other regions are referred to as well), providing a varied sample across the English landscape from the northeast to the southwest and including upland and lowland landscapes. Within these case study areas, several excavated sites with structural multi-period activity were selected to address a more human scale of activity, interspersed as insets throughout this chapter. Three questions are central: how did communities in the past structure the landscape they inhabited; how did these structures change over time; and what implications did the divisions and naming of the landscape have for local identities?

Division, Naming, and Identity People’s identities depend on an understanding of difference and separation: there is no ‘us’ without a ‘them’. Through their actions, people signify their belonging to different and often overlapping social groups, which may include ethnicity, geographical region, status, religion, gender, age, profession, and so on (Díaz-Andreu and Lucy  2005; Burke and Stets 2009; Pohl 2013). In a spatial context—which is a central concern of this book—these identities might manifest themselves in the construction of boundaries, physical or implicit divisions between people that were constructed in order to contain or to exclude. Or, to quote Giles’s (2007: 242) words from a study of Iron Age ladder settlements in the Yorkshire Wolds: where one was defined who one was. To be inside a compound, or returning to it, was to belong, but to be passing through was to be marked as an outsider.

The approach we take follows from the idea that our human understanding of the world derives from a complex interaction between people and things that creates a structured understanding of the world. Much of this understanding occurs at an implicit, bodily level.

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260  English Landscapes and Identities We walk, work, and perceive our surroundings in ways that are driven by habit and the interaction between the human body and the set of material relations in which it is enmeshed. Landscape features, as well as mobile material culture, shape and channel movement, work, and perception. In turn we can alter such features in the course of our ac­tiv­ ities. There is also a further complex interaction between discursive and non-discursive thought and action; that is between those things we just do without great reflection and those we put into words so as to think and talk about them. The distinction between discursive and non-discursive is obviously heuristic and in the flow of life we phase in and out of habitual action and conscious, verbal thought. Division and naming link to both nondiscursive and discursive aspects of life, respectively; how we act in a landscape is influenced by how we apply words to it. Enclosures, trackways between enclosed areas, and open land direct human actions in ways that are often unconscious once a landscape is known and taken for granted. How it is named derives from a variety of human relations with the land and with other people, showing where cultural emphases and forms of power lie, as well as notions of history. Division represents a re-definition of space, turning space into place. We will see marked variability in place making, with a basic divide being the long-term commitment to places in the west and north, where building of houses and enclosures in stone was common from the prehistoric period onwards, to the south and east, where wood was more important, houses were replaced rapidly in enclosed settlements, and unenclosed settlements tended to move. Life became more tethered through complex enclosures and stone architecture in the Roman period, when a complex geometry of enclosed settlements, trackways, roads, and fields held life in place rather more. Some of these structures may well continue in use in the post-Roman countryside, before nucleated villages and open fields took their place. In the central zone of England settlements are now less often enclosed as a whole, in contrast to some of the more long-term arrangements in the north and west. Division and naming seem to primarily concern space, but also bring in issues of time. As Giles (2007: 239) has pointed out in reference to pioneering efforts in aerial archaeology (e.g. Crawford and Keiller 1928; Riley 1980), mapping can result in a flattening of chronological depth: what seems to be a coherent system when viewed from the air (see Figure 8.3) may in fact be the result of piecemeal creation over a span of years if not centuries (also see Chadwick 2013: 18; 2016: 263–5). Interpretations moreover tend to be defined by shape and/ or size, often without acknowledging the factors underlying their creation and their complex and changing meanings (Chadwick 2013: 17). Complicated patterns of change are evident. For example, among the earliest settlement evidence from the North Northumberland case study area is the early Bronze Age unenclosed cluster of roundhouses at Houseledge/ Black Law near Wooler, set amongst formalized rectilinear field systems (Topping et al. 2008: 333; also see Frodsham 2004: 25–7). This is unusually early compared with much of the rest of England. In Northumberland, fields often seem to have been accompanied by  more extensive cord rig field systems seemingly lacking individual field divisions (Topping 1989; Frodsham  2004: 36, 45–7). Unenclosed settlements gave way to enclosed ones and this may suggest that enclosure as a cognitive act may have found its origins in the demarcation of field systems, and that this gradually shifted to things like settlements. An insight that the medieval period can provide relates to the fluidity of boundaries, emphasizing the importance of process. Historical sources shed light on the frequency of boundary disputes, and although some of the territorial divisions in Domesday Book are relatively ancient, others were more recent, probably reflecting episodes of reorganization that took place during the eleventh century. Even in the case of monumental boundaries,

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Identity, Naming, and Division  261 which were fixed in place, their significance was in constant flux. Early medieval names for prehistoric linear features—such as Devil’s Dykes or Grim’s Ditch—suggest that monumental boundaries could be mythologized, lending a ritualized aspect to their maintenance or refurbishment (Semple 2013: 12, 87; Chadwick 2016: 248, 264). Elsewhere, boundaries can become central places, for example during periods of colonization, political conquest, or shifting territoriality (McCarthy 2008: 202); outside England, the centrality of the Antonine Wall during the early medieval period, as recently investigated by Maldonado (2015), is a good case in point. It is impossible to appreciate fully the significance of boundaries from a long-term perspective without acknowledging such processes, and a subsequent section of this chapter therefore focuses on their life-course as monuments, looking at how their rele­ vance to human communities changed or remained constant over time. Here, the insets are important too, as such detailed issues are best addressed on a limited geographical and analytical scale. Boundaries can be seen as zones of becoming, neither here nor there, but—as structuring elements in a divided landscape—they were often also foci for placed deposits and un­usual burials, neutral places for assembly, or symbolic thresholds. Here the distinction between the spatial and the temporal becomes fuzzy, as ritual practices often include spatial (the landscape) and temporal (the succession of actions taking place) aspects (McCarthy 2008: 202–3), whereby concepts of centre and periphery may change place throughout any ritualizing process. If we consider human responses to boundary locations in this light, can we continue to regard them as liminal zones, or should we reassess our vocabulary and move beyond such dichotomies? There is a large body of existing scholarly work relevant to the study of enclosure and land division, ranging from their physical construction to their social and metaphorical significance, not least through a series of analyses of Domesday geographies (for instance, Darby 1971, 1977) and place names, whereby the emphasis varies from mapping large-scale migrations (e.g. Ekwall 1960; Townend 2000; Watts 2004) to smaller-scale issues of ter­ri­ tori­al­ity (e.g. Hooke 2009; Higham and Ryan 2011) or even the naming of individual fields (Cavill 2018), and from early medieval perceptions of landscape (Jones and Semple 2012) to the potential of using Old English place names to inform contemporary concerns, such as climate change (Jones 2016). Much existing research is period-specific, but the same broad interpretative discussions characterize different period specialisms, despite small differences in emphasis. There is also a tendency towards either regionally specific studies or broad-brush overviews that address specific types of division and enclosure, focusing—for example—on field systems, or settlements, or linear earthworks. The kind of long-term, interdisciplinary, and fairly holistic approach adopted here has obvious advantages in that it builds bridges and creates linkages, but the downside is that it cannot provide the same degree of in-depth insights as more localized or monothematic research. In what follows, we present an analysis of the EngLaId data for enclosure before returning to Domesday Book in a little more detail and, finally, addressing the implications of the early medieval period for raising questions about earlier times.

Enclosing Space: The Evidence from EngLaId This section takes the different categories of physically enclosed space from the EngLaId database as a starting point, graphing the chronological trajectory of different types of enclosure and landscape division, and commenting on regional and temporal differences.

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262  English Landscapes and Identities Some broad summary of the history of enclosure is useful (Table 8.1), although any such summary hides considerable variability. Some broad trends across time can nevertheless be identified when the data are investigated in more depth. One of these is the scale at which communities operated. Although field systems and settlement enclosures occur from the middle Bronze Age they rarely occur in the same places in this early period. Fully integrated landscapes of settlements and fields were absent in the south and east, although more commonly found in the north. Bronze Age examples tended to be small, growing in size and complexity during the Iron Age, and were ultimately replaced by a more uniform layout during the Roman period, returning to a situation of increased variety including the reoccupation of earlier en­clos­ ures in the early medieval period. In Figure 8.1 the spatial density of the database categories specified earlier was assessed on a nationwide scale using the spatial binning technique discussed in Chapter 2 (based here on 1-km squares). The number of spatial units that contained relevant thesaurus ­categories was compared to the number of units that contained data of any kind, thus ­minimizing the effect of ‘empty’ areas that may result from differences in archaeological affordances (see Chapter 2). In order to provide more regional definition, the same graphing exercise was carried therefore out for the six selected case study areas specified at the start of this section (now based on 350-m hexbins) (Figure  8.2). This was compared to a series of England-wide Kernel Density Estimate (KDE) surfaces (Figure  8.3). It is immediately clear that the nationwide pattern depicted in Figure 8.3 masks significant regional variation with regards to long-term patterns of enclosing space (indicated by the different shape of the graphs) and different spatial densities of enclosures (the values on the y-axes). Individual regions display considerable variability one from another. For Northumberland, the chronological trajectory looks broadly similar to the nationwide pattern, with a clear peak in the Iron Age, although there is a greater emphasis on enclosed settlement forms (Frodsham 2004: 43–4). As Figure 8.3 reveals, this is also apparent in the southwest. The Humber case study stands out for the early proliferation of linear land divisions, and otherwise a slight intensification of existing patterns into the Roman period. Kent is remarkably under-represented, which is also apparent from Figure  8.9, but does not ­contradict the national trend. Devon has a different chronological profile, caused by a preponderance of Bronze Age remains on Dartmoor; especially the evidence of Bronze Age field systems, the densest in the whole country (Figure 8.3). Cumbria is similar to the nationwide pattern, except a slight increase in all categories in the Roman period caused by the Hadrian’s Wall corridor, although on a nationwide scale this is not immediately apparent (Figure 8.3) (see inset for extra archaeological information on Devon). To some degree these differences were related to the existing character of the landscape, as is seen in the Yorkshire Wolds for example, where the openness of the landscape inspired the construction of long-distance linear earthworks during the Bronze Age, to order, divide, and regulate large tracts of empty space (Stoertz 1997: 3). Similar early land divisions occurred in the unforested upland areas of Dartmoor (so-called ‘contour reaves’; Fleming 2008). Meanwhile, the badly dated linear ­features in the Cheviots (Topping et al. 2008: 330), based on the chronology of clearance discussed in Chapter 4, probably belong to the Iron Age. It is, of course, also a fact that comparison between regions masks differences within regions. For example, in Dartmoor, Fleming (2008: 4–5; also see Fox 1957: 20) has noted a southwest/northeast divide whereby enclosed roundhouse settlements predominate

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Identity, Naming, and Division  263 Table 8.1  Broad chronology of settlement and field enclosure in England from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period I

Middle Bronze Age (c.1500–1100 bc)

The first enclosed field systems are laid out on a significant scale, with some enclosed settlement (Yates 2007). Fields may be earlier in some areas. II Late Bronze Age (c.1100–800 Ringforts, rectangular enclosures, palisades, and enclosed bc) settlements begin to occur, predominantly in the southeast, southwest, and northeast of England—these are stone built in the last two areas (Champion 1980; 2007: 105; Cunliffe 2005: 39–42; Topping et al. 2008: 328–33, 340–2; Newman 2011: 84). III Early to middle Iron Age In the south, large communal hilltop enclosures developed into (c.800–400 bc) hillforts. Many smaller enclosures in the middle Iron Age, with fewer field systems (Cunliffe 2005: 378–83, 384–7), but also unenclosed wandering settlements. Start of palisaded sites and small hill forts in Northumberland (Frodsham 2004: 40). IV Late Iron Age (c.400–1 bc) Refurbishment of a select number of hill forts (so-called ‘developed’ hill forts). Then late Iron Age dyke systems (Cunliffe 2005: 388–96, 601; Ashbee 2005: 157, 167). Ladder settlements in many areas. Construction of stone-built hill forts in Northumberland (Frodsham 2004: 40). Many new field systems are also laid out, which continue in use into the Roman period. V Early Roman period Widespread construction of Roman camps and forts, as well as (c.ad 1–100) limited urban sites with earth-and-timber defences (Mattingly 2007: 132–49, 330). Ditched settlements in the southeast, integrated with field systems. First building in stone in the south and east. In the northeast, the construction of enclosed ‘scooped’ settlements began, which continued throughout the Roman period (Frodsham 2004: 59). VI Middle to late Roman period Widespread enclosure of urban sites, starting with the (c.ad 100–400) high-status colonia and moving to lower-status towns (Mattingly 2007: 330). From the third century ad, increasing use of stone and larger town walls (Mattingly 2007: 330). Ditched enclosures in the south and east. VII Early Anglo-Saxon period Continuation of enclosed settlement in the northeast and the (c.ad 400–600) southwest into the sixth century (Frodsham 2004: 65; Webster 2007: 171–3); elsewhere settlement unenclosed. VIII Middle Anglo-Saxon period Enclosure predominantly restricted to monastic/ecclesiastical (c.ad 600–850) sites (including reoccupation of deserted Roman towns) (Blair 2005). However, also increasing evidence of internal rural settlement divisions (Reynolds 2003: 110–15; Rippon et al. 2015: 94), and emerging evidence of widespread changes in the rural landscape that would eventually lead to a pattern of nucleated villages and open fields across many parts of England (FeedSax; McKerracher 2018). IX Late Anglo-Saxon period Construction of burhs and other fortifications (including reuse (c.ad 850–1100) of earlier, Iron Age, and Roman forts and enclosed settlements) (Biddle 1976), which became urbanized in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries (Hadley and ten Harkel 2013). Increase of enclosed high-status settlement (Hamerow 2012). Also evidence of enclosed strip fields in the more wooded parts of England; elsewhere possibly continued use of earlier field systems, or emerging open fields (Banham and Faith 2014). Enclosed settlements fewer in the south and east.

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264  English Landscapes and Identities 14.00%

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Figure 8.1  Line graph of the relative spatial occurrence of different categories of enclosure (linear land divisions, field systems, enclosed settlement forms including hill forts, and enclosures) by broad time period (with generic prehistoric records half-weighted to the Bronze and Iron Ages). The data were collated on a presence/absence basis in 1 km × 1 km squares; the y-axis depicts the presence of enclosure categories in relation to all spatial units containing data of any kind (including undated records). Dated records represent 67.8 per cent of all records for linear ditches, 70.2 per cent for field systems, 97.1 per cent for enclosed settlements and 63.2 per cent for enclosures.

towards the west, and isolated roundhouses set within small fields were more common east of the river Dart. A major break in the south and east comes with the Roman period when larger houses start being built in stone and hence often last for a number of human generations. This contrasts with Iron Age house building, where houses were replaced more often than ne­ces­sary for strictly functional reasons. The same was probably true for early medieval housing, at least in early periods when settlement seemed less fixed in place than it later became (Hamerow 2012. More regular returns to individual sites are found from an early date in the north and west. The tradition of enclosed settlement in the southwest (identifiable by the place name element tre-) continued into the sixth century ad, but generally speaking enclosed rural settlements are the exception in early medieval England. However, as stated previously, internal settlement divisions became increasingly common by the middle Anglo-Saxon period (Reynolds 2003: 110–15; Rippon et al. 2015: 94). It is important to remember that unenclosed settlements—although relatively understudied because they are more difficult to define archaeologically—may have been the dominant settlement form in many regions and periods. The relationship between enclosed (and hence relatively static) settlements and those unenclosed (which could wander over

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Percentage of 350 m hexbin cells that contain evidence for different categories of enclosure (Devon)

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Percentage of 350 m hexbin cells that contain evidence for different categories of enclosure (Cumbria)

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Figure 8.2  As described in Figure 8.1’s caption, but for six selected case study regions. Data mapped as presence/absence in 350-m hexbins. Dated records represent variable percentages of all records for linear ditches (Northumberland: 47.2 per cent; Humber: 91.3 per cent; Kent: 47.8 per cent; Devon: 66.0 per cent; Marches: 56.9 per cent; Cumbria: 56.4 per cent), field systems (Northumberland: 74.4 per cent; Humber: 72.9 per cent; Kent: 76.1 per cent; Devon: 88.7 per cent; Marches: 53.4 per cent; Cumbria: 73.3 per cent), enclosed settlements (Northumberland: 96.2 per cent; Humber: 96.8 per cent; Kent: 95.8 per cent; Devon: 97.8 per cent; Marches: 96.6 per cent; Cumbria: 96.8 per cent) and enclosures (Northumberland: 55.4 per cent; Humber: 64.7 per cent; Kent: 59.4 per cent; Devon: 83.7 per cent; Marches: 64.0 per cent; Cumbria: 62.9 per cent).

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266  English Landscapes and Identities Bronze Age:

Iron Age:

Roman:

Early medieval:

Linears:

Field systems:

Enclosed settlement:

Enclosure:

Figure 8.3  KDE surfaces of the different categories of enclosure on a nationwide scale, based on presence/absence in 1-km squares. Dark areas indicate greater density. The shading of each KDE surface is numerically scaled relative to itself only (i.e. a specific shade of grey on one map will not represent the same density on any other map).

time) needs more attention. As well as varying ways of dealing with space, these also represent differing modes of creating time. Unenclosed settlement featured as one of the main categories in recent surveys of Roman settlement patterns as well (Taylor 2007; Smith et al. 2016), and also during the prehistoric period unenclosed settlements were a common phenomenon. Even during the Iron Age, which witnessed a surge in settlement enclosure across the country, unenclosed settlements continued to exist alongside. In Kent, early to middle Iron Age settlements even tend to be unenclosed as a rule (Champion 2019). An example is provided by the excavations at White Horse Stone in Kent, where an unenclosed settlement area was identified next to the remains of a field system (see Inset 8.5).

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Identity, Naming, and Division  267 Occupants of some enclosed sites were tied in to broader social networks with inhabitants of other enclosed settlements (Moore 2007), resulting in a polyfocal settlement pattern that can be difficult to reconstruct archaeologically.1 Excavations at Threemilestone in Cornwall in 2004 demonstrate some of the issues surrounding the relationship between enclosed and unenclosed settlement (Gossip 2005). The first Iron Age unenclosed settlement in Cornwall was discovered here, in the vicinity of and probably associated with at least one contemporary nearby ‘round’ (enclosed settlement) (Gossip  2005: 8, 31–2; Nowakowski 2011: 247). Since this discovery, potentially similar sites have been identified elsewhere in Cornwall through non-intrusive survey (Nowakowski 2011: 247), suggesting that Cornwall’s Iron Age settlement pattern may have been more complex than was hitherto suspected (see inset for extra archaeological detail on Cornwall). A crucial question is what happened in the early medieval period? It is possible that some enclosures are buried beneath modern settlement cores but with the surge in developerfunded excavations (Chapters 1 and 2) and better excavation techniques, this notion becomes gradually less tenable. A second possibility is that many enclosures and boundaries are dated on the basis of morphology, which can lead to circular arguments. For example, excavations at Cottam in East Yorkshire established an eighth- to ninth-century ad date for a suspected Iron Age to Roman cropmark enclosure, leading the excavator to suggest that many more of the unexcavated enclosures in the Yorkshire Wolds may be early medieval (Richards 1999: 72–3). Sites are generally classed by their date of construction, which goes some way to explain the sharp drop in the early medieval period, when ­earlier ­enclosures may have been reused. This happened with Roman towns, and in a rural context has been observed at West Heslerton in Yorkshire (Reynolds  2003: 103). However, there is evidence for the deliberate avoidance of earlier enclosures as well. A fourth possibility is that enclosures existed on a different scale to before—the aforementioned gradual increase of internal settlement divisions—rendered invisible through the broad-brush methodology employed here. The individually enclosed tofts and crofts of the medieval village are a case in point, and possibly suggest a greater emphasis on the nucleated household unit than the wider community, again possibly an outcome of the influence of Christian morality. Finally, the possibility exists that the landscape was divided in ways that were arch­aeo­ logic­ally invisible. One major change with preceding periods was the large-scale increase of documentary evidence, reflecting an increase of the use of documents for land management purposes from the middle Anglo-Saxon period. This new medium for expression had a far-reaching impact on the way in which landscape was divided and conceptualized. It is to the early medieval period and the power of words we now turn therefore, best initially exemplified through Domesday Book, but complemented by a mass of other evidence.

Domesday Book: Naming and Recording the Landscape One of the central discoveries of the EngLaId project concerns the sheer level of difference of the early medieval landscape, which provided the building blocks for early medieval 1  A similar model has been suggested for the early medieval period by Blair (2018), largely based on place name evidence.

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268  English Landscapes and Identities state formation and was influenced in its turn by the coming of Christianity. Within the central area of England the origins of the nucleated village, surrounding a church and a manor and surrounded in turn by open fields, probably emerged in the middle Saxon period following a period of considerable continuity with the Roman landscape, although opinions differ (Williamson et al. 2013; Banham and Faith 2014; Hall 2014; McKerracher 2018; Hamerow et al. 2019). The early medieval landscape and state were un­usual in their structures and relations, but also differed for us from previous periods in that we have relatively good documentation of them, which is a reflection of the increased importance of documents and the written word in early medieval society. We start with the core document, Domesday Book, looking briefly at how it was put together, before reflecting on what sort of record it provides of the existing landscape at the time of the Norman invasion. From there we will move on to consider the naming of the landscape, which took place as part of what we are calling the Great Renaming. Much communal effort was put into walking charter bounds (see later discussion in this section) and reciting names of individual landscape features: as the bounds were reaffirmed so was the community. The relationship between embodied experience and documents was crucial here, but so too were the subtle ways in which ancient features of the landscape were given contemporary force. This does not suggest a straightforward continuity from ancient past to present, but rather a strategic drawing in of older features into current landscape creation. Names and naming suggest a fluid triangular relationship between embodied experience of moving through the landscape, an interaction with physical features and with names written in documents. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in ad 1085, [William] the king had great thought and very deep conversation with his council about this land, how it was occupied, or with which men. Then he sent his men all over England into every shire and had them ascertain how many hundreds of hides there were in the shire, or what land and livestock the king himself had in the land, or what dues he ought to have in 12 months from the shire. Also he had it recorded how much land his arch­ bishops had, and his diocesan bishops, and his abbots and his earls, and—though I tell it at too great length—what or how much each man had who was occupying land here in England, in land or in livestock, and how much money it was worth. He had it investigated so very narrowly that there was not one single hide, not one yard of land, not even (it is shameful to tell—but it seemed no shame to him to do it) one ox, not one cow, not one pig was left out, that was not set down in his record. And all the records were brought to him afterwards.

These records—the results of what has become known as the Domesday inquest—were eventually summarized and compiled into a book, commonly referred to as Domesday Book, the first extensive summary of landholdings to have survived (Roffe 2000).2 The disapproval of the eleventh-century scribe who recorded the Domesday inquest in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle may suggest that the creation of such a detailed survey was unique, but it soon became a source of the utmost importance. Already by the twelfth century, it  was known by its current name, meaning ‘Book of Judgement’ and underlining the 2  Although usually referred to as a single book, Domesday Book technically consists of two separate works, Little Domesday (comprising the counties of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk) and Great Domesday (including the rest of England except regions that later became Northumberland, Durham, Westmorland, and Cumberland).

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Identity, Naming, and Division  269 reverence in which it was held, occasionally being quoted in court into the twentieth century (Roffe 2000: 5–7). The importance of this book reflects the importance in which the written word was held more widely following the conversion to Christianity, as texts such as charters were signed in the presence of God and by God’s representatives on Earth, thus representing sacred documents (Moreland 2001). This section will provide a brief characterization of the geography of eleventh-century England as recorded in Domesday Book. Using other historical sources such as charter boundary clauses, we will also consider the ways in which early medieval territoriality was manifested and briefly appraise the significance of this for our understanding of territoriality in earlier time periods. Domesday Book is frequently seen as the first detailed document that provides evidence for regional structures and administrative territories. Its potential for geographical research has long been acknowledged (Darby 1971: 1). Attempts to map the various administrative units date back to the nineteenth century (summarized in Darby 1971: 13). However, mapping Domesday is not a straightforward exercise. The inquest seems to have been based on a number of circuits, in each of which a group of surveyors went out to record manors, vills, and hundreds (administrative units of varying sizes; see discussion to follow). However, for the book this was reorganized—by shire—under the headings of individual landholders in descending order of importance: a difference which Darby (1971: iix, 8; 1977: 6–8) regarded as the replacement of a geographical for a feudal division, placing the emphasis on relationships between people instead of belonging to land. The feudal organization of Domesday Book reflects a different mindset to our own, used as we are to cartographic depictions of the world: to obtain a map of landholdings, it has been necessary to reconstruct the processes that underlie the Domesday inquest. Although paper and electronic maps have existed for some time now, the body of scholarly work that has gone into this has been enormous: 13,418 separate places are named in Domesday Book, the vast majority of which have been identified and ‘mapped’ by references to modern place names, which include modern settlements but also much more obscure place name elements (Darby 1971: 18–19; 1977: 15). Only 386 names were still unidentified in the late 1970s, with an additional 175 that could only be assigned to particular parishes (Darby 1977: 15); these numbers have not changed substantially since then. Although the different Domesday circuits were essential for the completion of the inquest, the largest spatial divisions in the book are the shires, which broadly correspond to modern counties (especially before their reorganization in the twentieth century). The long-lasting nature of these administrative divisions has also raised questions about their origins. This seems to have been varied, although they are usually placed within the early medieval period rather than any earlier. The shires that constituted the original heartland of the Kingdom of Wessex were possibly created in the seventh or eighth century ad as territorial divisions centring on royal estates. Elsewhere, as in the Midlands, they seem to have been superimposed onto earlier ‘tribal’ structures, possibly as late as the eleventh century in the context of administrative changes that took place after the political unification of England (Stenton 1943: 336–8; Baker and Brookes 2013: 90). The main subdivision of the shire was the hundred, or—in areas at one time under Scandinavian control—the wapentake, administrative units centred on a meeting place, bringing together groups of vills (the smallest administrative unit described in Domesday Book) for judicial and fiscal purposes (Baker and Brookes 2013). In some cases, vills cor­re­ spond­ed to manors, which were units of ownership rather than administrative d ­ ivisions, but a single vill could also contain several manors (or vice versa). The vills ­corresponded

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270  English Landscapes and Identities roughly to parishes or townships,3 and in some cases their geography seems to have remained largely intact until the nineteenth century, suggesting an incredibly long-lasting continuity of administrative divisions for a millennium or more, and giving rise to the practice amongst medievalists of using nineteenth-century maps for reconstructions of the medieval landscape. Domesday Book reveals a landscape of complex territorial divisions and multiscalar identities. In addition to other aspects such as status, ethnicity, gender, and age, the identity of an individual living in eleventh-century England would have been determined by the manor, vill, hundred or wapentake, and shire that he or she belonged to, and the personal relationships that these represented. Ownership is not a straightforward concept and refers to a bundle of rights in tension with each other, none of which were exclusive. From the early medieval period, the king (local or ‘national’) owned the land, for which use rights were given to individuals in return for various dues, thus tying territory firmly to personal relationships between rulers and ruled. Nevertheless, people did feel that ownership resided with them, through patterns of use and benefit. A similar complexity of tenure presumably existed in the Roman period, with all land owned by the emperor, the embodiment of the Roman state. It is possible that the link between power and land emerged in England for the first time in the late Iron Age, but this is surmise rather than something of which we can be sure. A concern with ownership over land at a local level emerges from analysis of Domesday place names, providing a proxy for the perception of central places within eleventh-century territories.4 Most Old English place names consist of two elements, a common com­bin­ ation being a (male) personal name followed by a settlement descriptor like tun, ham or (in areas with Scandinavian linguistic influence) by or thorpe (all meaning ‘homestead’, ‘farmstead’, ‘settlement’, or ‘village’). Figure 8.4 maps these for seven case study areas against all place names referred to in Domesday Book, illustrating their frequent occurrence. Although not all of these names were formed in the eleventh century, they reflect a more widespread early medieval concern with personal ownership of landed property, and this is the process that we call here the Great Renaming. The evidence from Domesday Book can be complemented by the mass of extant records of charter bounds. Early medieval charter bounds describe the boundaries of estates, and do so in varying levels of detail (Table  8.2). They range from a simple indication of the bordering estates or territories at each of the four cardinal points (Type 1), to detailed descriptions of every individual landmark along the way, recorded in the context of a perambulation along the estate boundary (Type 2). Type 1 charters—in Old English, Latin, or a combination of both—derive from late Roman practices, and were common in the southeast, including Kent, between the seventh and ninth centuries (Brooks and Kelly 2013: 133). Type 2 charters—also known as sequential surveys, written in the vernacular—originated in the southwest in the eighth century or before, and spread to the southeast in the course of the later ninth and tenth centuries (Brooks and Kelly 2013: 134–5). One of the earliest surviving examples, preserved in the Winchester Old Minster archives, details the boundaries of a territory in South Hams (Devon) (L298.0.00/Sawyer 298; Figure 8.5). Type 1 3 OE tun-scipe or village-scape, basically the self-sustaining territory of a village/settlement (OE tun) with its fields, woods, and other natural and humanly created resources, which may correspond to a parish or form part of a parish. It has nothing to do with ‘town’ in the modern sense of the word. 4  A lot of what follows would not have been possible without the enormous efforts of Roger Glyde.

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Identity, Naming, and Division  271 300000

400000

500000

400000

500000

600000

Personal name + –tun/ham/by/thorpe

400000 300000 200000 100000

100000

200000

300000

400000

Other placenames

0 300000

50

100 km

600000

Figure 8.4  Place names combining a personal name with –tun, –ham, –by, or –thorpe (in red) in seven EngLaId case study areas, mapped against all Domesday place names (in black). They represent just under 17 per cent. Data adapted from Palmer (2010).

typically only allows for a rough localization of estate boundaries, whereas Type 2 can be used (as has often been attempted) to map them on the ground (Figure 8.6). It may be that so much effort was put into establishing boundaries because this was a period of unusual renaming, so that new names needed to be inscribed into people’s memories through practice. Brooks and Kelly (2013) emphasize the bureaucratic, top-down aspects of perambulations, but they were also significant events for local communities cementing their village identities. In medieval and post-medieval England, perambulations were a feature of the Rogation Days or Gangdays, the three days before Ascension Thursday in May. Early references to the practice are patchy, but in a study of village life in thirteenth-century England, Homans (1975) traces the practice back to before the Norman Conquest. Each year, the villagers went out in procession around the village, led by their village priest. Younger boys would be thrown into the ponds or brooks that marked the boundary, or ‘had their buttocks bumped against the trees and rocks which marked the bounds, so that they should

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272  English Landscapes and Identities Table 8.2  Two examples of charter boundary clauses Type Text 1

2

⁊ þis sint þa landgemera æt ƿorahornan ⁊ æt flodhammam. on easthea`l´fe cealf hammas. ⁊ on suðhealfe Seaxana mearc ⁊ on ƿesthealfe gen lida ⁊ on norðhealfe þes hiredes land to folcan-stane. Ærest of stræt geate on tælen ford. þonon up on tælen oð blindan ƿylle. þonne on dene beorh. þanon on hæð feld mere. þanon on finan. þanon on otrig on stræt pol. þonne on brom dune middeƿeadre. þanon on hoan. ƿeg. þonne on rædan flodan. ðanon suð andlang dune. on ƿyrtum oð ƿicging land. of ðære landscore oð ƿacces treoƿ: þanon on berrdes. cumbes heafod. þonne on leofan dune. suðeƿearde. þanon on cetes holt suþeƿrdne. þonne on otrig. æt þam borstenan clife. þannon on pundfald. þonne on þone suþran ellen ford. ðanon. on hric. ƿeg. þonne on anne apoldor. step. þonne. on anne stan ford. þanon on rægen ðornas. þonne norð on hearpæþ eft on stræt geat.

Translation And these are the land boundaries at Warehorne and at Flotham: on [the] east side calf-meadows/ enclosures and on [the] south side [the] Saxons’ boundary and on [the] west side [the] counterchannel and on [the] north side the community’s land [belonging] to Folkestone. First from [the] street-gate to [river] Tale ford. Then up into [the] Tale as far as [the] blind spring. Then to [the] valley-barrow. Thence to heath-field pool. Thence into the Vine [stream]. Thence into [the] Otter to street-pool. Then to broom-down middle-part. Thence to hollowway. Then to red watercourse. Thence south along the down. To [the] tree-roots as far as Wicga’s land. From the land-boundary as far as look-out tree: thence to Beornred’s valley’s head. Then to Leofa’s down. Southwards. Thence to cetes [untranslated] wood southwards. Then to [the] Otter. At the broken cliff. Thence to the pound. Then to the southern elder-ford. Thence onto the ridgeway. Then to an apple tree step [untranslated]. Then to a stone ford. Then to roe-deer’s thorns. Then north onto the army-path back to street-gate.

Type 1: list of the bordering estates or territories at each of the four cardinal points (L282.000/Sawyer 282; Warehorne and Flotham [lost], Kent; ad 830). Type 2: detailed description of each individual landmark along the way, written down in the context of a perambulation (L1033.1.000/Sawyer 1033; Ottery St Mary [2], Devon; ad 1061). The words in bold refer to the landmarks in Figure 8.6. Text and translation from LangScape.

remember them the better’ (Homans 1975: 368). The practice has certain similarities with the Old English Æcerbot charm, a ceremony to improve the productivity of fields, during which the village priest performed prayers over sods taken from four different sides of the field (Jolly  1992,  1996; ten Harkel et al.  2017). The significance of ‘Holy Oaks’ along the route of the perambulation suggests that—like the Æcerbot ritual—the practice involved a complex mixture of ‘pagan’ elements and Christian ritual, characterized by Jolly (1996) as ‘popular’ religion. Indeed, there are striking similarities between the Æcerbot charm and the sacrificial procession of a suovetaurilia (a pig, sheep, and bull) around the fields in Roman times to invoke Mars’ protection over the harvest (ten Harkel et al. 2017). All these practices were instrumental in the creation and maintenance of divisions within the landscape without constructing actual physical boundaries, but through the use of writing and enacted social practices. The importance of documents for these changing approaches to dividing the landscape can also be discerned from a type of place name known as Buckland place names, such as Buckland-Tout-Saints in Devon or Buckland in Kent. These refer to the concept of ‘bookland’ (OE bocland), land transferred by charter. The idea of bookland originated as a provision for the Church, to grant land (and its rents and produce) to the emerging minsters, and allow it to be alienated (granted to someone else) (Blair 2005: 90). Scholars have argued that it existed in contrast to ‘folkland’ (OE folcland), land that was not alienable or transferable but tied to a community through ancestral rights. In other words, the concept of

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Identity, Naming, and Division  273

ðone torr æt mercecumbes æwielme [the crag at bundaryvalley spring]

ðone dic ðær esne þone weg fordealf [the ditch where Esne dug up the road] ðæs wælles heafod [the spring´s head]

merce cumbe [boundaryvallery]

afene [river Avon]

broc [brook]

sueord leage wælles [sword-clearing spring, ModEnd Sorley] wulf wælles heafod [wolf-spring’s head]

ða burg [ModEng Stadbury] oð sæs [as far as the sea] ðurelan stane [the pierced stone, ModEng Thurlestone]

ðone healdan weg [the sloping way]

smalan cumbes heafde [narrow valley spring]

ðone herepað [the army-path] hunburge fleot [Hunburg’s creek]

broc [brook]

to sæ [to the sea]

0

km

1

Figure 8.5  The boundary of the estate in the South Hams in Devon mapped on the ground, based on a ninth-century charter boundary clause (L298.0.00/Sawyer 298; South Hams, Devon; ad 846). After Hooke (1994: 105–12). Blue lines represent rivers; grey lines represent roads, and red dots represent Domesday estates that fall within the enclosed area. Names in bold represent modern place names (one river name and three Domesday estates), but in this case they all fall outside the enclosed area.

bookland allowed land to become commoditized—a medium of exchange within the ­personal relationships between king, Church, and secular landholding elite—and by the eleventh century the concept of inalienable land governed by the customary rights of ­kinship had disappeared, a transition which the unapologetically revenue-based Domesday Book can only reinforce (Williams 2001: 277; Banham and Faith 2014: 286). Thus the evidence suggests that divisions in the landscape did not disappear, but that they were increasingly solidified in ways that are archaeologically invisible as the importance of the written word grew. In order to obtain an impression of the kinds of landscape features

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274  English Landscapes and Identities

finan [Vine, ModEng

Fenny Meadow, blindan wylle Fenny Bridges [the blind spring] and Feniton] dene beorh [valley-barrow, ModEng Denberry otrig tælen field names] [River Otter] [River Tale]

bromdune [broom-down]

tælenford [the Tale-ford, ModEng Taleford]

stræt geate [street-gate, ModEng Straightway Head]

hoan weg [hollow way]?

OTTERY ST MARY

dune [down]

wicgincland [Wicga’s Land, ModEng Wiggaton]

hearpæp [army-path, poss, Roman road]

wacces treow [look-out tree] stanford [stone ford]?

0

km

1

hric weg [ridgeway]

þone suþran ellan ford [the southern elder-ford, ModEng Elwill Dairy]

berrdes cumbes heafog [Beornred’s valley’s head. To the east is ModEng Burscombe] leofan dune [Leofa’s down, ModEng Beacon Hill]

otrig [River Otter] cetes holt [cetes wood; to the south Harpford Wood]

Figure 8.6  An example of a charter boundary clause mapped on the ground (L1033.1.000/ Sawyer 1033; Ottery St Mary [2], Devon; ad 1061). Based on Hooke (1994: 207–12) in conjunction with 1st edition OS maps (1:2500 County Series 1st Edition (TIFF geospatial data), Scale 1:2500, Tiles: devo-06916-1 and devo-07009-1, Updated: 30 November 2010, Historic, Using: EDINA Historic Digimap Service, http://digimap.edina.ac.uk, Downloaded: 2016-07-25 14:39:39.932). Blue lines represent rivers; thick grey lines represent former Roman roads, and thin grey lines are other roads. Features drawn only in relation to the estate boundary (red dashed line). Names in bold represent modern place names.

that structured these ‘invisible’ boundaries, a number were analysed from (the broad vicinity of) three case study areas (Devon, Kent, and Humber). These included 88 Kentish charter bounds with 605 structuring elements (an average of 6.9 per charter), 7 from (or near to) the Devon case study (including 206 structuring elements, or 29.4 per charter), and 4 from (or near to) Humber (amounting to 53 structuring elements, or 13.3 per charter) (Figure 8.7). The structuring elements were assigned to a number of categories (Table 8.3). Figure 8.8 shows the results. The importance of waterways as a structuring element in the landscape is immediately apparent, although—as is clear from Figure 8.5—watersheds sometimes also coincided with boundaries. Rivers were also important in naming Domesday estate centres (Figure 8.6). The second-most frequent category is ‘roads’, illustrating that terrestrial routes also had a dual function of connection and division. Some of the roads are explicitly referred to as army-roads, including the hearpæð/herepath—the Old English elements hear- or here- meaning ‘army’ plus -pæð or -path meaning road— suggesting that such long-distance roads in particular had supra-local significance. Other

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Identity, Naming, and Division  275 100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

Kent Number of charters

Devon

Humber

Mean number of structuring elements per charter

Figure 8.7  Total number of charter bounds per case study region, compared to the mean number of structuring elements per charter boundary clause, reflecting the preponderance of (the relatively simple) Type 1 charter bounds in Kent.

common categories are natural and topographical features, including ‘land forms’ (mainly contours) and ‘vegetation’ (including trees, clearings, and hedges). The importance of natural features as structuring elements in the landscape is un­deni­able (Bradley 2000), but older human-made features were important too. A study of quali­fiers in charter boundary clauses revealed that the adjective ealdan (‘old’) occurs two and a half times as often as the next frequent qualifier (Kitson  1993: 34). Some of the roads and routeways that function as boundaries had much older origins. The practice of marginalizing earlier features (such as barrows) during periods of territorial reorganization by using them

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276  English Landscapes and Identities Table 8.3  Categorization of structuring elements within charter boundary clauses Category

Example

Water: natural

Creek; river; stream; brook; pool; watercourse; spring; spring’s head (source); whirlpool; marsh; fen; but also all river names Ditch; dyke

Water: human-made Water crossings Bridge; ford; stepping stones Land forms Island; meadow; field/open land; pasture; valley; hill; hillock; ridge; hurst (wooded hill); hill spur; hollow; down; tor; crag; coomb; knoll; head(land); slope; but also descriptive/personified names for contours (e.g. ‘Ram’s Horn’) Vegetation Tree; wood(land); oak tree; thorn bush/tree; bramble; lime tree; wood bank; hedge; willow; but also woodland clearing Cultivation Acre; land (as in cultivated land); bookland Roads Way; street; lane; ride; hearpæð/herepath (army-path); but also bridge; ford; stile; gate/gap; stepping stones Mounds and Tumulus; mound; barrow; stone barrow (i.e. cairn); groups of tumuli/barrows; barrows assembly mounds Other (Standing) stones; pit; (tree) stump; row; post; cross landscape features Buildings and All place names; fortification; burh; enclosure; pen; byre; pound; ham(m); market; settlements refectory Boundaries Explicit references to boundaries (gemaere); boundary ditch; boundary meeting place; boundary stone; land’s end; fence; wall; but also references to ‘a straight line’ Unknown Untranslatable and corrupt forms

50.0%

45.0%

40.0%

35.0%

30.0%

25.0%

20.0%

15.0%

10.0%

5.0%

0.0%

Water combined Land forms

Vegetation

Cultivation Kent (n = 605)

Roads

Mounds and barrows

Devon (n = 206)

Other landscape Buildings and features settlements

Boundaries

Humber (n = 53)

Figure 8.8  Relative distribution of structuring elements within charter bounds.

Unknown

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Identity, Naming, and Division  277 as landmarks for boundaries has been highlighted, and so the occurrence of burial mounds in this analysis is not surprising, although perhaps less frequent than one might expect, particularly given their importance for earlier, prehistoric land divisions (Chapter  10; Cooper and Edmonds 2007; Semple 2013; Cooper 2016a, 2016b). Based on the evidence from charter bounds we have made an implicit link between naming and enclosure—it is hard to think that an unenclosed landscape would be densely named, although this might be our contemporary bias showing through. We would see the naming of England in the early medieval period as part of what Blair has called the ‘cellularization’ of the landscape, with small divisions emerging through parishes and local ­village-based landscapes (Blair 2005). Writing was prevalent throughout Roman Britain (although comparatively little of the evidence for it survives), as part of the state’s control of the province taken up and used by citizens. There is considerable continuity from the late Iron Age into the Roman period and this is found in the structure of field systems as well as the naming of the land. Earlier periods saw enclosures and almost certainly named areas, but of the latter we know little. Names were passed down orally and possibly through deliberate acts in the landscape to encourage memory but—by the early medieval period—also in order to imprint power relationships onto a landscape that was increasingly commoditized (Figure 8.9). In Kent, several sites with multi-period activity were identified along the line of High Speed 1. One of these was the Saltwood Tunnel site (Inset 8.1), which included evidence for Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, and early medieval activity. In the early Bronze Age, a series of barrows were constructed on a general alignment. Later Bronze Age ditches were constructed in reference to the barrows but on a slightly different alignment (Champion  2011; also see Cooper  2016a,  2016b). In the Iron Age, a

70.00%

60.00%

50.00%

40.00%

30.00%

20.00%

10.00%

0.00%

Water combined Land forms

Vegetation

Cultivation

Roads

Kent (n = 253)

Mounds and Other landscape Buildings and Boundaries barrows features settlements Humber (n = 304) Devon (n = 186)

Unknown

People

Figure 8.9  Relative distribution of structuring elements within place names. The high peak in the buildings and settlement category results from the habit of including an element describing the kind of settlement (such as –tun or –by) in Old English naming practices.

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278  English Landscapes and Identities

0

m

Bronze Age Ditches

100

Iron Age Trackways

Aligned in Cut into earlier reference to barrows; partially in earlier barrows. reference to Bronze Age ditches.

Early Medieval Roman Trackways; enclosures Linear cemetery Re-cut some earlier trackways; reference barrows; enclosures added.

References earlier barrows and trackways.

Inset 8.1  Saltwood Tunnel, Kent Part of the Saltwood Tunnel excavations, redrawn after Booth (2011b), Champion (2011), Reynolds (2011). Features in olive green are of Bronze Age date (with pale green circles representing early Bronze Age barrows), grey of Iron Age date, dark blue of Roman date (some of which directly overlies earlier Iron Age ditches), and red of early medieval date.

series of trackways was laid out whose junctions cut into or respected the Bronze Age barrows. The more substantial of these were redug during the Roman period, when enclosures were also added (Booth 2011b). Early medieval activity consisted largely of burial activity, located in reference to the earlier Bronze Age barrows and the junctions of the Iron Age and Roman trackways, and in a broadly linear arrangement running parallel to an Iron Age trackway and aligned on the early Bronze Age barrows (Reynolds 2011). The Lanton Quarry site (Inset  8.2) had not yet reached publication but was awaiting further phases of work at the time of writing this chapter. Detailed interim reports were available as free downloads on ARS’s website (Stafford 2007; Cockburn et al. 2009). There is little evidence in this case that multi-periodicity represented any form of con­ tinu­ity, but rather indicated the repeated use of a location across an extended period of time. Scattered Bronze Age activity includes evidence for domestic occupation, whilst possible Iron Age activity included a single structure to the south, and some cist burials to the north. Early medieval activity (dated to the sixth and seventh centuries) consists of several sunken-featured buildings, evidence of industrial activity, and two associated fence-lines. The early medieval fences represent the earliest evidence for enclosure on the site. It is unclear whether the possible Iron Age structure to the north was still visible at this stage, in which case the fences may represent a distancing from the past. Size of excavation trenches was, however, limited, and further work may shed more light on the situation. During the A63 road improvement scheme at Melton, Yorkshire, a long sequence was established from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period, involving repeated phases of human and animal burial associated with ditches and trackways (Inset  8.3). However, Fenton-Thomas et al. (2011: 383, 394) have suggested that the site gives a false impression of

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Identity, Naming, and Division  279

0

Bronze Age

Iron Age

Roman

m

100

Early Medieval Fences Separate from earlier periods.

Inset 8.2  Lanton Quarry, Northumberland Part of the Lanton Quarry (Northumberland) excavations, redrawn after Cockburn et al. (2009), Stafford (2007). Features in olive green are of Bronze Age date, grey of Iron Age date, and red of early medieval date.

Bronze Age Iron Age Roman Linear earthwork; trackways; fences; Enclosures enclosures; linear burials Burials deposited Reference Bronze Age Extend existing enclosure complex; in earlier barrow barrow; spatial relationring-ditch. ship between linear burials and special earthwork, fences or deposits inserted in hedges and burials; ditches; square piecemeal expansion; barrow cut through by curving linear. more burials reference collapsed roundhouses near settlement enclosure and trackway.

Early Medieval Field ditches Reference Iron Age square barrow? Burials at junction of trackways.

0

m

100

Inset 8.3  A63 Melton, Yorkshire Part of the A63 Melton excavations, redrawn after Fenton-Thomas et al. (2011). Features in olive green are of Bronze Age date (with pale green representing an early Bronze Age barrow ring-ditch), grey of Iron Age to early Roman date, dark blue of Roman date, and red of early medieval date. Diamonds indicate burials (human and animal).

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280  English Landscapes and Identities continuity as the burial phases were separated by several centuries, and there is no evidence to suggest that people were aware of earlier burial episodes, a caution we must bear in mind. The earliest activity on the site was an early Bronze Age barrow with later middle Bronze Age cremation burials inserted in the ring-ditch. After a long hiatus, in the fifth or sixth century bc linear arrangements were constructed on the site, including a row of in­hum­ ation burials, a triple-ditched linear feature that cut through the barrow (possibly representing a long-distance linear earthwork), and associated fence-lines or hedges. These various linear features were broadly contemporary, but their relative stratigraphy is not entirely clear. The main north–south trackway further east may also date to this period. The Iron Age linear earthwork had a long-lasting impact on the landscape. In the late Iron Age to early Roman period, a settlement of trackways and ditched enclosures was established on the same alignment. Roadside ditches were added to formalize the ­north–south trackway. The settlement included several roundhouses, which later collapsed and became a focal point for human and animal burial interpreted as ritual deposits. Elsewhere on the site, square barrows and dispersed burials were added, some of which were cutting into ditches. In the early Roman period, a curving ditch was dug through the square barrow, removing the burial’s feet. More enclosures were added piecemeal on the same alignment, in­corp­ or­at­ing earlier Iron Age ditches. Sometime in the first century ad, the settlement was abandoned, and the site used for livestock management. This is unusual for the region, where many sites display continuity across the Roman conquest. During this period several partially articulated animal skeletons were inserted into the ditches and gullies associated with one of the enclosures. After a further hiatus of activity, during which only the north–south trackway remained in use, in the seventh century ad a group of furnished human inhumation burials was deposited at the junction of the two trackways, including a neonate and a ‘deviant’ burial. To the south, gullies indicate the presence of an early medieval field system, respecting the southernmost Iron Age square barrow.

Towards a Longer Term History of Boundaries and Enclosed Space How the early medieval period differed from earlier periods is a crucial issue, bound up as it is with whether there were any continuities between this and periods stretching back as far as the middle Bronze Age, opening up also questions of ownership of land. In contrast to the early medieval and Roman periods, the prehistoric period (and possibly also the earlier part of the early medieval period: it is important to point out here that such processes were not always linear) either lacked notions of landownership, or ownership/stewardship might have been exercised by the community as a whole, not the individual. In such a view land was probably seen as ancestral (Thomas 1997: 215), so that social responsibilities of land tenure tended to be emphasized over economic gain (Wickstead 2008). It has been argued that control over land became the basis of social power in the Iron Age, gradually replacing the importance of exotic and prestigious artefacts, but we cannot be sure of this (Thomas 1989, 1997: 213; Cunliffe 2005: 587, 589–90; Yates 2007; Topping et al. 2008: 358). It seems unlikely that land was bought and sold for most of prehistory, except possibly for the very late Iron Age. Land as commodity was a feature of the Roman period; as Mattingly (2007: 355) states, ‘the exploitation of its land and resources was fundamental to the success of the province’

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Identity, Naming, and Division  281 (also see Smith et al. 2016: 319). In many parts of the Roman Empire, this process was vis­ible in the evidence for centuriation or the laying out of regular gridded land divisions—often functioning as field systems—across the landscape. There is no unequivocal evidence for centuriation from Britain, where continued use of earlier land divisions and field systems was more common, as is for example apparent from the extension of the Iron Age enclosure complex during the Roman period on the A63 site near Melton (Inset 8.3) and the Sewerby Cottage Farm site (Inset 8.4), both in Yorkshire, as well as the recutting of Iron Age ditches during the Roman period at the Saltwood Tunnel site in Kent (Inset 8.1). This pattern seems to have been particularly strong in East Yorkshire: a detailed regional survey of the Foulness Valley within the Humber case study has indicated that enclosures from the prehistoric to the Roman periods gradually became more complex (Halkon 2008: 89, Table 4.8). However, the existing agricultural landscape could still be appropriated, surveyed, measured, and taxed even if the shape and alignment of field systems remained the same (Dilke  1971: 188–95; Williamson 2003; Peterson 2004; Mattingly 2007: 359–60). How people in the past made use of their past is of importance when considering the uses of enclosed space and boundaries over time. Enclosed spaces might be extended (as was the case with Danebury and Lincoln during the Iron Age and Roman periods, re­spect­ ive­ly), ignored (such as Mill Hill and Highstead in Kent after their initial occupation phase), destroyed (as eventually happened to many now entirely ploughed-out enclosures, such as the ditches at Sewerby Cottage Farm in Yorkshire (Inset  8.4)), reused (such as Lincoln during the middle to late Anglo-Saxon period), or put to radically different use (as

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Inset 8.4  Sewerby Cottage Farm, Yorkshire Part of the Sewerby Cottage Farm excavations, redrawn after Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss (2009). Features in grey are of Iron Age date, dark blue of Roman date (some of which directly overlie earlier Iron Age ditches), and red of early medieval date. Blue diamonds represent Roman burials. Features are drawn across 1st Edition OS data (1:2500 County Series 1st Edition (TIFF geospatial data), Scale 1:2500, Tiles: york-12814-1, york-12815-1, Updated: 30 November 2010, Historic, Using: EDINA Historic Digimap Service, http://digimap.edina.ac.uk, downloaded: 2015-11-24 13:48:45.142).

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282  English Landscapes and Identities was probably the case with the Iron Age hill fort of Gallow Law in Northumberland, whose place name suggests a more sinister use at a later stage in its history). The evidence is extremely varied and certain aspects are well-published (e.g. Williams 1997; Crewe 2012; Semple 2013). In what follows, we will focus on a small number of relevant examples from our ­database—combining broad-brush data analysis of the two very disparate case studies of Kent and Northumberland with the detailed examples from the insets—without trying to be comprehensive. As demonstrated earlier, two types of enclosed space that emerged ­frequently from the data analysis are Bronze Age field systems and Iron Age enclosed ­settlements. The following analyses will focus on the spatial relationships between Bronze Age field systems and Iron Age enclosed settlements and the features of the surrounding area. This will be done through the creation of a 200-m spatial buffer around data points cor­re­spond­ing to either of these categories; we then calculated the number of sites of key site types within the buffers and compared this to their overall density within the case study area as a whole. Only selected highlights are included here. The central questions we posed were: (1) what kinds of activities were associated with these spaces; and (2) how did their roles change over time? The results are suggestive in themselves, but also show the possibilities of our data for this type of analysis. Work at Sewerby Cotttage Farm, near Bridlington, took place between 1999 and 2004. The earliest activity on the site was Neolithic (not included in the image). The two halves of the site are separated by a modern field boundary. There was no Bronze Age phase. Towards the end of the Iron Age the landscape was enclosed with ditches, and a round and a square barrow were constructed, separated from the settlement area (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 12, 198, 214–17). The square barrow was situated right next to a square enclosure that slightly predated it, possibly a screenedoff area for preparation or laying out of the dead (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 244–5). The ditches were periodically recut to reinforce portions or block old entrance points; about five episodes were identified between the first century bc and the early third century ad (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 198). They continued to respect the barrows. Roman activity was situated largely inside the settlement enclosure, with an entranceway on the eastern side, south of the square barrow (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss  2009: 201). A group of quarry pits is closely associated with the enclosure ditches (FentonThomas and Bayliss 2009: 237–8). The character of the northern part of the site differs from the southern half, raising the possibility that the modern field boundary separating the two halves of the site is ancient in origin. An isolated crouched inhumation was found in the same area as the round barrow (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 239–40). This suggests a continued separation of space for the living from that for the dead. During the later second or third century ad a rectangular enclosure was built on the western end of the site, probably used for livestock (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 209). By this time the attitude towards human remains had changed, with four cremation pits located inside and roughly parallel to the main enclosure ditch (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 240–1). A large pit cutting the terminus of a gully was associated with ironworking debris, whilst two hearths were possibly also used for ironworking (FentonThomas and Bayliss 2009: 241–2). The site was abandoned in the third century ad. Two isolated features and the top fills of earlier Roman ditches contain some early medieval pottery, suggesting they may have remained partially open (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 12–13, 283–5). The site eventually

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Identity, Naming, and Division  283 became part of Sewerby village fields; surviving ridge-and-furrow was noted but not recorded for the main excavation area (Fenton-Thomas and Bayliss 2009: 3). Interestingly, the Iron Age to Roman ditches defining the western end of the round barrow enclosure are on the same alignment as the field boundaries and trackways on the 1st edition OS map. The first example considers the evidence associated with field systems. Figures 8.10 and 8.11 are a map showing 200-m buffers around Bronze Age field systems in the Northumberland case study area, and a graph of monuments and finds of different time periods that are found in proximity to these field systems. Positive values indicate a positive spatial correlation, whereas negative values indicate the opposite. The buffered area is relatively limited (4.6 km2 in total) because there were only a limited number of Bronze Age field systems in the study zone, predominantly in a broad arc around the eastern edge of the Cheviots and in other upland zones. The correlation between Bronze Age fields and funerary activity (mostly cairns) and to a lesser extent settlement activity is immediately obvious. This reflects the known pattern of association between Bronze Age field systems and unenclosed roundhouses referred to 380000

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284  English Landscapes and Identities Northumberland: Bronze Age fields and associated features

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previously (Frodsham 2004: 25–7), as well as the close relationship between clearance and burial, emphasizing the importance for ancestral connotations for the laying out of the earli­est field systems in this region (Chapter 6; more broadly Chapter 9; Johnston 2000). There is also some link between Bronze Age and Iron Age fields suggesting continuity in places, unlike that further south where Iron Age fields were fewer. Given the late history of woodland clearance (Chapter 4), these may well have been small field systems in clearings before the late Iron Age. However, it may partially also be an artefact of data categorization, caused by the half-weighting of prehistoric records to the Bronze and Iron Ages. The redistribution of generic prehistoric records across the Bronze and Iron Ages is a more serious problem for Iron Age funerary activity, as many of the records now weighted to the Iron Age in reality probably belong to the Bronze Age. Settlements and finds, which continue into the Roman period, show definite positive correlation with Bronze Age field systems, although this may be a return after an absence of use, rather than any real continuity. Similarly, the construction of new Roman stone-built settlements over the defences of Iron Age hill forts in the Cheviots shows a return to older sites rather than continuity, representing ‘a radical re-orientation of society’, expressed through its deliberate slighting of the Iron Age defences (Topping et al. 2008: 359). We are dealing with a periodic return to particular

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Identity, Naming, and Division  285 places which are given new structures and significances, leading to the building up of a palimpsest now difficult to untangle. Overall, there are few Roman or early medieval links with the earlier fields, which is interesting. The suggestion of periodic activity is confirmed by Lanton Quarry (Inset 8.2), the only site within the North Northumberland case study area where multi-period activity including at least three EngLaId periods could be identified (although the evidence did not include any Bronze Age field systems). Despite the presence of three periods of activity on the Lanton Quarry site, there is no evidence for vertical stratigraphy, suggesting that reoccupation of the site occurred at intervals without deliberate reference to (or even knowledge of) earlier phases (unless the early medieval fence lines signalled a deliberate distancing from the earlier occupation). If the image from the Northumberland case study area is one of periodic return, the situation in Kent may indicate some continuity, although dating as ever is an issue (Figures 8.12–13). The buffer zone is even smaller (2.0 km2 in total), reflecting a more limited number of positively identified Bronze Age field systems in the EngLaId database in Kent than in Northumberland. However, it appears that Bronze Age field systems and associated

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286  English Landscapes and Identities Northumberland: Bronze Age fields and associated features

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features had some direct impact on the development of the later landscape. This suggestion is seemingly confirmed by the more detailed analysis in Inset 8.1, focusing on the Saltwood Tunnel excavations in Kent, although the alignment of the Iron Age trackways differs from that of the Bronze Age field ditches. It is therefore also possible that the defining features in the landscape were the earlier Bronze Age barrows, which both the Bronze Age field ditches and the Iron Age trackways respected. In the Bronze Age in Kent, there is a positive association between fields and funerary activity (strengthening the possibility that later uses had as much to do with burials as with the fields), settlements, industrial evidence, routeways (again reflecting the close relationship between enclosure and movement), and finds. Middening of a type explored in Chapters 3 and 6 may have been important for this last category, with material spread on fields. These results suggest that in Bronze Age Kent people existed on a localized scale, living and dying near the fields that fed them, although the clustered nature of arch­aeo­ logic­al investigations may also affect these patterns. In the Iron Age, there is a positive cor­ rel­ation with Iron Age fields, settlements, industrial activity, routeways, and to a lesser extent funerary activity, suggesting some continuity of the same activities in the same places. Iron Age finds, however, are negatively correlated to Bronze Age fields, reflecting

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Identity, Naming, and Division  287 their strong concentration in the vicinity of Iron Age enclosed settlements (see below). For the Roman period, the negative correlation of settlements, industrial activity, and finds with Bronze Age fields is caused by the urban–rural divide, whilst in the early medieval period there is little link with areas previously occupied by Bronze Age field systems, suggesting quite a new layout of the landscape. We also considered Iron Age enclosed settlements for the two case study areas (Figures 8.14–17). In Northumberland, where the density of such settlements is high, the buffer zone covers an area of 19.7 km2; in Kent this is only 2.2 km2. Finds were excluded from these graphs, as they were completely disproportionate for the Kent graph, reaching a positive correlation value of 48.5 (compared to the next highest value for ‘other settlement’ at 2.2); in Northumberland, the value for Iron Age finds was only 0.1. To some degree, this reflects a paucity of artefacts in the region, although the lack of excavation and metal-detecting in the north also feeds into this. What is interesting is the positive association between Iron Age enclosed settlement and Iron Age field systems in Northumberland, and between Iron Age settlements and funerary activity in Kent.

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288  English Landscapes and Identities

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It is also possible to look backwards in time to the Bronze Age. This does not reveal anything conclusive in Northumberland, but in Kent there is a weak positive correlation with the same categories that occur in the Iron Age, suggesting some general continuity in activity and types of features. This is repeated in both areas into the Roman period, but the early medieval period is characterized by different patterns. In Northumberland positive correlations are few, but in Kent the same categories seem to continue, with the interesting addition of the ‘ritual’ category (including Christian establishments). This suggests that in Kent, Iron Age enclosed settlements were situated in locations that remained focal points within the landscape into the early medieval period, whereas in Northumberland this was not the case. This may reflect the much more widespread occurrence of enclosed settlement forms in Northumberland than in Kent, where the fewer—and larger—Iron Age enclosed settlement forms may have made a more permanent imprint on the landscape. The exercise was repeated for other types of enclosed space, which contributed to an overall picture of spatial and chronological complexity of associated activities. Broad con­tinu­ities—both short and longer term—occur side by side with substantial change and disruption. However, even if certain places within the landscape are repeatedly enclosed and/

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Identity, Naming, and Division  289 580000

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or reoccupied, forming the focal point for human activity across multiple time periods, real long-term continuities (of both place and practice) are generally the exception. We hope to have developed a method which is more broadly applicable and can help bring out the differences that are emerging between regions, although obviously the results need careful scrutiny against the record from detailed survey and excavation. Comparing the results of broad-brush spatial analysis with detailed conclusions drawn from the insets underlines the fact that analytic scale matters, and significantly affects our interpretations. The Lanton Quarry site in Northumberland (Inset  8.2) has multi-period activity but no evidence for continuity; the same can be said for the site at White Horse Stone in Kent (Inset 8.5), which showed no evidence for continuity between the Iron Age and Roman periods. At the Saltwood Tunnel site in Kent (Inset 8.1), there is seeming con­ tinu­ity between the Bronze and Iron Ages, although the slight shift in alignment of linear features between these periods may indicate that this also masks a repeated use of the same location—possibly in reference to the early Bronze Age barrows—instead. Evidence for Iron Age to Roman continuity is stronger here, as it was on the A63 site at Melton (Inset 8.3)

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290  English Landscapes and Identities Kent: Iron Age enclosed settlement and associated features

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and Sewerby Cottage Farm (Inset  8.4), both in Yorkshire. In the latter case, the general alignment of some of the enclosing features even seems to have been preserved until the present day. However, even sites with more compelling evidence for continued practice, such as the A63 site (Inset 8.3) with its multi-period evidence for burials along the same linear features, have substantial chronological gaps that raise the question whether the memory of these practices was preserved between their various phases. Burials and other ‘special’ deposits placed in or alongside boundary features will be discussed briefly in the final part of this chapter.

Sacred Boundaries The previous sections have emphasized the spatial and chronological complexity of bound­ ar­ies and divisions, representing elements in a constant process of landscape change on multiple levels. Despite this state of flux, however, there is one thing that is often argued to unite all boundaries: their liminality. Regardless of their physical appearance and the time

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Identity, Naming, and Division  291 of their construction, boundaries separated people. To pass from one side to the other ­represented the difference between belonging and being an outsider or an intruder. The special significance of boundaries was grounded in ritual behaviours, during which boundaries took centre-stage. Human burials or entire cemeteries were situated on or alongside linear earthworks, roads and trackways, or inserted in settlement and field ditches (Insets 8.1 and 8.3; Millett 1995: 125; Johnston 2000; Astill 2009: 232–3; Semple 2013: 25–6, 45–6; Sofield 2015; Chadwick 2016: 251). Metalwork, animal burials, and coin hoards were deposited in or alongside linear features including rivers and routeways (Bradley 1998a; Stocker and Everson  2003; Mattingly  2007: 62; Semple  2011: 748; Hamerow  2012: 130–3; Chadwick  2016: 262–4). For the Roman period, the majority of inscribed altars can be found on Hadrian’s Wall (see Roman Inscriptions of Britain5). Festivals like the Terminalia and Gangdays sometimes involved the deposition of ‘special’ deposits that can be recognized archaeologically (e.g. Thomas  1997: 216); the so-called Bridgeness slab on the Antonine Wall depicts the suovetaurilia, a formal sacrifice of a pig, a bull, and a sheep, suggesting a further link between this major linear earthwork and ritual activity (Mattingly 2007: 210). All were drawn-out processes—involving the digging of the pit or grave and the deposition of the treasure, the sacrifice, or the deceased, probably ac­com­pan­ ied by rituals—during which whole communities may have been present. It was at times like these that boundaries reinforced their active and reciprocal relationship with the ­centres they enclosed. We focus on one aspect of special deposition in boundary locations—burials—because burial itself represents a transitional act between the realms of the living and the dead. Their spatial coincidence with physical boundaries in the landscape could therefore be seen to reinforce the relationship between spatial and temporal liminality in the past. The practice is well documented, and no attempt has been made here to repeat what has already been said (e.g. Williams 1997; Cooper and Edmonds 2007: 135; Sofield 2015). A long-term perspective can nevertheless bring new insights, in particular with respect to the supposed liminality of such burials. Regionally variable attitudes towards burial can already be observed in the Bronze Age. In this period, formal enclosed cemeteries were common in Scotland and to a lesser extent in northern England, as at Ewe Hill in Northumberland (Topping et al.  2008: 338). At roughly the same time, the practice of depositing cremations into field ditches was more prevalent in other parts of England (Cooper and Edmonds 2007: 135). Burials in ditches represent a shift that occurred during the Bronze Age, between a period when boundaries were constructed in reference to burials to a period when burials were placed in reference to boundaries. The sequences in Insets 8.3 (A63, Melton, Yorkshire) and 8.1 (Saltwood Tunnel, Kent) illustrate this well. The first human-made elements in the landscape are earl­ ier Bronze Age barrows. At the Saltwood Tunnel site these were constructed on a roughly linear alignment. In both cases, the barrows became points of reference for linear features, which in turn seem to have become focal points for subsequent burials. The shift depended to a degree on the fact that linear divisions in the landscape became an increasingly common phenomenon through the Iron Age and Roman periods, but is not a one-way development. For example at the A63 Melton site in the Humber case study, Roman and early medieval linears may have been constructed in reference to Iron Age square barrows.

5 https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/

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292  English Landscapes and Identities The distinction we have just made between burials preceding or succeeding boundaries will become clearer if we focus on underlying processes. In the first case, burials precede boundaries, and it is widely accepted that the boundaries therefore tell us something about past people’s perceptions of these burials. Field ditches or other types of land divisions aligned on, cutting into, or avoiding earlier barrows were a deliberate act to emphasize or negate the importance of ancestral relations or express fear for the spirits of the deceased. In the second case, boundaries precede burials. This might mean that the burials can tell us something about past perceptions of these boundaries. Burials inserted in ditches or placed along other types of boundaries can be seen as ritual deposits that have something to do with the importance of liminality, or representing deliberately marginalized in­di­vid­ uals (e.g. Fenton-Thomas et al. 2011: 374; Reynolds 2011: 378) (Inset 8.5). This depends on our understanding of both boundaries and burials. If the dead were important, their deliberate association with boundaries made these boundaries important; if the dead were to be

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Inset 8.5  White Horse Stone, Kent Part of the White Horse Stone excavations, redrawn after Booth (2011b), Champion (2011), Reynolds (2011). Features in olive green are of Bronze Age date, grey of Iron Age date, and dark blue of Roman date. Red features are of early medieval date: the diamond represents a burial, the solid line a routeway (the Pilgrim’s Way), probably of early medieval origin, and the dashed line is the hundred boundary between Maidstone and Eyhorne.

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Identity, Naming, and Division  293 shunned, this emphasized the liminal nature of these boundaries. In other words, the l­im­in­al­ity of boundary features should not be seen as a given, but their complexity should be acknowledged. One thing that is clear is that boundaries were special places, whatever their exact associations. This was not only true for physical boundaries but also for invisible boundaries. During boundary rituals from the suovetaurilia to medieval village perambulations or field blessings, priests were habitually present, and in Christian contexts holy water might have been sprinkled or prayers recited. Meanwhile increasing numbers of charters with boundary clauses were signed and witnessed in the presence of God. During this period the production of documents became firmly embedded in Christianity as the importance and iconic nature of the Bible continued to reinforce the power of writing.6 As sacred documents, writings—and the boundary descriptions they contained—could stay immutable for many centuries, much in the same way as major earthworks could. At White Horse Stone along the line of High Speed 1 in Kent, remains of Bronze Age and Iron Age unenclosed settlements were found in the same area as an earlier Neolithic settlement (not included in Inset 8.5’s plan) (Champion 2011). In the Roman period, a roughly north–south road ran across the site, whilst an en­clos­ ure and later trackway were constructed further north. The enclosure overlays a dense area of Iron Age settlement activity, long out of use, but no internal features of Roman date were found (Booth 2011b). During the early medieval period, a burial of a female aged 25–35 was placed at the crossroads of the Roman road, the Pilgrim’s Way and the hundred boundary between the hundreds of Maidstone and Eyhorne. She was buried in supine position, arms folded across her chest, and was radiocarbon dated to the seventh to tenth centuries ad. On the basis of her location within the landscape, Reynolds (2011: 378–80) interpreted her as a social outcast or a stranger. The site at Sewerby Cottage Farm in Yorkshire (Inset 8.4) provides a good example of shifting attitudes to burials near boundaries. In the later Iron Age, barrow burials were located at the centre of enclosures that were periodically recut into the Roman period. Here, the boundaries served to separate the dead from the living rather than as focal points for the burials themselves. During the Roman period, however, a series of cremations were inserted on a rough line along the northern settlement enclosure, suggesting a shift in practice whereby the boundary itself took centre stage. What other explanations could be offered for burial in boundary locations? In an early medieval context, Sofield (2015: 383–4) suggests that the burial of children and young adults alongside settlement and farm boundaries lent importance to these boundaries, legitimizing claims to land and reinforcing community identities in the face of strangers. Perhaps the same was true for the woman from White Horse Stone (Inset  8.5). Similar arguments can be suggested for earlier time periods. The prehistoric burials alongside the triple-ditched linear earthwork at the A63 Melton site in Yorkshire (Inset 8.3) could have emphasized the importance of this earthwork, expressing some claim to land and statements about sedentism in societies that were gradually becoming less mobile (FentonThomas et al.  2011: 358). The burials are unique for this region, and fill a gap in our knowledge between the Bronze Age cremation rite and the later Iron Age square barrows (Fenton-Thomas et al. 2011: 372). Their linear placement may be key to our understanding

6  Brown (2011, 34).

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294  English Landscapes and Identities of changing notions of territoriality, tying communities to place through deposition of their dead in a boundary location. The placement of burials in field ditches may also represent attempts to improve the agricultural fertility of the enclosed fields by placing the spirits of the ancestors amongst them. Perhaps agricultural fertility was also a consideration for the deposition of (partial) animal burials in field ditches, as happened during the Roman period at Melton in Yorkshire (Inset 8.3); in Cato’s De Agri Cultura—although dating to the second century bc and certainly not referring to Roman Britain (which did not yet exist at that stage)—animal sacrifices are in some instances recommended. Although crossroad burial may have been reserved for criminals in the later medieval and post-medieval periods, it should not be forgotten that crossroads were also important nodal points within the landscape, and that this was their defining feature during earlier periods. The emergence of stable settlements depended on their location within well-functioning networks of communication routes, a point already made in connection to the long-lasting stability of some Domesday estates and the relatively frequent occurrence of water-crossing places in Domesday place names. As it is likely that the Iron Age linear earthworks identified on the A63 site near Melton (Inset 8.3) were not only boundaries but also played a role in long-distance movement, the Iron Age burials alongside may also have served to emphasize the importance of mobility, possibly even giving protection to travellers. This suggestion could be extended to the furnished Anglo-Saxon burials at the old cross-roads on the same site, or the numerous Anglo-Saxon burials respecting the old Iron Age trackways at the Saltwood Tunnel site in Kent (Inset 8.1). In the latter case, they focus on the Bronze Age burial mounds too, possibly fulfilling a dual function of creating a claim to land through the ancestors and emphasizing the importance of these communication routes across the landscape. We should not expect straightforward answers: the past was as complex and multi-vocal as the present.

Discussion We tend to think of English rural landscapes as relatively fixed and static, or at least organized around principles with which we are now familiar. Our current landscape is organized around settlements, such as farms or villages, which sit in the centre of their countryside, which is variably covered by fields, woods, trackways, and open grazing land that in turn is owned, named, mapped, and known. On the long view, such landscapes are unusual. For a village to have had a millennium of occupation, with a church, graveyard, and houses of variable age, was unprecedented in any earlier period. We might see the Great Renaming of the early medieval period as part of the Great Settling Down. Not that such settling brought an end to change, but simply gave it a new dynamic. The early medieval period stands out from all those that went before. In this chapter’s graphs there is less evidence of formal enclosure, although there may be some continued use of earlier features. Our work on charter bounds has also shown the importance of features in the landscape which were used to mark boundaries but whose significance would be invisible archaeologically. Two processes were important in marking and remembering boundaries in the early medieval period. First, there was the walking of the charter bounds and the very direct physical measures (banging boys’ bottoms on trees) taken to ensure that memories endured in the community as a whole. Second was the importance of bookland, whereby written records were amassed around rights and obligations to various parcels of

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Identity, Naming, and Division  295 land. This reached something of a peak in Domesday Book itself, which forms a metadocument, pulling together the individual legal instruments in overview. The Great Renaming of the landscape might well have been part of this new attitude to land and it is interesting that links between surnames and place names help connect people to land in novel ways. Notions of home and foreign, of personal identity and dense links to a village community of the living and the dead all brought about profound shifts in individual, group, and regional identities. Given the mass of early medieval material, it is frustrating that so little legal documentation survives from Roman Britain. The mass of maps and documents that once existed was destroyed or decayed in the centuries after ad 410, leaving few hints as to legal title and its implications. From the archaeological evidence the Roman period often looks more like an exaggerated version of the late prehistoric landscape than it does of the early or middle Anglo-Saxon one. In our plots of the overall occurrences of field systems or enclosures, the Roman maps appear denser versions of those from the Iron Age and in the graphs of enclosure types across regions there is a rise in modes of enclosure from the Bronze to the Iron Ages, general continuity from the Iron Age to the Roman period before a sharp decline in the early medieval phase. It may be that although all land was officially owned by the emperor that de facto control remained in the hands of those who had benefitted from land in the Iron Age and, where there were new external landowners, these operated in a similar manner to those around them. There are some hints of processions around various boundaries, but these might have been less an effort to etch bounds into community memory and more of a ritual procession. Indeed, the act of digging or cleaning out field ditches, which now existed over much of central England, would have been enough to maintain any form of memory. In one important respect the Roman period differed from earlier periods and this was in the longevity of some settlements and structures, particularly those built in stone.7 The settlements that arose from the middle to late Anglo-Saxon periods onwards were even more permanent, many lasting in changed form down to the present. Previous situations varied over time and space, but none of the arrangements had the longevity of the medieval and modern situations. In prehistory we can see two dynamics of enclosure and settlement. The stone-built settlements (often enclosed by stone walls) of the west and north were relatively long-lasting, being in place for hundreds of years and sometimes rebuilt in different form on the same spot. People returned to settlements, fields, terraces, and cairns over many hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, presumably weaving complex narratives and genealogies around physical features. These returns created a complex history and cannot be seen as continuity. In the south and east, change and movement were the norms. Houses generally lasted no more than a generation, being replaced possibly due to events within the human community, such as death or marriage. Enclosure was by bank and ditch, not stone wall. The wandering settlements of the Iron Age created long lines of houses and pits across the landscape, their course physically marking the evolution of the community. Stability was provided by field systems, which changed in detail, but remained in place and with similar orientation. The Roman period brought a more settled existence for some, with building in stone representing a commitment to a structure and a place for several generations which was novel in many places, although stone-built settlements had wooden components and were surrounded often by

7  Through to the present day in some cases.

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296  English Landscapes and Identities ditches. Stone-built structures remained unusual in places like East Anglia. There is also an interesting dialogue between the form and substance of housing, with stone-built round houses found in many areas by the later Roman period, along with the spread of rectangular architecture. The settlement record is difficult to understand in the south and east in the early medieval period, until more permanent forms re-emerge in the middle to late AngloSaxon period, especially across the central belt of England, which is also where most Roman villas were found. The north and west saw a mixture of forms, with stone-built structures side by side with wooden halls and smaller houses. There is a crucial difference within the class of archaeologically visible boundaries, between ditched systems, most often found in the south and east, and boundaries made of stone, commonest in the west and north. For example, excavations at Lanton Quarry in Northumberland revealed evidence of early medieval fence-lines demarcating a settlement area (Inset 8.2) and prior to road works on the A63 near Melton in East Yorkshire evidence of fence-lines or hedges was found on the same line as a prehistoric linear earthwork (Inset 8.3). Although difficult to spot by archaeologists, they made a visible impact on the landscape in the past, in some ways perhaps representing the equivalent of ‘the electric fence . . . [and] the high barbed wire’ that Hoskins lamented in the twentieth century (Chapter 1). In addition to hedges and fences, in the context of this discussion this category also includes roads and routeways which—like rivers—often fulfil a dual function of communication route (Chapter  5) and (semi-) penetrable boundary, the latter aspect being somewhat under-acknowledged. There is archaeological evidence to suggest this occurred on different scales as well: on the A63 site, a Roman enclosure was built up against the junction between two long-lived trackways, using the roadside ditches to demarcate its northern and eastern extent (Inset 8.3). We started our analysis thinking that the early medieval period might provide insights into earlier periods in the mix of invisible and visible enclosures, which must both have existed in earlier periods. Some insights have been forthcoming, but overall we have gained an impression of the difference of this latest period, cautioning us against too close an ana­ logy between the early medieval landscape and those of earlier periods. The emergence of a text-based administration system facilitated different ways of preserving, transmitting, and controlling complex knowledge: expertise could be fragmented and did not have to be exhaustive. Brown (2011: 105) regards these changes as an issue of control: although complex knowledge could be preserved and transmitted using non-literate means (Kelly 2015: 36–61), tensions might easily arise as a result of conflicts between the detailed knowledge of a local community or local magnate and the more distant perspective of a king, especially in an expanding kingdom. The perceived authority of the written word rendered such potential problems irrelevant. In the case of Domesday Book, compiled under the incoming Norman elite, this was done in Latin, but in the earlier tradition of charter boundary clauses knowledge was preserved in the vernacular, embedding local landscape knowledge firmly within instruments of government. A further insight we have gained is that the Bronze Age stands out too from later p ­ eriods. Field systems were created for the first time in the early to middle Bronze Age and linears used in the Late Bronze Age to divide the land up on a larger scale. Overall, the degree of enclosure in the landscape was much less than it came to be from the middle Iron Age onwards and the nature of the Bronze Age groups might also have differed. We might doubt, but can never know, that the landscape was quite so densely named in the Bronze Age or that the names of people and places were linked. Places were created though mass labour on banks and ditches and then through the routines of daily life in a place, but then

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Identity, Naming, and Division  297 again one could argue the same for the communal labour carried out in medieval open fields. But we must bear in mind that the combination of field systems and settlements appear rare in the middle Bronze Age and this is only partly due to the ephemeral nature of houses and settlements. What we might call fully articulated landscapes of settlements, trackways, fields, and open land come into focus in the late Iron Age, continuing through the Roman period and probably beyond. We might speculate that the feel of these landscapes came to approximate those of our own, as people walked or droved animals along trackways between fields and open land and towards settlements which were often stable and enclosed, or composed of internal enclosures. We should not, of course, make these landscapes seem too familiar, but they help emphasize the sheer difference of what came before in terms of the general openness of the terrain, the shifting nature of settlement and the means of knowing and moving through an area.

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SECTION III

U N DE R STA N DI NG R E G IONA L A N D LO C A L VA R IA BI LI T Y

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9

Scale Anwen Cooper, Chris Green, and Chris Gosden

The term scale carries with it the implication that phenomena can be viewed on a s­ pectrum, or series of levels, from the very small to the very large. This is thought true whether ana­ lysts are considering the temporal or the spatial scale, or viewing scale in numerical terms, where numbers obviously have inherently scalar properties. Such a view of scale is quanti­ tative. Instead, we want to develop a view that is qualitative (in part at least—as we shall see there is an intermingling of quality and quantity in the notion of scale). In our view what might be considered to be a larger scale is not so much that, but rather is more complex. This is similar to the view taken by Edgeworth (2013) and Gosden and Kirsanow (2006). An argument for complexity involves a perspectival view, such as when a craftsperson who has been tracing a curvilinear ornament on the back of an Iron Age mirror steps back and views the whole ornament, the mirror, and its surroundings. This increased breadth of view includes more things within the field of vision, but precludes such a close and intense con­ centration on any one of them. Changing scales involves both loss and gain, such that there is no inherently best scale for archaeological work to take place. A useful starting point, partly because it helps bring out, by contrast, the peculiar issues of scale faced by archaeology, is Susan Stewart’s book On Longing (Stewart 1984). This com­ plex book defies easy summary, but is partly about scale. Two terms in the subtitle—the miniature and the gigantic—explore scale using the human body as an implicit or explicit measure and where the tale of Gulliver’s travels is paradigmatic. Stewart sees the miniature (such as tiny models, which are complex as linked to our interior life) and the gigantic echoing the world outside, and human experience made up of negotiating the two. A third term in the subtitle—the collection—draws attention to a further theme: the incomplete­ ness of our apprehension and perception of the world. We can never perceive or under­ stand everything at once, so that as we attend to one or a number of things, an infinite number of others fade into the background or out of sight.1 For Stewart, the collection can be spurred by a desire for completeness, such as the need to possess all British stamps or the whole of an artist’s works. Collecting is a response brought on by the insecurity of our partial perception and understanding of the world. Her work is relevant to ours in a num­ ber of ways. Our definition of Big Data (see Chapter  2) is not in terms of its absolute size, which might be measured in terabytes or petabytes, but rather concerns the amount of informa­ tion that one person, with conventional physical means, such as file cards, might be able to order, see patterns in, and interpret. Hence, for us, Big Data is that amount of information that can only be practically manipulated and understood using computers, GIS, and 1  This is somewhat analogous to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics.

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Anwen Cooper, Chris Green, and Chris Gosden. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0009

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302  English Landscapes and Identities statistics—when human perception is mediated and extended in particular ways. Consequently, if new forms of manipulation are developed in the future, such as those based on forms of virtual reality, the notion and nature of Big Data will change. Big Data may give rise to two desires, which we believe should be resisted. One is, to echo Stewart, the yearning for completeness. Now we have lots of data, is it not reasonable to think that we could have all data, or something approaching that? However, we have no idea what all data pertaining to an area or period would look like, so this desire must remain an undefin­ able dream. Secondly, once large amounts of evidence are entered into a database, we may also wish for perfect order, which would arise when all information was created, curated, manipulated, and interpreted in the same way, so that their analysis would provide a direct and true insight into states of affairs in the past. Simple things can be done to make data more useful, such as the provision of accurate grid references for finds and sites, but data are characterful (as discussed in Chapter 2) and this is part of their beauty and interest. An important element of any analysis must be the history of creating and curating evidence, by generations of archaeologists, amateur and professional. Most disciplines encounter questions about what their minimum unit of analysis might be. In founding sociology as a discipline, Durkheim made a distinction between in­di­vid­ uals and society, in which the former were motivated by intentions and purposes, con­ strained or enabled by the structures of society. Anthropology in the later twentieth century doubted the notion of the individual, so that Strathern (1988) used an image of fractals to argue that the individual and society had exactly the same structure and properties, but at different levels and scales. Her notion of the ‘dividual’, where persons are divided members of a social whole, rather than autonomous social units, was given a more material aspect by Gell’s idea of the distributed person (Gell 1998: Chapter 7). The idea of distribution allowed Gell to concentrate not on the person, their body, and immediate acts, but look instead at all the acts and their products emanating from a person which become distributed over time and space. Each of us, in this view, helps to contribute to overlapping fields of practice and products, which is both complex and realistic as an idea. In archaeology, of course, we might be able to identify fields of practice but we are not able to tie them back to in­di­vid­ uals, or even dividuals. These problems have not prevented archaeologists taking up Gell and Strathern’s ideas in thought-provoking ways (Fowler 2004). We think that rather than trying to define, or redefine, persons as minimal units of archaeological analysis, that uncertainty and ambiguity is useful. Rather than assuming in advance of all our analytical work what our units should be, these arise from the analysis itself in which our units derive from contexts and the degrees of complexity inherent in that context, for which an idea of scale is vital. However, we would argue that our most detailed units (we hesitate to use the word ‘smallest’) are sites, artefacts, and biological remains including human bodies, which can, potentially, be located in space and time. Archaeology still faces basic questions about what our evidence is evidence of. How do pots, buildings, fields, or burials relate to indi­ vidual or aggregate group behaviour? Unlike any other discipline in the human sciences, for most periods and places archae­ ology lacks any individual subjects that can act as units of analysis. For all of prehistory, people’s names and identities are lacking and the same is true for the vast majority of the population in historic periods. Even where people are named, linking a name to a body and its archaeologically visible products is impossible, hence the excitement generated by the discovery of Richard III. Conversely, someone like Ötzi, whose relatively well-preserved body, clothing, and artefacts have been analysed to throw up various biographical details, does not have an ancient name, a link to a language or kinship group, or a detailed personal

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Scale  303 biography, all aspects of being that anthropologists, sociologists, or historians would con­ sider minimal requirements from which to create analysis and narrative. The scaling that many disciplines derive from the human person and their body is not available to archae­ ology and in our work for EngLaId we have made almost no analytical use of named per­ sons. Many other disciplines work with mass statistical data, but in all cases these can be referred back to people and their lives. The advantage of the mass analysis of data is that it brings out patterns that have not been seen before, or only imperfectly. But it does raise the questions posed by all generalities: how do we also incorporate the specificity and local texture of places, sites, and artefacts? In what follows, we will juxtapose the possibility that there are some large and long-lasting structures in our data that might indicate that a mass of regional differences existed and persisted through much of the 2500 years covered by EngLaId. We will complement this by thinking about the mutual implications of landscapes and buildings, drawing on data from the Isle of Wight during the Roman period.

Scale and Resolution An adequate theorization of scale is key to the interpretation and understanding of space. In particular, different processes in the past operated at different scales and also may be potentially discernible at different scales (Wheatley  2000: 123, 128; Lock and Molyneaux 2006b; Yarrow 2006; other papers in Lock and Molyneaux 2006a). To take a very simple example, the Roman road network of Britain can only be understood when mapped at scales approaching the whole province, whereas the internal physical structure of a Roman road would be best understood at the level of a single trench or perhaps across an archaeological excavation area; or in a more general sense by comparing a selected set of detailed site records across a wider region. In essence, the study of space is fundamentally scale-dependent: when one changes the scale at which one works, spatial patterns and their associated statistics are also changed. This has been extensively theorized within spatial science as part of the so-called Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) (Openshaw 1983; Wong 2009). This point is equally true of temporal scale, with different processes operating to differ­ ent temporal rhythms (as represented in a somewhat oversimplified form by the work of Braudel and the Annales school of history (for archaeological applications of this the­or­­ etic­al approach, see Bintliff 1991; Knapp 1992)). To take another simple example, a medieval cathedral, built over a number of decades and still standing in a modern city actively oper­ ates at a much longer temporal timescale than a pot of gruel cooked over a hearth in the late Bronze Age and recovered from a site like Must Farm, Cambridgeshire although both have survived archaeologically until the present day. The effect of these two fundamental starting points is that the scale at which we approach our questions affects the answers that we will discover and, indeed, the questions that are possible to ask in the first instance. The opposite also applies, with some questions only being answerable at particular spatio-temporal scales. In the context of EngLaId, this can be seen in the different ways in which we have approached data analysis at the level of 10 km × 10 km squares (Chapters 2 and 3, and insets at the end of Chapter 3), at the level of case studies, and at a national level (throughout). Operating at these varied spatial scales has enabled us to approach different topics and questions. To a lesser extent, this is also true of time: although most of the analysis presented in this book has been necessarily undertaken at the scale of broad periods, some of the more detailed work done at finer

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304  English Landscapes and Identities Space

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spatial scales or with PAS data has been approached at a much finer chronological ­reso­lution (Chapter 10), which has opened up other questions that could be approached. We can also see that scale is intimately tied up with resolution, by which we mean the units into which we divide space or time, or indeed type of entity being analysed (e.g. of object or site). Working at broader scales inevitably involves compromises in terms of also working at coarser resolutions. Furthermore, there is a tension between space, time, and type: when one works at a finer resolution in one of these metrics, the others will tend to be pulled towards coarser resolutions (Figure 9.1). This applies both to computational analyses (although these limits improve over time) and to analysis within a human’s brain (every individual has limits in terms of the complexity of data they are able to both perceive and comprehend). Specifically on the topic of spatial scale/resolution, the MAUP means that patterns plot­ ted using our three different synthesized national datasets (5-km hexagons, 3-km hexagons, 1-km squares) will all be somewhat different. Specifically, patterns plotted using the largest spatial bins will look far more widespread/continuous, due to the presence/absence nature of the datasets and to the bins’ large size (Figure 9.2). The same would also be true of any statistics extracted using these different sets of spatial bins, but this problem has been ­minim­ized by only extracting national statistics using the 1 km × 1 km squares. For visu­al­ iza­tion, however, using varied resolutions of spatial bin is necessary as scale dependency also means that the smaller bins would not be visible at broader scales, especially when the size of image produced is small. Another key scalar entity that needs to be taken into account is the size and complexity of the datasets being gathered, studied, and analysed. To make some simple comparisons, the main EngLaId dataset is very large in terms of the number of records (over 900,000) and complex in terms of the diversity of its datasets. By contrast, the main dataset compiled by the Roman Rural Settlement Project (Allen et al. 2015) contains far fewer sites (c.3,600) with much less complexity in terms of dataset diversity (being compiled manually by a well-oiled team), but is far richer than the EngLaId dataset in terms of the detail of its records (recording, amongst other things, extensive details of the animal bone assemblages and small finds associated with each site). The different character of these different datasets in terms of their scalar attributes have resulted in the two projects being capable of approaching very different sets of questions, despite aspects of the two projects looking somewhat similar at first glance.

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Much of the foregoing may seem obvious, but we would argue remains under-theorized within archaeology (an obvious exception being the EngLaId-derived papers on character­ ful data and findspot analysis by Cooper and Green 2016, 2017). This lack of explicit the­or­ iza­tion is problematic due to the fundamental ways in which scale and resolution affect data analysis, as we have seen. Scale and resolution influence every attribute of arch­aeo­ logic­al data, being probably most obvious in their effect on space and time, but also having a structuring influence on all other aspects of archaeological data collection and analysis. In what follows we will consider aspects of scale in both a quantitative and qualitative sense, bringing out the differences or tensions between these two approaches.

Scale-Dependent National Complexity A central question throughout the EngLaId project was whether we could perceive ­regularities in the types of sites and artefacts across England that would allow us to discuss differences in ways of life at a regional or relatively local scale. Such variability, if it could be found, would show that aspects of past life could become apparent through the use of Big

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306  English Landscapes and Identities Data, which might not be seen in more partial data sets. We will argue that there is structure in our data, not just at a broad regional scale, such as that between the south and east and north and west (Chapter 3 and throughout), but also in smaller areas measured in a few square kilometres. We argue here that we have been able to recognize such smaller scale patterning, which then leads us to wonder whether this is due to local topographic variations, such as communities being clustered in river valleys and using surrounding slopes, or whether more cultural factors might be involved. One measure through which we can examine the EngLaId dataset on a national scale is through what we might call data ‘complexity’, by which in this instance we mean the num­ ber of different types of site/monument in each 1 km × 1 km grid cell (see Chapter 2 for discussion of the spatial binning methodology and our site type thesaurus). The numbers of different sites in a defined area can tell us about both the range of activities at any one time and persistence in the use of an area through time. Thus if large and small settlement sites are found together with fields and burials in a small area this might indicate that a full range of human activities was found in a defined zone, contrasting with other areas that had little or no variability in their evidence, or indeed no evidence of human activity at all. Our analysis of complexity was first carried out on a presence/absence basis, so that each type of evidence only counts once per cell. In this way, some genuine variation is lost, but this is mitigated by the vast reduction in difficulties caused by unknown data duplication. These ‘complexity’ values can then be used to produce density maps at a national scale, for all periods or for each individual period. Models of this measure (using a 10-km kernel for the density search radius) and the various factors which help to structure them have already been discussed elsewhere by the project team (see Green et al.  2017). Here, however, a slightly different approach has been utilized. Figure 9.3 shows a density model (Kernel Density Estimate/KDE) of complexity for all periods using a 5-km kernel. The concept of KDE modelling is that any spatial (or numerical) pattern exhibits density between recorded locations, which is estimated by summing the number of events (multiplied by a numeric variable—the population) within a region (the kernel) around each point. This converts point data into a continuous surface. The result of this is a continuous density surface showing the variation in the population across space and between the known recorded points. A KDE plot allows for the discovery of higher and lower areas of population and is one of the most useful ways of moving from a point pattern to a more realistic surface model of a variable (O’Sullivan and Unwin 2010: 68–71). As such, by varying the size of the kernel used, we could begin to understand patterns operating within a dataset on different scales and at differing resolutions. The 5-km kernel model shows patterning at what we might characterize at a local level (or scale): in other words, the kernel size is small when compared to the size of the whole country. However, the numerical scaling (rather than the spatial scaling) operates on a national level (which we will refer to as global here, by which we mean the entirety of the dataset rather than the entirety of the planet): in other words, the colour shading on the map is scaled based on variation across the whole dataset. We wanted to bring out both local and regional scaling, working between the two. Much local patterning is obscured due to the large ‘regional’ variation within the dataset. It is possible to attempt to counteract this regional scale variation using a methodology developed by the project team for site prospection using PAS data (Cooper and Green 2017). The first step in this process is to remodel the data using a ‘regional’ scale kernel, in this case 50 km (i.e. regional has been defined here as operating at ten times the ‘local’ kernel) (Figure 9.4).

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However, partly because of the relatively large kernel used, there is a very strong edge effect apparent in the data, whereby the values in the model fade off towards the coastlines due to the lower density of input points in those areas (as there are no points within the ocean). By rerunning the 50-km KDE model but without a population value assigned to each point, we can extract the overall dot density for the input data (Figure 9.5a) operating on the same spatial scale. This model was then adjusted to vary between 0 and 1, by divid­ ing the value for each cell by the maximum value for the dataset. We then corrected for the edge effect present in the original 50-km regional complexity model by dividing each value in that model by its corresponding value in the 0–1 scaled dot density model. The result of this is a model with a much-lessened edge effect (Figure 9.5b). It is important to take this step or the resulting final model (see below) would also show this potentially misleading edge effect once the regional variation has been removed. While removing regional scale variation, it is also possible to mitigate the effects of the modern affordances that structure our data (see Chapter 2), much like we did for the move­ ment models presented in Chapter 5. To do so and to minimize the noise that the affor­ dance correction might introduce, the model was first smoothed out using a 5-km radius

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Scale  309 circular window, in order to match its variation to that of the 5-km local complexity model. Its numerical scaling was then adjusted to vary between 0.5 and 1 (rather than 0 and 1), so that its effects would not be unduly strong (Figure 9.6a). The regional complexity model (already edge-corrected) was then divided by the new affordance model, so that areas of lower opportunity to discover archaeological material were boosted up relative to areas of higher opportunity. In similar fashion to the other ‘correcting’ layers, this final regional variation model was then also adjusted to vary between 0 and 1 (Figure 9.6b). By then dividing the original 5-km complexity model (Figure 9.7a) by this affordanceweighted regional model, a final model is produced that shows local variation in complexity in terms of both spatial and numerical scale (Figure 9.7b). When comparing these two models, 400000

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310  English Landscapes and Identities the most obvious difference is the appearance of far more detail in northern and western England. These models are, in fact, best read together, with the global measure displaying over­ all differences between regions and the local measure showing clearer vari­ation within regions. Although we would suggest that clearly less archaeologically visible activity was taking place in highland England (with probable implications in terms of relative population density and a stress in material culture—see Green et al. 2017), there were also clearly parts of that zone that are locally more archaeologically significant than others. Naturally, these models become more interesting when run by period rather than for all of our (dated) data (Figures 9.8 to 9.11). For the Bronze and Iron Age periods, unspecified

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prehistoric records were added in at a half-weighting. The global models all show the same highland/lowland divide identified in the all-periods model and seen in so many of our analyses (see previous chapters and as defined long ago by Fox  1932). Although elided somewhat by the widespread presence of the military in the northwest of England during the Roman period, this picture remains particularly consistent throughout our time period of interest. The aetiology of this pattern is, in part, due to the modern affordances which structure English archaeological fieldwork and prospection (Chapter 2), but this is not the whole story: there does appear to have been a distinct difference between ways of life and their resulting archaeological signatures in the highland north and west of England and in the lowland south and east. We are reasonably confident that expanding out the

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312  English Landscapes and Identities geo­graph­ic­al remit of EngLaId to take in Wales and/or Scotland would have reinforced this result. What is of more interest here is whether we can perceive more local variation. The southwestern peninsula shows greatest global activity in the Bronze Age and in the early medieval period. The Roman period shows the greatest spread of high complexity areas on a global scale. For the local models, interestingly the patterns show strong simi­lar­ ities throughout all of our time periods. Particular river valleys are highlighted throughout (notably the Thames, the Nene, and the Trent). From the Roman period onwards the Roman road network also has a clear effect on the local models (and arguably from the Iron Age in some cases, e.g. Ermine Street). Overall, places of locally high complexity look remarkably consistent throughout our time period of interest. This persistence of importance of local places can be examined spatially by summing a binary reclassification of each local period model based on its mean value (so that values below the mean are scored 0 and values above the mean are scored 1): this then shows us for how many periods (from none to all four) each area of the map was of above average complexity (Figure 9.12). The results show that the areas of above average local complexity varied little over time, with most above average areas remaining so across at least three time periods. The question then is what does this mean? In part at least, it reflects the gravi­ tational effect that archaeological remains possess: archaeology attracts archaeology (Figure 9.12). This partly reflects genuine past practice, with people encountering and reus­ ing the same locations over time, perhaps partly due to their offering more favourable local conditions for settlement/farming.2 This also partly reflects modern fieldwork practices, whereby areas with known archaeological remains are more likely to be explored, pro­ tected, and investigated in the modern day. A notable instance of this would be the peaks in local Iron Age (and to a lesser extent Bronze Age) activity along Hadrian’s Wall, which are clearly caused in part by the detailed work done on the Roman and later remains in that area: if archaeologists are seeking Roman activity, they are also more likely to discover earl­ ier activity in the same areas. Another example would be the obvious appearance here of the route of the High Speed 1 railway line in Kent (Chapter 6). Overall, however, the pat­ terns here are so strong that they must also reflect the use and reuse of the most attractive parts of the landscape for settlement and other activities over the long term, both on the scale of all of England (with the south and east being more intensely exploited) and at a more localized scale (e.g. with river valleys being more intensely exploited than their sur­ roundings). It is perhaps also notable that many of the areas of low activity over the long term accord with the great forests of medieval England (e.g. the New Forest, Epping Forest, the Forest of Arden, Sherwood Forest, etc.; also the Weald), which in some cases may thus have been wild areas back into earlier periods (Figure 9.13). As we have shown previously there is a persistent difference in the nature of our data across England as a whole, with more evidence of all types in the south and east than in the north and west, which we believe is due to differences in the ways of life in these broad areas, as well as partly due to differences in modern practice. What we have shown here, as a complement to this broadest pattern, is local variability, which is sometimes located within river valleys, but not always, and which appears to remain reasonably consistent across time. Projects such as Roman Rural Settlement (Smith et al.  2016) have defined broad regional differences for the Roman period, such as the Central Belt through the Midlands, which bears some resemblance to the Central Province of Roberts and 2  Particular instances of the links between sites of varied types and ages was demonstrated through our work on barrow histories discussed in Chapter 10.

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Wrathmell (2000). However, the act of defining regions is inevitably an act of simplification (Chapter  3) and, as such, the recognition of variability we have made is different again, being more localized and less strictly bounded: we model variation over space, rather than dividing space up into characterized (and potentially homogenizing) blocks. If more detailed work shows some empirical basis for our observations, then this will raise the pos­ sibility of some continuity across conventional period boundaries in the complexity of landscapes, although this does not indicate that people were using areas in the same way in different periods or that cessations in use of areas of the landscape did not occur. Once again, our work on barrows (Chapter 10) shows the subtle and varied sets of relations there can be between barrows and other features and it is likely that such subtlety would be repeated if we had taken another class of site. However, what these various pieces of work point to is a combination of both continued patterns of life at one scale and variability of interaction at a more detailed scale. Having examined, using computational methods, the relationship between local, regional, and national level patterning and between period-specific and long-term trends

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314  English Landscapes and Identities 100000

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in the EngLaId dataset as a whole, we will now move on to tackle scale in a rather d ­ ifferent— more materially focused—manner.

Where Do Landscapes Start and End? Roman Villa Landscapes from the Perspective of Stone The following study of stone use (for building and other purposes) during the Roman period on the Isle of Wight takes a more ‘ground-up’ approach to the topic of scale. In some ways this analysis is spatially and temporally constrained—it operates mainly as a regional case study and focuses primarily on evidence from one specific time period. As the title of this section suggests, however, the spatial (and temporal) extent of this investigation is not limited, bounded, or necessarily neatly defined. At one level, the study provides an intimate

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Scale  315 investigation of materials and building practices that were central to the emergence of villa architecture on the Isle of Wight, drawing out the particular ways in which stone was used over the main lifetime of a certain set of buildings. At another level, it asks how a detailed consideration of the stone used in villa buildings can lead to an exploration of landscapes much more broadly—landscapes within, in the immediate vicinity of, and distributed well beyond any particular building project. Overall, we hope to elucidate how landscapes reside in buildings, as much as buildings sit within landscapes. What we would generally take to be big and small, relatively speaking, does not mean that the landscape provides the context for the building, but also that entities within landscapes, such as buildings, recom­ pose and newly present a landscape. Landscapes change as the buildings and other material forms within them alter. To begin with, it is worth explaining why we chose to undertake this study, and also why an analysis of stone used in villa buildings on the Isle of Wight is relevant to the matter of scale much more widely. As many researchers have argued recently, villas and villa landscapes are a well-worn topic in Roman studies both at a wide level and on the Isle of Wight specifically (e.g. Taylor 2011: 179; Walton 2012; Millett 2016: 699; Smith et al. 2016: 5). There are several good reasons, however, for revisiting this site category here. Over the past 10 years analyses of metal detected finds (mostly coins) and cropmark evidence have recast previous under­ standings of Roman landscapes on the Isle of Wight (e.g. Basford  2007; Royall  2010; Walton 2012). However, excavated evidence for activity beyond Roman villas on the island is sparse. Although villa evidence from the Isle of Wight has been summarized previously (Tomalin  1987,  2006; Neal and Cosh  2009), this evidence remains somewhat enigmatic. Estimates of the number of villa sites on the island have oscillated from 7 (Tomalin 1987), to 11 (Neal and Cosh 2009), to 8 (Cunliffe 2013b), to 15 (the number of HER records relat­ ing to villa or potential villa sites in 2012), depending on how the category ‘villa’ is defined. Evidence from the Isle of Wight also barely features in Smith et al.’s (2016) recent investiga­ tion of Roman rural settlement in Britain since so few of the known sites on the island are both extensively excavated and fully published. The recent, high-quality fieldwork under­ taken at Brading Roman villa (Cunliffe  2013b) is a widely recognized exception in this respect (Smith et al. 2016: 94). It is also worth stressing that although Roman villas (on the Isle of Wight and more broadly) are certainly very well studied, we argue that this should not deter the development of accounts that approach this evidence differently: studies that look beyond mapping, categorizing, and analysing key architectural elements (the main villa buildings, mosaics, etc.), and beyond the lives of certain social groupings (the rural elite) (e.g. Taylor 2011, 2013). The focus taken here on stone is inspired, in part, by the significant attention paid to stone in specialist reports for the excavations at Brading (Gale  2013; Hayward  2013). Through their detailed descriptive approach, these reports revealed major shifts in the use of stone from the late Iron Age through to the early medieval period. They also elicited certain properties of stone which set this material apart from other key building materials (timber, thatch, clay, and so on), and allow it to operate as a starting point for considering landscapes well beyond the villa itself. Firstly, and obviously, stone is durable. Unlike many other important building materials, stone usually survives such that it can be analysed archaeologically, and its occurrence and use can be compared in different contexts. Secondly, it is at least possible (if often difficult) to find out where the stone employed in Roman building projects came from and where it moved to. To us, this seemed an op­por­ tun­ity to view villa landscapes in a different way.

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316  English Landscapes and Identities

Figure 9.14  Assemblage of Isle of Wight stone in the wall of an upstanding post-medieval farm building.

Several other factors were instrumental to our focus here on stone. Having for a long time been the quiet realm of a few key specialists (e.g. Williams 1971; Blagg 1990), there has been a recent burgeoning of interest in stone studies in Roman archaeology (e.g. Pearson  2006; Hayward  2009, forthcoming; Sekedat 2012; Russell  2013; Russell and Wootton 2017). It is also evident that stone plays an important role in contemporary and past identities on the Isle of Wight. Stone quarrying was a central element of early medieval activity on the island (Tomalin et al. 2012: 264). Stone is also a striking aspect of the con­ temporary landscape. Chalk, fiery sandstone, and limestone outcrops are readily apparent both around the coast and inland and attract a regular flow of geology students and fossil hunters. The island’s diverse geology is sometimes reassembled strikingly in upstanding post-medieval buildings (Figure 9.14). Additionally, it is hoped that the emphasis placed on practices involving stone in this chapter balances out that placed on practices involving timber (also from the Isle of Wight) in Chapter 10—the relationship between these differ­ ent material trajectories is interesting in itself. Before examining the evidence from the Isle of Wight it is useful to provide a context for this material and for the interpretative approach taken here. This requires a consideration of recent discussions about rural landscapes in Roman Britain, and about architecture, scale, and identity.

Recent Approaches to Villas, Villa Landscapes, and the Romano-British Countryside There is not scope here to synthesize fully the substantial body of previous research into Romano-British villas and villa landscapes and the countryside more broadly (see Smith

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Scale  317 et al. 2016, Chapter 1 for an excellent recent overview). It is important, however, to consider how villas and villa landscapes are currently delineated, and to highlight relevant insights from recent analyses that have responded to the tremendous wealth of evidence produced mainly via developer-funded fieldwork since 1990. One key outcome of recent studies has been a blurring of how villas and villa landscapes are defined. Rather than forming a neat category as earlier villa studies implied, it is now generally agreed that villas are best understood as belonging to a continuum of Roman rural buildings—they share traits with other rural building types and are not always easily distinguished (Smith et al. 2016: 44). Bearing this vagueness in mind, and following Millett (2016: 703) and Smith et al. (2016: 5, 33, 54), we define villas here as rural farming establish­ ments mainly located in southeast and central Britain that share common architectural features modelled on examples from the Continent. These architectural features include tiled rooves, painted plaster walls, tessellated floors (mosaics), hypocausts, and stone-built structures. Around 2,000 villa sites are currently known in Britain and as a site category, they comprise a highly influential c.1 per cent of all Roman rural sites. Figure 9.15 shows all potential villa sites logged within the EngLaId database (grouped within 3-km hexbins). 100000

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318  English Landscapes and Identities For more refined versions of this distribution (including only verified or excavated sites) see Taylor (2007: Figure 4.9) and Smith et al. (2016: Figure 2.19). Moving on to villa landscapes, a recent edited volume on this topic in northern Europe (Roymans and Derks 2011: 1) defined these as areas of countryside that are dominated by villa settlements in terms of their monumentality, social status, and, sometimes, density relative to other rural settlement forms. Dark and Dark’s now quite old account of The Landscape of Roman Britain noted that many villas were surrounded by enclosures that ‘separated its principal buildings from the outside world’ (1997: 47–8). In line with recent moves towards developing accounts of the Romano-British countryside that are not dom­ in­ated by villa evidence, researchers in Britain have tended to be less assertive in defining villa landscapes. The term is used when describing the positioning of villas (for instance, in describing their prominent locations or stunning views), the location of villas relative to major landscape features (rivers, roads, elevated ground, etc.), and context of fields, farm­ ing, villages, and industry in which villas are set (e.g. Taylor 2011: 183–4; Smith et al. 2016: 114–20). Overall, recent surveys have stressed the significant variability across England of villa buildings, villa landscapes, and the Roman countryside more broadly (e.g. Taylor 2007, 2011; Millett 2016 Smith et al. 2016; Ferraby et al. 2017). Previously this diversity has been inter­ preted as evidence of different degrees of Romanization (e.g. Collingwood and Richmond 1969), or as an outcome of specific social, cultural, or economic factors (e.g. Smith 1997; Perring 2002: 50–1). More recently, however, this variegated picture has been interpreted as expressing the complex and diverse character of Roman rural identity (e.g. Mattingly 2006; Roymans and Derks 2011; Taylor 2013; Millett 2016; Smith et al. 2016). At a broad level, recent studies have emphasized the busyness of the Romano-British countryside: ‘the countryside was teeming with people’ (e.g. Millett 2016: 700). There has also been a concerted effort to shift the balance of previous accounts of the Roman land­ scape in order to remedy the previously mentioned overemphasis on villas and elite social groups (at the expense of other forms of rural settlement and of other social groupings), and to develop more dynamic understandings of the countryside (Taylor 2007, 2011, 2013; Millett 2016; Smith et al. 2016). Taylor in particular (2011, 2013) has led the way in calling for more interesting and theoretically adventurous accounts of the Roman rural landscape that rely less heavily on literary evidence and on a narrow set of interpretative themes (agri­ culture, population, environment, economy). Through his emphasis on human practice, Taylor has also sought to explore the multifaceted character of rural identities and their varied contexts of production (2013: 173–7; see also Mattingly  2004,  2006; Bevan 2005; Gardner 2007; Chadwick 2010). More specifically, researchers have highlighted the limited ways in which villas have pre­ viously been interpreted: as economic institutions serving urban and military markets, and/or as forms of ‘cultured status display’ (Taylor 2011: 179). In recent years, both the mod­ est scale of Romano-British villas relative to Continental examples (e.g. Millett 2016: 703) and their monumental character (in terms of their performative qualities and their repre­ sentation of ‘significant investments of wealth’ (Smith et al. 2016: 34)) have been empha­ sized. In this context additions to villa buildings following their initial construction that might be viewed as ‘classical architectural lexicons’ (Taylor 2013: 173) (e.g. the creation of a ‘winged villa’ form, the addition of an elaborate mosaic) are presented as somewhat super­ ficial acts of monumentalization (Millett  2016: 706). Taylor (2011,  2013) in particular has attempted to balance an earlier research focus on showier architectural elements (the main/

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Scale  319 most elaborate villa buildings and key decorative traits) by investigating the role played by aisled halls in villa complexes—multipurpose (agricultural and residential) buildings that were novel architecturally both within Britain and the Roman Empire more broadly (Taylor 2013: 177–9). One outcome of this work has been to raise the important and poorly understood question of who lived and worked in villas beyond the main (elite) group. Of particular relevance to the study presented here, several authors have also considered the materials and building techniques employed in villa architecture. Perring (2002: Chapter 2) provides a thorough account of the diverse materials employed in Roman buildings (including villas)—stone, clay, mud, timber, and so on—and the techniques used to com­ bine these materials. Both Smith et al. (2016) and Taylor (2011: 181) charted the slow trans­ formation from building primarily in timber to building also with stone from the late Iron Age to later second century ad in Britain (Figure 9.16). Recent considerations of villa landscapes have provided a useful summary of spatial relationships between villas and other topographic features. It is generally agreed that villas are often prominently located in elevated positions and sometimes have spectacular views 100000

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Figure 9.16  Stone buildings in rural contexts in Roman Britain (based upon Allen et al. 2015).

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320  English Landscapes and Identities (Taylor 2011: 184; Smith et al. 2016: 114). Broad surveys suggest that although many villas are located fairly close to major Roman roads or rivers, frequently they were not. For instance Smith et al. (2016: 115) observe that c.17 per cent of villas in the southern region were located more than 7 km from the nearest major routeway. Overall, however, it has been suggested that more work needs to be done on investigating the landscape context of villas (Smith et al. 2016: 420). Again, Taylor’s (2013) work on agricultural buildings within villa complexes has offered thoughtful insight into the likely significance (both practically and conceptually) of farming practices to villa inhabitants at a general level. However, rela­ tionships between villa complexes and field systems are typically not well understood (Smith et al. 2016: 117). Although surveys of plant and animal remains from villa sites sug­ gest that the diets of villa inhabitants were slightly different to those of people who lived in other types of rural settlement (for instance, in southern England at least, villa inhabitants ate more pork, venison, and fruits: Smith et al. 2016: 129), it is very difficult to determine whether these species were also farmed more commonly by the groups associated with villas. The following points from this summary are useful to bear in mind since they influenced the study presented below. Firstly, the topic of scale has not been theorized explicitly in any of the studies discussed above. It can be argued, however, that ‘villas’ and their ‘landscape contexts’ have primarily been visualized, if often implicitly, as separate, nested, entities: villa buildings are understood to sit in a landscape setting. Moving beyond landscape set­ tings (and extending this compartmentalized visualization outwards), villa evidence is typically approached at a regional and/or at national scale. It is also worth pointing out that such nested understandings of space are easily aligned with nested understandings of iden­ tity (individuals, households, communities, and so on). For instance, Taylor calls spe­cif­ic­ al­ly for further exploration of the ‘nested affiliations’ of people in the Western Roman provinces ‘at a series of scales, from the individual farmstead or community to broad regions’ (2013: 177; following Gardner 2007: 199). Secondly, although it is widely recognized that the findings of developer-funded archae­ ology have enabled a better appreciation of building practices in Roman rural Britain (Smith et al.  2016: 51; see also Perring  2002), existing studies of building practices have approached this topic somewhat narrowly. They have focused primarily on describing building materials, techniques, and built forms rather than on considering the social and wider implications of construction processes. Thirdly, masonry buildings are viewed as one of the defining features of villa architec­ ture (76 per cent of structures within villa complexes recorded in the Rural Settlement of Roman Britain project database were built with stone, compared with only 25 per cent of buildings within farmsteads: Smith et al.  2016: 54), and quarries are mentioned only in passing as features of the Roman countryside (e.g. Millett 2016: 701). However, discussions about Roman rural landscapes have remained largely separate from discussions about stone and quarrying (see McCarthy  2013 for one notable, explicitly broad-brush, excep­ tion), with the former focusing mainly on settlement and farming. Fourthly, although recent studies have highlighted the monumental character of villa architecture, this monumentality is typically couched in terms of the wealth of the owner or the performative qualities of the building. Only when Taylor discusses the monumental qualities of the earthworks surrounding other forms of rural architecture in the northwest of England (small, enclosed farms) does he draw on insights from Iron Age studies (e.g. Sharples 2010; Wigley 2007) that view monumentality also in terms of communal labour (2013: 79–85).

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Scale  321

Taking a Different Approach to Landscape, Buildings, and Scale (and Identity) As well as connecting with key insights from recent studies of Roman Britain, our investi­ gation of the stone used in Roman villas on the Isle of Wight draws on ideas developed both within archaeology and across the social sciences about the broad nature of worldly phenomena and, more specifically, on the theme of scale. At a general level, our approach is underpinned by the broad set of ideas raised in Chapter 10 (see ‘Emphasizing Process, Relationships, and Nonlinear History’), which has consequences for how we understand both temporal and spatial scale. Overarching aspects of this set of ideas include the fluid character of all worldly phenomena, the distributed nature of agency, and the extent to which all entities are produced through their relation­ ships with other entities. Of specific relevance here, despite first appearances and their often reassuringly solid and passive renditions (for instance, in maps and plan drawings), even geological formations and buildings ultimately move and undoubtedly play an active role in people’s lives (see Edgeworth (2011: 108) for a characterization of stone as ‘flow’; Latour and Yanera (2008) for an understanding of buildings as process; Paton (2013) for a consideration of stone as surface; and also Ingold (2013) for a broader view of making in which buildings play a part). Another important element of this set of ideas that was dis­ cussed at length in theorizations of archaeological landscapes during the 1990s and early 2000s (e.g. Barrett 1999b; Edmonds 1997, 1999; Giles 2012; Ingold 1993, 2000) is the notion that landscapes and human identities are produced through practice. In order to capture these creative processes archaeologically, it is vital that landscapes are approached ana­lyt­ic­ al­ly at a human level. Edgeworth’s comment that ‘it is the countless repetitive actions and interactions of entities at smaller levels of analysis . . . that give rise to structure and order at greater levels of analysis’ (2013: 381) is a useful extension of this idea for the consideration of scale given here. McFadyen’s (2006b, 2008) reconsideration of the relationship between material culture, architecture, and landscape is particularly pertinent to our own study of villa landscapes (see also Massey 2005; Banks 2006; Hauser and Hicks 2007; Edgeworth 2013). Drawing on ideas developed by architects (e.g. Grosz  2001) and philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1988), McFadyen critiqued approaches that saw material culture, architecture, and land­ scape as being related hierarchically or nested, much like Russian dolls—a vision which she, like Latour and Yanera (2008), viewed as being compounded by the creation of aes­ thetically alluring building plans and mapped distributions: ‘the problem with establishing and enforcing these scales at an analytical level is that the resultant rigid divisions cut across an understanding of the diverse scales at which people themselves operated’ (2008: 307). McFadyen also emphasized the importance of viewing aggregations of material at archaeological sites (the stone, mud, clay, shell, timber, etc. encountered at flint scatters, Neolithic long barrows, villas, and so on) and the immediate practices these represent, as starting points for understanding much wider ‘connective dynamics’: there should be no endpoint to what we perceive architecture or indeed landscape to be, because architecture extended outward and so was caught up in other parts of the land­ scape. Areas of flint-working were needed for tools; areas of tree-fall and woodland clearance were needed for stakes; pathways and pasture were required for people to manage their herds; and so these features were also part of these distributed sites (2008: 309).

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322  English Landscapes and Identities McFadyen’s approach is perhaps comparable with Gell’s (1998: Chapter 7) use of the idea of distribution to focus not on people and their immediate practices, but also on the outcomes (activities and products) that emanate from people and which are ultimately distributed over time and space (see above). It is also worth emphasizing that our intention here is not to eschew entirely nested or neatly organized understandings of scale, or to do away with mapped distributions and building plans—these are vital outcomes of the processes by which we simplify and inter­ pret complex archaeological evidence. Rather it is to ask whether, by organizing and approaching the evidence from a seemingly well-understood site type (Romano-British villas) in a different way, it is possible to bring into view other ways of understanding land­ scape, building, and scale (Yarrow 2006). The following study begins with summaries of the evidence for Roman villas on the Isle of Wight and of the geological (or stony) character of the island. After this, we use stone as a device for revealing the multiple scales that inhere in both buildings and landscapes. Evidence for stone use at villa complexes on the Isle of Wight offers a starting point for examining relationships between Roman villas and landscapes. In probing these relation­ ships, we hope to complement but also to augment existing considerations of Roman building practices. In a more experimental vein, we go on to explore the notion of villas as condensed landscapes, collapsing the (scalar) separation that is typically upheld between the two. Finally, we ask whether and how it is possible to extend villa landscapes beyond the conventional geographical (and temporal) frames within which they are usually viewed. Overall, we hope to attend to the important question of scale that was raised at the begin­ ning of this section, namely: where do landscapes start and end?

Villas, Villa Landscapes, and Stone on the Isle of Wight As we have already mentioned, although evidence for Roman villas on the Isle of Wight has been synthesized previously, assessments of the makeup of this dataset vary. Our initial approach here is inclusive. Figure 9.17 shows all potential Roman villa sites on the Isle of Wight (based on evidence from existing published summaries). Figure  9.18 summarizes known information about their chronologies. Table 9.1 includes basic details about these sites, including key bibliographic references. The main points to note from these summaries are as follows. Only 7 of the 15 potential villa sites on the Isle of Wight have been excavated. Of these, only Brading has been both excavated extensively and fully published (Cunliffe  2013b). Villa buildings on the Isle of Wight are characterized as being ‘humble’, at least in their earliest phases (e.g. Lyne 2006). Several of these villa sites have evidence of pre-Roman or early Roman occupation. However, the main period of villa construction was from the mid-second to mid-fourth century ad. Industrial or agricultural features were added during the later phases of occu­ pation at several villa sites: there is evidence of iron working at Brading and Newport (Shide), and of corn-drying ovens at Brading, Rock, and Newchurch. Regarding the plan form of the main villa buildings, most would be categorized as aisled halls. Wingedcorridor structures were added to the villas at Newport (Shide), Brading, and possibly also Combley in the late third–early fourth centuries. The villas at Brading and Combley also produced fine mosaics (summarized in Neal and Cosh 2009). Only at Brading has the area around the main villa buildings been investigated in detail—evidence of paddocks,

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Scale  323 430000

435000

440000

445000

450000

455000

460000

465000

Villa complex discussed in text

105000

105000

Villas on the Isle of Wight: Substantial villa-related evidence Potential villa mentioned in published source

100000 95000

95000

100000

Chalk bedrock

Gurnard

Thorley

90000

Newport/Shide

Newport Bowcome (Watergate)

85000

Chessel

Carisbrooke Clatterford

Combley

Brading

Yaverland

Newchurch

85000

90000

Northwood

Brightstone/Rock

80000 75000 70000

70000

75000

80000

Brightstone/Grange Chine

0 430000

435000

440000

445000

450000

455000

2

4

460000

6

8

10 km

465000

Figure 9.17  Distribution of all potential Roman villa sites on the Isle of Wight.

cremation burials, and later Roman industrial activity was identified (Cunliffe  2013b: Chapter 12). Overall, this evidence accords well with that from villa sites excavated across southern England (summarized in Smith et al. 2016). There has been only limited previous discussion specifically about villa landscapes on the Isle of Wight. In his initial report on the villa excavation at Newport (Shide), Tomalin suggested that both arable crops and fruit (including grapes) were potentially farmed close to villa sites (1975: 27–9). Tomalin also observed that villas on the Isle of Wight were often built close to navigable rivers and/or the sea. Indeed the villa at Gurnard was located so close to the sea that it was washed away in the early twentieth century (Motkin 1990). This is seen as evidence for the importance of fishing, trading relationships, and the transporta­ tion of supplies such as food and timber (Tomalin  2006: 54). More specifically, Cunliffe described the benign setting of Brading villa in terms of its fertile soils and easy access to numerous resources, including imported goods (2013a: 5). He also mentions the fantastic views from the site: ‘It is not too fanciful to suppose that the Romano-British residents had an appreciation of landscape and the picturesque: the views from the villa are still one of its

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324  English Landscapes and Identities Brading Brightstone/Rock Brightstone/Grange Chine Bowcome Carisbrooke Clatterford Combley Gurnard Newchurch Newport/Shide Thorley 100BC

50BC 1BC/AD1 AD50 Villa lifespan

100

150 Phase 1

200

250 Phase 2

300

350

400

AD450

Phase 3

Figure 9.18  Chronology of villa complexes on the Isle of Wight (based on information from Tomalin (1975, 1987); Busby et al. (2001); Neal and Cosh (2009); Cunliffe (2013b), and from Isle of Wight HER records). Where the chronological information in published texts comprises only broad dates or date spans, these were simplified as follows: first–second century ad = ad 1–200; mid-third century ad = ad 250; late fourth century ad = ad 375. Overall, this should be seen as a ‘best fit’ diagram based on evidence which is vague and sometimes contradictory.

glories’ (2013a: 270). As well as undertaking a geophysical investigation of the trackways and enclosures around the villa (see section ‘Brading Roman Villa’), the evidence from soils and plant and animal remains allowed for a characterization of the mixed (marine, meat, and vegetal) food economy of the site. By contrast, Fennelly’s (1971) characterization of the landscape at Combley villa might best be termed challenging (both for his own excavation team and for the Roman inhabitants of the site). The villa was built on a platform cut into a steep north-facing slope. Land slippage was a recurrent problem both up- and downslope of the villa, exacerbated by the constant flow of water from abundant natural springs (1971: 422–4). Given that this study focuses on stone used in villa complexes on the Isle of Wight, it is also worth considering briefly the island’s geology—well known for its remarkable variety (Figure 9.19). Prominent geological features include the central chalk and upper greensand ridge, sometimes described as ‘the backbone of the Isle of Wight’ (Royall 2010: 14), and on which 11 of the 15 potential villa sites listed in Table 9.1 are located. A further block of chalk and upper greensand at the southern end of the island includes a remarkable 1-km stretch of cliff (‘the undercliff ’) that resulted from land slippage initially in the Pleistocene, and exaggerated over the past 10,000 years (a good example of how stone ‘flows’). The lower greensand which covers much of the southern half of the Isle of Wight is known for its weathering into easily worked soils (Basford and Loader 2008: 10). Meanwhile the tilting of the heavier mixed sands, clays, and gravels of northern Wight has spawned exposures of brightly coloured rocks along the north coast. These sands, clays, and gravels are also punc­ tured in places by outcrops of marls, clays, and Bembridge limestone (Royall 2010: 14).

Site name

Means of ident.

C

DP Broad date of occupation

Villa Phase 1

Villa Phase 2 Villa Phase 3

From

To

From

To

From To

From To

Brading Brighstone/Rock Brighstone/Grange Chine Bowcome Carisbrooke Chessel Clatterford Combley Gurnard Newchurch Newport/Shide

Ex (recent), geophysics Ex (late 20th century) Finds (coastal erosion) Finds (FW) Ex (Antiq.) Place name Ex (recent), geophysics Ex (late 20th century) Ex (Antiq.) Finds, corn drier (FW, Ex) Ex (late 20th century)

1 1 2 2 1 3 1 1 1 2 1

1 1 3 2 3 — 1 2 3 3 1

-50 275 200 100 275 n/a 50 50 50 325 75

400+ 400 400 400 325 n/a 400+ 375 400 350 375

75 275         175 125     275

175 330         275 175     325

175           275 175      

275           325 275      

275             275      

400             350      

Newport (Watergate) Northwood Thorley Yaverland

Finds Finds (FW) Finds (FW) Finds (FW)

2 2 3 3

— — 3 —

n/a n/a 100 n/a

n/a n/a 300 n/a

       

       

       

       

       

       

C = certainty; DP = dating precision; Antiq. = Antiquarian; ident. = identification; FW = field-walking; Ex = excavation.

Key refs.

Cunliffe (2013b)       Neal and Cosh (2009) Busby et al. (2001) Fennelly (1969, 1971) Motkin (1990)   Tomalin (1975, 1987); Basford (1992)   Tomalin (2006) Neal and Cosh (2009) Neal and Cosh (2009)

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Table 9.1  Summary of villa sites on the Isle of Wight including key bibliographic references

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326  English Landscapes and Identities 440000

435000

105000

445000

450000

455000

460000

465000

Alluvium

Chalk

Superficial clay

Clay & other unconsolidated bedrock

Sand and gravel

Mixed limestone & mudrocks

Silt

105000

430000

Simplifed shallowest geology:

100000 95000 90000 85000 80000 75000 70000

70000

75000

80000

85000

90000

95000

100000

Mudrocks

0 430000

435000

440000

445000

450000

455000

2 460000

4

6

8

10 km

465000

Figure 9.19  Map of simplified Isle of Wight geology.

Building with Stone In considering how stone was used as a building material, we will begin by looking closely at the evidence from Brading Roman villa, before summarizing key elements of building practices at other villa buildings on the Isle of Wight. This evidence is contextualized with reference to insights from broader recent studies of Roman building practices. Our main aims are to elicit, firstly, the wealth of materials (including stone) that were accumulated at villa complexes; secondly, the active role that stone played in these buildings; and, thirdly, the particular ways in which stone was handled as a building material. Before beginning this account it is worth mentioning some important complexities of the evidence under consideration. The stone (and other materials) used in villa buildings was not only brought to these sites for construction purposes. It was also often recycled or robbed, both during and after the villa’s main period of occupation (see Munro 2011 for a further consideration of this issue for the late Roman period). As is shown by the many villa sites on the Isle of Wight that are identifiable only from surface scatters, building remains were also sometimes ploughed back into the ground. This highlights, once again,

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Scale  327 the fluid character of materials employed in villa architecture. It also means that the evidence available for analysis is, in some cases, quite patchy. Although the detailed descriptions of villa buildings in the Brading publication provide ample evidence for considering building practices, this is not always the case, particularly when dealing with accounts of excava­ tions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see also Tomalin  1987: 30). Most importantly, many types of building stone are incredibly hard to identify visually (e.g. Pearson  2006; Hayward  2009: 1). Despite the important work undertaken by Williams (1971) and Blagg (1990), it is only recently that excavated stone has been identified and sourced accurately using scientific methods (Hayward forthcoming). To give an example, Tomalin argued that Bembridge limestone from the Isle of Wight was used widely for roof­ ing slabs on the island’s villa buildings (e.g. 1975: 13; 1987: 97). In his recent analysis of the material from Brading, however, Gale suggests that Bembridge limestone makes a poor roofing material. Instead it is now clear that the roofing slabs from Brading (at least) were made from specific horizons of Upper Purbeck limestone from the east Dorset coast (2013: 137). For this reason, stone identifications from excavations in the late twentieth century are useful in aggregate, but must be treated with some caution. We will now focus on Brading in more detail.

Brading Roman Villa

The main phases of construction at Brading Roman villa are outlined in Table  9.2 and Figure 9.20. Broad patterns in the use of stone at Brading are summarized in Table 9.3. It is important to highlight first that stone was not used as a building material during the earliest (late Iron Age) phase of occupation of the site. The nature of the earliest buildings is not clear. However, the main architectural materials at this time were almost certainly tim­ ber and earth. The emergence of villa-type buildings at Brading in the late first century ad was marked by the construction of an aisled hall, a three-roomed masonry building, and a bathhouse. These buildings were larger and more enduring than their predecessors. A much wider range of materials also had to be mobilized for their construction, including stone of vari­ ous origins, timber, clay, and so on (Cunliffe 2013b: 58–67). The timber superstructure of the aisled hall was supported on large (1.5 m × 1.5 m) stone pillars (subsequently robbed). 2nd century 2nd/3rd century 3rd century 3rd/4th century 4th century

0

m

50

Figure 9.20  Plan of the main building phases at Brading Roman villa (redrawn from Cunliffe 2013b: Figure 14.2).

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328  English Landscapes and Identities Table 9.2  Summary of the main building phases at Brading Roman villa (following Cunliffe 2013b) Phase Date

Activity

 

Extensive settlement to the west of the villa complex including ditched enclosures and possible industrial features Occupation evidence, the precise nature of which is not yet clear

  I

II

III

IV

V

Late Iron Age Early 1st century ad Late 1st–early 2nd century ad Late 2nd–early 3rd century

Buildings 3–5. These comprise a timber and clay, tile-roofed aisled hall, demolished in the late 2nd century ad (Building 4); a three-roomed masonry structure (Building 3); and a bathhouse (Building 5). Associated with these were a well and ditched enclosures to the east. Construction of a more substantial aisled hall, similar in plan to those at Combley and Carisbrooke, with separate areas for family and community activities (Building 2). More broadly a cremation cemetery was inserted along one edge of an earlier ditched enclosure to the east of the villa. Late Addition of a grander winged corridor building, forming the western side of a 3rd–early courtyard arrangement of buildings, probably with a garden at the centre 4th century (Building 1). The earlier aisled hall forming the northern range (Building 2), continued to be used probably for more community-orientated/public purposes Late 4th The winged corridor building was roughly remodelled. Industrial features were century inserted (e.g. a corn-drier), and there is evidence of intense burning more broadly. The northernmost room of this structure may have been used as a shrine. An insubstantial timber structure (Building 6) was built reusing the collapsed wall of the 1st–2nd century bathhouse. 5th century Abandonment of the site—the settlement focus shifts to the east where the ad medieval settlement of Morton later emerged.

Stone from various, exclusively local, sources (flint cobbles, limestone, tufa, sandstone) was used in the (possibly slightly later) bathhouse. However, these materials were not necessar­ ily used in specific ways—for instance they were mixed together in the fill of the rumble drain. None of the stone from the bathhouse was well finished or dressed. Rather, a fine surface was created by covering the stone with brightly coloured plasters. Stone played a much more prominent role in the architecture of the late second–early third century ad at Brading (the Phase II aisled hall, Cunliffe 2013b: 32–51). Some stone for this building was garnered locally, as it had been previously. Other stone types, however, came from formal quarry sites both close to Brading and further afield. This includes Bembridge limestone from the east coast of the Isle of Wight, upper greensand from a reputedly inaccessible source on the south Wight coast at Ventnor (Gale 2013: 137–8), and Upper Purbeck limestone of various lithologies, probably from an outcrop close to Durlston Bay, East Dorset. Although some of these stone types were used much as they were found (as untrimmed flint nodules, water-worn beach pebbles), others were dressed and/or care­ fully sorted. Overall, stone was used in a much more structured manner in the Phase II aisled hall. There is also a clear sense that the aesthetic and performative properties of stone, as well as its structural capacities, were considered in its use. The excavators observed the precise ordering of tightly packed lumps of upper greensand, successive layers of chalk rubble, and slabs of water-worn Bembridge limestone in the foundation trenches. The coursed flints of the outer wall faces are contrasted with the creamy chalk block and marl of the inner wall faces. High-quality stone gathered from more distant (and difficult) sources was positioned, perhaps strategically, at key architectural junctures. Use was made of the

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Scale  329 Table 9.3  Broad patterns in the use of stone at Brading Roman villa

Stone

Flint Chalk Bembridge limestone (beach boulders) Tufa Upper greensand Bembridge limestone (water-worn slabs) Bembridge limestone (dressed stone) Ventnor greensand Upper Purbeck limestone Kimmeridge shale Purbeck dolomitic limestone Unspecified rubble Recycled stone Other materials Timber Clay Plaster Mortar Sand Glass Recycled clay tiles

LIA/ ad Conquest 50–150 period (villa phase I)

ad 150–250 (villa phase II)

ad 250–350 (villa phase III)

ad 350–410 (villa phase IV)

     

N N N

P P  

P P P

  P  

     

N N  

P P N

  P P

     

 

 

N

P

 

   

   

N N

  P

   

   

   

   

N ?

   

    Y Y          

N   Y Y     Y    

    Y   Y Y   Y  

  N Y   Y Y      

P P Y       Y   Y

For stone: N = new, P = used in previous phase, ? = uncertain identification; for other materials: Y = present.

variable makeup of the Purbeck limestone when made into roofing tiles: rough limestone became standard pentagonal tiles, fine fissile limestone was made into more decorative tiles (Hayward 2013: 143). Later repairs to this building were made in tufa—a stone type that was apparently quarried almost to exhaustion in Britain by this time (Gale 2013: 37). Alongside the evidence that stone was used more thoughtfully and extensively in the Phase II aisled hall at Brading, stone simulacra were also created from another material—plaster frag­ ments were painted in an imitation marble style. If you could not use stone itself, you could make other materials look like stone and thus create the desired stony effect. Overall, it appears that stone played a central role in construction practices at Brading in the late second–early third century ad, both materially and conceptually. By the time that a substantial winged-corridor building was added to the villa complex in the late third–early fourth century ad, stone was arguably treated less deferentially. As was noted for the previous construction phase, substantial quantities of stone were amassed from both local sources and further afield for the construction of the winged-corridor building. Some of this stone was also treated with care: flint was carefully sorted for size in one wall (Wall 17); blocks of finely dressed Bembridge limestone and upper greensand were used for quoins. More widely, however, stone was used in a less ordered and more expedient

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330  English Landscapes and Identities manner. A roughness of approach is noted, particularly regarding the use of local stone. There was a broad tendency for (rather than a rigid adherence to) using flint in outer walls and chalk or limestone in inner walls. The irregular makeup of some internal walls had to be ‘made good by lavish use of mortar’ (Cunliffe 2013b: 97). Stone was also recycled for the first time in this building phase, a practice that might be viewed as being both expedient and respectful. In order to contextualize this shift in attitudes towards stone, it is worth noting that considerable aesthetic attention was paid at this time to other aspects of the villa building—the walls were adorned with elaborately decorated plaster and highly un­usual figurative mosaics were inserted (Neal and Cosh  2009). Although stone was a component of mosaics (tiles were made of Kimmeridge shale, downland chalk, and pos­ sibly also Purbeck dolomitic limestone; see also Tasker et al. 2011), it was certainly not a central feature of them. The building practices represented in the latest construction phase at Brading villa bear comparison with the DIY mode of architecture described by architect Rendell (1998) in recounting her remodelling of an attic squat in London—a bricolage of materials was involved and existing structural boundaries (e.g. walls) were transgressed. The resulting spaces were fluid, the resulting structures fragile. During the late fourth century ad at Brading, earlier masonry buildings were demolished and refashioned; stone and other building materials were recycled and, in some cases, probably removed from the site. An insubstantial timber structure was added on to one half-ruined building. Chalk was tram­ pled into backfilled rubble to create a floor, and a corn-drying oven was inserted into the former entrance passage of the winged-corridor building.

Other Villa Sites on the Isle of Wight

Evidence from villa complexes elsewhere on the Isle of Wight (summarized in Table 9.4) adds to this account in the following important ways. At a broad level, there are strong harmonies in the way that stone was used in villa build­ ings across the Isle of Wight. Stone was mainly obtained locally (from the island itself). A similar range of stone types was employed overall: Bembridge limestone, upper greensand, chalk, and flint were a feature of all excavated structures. Additionally, as at Brading, stone was drawn from the widest range of sources and the furthest distances, and was used most extensively and most precisely in villa buildings (particularly aisled halls) dating to the late second to early fourth centuries ad. Alongside these broad commonalities, it is important to highlight the specific ways in which stone was employed in separate building projects. Once examined in detail, slightly different spectrums of stone (and other materials) were used in slightly different combinations in creating a range of plan forms and varied aes­ thetic effects. For instance, ironstone conglomerate quarried from immediately adjacent to the site was used extensively in the aisled hall at Combley but not in other villa buildings on the Isle of Wight (Fennelly 1969, 1971). The evidence from Combley also reveals another aspect of building with stone that is discussed much less widely in Roman studies: building in stone (and in desirable locations) was not always straightforward and did not always go to plan. The people who built and used Combley villa had to contend not only with the persistent effects of subsidence (see the earlier section ‘Villas, Villa Landscapes, and Stone on the Isle of Wight’)—the excavation report notes that flint and chalk were used exten­ sively for packing and consolidation purposes—but also with a number of other challenges. A sizeable swelling in the floor of one room almost certainly dates to when the villa was inhabited (Fennelly 1969: 279). It is also possible that one of the chalk-built walls disinte­ grated during the villa’s main lifetime (Fennelly 1969: 276).

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Scale  331 Table 9.4  Summary of materials used in other villa buildings on the Isle of Wight (beyond Brading) and also how they were used Name

Construction period

Carisbrooke 3rd and early 4th centuries ad Clatterford Late 1st–early 2nd century ad Late 2nd–early 3rd century ad

Materials

Practices/context of use

Reference

Bembridge Limestone Flint cobbles

Used for roofing tiles

Greensand blocks Timber

Roughly hewn. Used for trackway construction Used for main structure

Tomalin (1987) Busby et al. (2001)

Flint cobbles

Rubble used to form yard surface. Larger pieces used in rough walling (arranged with sandstone in ragged line) Rough blocks used in rough walling (arranged with flint cobbles in ragged line) Sourced locally (possibly from close to Combley villa). Used for making roof tiles Used for flooring surface

Sandstone blocks Clay Late 3rd–early 4th century ad Combley

Late 2nd century– 3rd century

Chalk Recycled tile fragments Ironstone conglomerate Bembridge Limestone Glauconitic sandstone Greensand Chalk

Flint

Timber

Used for trackway construction

Used for flooring surface Used in the lower wall courses. Fennelly Sourced from an adjacent outcrop (1969, 1971) Used for portals and door jambs. Possibly also for roof tiles. Used for key structural junctures. Possibly sourced from elsewhere along the chalk downs. Quarried blocks used for quoins. Used in combination with flint for internal walls. Mixed with clay as a packing material. Probably quarried from nearby sources (possibly one c.400 m from the villa complex). Used in combination with chalk for internal walls. Mixed with clay to form the bath house floor. Used in substantial quantities to consolidate the ground on which the villa stands. Probably gathered from nearby ploughed fields. Substantial planks used in combination with flint cobbles, ironstone fragments, and sand to consolidate the ground beneath the villa and create foundations. Almost certainly also used for the superstructure. (Continued)

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332  English Landscapes and Identities Table 9.4  (Continued) Name

Construction period

Materials

Practices/context of use

Sand

Layered along with earth, clay, mortar, mixed rubble for flooring. Also used as foundation material. Mixed with chalk as a packing material.

Clay

Late 3rd–early 4th century

Gurnard

Late 1st to late 4th century ad

Earth Plaster Mixed rubble (including midden material) Timber

Bembridge Limestone Newport

Late 1st–mid 2nd century ad

Clay Timber Earth Clay

Late 2nd to late 3rd century ad

Thatch Timber Bembridge Limestone Tufa Greensand Chalk Clay Plaster

Brighstone/ Rock

Late 3rd–early 4th century ad

Bembridge Limestone

Reference

Used to consolidate collapsing walls. Also used for later drystone walling added to rooms in the southeastern part of the villa complex Almost certainly used for the main Motkin (1990) superstructure of the aisled hall. Also for internal features (a burnt wooden door was recovered) and for the piles possibly representing a pier head found in the intertidal zone. Used for walling and roof tiles. Probably quarried from the adjacent cliff. Used for roofing tiles Used for the main structure Tomalin (1975, 1987) Cut into to create a linear ditch defining one side of a building Used to fill the ditch prior to the late 2nd century ad construction Possibly used for roofing Used in substantial quantities for superstructure Used at key architectural junctures—door jambs, quoins, etc.—and for roofing tiles Used to roof the arched chambers of the bath house Smaller fragments mixed with chalk for use as general infill. Smaller fragments mixed with greensand for use as general infill. Used to make tiles for roofing. Marked with comb scrapes and signatures. Wall plaster fragments decorated with flowers and leaves. Some fragments decorated in an imitation marble style Used for roofing tiles Tomalin (1987)

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Scale  333

Villa Sites in Roman Britain More Broadly

To finish this consideration of building with stone, it is important to reflect briefly on how our account of stone use at Isle of Wight villas accords with broader recent analyses of Romano-British architecture, particularly in the southeast (e.g. Perring 2002; Pearson 2006; Neal and Cosh 2009; Taylor 2011, 2013; Smith et al. 2016; Millett 2016). The general chronology of stone use in villa buildings on the Isle of Wight ties in very well with evidence from wider accounts. This includes the seemingly sudden (if limited) introduction of stone in building projects in the early decades of Roman Britain; the slow emergence of masonry structures in rural architecture more broadly, peaking in the late second to third centuries ad (a pattern which Pearson (2006: 21) relates to the slow emer­ gence of formal stone quarrying in Britain); and the growth of stone recycling in the later Roman period (Neal and Cosh  2009: 24–5). Recent syntheses have also emphasized the local origins of most stone used in villa buildings, and the diverse character of villa archi­ tecture overall, beyond certain shared traits (see section ‘Building with Stone’). More spe­ cif­ic­al­ly, Pearson (2006: 83) argues that ‘stone connections’ could be identified between nearby villa buildings along the south coast of England, much like the core repertoire of stone types identified earlier that links villa buildings on the Isle of Wight (e.g. Bembridge limestone, upper greensand). It has been suggested that Roman builders and stone workers became attached to certain stone types, the use of which sometimes defies rational ex­plan­ ation: flint is used widely in Roman buildings, despite the considerable difficulties involved in building with it (e.g. Pearson 2006: 77; Russell 2013: 167–8). Pearson also notes that imi­ tation marble (made of plaster) and high-quality stone veneers were used extensively in Roman rural buildings (2006: 80–1). The evidence presented here also augments existing understandings of Roman architec­ ture in important ways. Our focus on stone and on building practices emphasized that villa building projects were monumental not only in the sense that they required considerable amounts of wealth and were performative (see section ‘Taking a Different Approach to Landscape, Buildings, and Scale (and Identity)’) but also in the sense that they required significant amounts of material and labour (see also Smith et al.  2016: 71). Despite their modest size relative to some urban and military building projects in Britain and to villa buildings on the continent, villa buildings were substantial—even impressive—relative to other contemporary buildings on the Isle of Wight. Moreover, in order to build them, sig­ nificant quantities of stone and other materials were acquired, amassed, worked, and manipulated. This would also have involved a significant mobilization of people. To take one example, Hayward (2013: 143) suggests that around 22,000 stone tiles were imported from Dorset for use in the late second to fourth century ad villa buildings at Brading. Meanwhile Fennelly questions ‘the number of labourers who can possibly have been avail­ able to one landowner’, ‘the sheer toil of building on this unsuitable soil’, and the ‘immense task’ of transporting and deploying in villa buildings even the relatively easily accessible ‘countless flints’ (1971: 430). Viewed in this way, it seems worth extending Taylor’s (2013) consideration of other modes of rural architecture (earthwork-enclosed settlements in northwest Britain) as significant investments of communal labour where local identities were forged, to incorporate villa architecture. In truth, it is very difficult to determine archaeologically exactly who was involved in building Roman villas in Britain. Based mainly on continental classical sources, studies that do broach this topic mention the potential involvement of villa owners, professional (immigrant?) architects, builders, and ‘teams of workers’ (paid labourers and slaves)

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334  English Landscapes and Identities (Perring 2002: 81; McCarthy 2013: 101–2; Russell 2013: 202–3). We would add to this Millett’s (2016: 701) important point that the division of labour between farming and other rural activities may well have been relatively fluid at this time: builders may also have been farm­ ers, stone masons may also have been traders. Additionally it is worth mentioning that, very occasionally, it is possible to catch remote glimpses of the people involved in building villas. For instance clay tiles used on the Isle of Wight (and more broadly) often bear marks: comb, foot, and hand prints (human and animal), seed impressions, and other signatures (see also Tomalin 1987: 99). While these are usually interpreted as routine outcomes of the tile production process—as indications that a pile of tiles had been checked and were ready to fire—they could also be viewed as fleeting markers of a somewhat under-theorized com­ munity of builders. Most importantly to the topic of scale, this analysis evinces the extent to which villa buildings were built of as well as in landscapes. Viewed abstractly, villa buildings can be understood as intense gatherings of people, stone types, timber, animals, clay, thatch, and so on, as assemblages of matter and energy (Bennett  2010): of landscape (see also Ferraby 2015: 425). Once these elements are considered in detail, it also becomes clear that the makeup of villa buildings points to locations, practices, and identities—to landscapes— well beyond the villa site: to patches of woodland that were managed to make timbers, crops that were harvested for thatch, and, of particular pertinence to this study, fields that were ploughed to produce flint nodules, and rocky outcrops that were quarried for stone. Understood in this way, it becomes much more difficult to uphold the common (hier­arch­ ic­al) separation that is often imagined between Roman villas and their landscapes. Moving beyond our examination of building with stone at Roman villas on the Isle of Wight there­ fore, the rest of this study takes one particular element of villa makeup—stone—and asks what this can tell us about the landscape in villas.

The Landscape in Villas on the Isle of Wight As noted earlier, given that masonry buildings are a defining feature of villa architecture in Britain, it is perhaps surprising that the processes of finding, extracting, and moving stone have rarely been considered as an aspect of villa landscapes. Beyond the fact that stone quarrying is typically considered separately—as an aspect of the Roman economy—this oversight may well be linked to a common emphasis in villa studies on the mainly local origin of stone used in villa buildings, and on the often close relationship between villa sites and transport routes (major roads, rivers, and the sea) (e.g. Tomalin  1975; Motkin  1990; Gale 2013; Tomalin 1975). This has led to an underestimation of the considerable effort and energy involved in mobilizing stone even, or perhaps especially, over relatively short dis­ tances and for relatively modest building projects (e.g. Fennelly 1971; Pearson 2006: 50–1; Russell 2013: 97). We follow here the processes of locating, quarrying, and moving stone for building purposes.

Finding Stone

Evidence directly from villa sites on the Isle of Wight shows very clearly that, over the dur­ ation of the Roman period in Britain, some people would have developed an intimate knowledge of stone. As well as learning how to work with this material architecturally, ­people would have gained a close understanding of which stone types made suitable

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Scale  335 building materials (both structurally and aesthetically), where these could be found, and how to mobilize them (see also Russell 2013: 15). Regarding the identification of building stone sources at the very beginning of the Roman period in southeast Britain, Hayward (2009) suggests—based on the inclusion of high-quality local building stone in even the earliest masonry buildings—that formal geo­ logical surveys were undertaken, either just before or just after the Roman conquest (see also Mattingly 2011; Wilson 2012). Although it is very difficult to establish who undertook these surveys, a combination of military (potentially naval) and local specialists has been proposed (Hayward 2009: 108). One important factor to note in considering early Roman stone prospecting on the Isle of Wight is that objects of Bembridge limestone (querns and stone weights) were exported widely from the island from the later Iron Age onwards (e.g. Neal  1980: 104–5; Cunliffe  2003). The communities involved in producing, transporting, and using these items would already have developed a close understanding of the qualities of Bembridge limestone, if not of its particularly capacities as a building stone. Consequently, it is certainly possible, even likely, that local specialists were also intimately involved in early attempts to source building stone on the Isle of Wight. In relation to this point it is interesting to observe that Bembridge limestone from the Isle of Wight was used as a building material in one of the earliest (late first century ad) major buildings in Roman Britain—the ‘palatial’ villa at Fishbourne (Cunliffe 1998; Pearson 2006; Russell 2013: 163; see the later section ‘Following Stone, Extending the Landscape’ for further details). Early attempts to find building stone on the Isle of Wight may have involved immigrant specialists (probably drawing on local knowledge) and were almost certainly spurred by broader moves to build with stone in the new Roman province. As time progressed, how­ ever, and as masonry buildings emerged on the island itself, it is likely that prospecting practices were driven locally. As Edmonds notes in his account of Neolithic stone quarry­ ing, once acquired, knowledge about how to seek out new sources, how to test, extract, and work the material from existing ones, and so on, would very likely have been shared amongst communities and also transmitted from one generation of stone workers to another (1999: 46; see also Ferraby 2015: 137–8). In relation to this point it is worth consid­ ering that as well as finding and testing building stone on the Isle of Wight, over the longer term, and through their involvement in building projects both on and beyond the island, stone specialists on the Isle of Wight would almost certainly have also developed a detailed knowledge of the sources and qualities of building stone much more broadly. The use of specific horizons of Upper Purbeck limestone (Corbula Beds, Upper Building Stones, lowgrade Purbeck Marble) for roofing at Brading might be seen as one outcome of this process. Finally, it is interesting to note that Quarr limestone—distinctive for its intensely shelly texture and highly prized as a building material in the early medieval period (Tomalin et al. 2012: 265)—was not used in Roman building projects on the Isle of Wight (Gale 2013: 139). Since this stone source was certainly known about during the Roman period (Quarr limestone querns were found at Brading and Combley villas: Tomalin  1987: 87), we can only assume that either the particular qualities of this material did not conform to contem­ porary understandings of good building stone or that, for some reason, it was not feasible to extract Quarr limestone on a large scale at this time.

Extracting Stone

The processes of gathering stone from fields and beaches and of formal stone quarrying are in some ways the most archaeologically visible aspects of the landscape in villa buildings

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336  English Landscapes and Identities on the Isle of Wight. Visible traces of stone extraction are either hard to identify—quarry sites are notoriously difficult to date—or have otherwise been removed or disturbed by later activity: through quarrying, ploughing, or coastal erosion (see also Pearson 2006: 45; Hayward  2009: 2). However, where accurate stone identifications have been made—­ particularly at Brading villa—it is possible to gain a good understanding at least of where these activities took place. Broader generalizations (studies of Roman stone quarrying in Britain and more widely, and of stone quarrying in other periods) offer further insight into the makeup of extraction sites. Gale’s (2013: Figure 8.1) map showing the sources of all stone types used in villa build­ ings at Brading provides a useful starting point for considering where the stone used in villa complexes was extracted (both on and beyond the Isle of Wight). We can add to this (less accurately) by mapping potential stone sources mentioned in the excavation summa­ ries from other villa sites, and using evidence from the EngLaId database (Figure 9.21). It is worth noting at this point that only two Roman quarries are recorded in the Isle of Wight HER, one of which (at Quarr) was almost certainly not used as a source for building stone during the Roman period. Additionally, although Gale (2013) helpfully mapped and named 400000

410000

420000

430000

440000

450000

460000

Villas on the Isle of Wight

120000

120000

390000

Stone sources: Bembridge Limestone

Purbeck limestone

110000

110000

Ironstone conglomerate

Roman quarry in EngLaId database Upper Greensand Formation

390000

0 400000

410000

420000

430000

440000

450000

5

10 460000

Figure 9.21  Location of Roman villas in relation to stone sources on the Isle of Wight.

15 km

50000

50000

60000

60000

70000

70000

80000

80000

90000

90000

100000

100000

Beach boulders

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Scale  337 the sources of stone for Brading Roman villa, he did not discuss them further. Overall therefore, existing data sources either overlook stone extraction sites or render them as remote and somewhat abstract resource locations rather than as positive and active spaces where the Roman period inhabitants of the Isle of Wight almost certainly spent con­sid­er­ able amounts of time and invested a lot of energy (see also Sekedat 2012: 81). Like Ferraby, we would argue instead that ‘the voids left by the absence of stone can be as engaging as the stone material itself ’ (2015: 320). Since flint nodules, water-worn beach pebbles, and slabs of Bembridge limestone and upper greensand played a significant role in villa architecture on the Isle of Wight, it is use­ ful, first, to consider where these were gathered and what the gathering process involved. As Pearson notes, requirements for this kind of bulk material almost certainly outweighed those for formal quarried stone in the vast majority of Roman building projects (2006: 56). Moreover, it is easy to downplay the considerable toil involved in extracting stone even from close to villa sites (Fennelly 1971). Based on current understandings, it seems likely that flint nodules were gathered from the chalk downland close to many villa sites, whereas water-worn slabs and beach pebbles were garnered from along the east Isle of Wight coast. On this basis it is important to recognize that many hours would have been spent scouring fields in the vicinity of villa construction sites (potentially immediately following plough­ ing), and beaches close to known limestone outcrops. Extracting these materials would have had a marked visual, textural, and audible impact on the landscape (Evans  2003: 45–72). Fields formerly flecked with nodules of white and grey flint would have darkened; stretches of beach that offered suitable boulders may well have become noticeably denuded. For concentrated periods, the soft clunk of flint nodules as they were gathered for transpor­ tation would have sounded across the chalk downland. Turning to the character of more formal quarrying, Pearson suggests that many Roman quarries were surface workings—highly visible and probably quite messy, due to the diffi­ culty of extracting surface stones neatly (2006: 61). Although many of these sites are no longer visible, during the early Roman period at least they would have been fresh and strik­ ing elements of emerging Romano-British landscapes, viewed perhaps as blemishes or alternatively as positive signatures of involvement with the new regime. As time progressed, quarries would have made an enduring and widespread visual impact on the landscape: ‘rock was quarried virtually everywhere that settlement existed’ (Pearson 2006: 69). Understandings of quarry working methods are hampered by the fact that stone work­ ing tools and inscriptions detailing these practices are rarely, if ever, found in stone quar­ ries in Roman Britain (see, however, Russell 2013: 56; Kennecke 2014). Additionally, stone working tools were very similar over extremely long time periods—it is therefore very dif­ ficult to date tool marks in quarries specifically. However, Pearson describes wedge holes made by a narrow pointy tool which survive on a Roman quarry face at Barcombe Down, near Vindolanda, Northumbria (2006: 50). Quarry workers almost certainly also harnessed natural forces—water penetration and freezing—in order to remove the thin sheets of material required for roofing tiles (Pearson 2006: 64). Considering the periodicity of such work, Pearson observes the difficulty of identifying whether quarrying took place spor­ad­ic­ al­ly, only in relation to major building projects, or near continuously at a low level and with heightened intensity when major architectural endeavours took off (2006: 65). As Millett (2016: 701) suggests, it is also interesting to consider how the temporalities of different modes of rural activity intersected (see, for example, Sekedat (2012: 89) for a consideration of how Roman stone quarrying in Turkey may have intersected with food production, craft activities, trade, and so on).

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338  English Landscapes and Identities Again, the social makeup of Roman quarry working (including whether quarry sites were owned and who owned them) is much discussed, but difficult to reach arch­aeo­logic­ al­ly. It probably also changed over the duration of the Roman period. It is certainly pos­ sible, as Pearson suggests, that immigrant stone engineers and cutters played a role in early quarrying for building stone on the Isle of Wight, together with teams of forced and free labourers (2006: 59, 65). Based on Hayward’s suggestion that the Roman military played a diminishing role in stone quarrying from at least the mid-second century ad onwards (2009: 107), it is also likely, however, that local quarrying specialists emerged as stone quarry­ing in Britain became established (Pearson 2006: 36), together with a range of other identities and relationships (see also Edmonds 1999: 38). Additionally, it is worth considering briefly some broader outcomes of stone quarrying. Alongside developing an intimate knowledge of the physical properties of stone, there is evidence to suggest that people who worked closely with stone developed a certain awe for this material. This is perhaps understandable given the potential dangers (e.g. of sudden rock falls) associated with stone quarrying, and the extent to which human (and animal) bodies were shaped by stone extraction (both quarrying and gathering): First and foremost, there were scars, cuts and other superficial injuries . . . To these can be added the more chronic ailments that arise from a prolonged and repeated association with these activities such as silicosa and emphysema. (Edmonds 1999: 48)

Bones were undoubtedly broken and lives lost in pursuit of stone in Roman Britain. Pearson notes Pliny’s appreciation of the magical properties of stone and of the folklore that emerged in relation to it (2006: 74–5). In the context of Neolithic stone quarrying, Edmonds (1999: 47–8) highlights the cooperative nature of quarry working, suggesting that key stone sources would have developed histories that became tied into broader commu­ nity biographies (ibid. 47–8). Quarries where desirable stone types became depleted (e.g. tufa), that yielded stone types that gained repute beyond the Isle of Wight (e.g. Bembridge limestone), or where the stone was particularly tricky to remove (e.g. at Ventnor) could have played a particular role in this respect. While this evidence should be interpreted with care, the phallus—a Roman symbol of good luck (Pearson 2006: 50)—carved on a Roman quarry surface from Barcome Down, Northumbria, and the inscription on an altar from Marignac, France giving thanks for the safe production and transportation of a pair of col­ umns (Russell 2013: 57), perhaps bear testament to such concerns.

Moving Stone

As noted earlier, existing studies of villa landscapes both on and beyond the Isle of Wight almost certainly downplay the considerable energy and work involved in moving stone, in contrast to studies that focus specifically on Roman stone. Unfortunately although it is pos­ sible to identify start and end points (quarries and villas, respectfully) for journeys with stone on the Isle of Wight, it is very difficult to establish the routes taken between these points (even considering the advances made by recent aerial photographic research that has identified fragments of trackways across the chalk downs—Royall 2010). Although this situation is exacerbated on the Isle of Wight by the absence of formal Roman roads, Russell (2013) notes more broadly that, even where road and river routes are well known, the makeup of stone, animals, people, and other materials involved in stone transportation is still intangible.

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Scale  339 According to common sense understandings of the ease of transportation, recent accounts of stone quarrying suggest that stone was preferably moved by sea or by river rather than overland (Pearson 2006: 90–1). Even so, both Pearson (2006) and Russell (2013: 114) note that journeys overland were commonplace and sometimes undertaken over extremely long distances. Both ‘rough outs’ and finished stones were transported from quarry sites (Pearson  2006; Russell  2013: 214–20). Evidence from shipwrecks on the Continent also suggests that stones were usually moved together with other materials (tim­ ber and other goods) rather than in specialist craft (Russell  2013: 131). Russell notes the considerable skill required for loading and unloading stone from boats (2013: 131). For overland journeys it is suggested that human porters, pack animals (potentially in large numbers), carts, and sledges/rollers would have been involved (Pearson  2006: 99; Russell 2013: 97–8). In tethering these insights to evidence from the Isle of Wight, it is certainly possible that the island’s maritime location (and that of its villas—Tomalin 2006) facilitated movements of stone. Stone was potentially gathered and shipped directly from quarries on the south­ ern English coast or along the shoreline of the Isle of Wight to landing places within a few kilometres of building sites. As Pearson highlights, however, the simplicity of coastal trans­ portation, even over fairly short distances, is easily overstated and is directly contradicted by the abundance of wrecks (2006: 92). The positioning of many of the Isle of Wight’s villas on the central chalk ridge would also have had implications for the movement of stone. Flint, chalk, and ironstone conglomerate would have been more readily available since they are a feature of this ridge. By contrast beach pebbles/slabs and most formally quarried stone would necessarily have been moved (shipped, carried, hoisted, dragged, carted, driven) over distances of at least several kilometres, possibly by sea, along navigable river channels, and overland. It is also important to acknowledge that through the process of moving stone, new routes—tracks and pathways—would almost certainly have been trodden.

Following Stone, Extending the Landscape

Maintaining our focus on stone and on the topic of scale, we will finish this study by fol­ lowing stone further, and opening up our analysis both spatially and temporally. Through an examination of known incidences of stone from the Isle of Wight in contexts beyond the Isle of Wight over the entire EngLaId study period (from 1500 bc to ad 1086) we ask where else (and how far) stone from villa buildings on the Isle of Wight can take us (Edgeworth 2013: 380), and also what the social implications of the resulting distributions are. Fundamental to this analysis is the idea that stone quarries (and other stone extraction processes) can be considered as concentrations of an array of distributed practices (or as sites of landscape production) much like Roman villas (Sekedat 2012: 86). At one level, this account can be seen as a spatial, temporal, and interpretative extension of Pearson’s notion of ‘stone connections’—his observation that stone originating from the same quarries sometimes occurs in groups of Roman villas (2006: 83; see also Hayward forthcoming). Regarding the matter of scale, we also hope to show that, as well as being condensed into Roman villa buildings, the Isle of Wight landscape (or, more specifically, certain stone types and other relationships from this landscape) also extended outwards into other sites and landscapes on the English mainland. Figure 9.22 and Table 9.5 synthesize the evidence for known incidences of Isle of Wight stone on the English mainland from 1500 bc to ad 1086 (see Tomalin  1987; Tomalin

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340  English Landscapes and Identities 550000

500000

550000

600000 250000

500000

200000

Isle of Wight stone

150000 100000

50000

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

450000

0 450000

20

40

60 km

600000

Figure 9.22  Occurrences of stone from the Isle of Wight in contexts on the English mainland from 1500 bc to ad 1086.

et al. 2012 for earlier discussions of aspects of this evidence). Our focus is necessarily on occurrences of Bembridge and Quarr limestone from the Isle of Wight, since these stone types are most readily (and reliably) recognized. The main points to note from this synthesis are as follows. The earliest example of Isle of Wight stone in an architectural context on the English mainland is the Quarr stone slabs used to revet (and also possibly to cover) a later Bronze Age (fourteenth century bc) funer­ ary cairn at Puncknowle, Dorset (Greenfield  1984). The excavator’s suggestion that the stone was brought to Dorset as boat ballast is difficult to verify. While this incidence seems somewhat removed (in time and in character) from later examples discussed here, it does at least highlight that communities on the Isle of Wight and in east Dorset were closely connected in the later Bronze Age, and that stone (a material that does not usually feature strongly in discussions of the later Bronze Age in southern Britain) was an aspect of these relationships. Occurrences of Isle of Wight Bembridge limestone querns and stone weights in Iron Age contexts on the English mainland from the fifth century bc onwards (Neal 1980: 104–5; Tomalin  1987; Cunliffe  2003: 139) potentially represent the earliest known formal

Table 9.5  Summary of incidences of Isle of Wight stone at excavated sites on the English mainland from 1500 bc to ad 409 including key bibliographic references (see Tomalin et al. 2012 for a summary of Quarr limestone exports during the early medieval period) County Broad date Start date End date Dating details Stone source

Mode Monument context

Specific use

Key references

Puncknowle

Dorset

Bronze Age −1400

−1400

RC date

Quarr

BM

Hants

Iron Age

−470

50

Bembridge

PI

Little Somborne Hants

Iron Age

−300

0

Bembridge

PI

Settlement

Fishbourne

West Sussex

Roman

70

95

Broad occupation period. Associated pottery Construction date

Mound material Stone weights

Greenfield (1984)

Danebury

Round barrow Hillfort

Bembridge

BM

Palace

Fishbourne

West Sussex

Roman

150

325

Associated pottery and coins

Havant

Hants

Roman

150

300

BM Potentially various (Bembridge, ?chalk, ?Upper Greensand, ?London Clay conglomerate, ?Ironstone conglomerate, ?other shelly limestones) Bembridge BM

Roofing tiles

Tomalin (1987: 87)

Sparsholt

Hants

Roman

200

300

Bembridge

BM

Villa complex

Villa complex Villa complex

Tomalin (1987: 87); Cunliffe (2003: 139) Rotary quern Neal (1980: 104-5); Tomalin (1987: 87) Guttering and Tomalin (1975); pillar bases for Cunliffe (1998); the garden Pearson (2006); courtyard Russell 2013 Rudkin (1986: 62–4)

Tomalin (1975); Johnston et al. (2014) (Continued )

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Site name

Site name

County Broad date Start date End date Dating details Stone source

Mode Monument context

Portchester

Hants

Roman

Bembridge

BM

Bitterne, Southampton (Clausentum) Winchester (Venta Belgarum) Dorchester (Durnovaria) Corhampton

Hants

Roman

Bembridge

PI

Hants

Roman

Bembridge

PI

Dorset

Roman

Bembridge

PI

Hants

Roman

250

500

Bembridge

BM

Warblington

Hants

Roman

43

300

Bembridge

BM

285

For Mode, BM = built monument; PI = portable item.

290

Construction date

Broad date of masonry structure Associated pottery

Specific use

Key references

Saxon Shore Defensive wall Fort Roman Altar fortified town Roman Altar civitas

Cunliffe (1975: 20)

Roman civitas Villa complex

Altar ?roofing tiles

Farrar (1972); Tomalin (1987: 87); Tomalin (1975)

Villa complex

Roofing tiles

Tomalin (1987: 87)

Doubleday (1900); Tomalin (1987: 87) Tomalin (1987: 87)

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Table 9.5  (Continued)

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Scale  343 stone exports from the Isle of Wight. In considering this evidence it is important to high­ light that objects made of other stone types (e.g. Lodsworth stone from West Sussex— Peacock  1987,  2013; see also Pearson  2006: 17) are well known to have been transported extensively in the later Iron Age. Overall therefore, it appears that communities in southern Britain were developing a growing appreciation of stone, and were sharing ideas about and also moving certain stone types and items widely, well before the Roman invasion. Most importantly here, stone and stoneworkers from the Isle of Wight were evidently part of this movement. As already mentioned, the use of Isle of Wight Bembridge limestone for guttering and also for column bases around the garden of the late first century ad ‘palatial’ villa at Fishbourne, Sussex (Cunliffe  1998; Pearson  2006: 139; Russell  2013: 163) could relate not only to the fact that Bembridge limestone quarries were potentially visible across the sea from the building site and were handily positioned for transportation (e.g. Pearson 2006: 140): these quarries were also already known of locally as sources of high-quality stone. Previous considerations of the stone used in building the villa at Fishbourne have under­ standably focused on identifying stone sources, on questioning the seemingly illogical use of certain stone types (e.g. oolitic limestone from Gloucester; Pearson 2006: 140), and on considering the network of (elite) social connections the owner may have had (Pearson 2006: 140; Hayward  2009: 108–9). Alongside these insights, we would like to raise some broader potential implications of the occurrence of stone from the Isle of Wight, and from other key stone sources across southern Britain (as well as from Greece, Turkey, Gaul and Italy), in this unique, very early Romano-British monumental building project (see also Cunliffe 1998; Pearson 2006: 137–9; Hayward 2009; Millett 2016: 706). It could be argued that, through their provision of high-quality Bembridge limestone for the construction of Fishbourne villa, certain people on the Isle of Wight were able to mark their endorsement of this seminal building project and of the Roman occupation more broadly. Through their involvement in quarrying, crafting, and shipping stone for Fishbourne villa, Isle of Wight communities would also have come into contact with other local stone-providing commu­ nities and with immigrant stone-working specialists. In this way, the construction of Fishbourne villa, and the use of stone as a building material, can be viewed as mechanisms through which indigenous communities from across southern Britain were able to develop their existing tastes for, and understandings of, building with stone. Through this process, the properties of Bembridge limestone as a building material became known well beyond the Isle of Wight. It is also worth situating these observations in relation to wider arguments regarding the emergence of social identities during the early Roman occupation of Britain. Eckardt sug­ gests that immigrant communities developed ‘hybrid’ forms of material culture which allowed them to foster local relationships (2010: 104; following Lilley  2007). Meanwhile Fincham argues that materials came to acquire a ‘Roman’ identity by removing them from their ‘native’ contexts and situating them in contexts where imperial identities were fore­ grounded (2002: 5). While these arguments are typically raised in discussing portable items, it is certainly possible also to view Fishbourne villa as a form of ‘hybrid’ material culture. It was built in what was essentially an Iron Age oppidum (Millett 2016: 703) and employed stone from extremely diverse (local and exotic) sources. In this way, local ma­ter­ials— including stone from the Isle of Wight—essentially developed a ‘hybrid’ (partly Roman) identity. Through the performance of building a monumental villa, relationships between colonizing and colonized communities over a wide area were also built.

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344  English Landscapes and Identities By the later second to third centuries ad, Isle of Wight Bembridge limestone was employed extensively in villa buildings, in fortifications (e.g. in the late third century ad shore fort at Porchester—Cunliffe 1975), and in urban contexts on the English mainland: it was clearly established widely as a good building material. As well as identifying ‘stone con­ nections’ such as this (Pearson 2006), it is also important to highlight their practical and social corollaries. Even based on the limited amount of scientific work carried out thus far on identifying the geological origins of building stone, it is possible to suggest that stone was on the move at a substantial scale during the later second to third centuries ad, if mainly within fairly restricted areas (Hayward forthcoming). It also seems likely that this significant mobilization of stone over a sustained period grew hand in hand with the devel­ opment of a widespread and nuanced appreciation of stone’s aesthetic and practical proper­ ties at various social levels—not only amongst those who commissioned and designed building projects, but also amongst stone masons, traders, quarry workers, and so on. Certain stone types (e.g. tufa, flint) became valued and used widely across southern Britain in specific structural contexts (e.g. in bath houses, as wall facing, etc.). Other stone types (e.g. Bembridge limestone from the Isle of Wight) were appreciated more locally and came to mark the shared tastes of certain sets of builders and/or villa owners. Additionally groups of stone masons became attached to (and thus specifically known for their as­so­ci­ ation with) certain stone types (see also Hayward forthcoming). The distribution of Isle of Wight stone in early medieval buildings on the English main­ land suggests a different set of social relationships once again. By this time it was Quarr rather than Bembridge limestone from the Isle of Wight that was highly prized as a build­ ing stone. Quarr limestone was quarried more intensively and distributed more widely than earlier stone sources—it occurs in buildings as far afield as Kent (Tomalin et al. 2012). Indeed such was the popularity of Quarr stone in the early medieval period that this source was virtually quarried out by the fourteenth century ad (Tomalin et al. 2012: 292). Finally, while it is not a specific focus of this study, it is very interesting to consider the trajectory of stone exports from the Isle of Wight alongside the flow of other materials over the same period: movements of stone from other geological sources, and of pottery and timber (see also Tomalin 1975; Fulford 2007; Tomalin et al. 2012: 257–61). For instance, it is noteworthy that Upper Purbeck limestone—highly prized and extensively exported from the early Roman period onwards—was first used in substantial quantities on the Isle of Wight (for roofing tiles at Brading) during the late second to third centuries ad, a period when stone exports from the Isle of Wight were flourishing, while those from Purbeck were, overall, in decline (Allen et al. 2007: 182). Tomalin et al. (2012: 260) raised the in­tri­ guing possibility that ceramics found in the intertidal zone of the Isle of Wight provide a useful proxy record for trading more broadly. For instance, they suggest that a large deposit of first-century ad pots on Binstead beach could represent practices associated with the winning of building stone (2012: 259), and that a wider blossoming of pottery imports on the Isle of Wight in the late second century ad could be linked to the growth in exports of Bembridge limestone at this time (2012: 261). Looking at the evidence from intertidal wooden structures on the Isle of Wight considered in detail in Chapter 10, it is also worth recounting that these structures were, perhaps surprisingly, rare during the Roman period. It is certainly possible that the lull in the construction of intertidal wooden structures at this time links to the fact that wood was being channelled in substantial quantities into construction projects elsewhere on the Isle of Wight. The growth of monumental buildings during this period required not only the mobilization of stone on an unprecedented scale, but also that of timber and of many other materials.

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Scale  345

Landscapes in Buildings; Buildings in Landscapes To say that landscapes reside in buildings, as much as buildings exist in the landscape, is not just to reverse general views of scale (buildings are small relative to landscapes), but is also to emphasize the mobile and recomposable aspects of scale and the link between scale and complexity. Particular entities, such as buildings, can be seen as condensations of the relations of landscape through human activity, in this case of quarrying, moving, and building with stone. Each of these activities brings in other materials, creating also chan­ ging human groups. Stone is characterized by its solidity, but we would also emphasize the flowing nature of activities and groups that separate blocks of stones from the mass of bed­ rock and send them off on histories of different lengths, so that there may well be stone quarried in the Roman period that forms part of buildings today. Spatial relations underpin temporal relations of many different lengths and vice versa. Through a detailed con­sid­er­ ation of the active role played by stone in building villa complexes, it was possible here, to move beyond traditional, ‘nested’ spatial visualizations of villa buildings set in landscapes, regions, and, ultimately, nations and empires. Instead, we explored the landscape in villas on the Isle of Wight, and also how these landscapes extended into other landscapes well beyond the Isle of Wight. Although traditional approaches to scale continue to be analytically important, we sug­ gest that it is also vital to explore the idea that multiple temporal and spatial scales reside in all archaeological entities. By attending to the specific material makeup of certain sets of evidence (e.g. the stone used in villa buildings) and by asking where and how far these materials can take us, it is possible to traverse scale in a way that is more sensitive to the multiple and cross–cutting scales at which human lives operate. We also hope to have shown that we cannot think about materials without the human practices to which they are linked and which animate them. We stopped our investigation at the point of asking how far stone from the Isle of Wight extended, but with more scientific work we could easily have taken it further: for instance, by using as a starting point buildings from across southern Britain that include stone from the Isle of Wight, and then asking what other landscapes—buildings, practices and geolo­ gies, and so on—these buildings refer to. There is a dense network of buildings and ma­ter­ ials that move, linking sites at a considerable distance. Materials from far away indicate that buildings do not just sit in the landscapes that surround them, but make what seem to be distant landscapes present. Our focus on scale leads us to think not just about individual buildings, but about Roman rural landscapes more generally. Our emphasis on building practices and labour responds to recent calls to consider Roman landscapes at a human level. We can then think about human communal effort as a series of gradations or, indeed, scales. Villa buildings are monumental structures not only in terms of their durable and performative qualities but also in the sense that they represent considerable communal efforts. Villas were built through the expenditure of human energy and strength, but were also directed by con­sid­ er­able skill in architecture and building. Rather than see architecture as the creation and execution of a plan, we would see it as a process in which the capacities of people and the qualities of materials interact and shape each other. For large buildings, not all material comes from areas nearby, so that part of the skill of building is a knowledge of many land­ scapes and the stone, trees, plasters, and mortars they contain. Furthermore, an emphasis on the stone used in building villas has allowed us to generate an account of the Roman countryside (and of villa landscapes in particular) that counterbalances a previous

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346  English Landscapes and Identities em­phasis on the landscape as a series of resources to be gained through the expenditure of energy, where it is tacitly assumed that resource use will be maximized and expenditure of energy minimized, leading to the further assumption that suitable local materials would be preferentially used. A much more complex set of values is being worked out through the landscapes of stones, where the qualities of different materials were understood and sought after, so that landscapes of stone were large and varied. It could further be the case, that social connections at some distance were drawn on and valued, so that consistent connec­ tions between points at some distance could be identified and elaborated on. Connections to important people, groups, or materials might all have had a role in where stone was procured from and why. Stone did not exist on its own. We will consider wood in the Isle of Wight, although not specifically for buildings (see Chapter 10). The planting and husbanding of particular tree species was an important project which stretched over a generation or more in the case of slow-growing species. The existence of suitable, mature trees might have influenced whether a building project was undertaken, so that complex issues of temporality and tim­ ing come into play. Labourers and builders need feeding and rewarding, so that plant food must be grown and stored, with animals fattened and gathered. We could go on, but much of the landscape comes into play when a major building is initiated and the building itself contains some record of various elements of the landscape, as we hope to have shown.

Discussion Scale has in many ways been fundamental to almost all aspects of the EngLaId project, not just this chapter: this is true not just of the large spatio-temporal entity studied—England over 2,500 years—but also at much smaller scales, such as in the buildings and landscapes of the Isle of Wight. At all scales we can see identity as a process, but this possibly comes across most readily at smaller scales. The overall distinction in England between the west and north and south and east provides a slowly shifting substrate to how people organized their lives, with some degree of continuity over at least the 2,500-year period of interest here. Alternatively, building in stone was something new for domestic architecture in the Romano-British period and was most commonly found south and east of our imaginary line between present-day Torquay and Whitby. The even more detailed processes by which a large building like Brading was put together join the landscape from which materials were taken, multiple forms of human labour that shaped and moved things, to the building skills and aesthetics through which they were put together into a most impressive building. In the post-Romano-British period, the ruins of buildings like Brading were used as quar­ ries, so that Roman stone was incorporated into later building fabrics. Complexity is key to all of this: both in the sense of the ‘complexity models’ presented in this chapter and in the way in which we have embraced the overall complexity (and diffi­ culties) inherent in our data (Chapter 2). If we were to characterize English archaeology in a single phrase over the EngLaId time period (and undoubtedly beyond) it would be in the famous relationship status: ‘it’s complicated’. However, multi-scalar thinking and working methods can provide a route (possibly the only route) into attempting to unravel and understand this complexity. In this chapter, this has been explored in two complementary ways. The first elaborates on how the scale of analysis affects both the answers to questions and the very questions that can be asked of data. This emphasizes the power of computer­ ized analysis of variation over space (and, by extension, time): a multi-scalar/scale-aware

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Scale  347 process that avoids the creation of inevitably homogenizing divisions created across landscape by region-defining archaeologists (see Chapter 3). Maintaining but explicating complexity produces a much fuller and more representative characterization of regional variation across any study area (as also with the emphasis on complex cost surfaces over simple least cost paths followed in Chapter 5). The second focus of this chapter has been on the manner in which a seemingly discrete/ singular entity (here, a Roman villa) operating only on a fairly local scale actually embodies processes and materialities connecting a whole range of spatial and temporal scales. This is true of all archaeological entities: they are fundamentally and inherently multi-scalar. We have shown in the study of Roman villas here how this can be studied and assessed empirically, not just through theoretical extemporizing. This is undoubtedly another way in which all archaeological data can helpfully express its in-built complexity. Ultimately, multi-scalar thinking in archaeology has all too often drifted into a simplistic contrasting of ‘site’ and ‘landscape’ scales of analysis. However, the ‘site’ cannot be detached from the ‘landscape’: sites are built from the landscape and, therefore, sites embody land­ scapes. Furthermore, where a multi-scalar approach has been advocated before in archae­ ology, this has also been largely conducted on an abstract level: as such, these approaches have perhaps previously failed to reach their full potential. We have demonstrated through the two studies in this chapter how embracing the power of multi-scalar thinking and analysis can provide a much fuller and context situated vision of the past. Overall, there is tension between the large-scale patterns we can recognize, such as dif­ ferent ways of life in two parts of Britain and the smaller scale processes which help con­ tribute to that pattern, which are themselves characterized by variety. We will look further at the sheer variability of local patterns in Chapter 10, now focusing on time.

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10

Time Anwen Cooper, Chris Green, and Laura Morley

Time is, unsurprisingly, a vital issue for a project that set out to investigate landscape ­his­tor­ies over two and a half millennia. Indeed EngLaId’s extended timespan is one quality that distinguishes it from other, recent, major synthesis projects (e.g. Bradley et al. 2015; Rippon et al. 2015; Smith et al. 2016; Blair 2018)—in terms of both the overall time period covered and, more importantly perhaps, the project’s endeavour to work across several different traditional time periods and research areas. Clearly at one level, all of the contributions within this volume raise important chronological matters. In this, we aim to address more directly two temporal themes that were central to the initial aims of the EngLaId project (Gosden 2010: 10), and to archaeological considerations of time much more broadly, namely: how we define and understand the balance between continuity and change, and how and when history mattered to people. Further chronological themes arising from the EngLaId project—the complex historical makeup of archaeological information, and the temporal properties of substantial artefact assemblages—are explored in separate publications (Cooper and Green 2016, 2017). At the outset, it is worth revisiting briefly some of the particular ways in which it was hoped that EngLaId might be able to address aspects of landscape chronologies, moving beyond Ingold’s (1993) and Barrett’s (1999a) essays on this topic—now rather old (see also Hicks 2016). Put simply, these papers highlighted some of the complex temporal properties of landscapes including the pervasive idea that landscapes were constantly being produced rather than operating as a static backdrop to life. They also emphasized the extent to which rhythms of human practice are integral to the emergence of landscapes, and raised the importance of approaching landscapes analytically at a human scale—the level at which people engage with and interpret the world. The EngLaId project’s intention to explore the temporal complexities of landscapes, and to think further about past people’s handling of the past, might be seen at one level as an empirically grounded response to these earlier, somewhat abstract ideas. However, EngLaId also set out with some more pragmatic concerns and with the intention of broaching aspects of time that are germane to a project operating well beyond the human scale. Continuity and change are terms that have for many years, and in some cases rather unquestioningly, framed archaeological understandings of long-term temporal patterning (see, for instance, Fokkens 2012; Jervis 2013; Rippon et al. 2015). Consequently it seemed important to unpack how we understand continuity and change—to consider the relationship between these terms, to identify investigative tactics that tend to bring to the fore one or the other, to foreground gaps, disjuncture, and other temporal qualities of emergent landscapes that are not necessarily expressible in terms of continuity and change, and also to remain ‘open to surprise’ in this regard (Gosden  2010). One particular target was to revisit recent discussions about the Roman or early medieval origins of certain broad scale English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 bc to ad 1086. Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Anwen Cooper, Chris Green, and Laura Morley. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870623.003.0010

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Time  349 patterning in English landscapes (Roberts and Wrathmell 2000, 2002; Taylor 2007), and to ask whether these traits (or at least aspects of them such as fields) might have even earlier roots in prehistory with the possibility of long-term continuities (see Chapters 3 and 7 for a detailed examination of this issue). Another was to explore specifically the effects of working concertedly across conventional period (and research tradition) boundaries. We begin our exploration of time by outlining a set of theoretical ideas that has ­influenced at a general level our understanding of the chronological makeup of English landscapes. In short, these approaches emphasize relationships, process, and nonlinear ­historical development. They offer what we find to be helpful working theories about the temporal properties of specific archaeological entities (a pot sherd, a field system, etc.), of broader archaeological assemblages, and of historical trajectories much more widely. In the remainder of the chapter we illuminate specifically the themes of ‘continuity and change’ and ‘past people’s historical understandings’, using two detailed empirical studies, both of which span the period 1500 bc to ad 1086. The first of these studies investigates intertidal wooden structures on the Isle of Wight; the second explores activities associated with early Bronze Age round barrows in the East of England, the Marches, and Humber. Previous discussions about continuity and change, past people’s historical understandings, and other themes of key relevance to archaeological understandings of time are summarized and developed within the relevant sections.

Emphasizing Process, Relationships, and Nonlinear History Over the past 20 years or so a range of approaches have been developed that elicit the complex and emergent character of all worldly phenomena, including human beings and their material/conceptual corollaries (e.g. De Landa  1997; Haraway  2003; Ingold  2007,  2012; Clark  2011; Connolly  2011; Robb and Pauketat  2012; Fowler  2013a,  2013b; Gosden and Malafouris 2015). Accepting that there are important differences in the specific conceptualizations involved (Fowler 2013a: 238; Gosden and Malafouris 2015: 702), several common themes in this work are relevant here. First, such approaches emphasize the distributed nature of the agencies involved in historical happenings. People are only a small (if im­port­ ant) part of emergent worlds that comprise a complex mix of interacting agents, some of whom are more sentient than others. Second, such approaches stress the mutable character of worldly phenomena—nothing is essential or fixed, even if some things are incredibly long lasting. Within this dynamic flow or flux of life, relatively stable, ordered forms do emerge—human beings, field systems, pottery types, mountains, and so on—and people make sense of the world in relation to these forms. Residues or ‘memories’ of earlier phenomena also reside in these tangible forms—much like unexpressed genes reside in our genetic makeup—and contribute to later developments. Third, aspects of the world are defined, at least in part, by their relationships with other phenomena. As a result, changes in archaeological entities (field systems, identities, pottery designs, etc.) can be viewed as shifts in the constituent relationships of these entities rather than shifts in their essential properties. Fourth, historical developments are irregular, unpredictable, and nonlinear in character (see also Althusser 1969; Braudel 1980; van der Leeuw and McGlade 1997). Linear understandings of time are one outcome of recent and contemporary attempts to make sense of worldly phenomena and were almost certainly not relevant for much, if not all, of the period under consideration here (e.g. Feeney  2007). Nevertheless it is important to

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350  English Landscapes and Identities remain open to the possibility of deviations from this course even, for instance, as we create our (typically linear) archaeological narratives (Lucas 2005: 117). This set of ideas has guided loosely how we have sought to highlight temporal com­plex­ities (disjuncture, gaps, irregularities, folds, etc.), to focus on relationships between arch­aeo­logic­al entities, to question the essential character of key archaeological categories, and to foreground the agency of certain materials and vestiges in the emergence of the arch­aeo­logic­al landscapes to be discussed in this chapter. One concept within this broad body of work that we have found particularly helpful analytically is that of multi-temporality (Olivier 2001, 2011). Olivier develops this idea in response to his belief that archaeological understandings of the past were ‘wrong’ since they relied primarily on an illusory (linear, sequential) view of time (2001: 65). Following Bergson (1910; see also Lucas 2005: Chapter 2), Olivier stressed the interpretative importance of enduring archaeological en­tities (substantial monuments, curated objects, and so on) since they disrupt linear conceptions of time. Long-lasting entities resist categorization into traditional chronological schema. Additionally, through their persistence, enduring entities actively expose the extent to which people’s lives at all times comprise accumulations of matter of different origins and of varying durability (ibid. 66). For instance, the survival of Iron Age linear earthworks such that they shaped the layout of a RomanoBritish settlement challenges any sense that Romano-British people occupied a world that was ever uniquely ‘Roman’. Responding to Olivier’s call for archaeologists to foreground the multi-temporal character of the archaeological record and to work beyond ‘pristine’ period boundaries and typochron­olo­gies (2001: 70), resonant archaeological entities play a key role in the studies presented here. It is also important to qualify our engagement with the ideas outlined above. For us, these concepts present a helpful working model for describing broadly the world’s complex temporal makeup. Additionally, they offer some useful starting points for exploring the temporal qualities of archaeological landscapes. We have not necessarily found them helpful, however, in tackling the important practicalities of untangling site or landscape chron­ olo­gies. The capacity of these ideas to inspire engaging empirically grounded interpretations of the past has yet to be proven. Significantly, many discussions about the complex and emergent character of the world were developed in studies of phenomena well beyond archaeology. As Barrett pointed out in criticizing Ingold’s (1993) concept of the ‘taskscape’, it is essential that we remain sensitive to the specific interpretative capacities of arch­aeo­ logic­al evidence (1999a: 22). Like Lucas (2005: 111–12), Sturt (2006), Yarrow (2006) and Fowler (2013a: 251), we suggest that it is important not to lose sight of the value of ana­­ lytic­al categories (e.g. metalwork typologies), methods (e.g. biographical approaches to objects), and structuring principles (e.g. continuity and change) that are the mainstays of archaeological work. These classifications provide useful ways of simplifying the world so that we can comprehend it better, even if in some contexts they seem problematic (see, however, Ingold 2012). Indeed it is also vital (and often more interesting) to ask how, why, and where interpretative groupings arise, both in recent times and in the past (e.g. Strathern 1991; Garrow and Gosden 2012).

Existing Considerations of Continuity and Change Alongside important studies that have sought to identify aspects of continuity across major period transitions (Brück 2000 for the early/middle Bronze Age; Herring 2008; Kamash

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Time  351 et al. 2010 for the Iron Age–Roman period; Rippon et al. 2015; Flemming 2016 for the Roman–early medieval period; and Williamson  1987,  1998 for prehistory through to the medieval period (see, however, Hinton 1997; Williamson 2016)), specific applications of the term continuity, and continuity narratives or renditions of very gradual—generally progressive—change more broadly, have been critiqued on several occasions. In a seminal paper examining the multi-period ritual complex at Yeavering, Northumberland—and responding to Hope-Taylor’s (1977) claim that evidence from this site reflected ritual continuity from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period—Bradley (1987) raises the vital point that significant time periods had elapsed between each of the episodes of ritual activity at this site. Consequently, evidence that later (Roman and early medieval) practices responded directly to traces of earlier (prehistoric) activity on the site represented instead attempts to create a sense of continuity, particularly in times of considerable social change (see also Hobsbawm 1983). Both van der Leeuw and McGlade (1997) and Barrett et al. (2011) argue that archaeologists have tended to overemphasize continuity and that, as a result, linear notions of time have been unhelpfully reproduced. Overall, van der Leeuw and McGlade suggest, continuity narratives fail to capture the messy, unstable, discontinuous, and unpredictable character of historical processes (1997: 4). Meanwhile Lucas (2005) highlights that the term continuity has in some cases been assigned too straightforwardly to archaeological trajectories without considering fully how this quality has been generated. One common theme amongst those who have critiqued accounts that identify continuity is that a close relationship exists between how archaeological evidence is approached and the extent to which continuity and/or change are emphasized in the resulting narratives. Van der Leeuw and McGlade argue that the use of period boundaries tends to suppress difference and anomaly and thus fosters an artificial sense of continuity (1997: 5). Following Holtorf ’s criticism of his own work (2002), Lucas (2005: 58) notes that one problematic outcome of using biographical approaches in archaeology—studies that follow the ‘life histories’ of objects, prehistoric monuments, and so on—is that by considering change in one domain (e.g. the changing associations over extended time periods of funerary monuments, pot sherds, etc.) continuity is imposed artificially on the entity under consideration itself (e.g. the monument), since the latter is assumed to have remained stable in its makeup throughout the study period. More recently Evans et al. (2013b) have suggested that frankly ‘ridiculous’ interpretations of landscape continuity arose from rigid adherence to successive typochronologies (e.g. Grooved Ware, Beaker, Collared Urn pottery phases). Given the significant lengths of time often represented by typochronological groupings, continuity of occupation cannot be assumed from the co-presence of successive groupings in one location. Prompted by such concerns, van der Leeuw and McGlade (1997: 4) and Lucas (2005: 83) raise the importance of considering the relationship between continuity and change, and also the processes that generate such characterizations. Following Ricœur (1984), Lucas (2005: 6) calls for a greater acceptance and exploration of the paradoxes involved in hand­ ling temporal aspects of the archaeological record rather than necessarily seeing them as problematic (see also Fowler  2013a). Several methods or evidence sets have been mentioned which, it is suggested, are better able to elicit the unpredictable, discontinuous, and unstable character of historical change. Van der Leeuw and McGlade use mathematical modelling for such purposes (1997: 16–18). Barrett et al. make the (somewhat obvious) point that further radiocarbon dating programmes are needed in order to capture the subtle­ties of historical sequences for the Iron Age (2011: 2). Evans et al. meanwhile, suggest

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352  English Landscapes and Identities that detailed analysis of objects from buried soils offers significant potential to complicate and nuance simplistic continuity narratives (2013b: 242). Studies that investigate how people in the past created a sense of continuity (and to a lesser extent change) offer another positive contribution to this topic. Overall, practices characterized by commonalities that extend over considerable time periods and in which social memory plays a key role have been contrasted with those that sought actively to reconnect with elements of the past that were almost certainly beyond living memory (see Lucas  2005: 81–5 for a useful summary). More recently, Jervis (2013) has explored the capacity of objects—in particular pottery vessels—to create a sense of continuity across the Saxo-Norman transition in Southampton. He argues that both ‘locals’ and ‘incomers’ employed familiar pottery forms and ways of eating or drinking, in the period immediately after the Norman invasion as a means of negotiating one aspect of this unsettling experience. More challengingly, perhaps, and resonating with the aims of the EngLaId project, Lucas (2005: 83) asks the important question what does continuity mean? We will pursue this question by means of two case studies. The first study, outlined in the upcoming section, ‘Continuity and Change in the Intertidal Zone on the Isle of Wight’, considers the theme of continuity and change using evidence from wooden structures in the intertidal zone of the Isle of Wight (see inset in Chapter 3 for general information on the Isle of Wight). Scientific analysis of these structures has offered detailed insight into the particular practices involved in their construction (Darrah et al. 2012). The primary material from which they are built (timber), their simple forms, and the lack of evidence for repair suggest that they were created and used over relatively brief periods. Additionally these wooden structures are located in a context (next to the sea) that is widely characterized as changeable. Alongside these temporally specific and dynamic creations, however, occupation in the intertidal zone is commonly presented as being broadly similar in essence over extremely long time periods. The complex (and in some ways contradictory) temporal makeup of this evidence set, together with the fact that both intertidal wooden structures and the archaeology of the Isle of Wight more broadly do not feature prominently in existing accounts of the English landscape, seemed to us an interesting context in which to probe the notions of continuity and change. The second study considers past people’s historical understandings (together with several other important temporal themes) drawing on evidence from three diverse and widely spaced English regions—the East of England, Marches, and Humber Estuary case study areas—and focuses in particular on relationships between round barrows and other aspects of landscape (other types of archaeological evidence, topography, etc.). The idea here was to take a seemingly familiar, coherent, and enduring aspect of the English landscape and to use this, firstly, as a basis—following Olivier (2001)—for illuminating the multi-temporal character of landscape, and secondly, as a medium for exploring how and when history mattered to people over our study period. Our consideration of round barrow relationships in three separate geographical areas also allowed us to examine regional variations in these historical trajectories, linking with the theme of regionality that arises throughout this volume.

Continuity and Change in the Intertidal Zone on the Isle of Wight We will contextualize our investigation of continuity and change in the intertidal zone of the Isle of Wight, by summarizing firstly, key points from existing discussions about

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Time  353 continuity and change, and secondly, the broad character of intertidal archaeology in England over the period 1500 bc to ad 1086. The following account of intertidal archaeology on the Isle of Wight considers spe­cif­ic­ al­ly the relationship between continuity and change, building on some of the insights raised in the section, ‘Existing Considerations of Continuity and Change’. In particular it attends to Barrett et al.’s (2011) question ‘How can we define and explain the subtleties of the social landscape when it appears hidden from us archaeologically by outwardly uniform, static, settlement forms and site histories and shared inventories of material culture?’ We liked the idea of approaching the topic of continuity and change using an evidence set—intertidal archaeology—that lies beyond the research areas and time frames in which this theme is usually discussed. For instance, this analysis does not focus on ‘continuity’ at a time that is typically associated with evidence for considerable ‘change’: a period transition (e.g. Rippon et al. 2015), an episode of invasion (e.g. Jervis 2013), or the advent of a distinctive and novel set of practices in the archaeological record (e.g. Brück  2000). Nor does it focus on evidence types that are typically a mainstay of long-term analysis: farming, settlement, or ritual practice (see, for example, ten Harkel et al. 2017). We were also interested in considering the possibility of emphasizing continuity using an evidence set (wooden structures) which occurs in a setting (by the sea) that is, in itself, often characterized as being liminal, dynamic, and changeable (see, for example, Allen et al.  2001; van der Noort  2004; Sassaman 2012: 184; Tomalin et al. 2012; Bell 2013b: 319). It is also worth noting that our approach to investigating continuity and change is necessarily in some ways playful. We felt that in order to better understand the notions of continuity and change it was also im­port­ ant to employ them critically using a relevant evidence set—to see how they worked and what they could (and could not) do analytically.

Intertidal Archaeology in England Research into evidence from the intertidal zone has been a particular feature of wetland archaeology in Britain over the past 25 years or so (Bell 2013a; Murphy 2014) (Figure 10.1). During the late 1980s/early 1990s, a series of groundbreaking landscape-scale fieldwork projects revealed the sometimes exceptional preservation of intertidal archaeology (e.g. Wilkinson and Murphy  1995; Bell et al.  2000; Allen et al.  2001; van de Noort  2004; Waughman 2005). More recently Historic England commissioned a series of rapid coastal zone surveys, contributing to understandings of the broad character and widespread survival of intertidal evidence and of coastal archaeology in England.1 Excavations are now undertaken only rarely, since monitoring and artefact collection at eroding sites has proved to be the most expedient investigative technique (Murphy 2014: 31). Recent overviews of English coastal archaeology (Murphy 2009, 2014) and of intertidal zone archaeology in particular (Bell 2013a) highlight the overall diversity of this evidence set. One reason for this diversity is that parts of the English coastline have shifted significantly over the past 10,000 years (e.g. Sturt et al.  2013). Consequently certain forms of archaeological evidence within current intertidal areas (e.g. Neolithic settlement, Bronze Age field systems) would formerly have been located some distance from the sea. Similarly

1 https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/planning/marine-planning/rczas-reports/

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some former intertidal areas are now inland. We will summarize briefly here evidence for the period 1500 bc to ad 1086 (Table 10.1). The bulk of later prehistoric intertidal evidence comprises small-scale (and probably short-lived) wooden structures—trackways, bridges, and platforms. These are thought mainly to relate to seasonal salt marsh grazing (Murphy  2009: 42; Bell  2013a: 475). Prehistoric structures for trapping marine wildlife (fish, fowl, shellfish) are rare. This, together with the fact that isotope evidence suggests that marine resources were not a significant component of prehistoric diets (Bell 2013b: 326; see also Chapter 6), and the fact that human bone fragments are sometimes found at wooden intertidal structures (e.g. at Shinewater Park, Sussex (Greatorex  2003); Goldcliff, Gwent (Bell  2013b: 299–300); and South Woodham Ferrars, Essex (Murphy 2014: 59–60)), led Murphy to suggest that in certain contexts taboos prohibited the exploitation of marine resources in later prehistory (2014: 73). Traces of later prehistoric occupation in the intertidal zone tend to be ephemeral— probably representing seasonal camps (Bell 2013b: 320–1; Murphy 2014: 60). Several later prehistoric wooden boats have been recovered (e.g. in the Humber Estuary, van de Noort  2004; see also Chapter  5 for a broader discussion of archaeological evidence for

Broad period

Main evidence types Trackways

Main activities represented

Bridges

Platforms

Boats

Salterns

Later prehistory Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Roman

Rare

Rare

Rare

Rare

Early medieval

Relatively rare Relatively rare Relatively rare Rare

Fishing structures

Oyster beds

Sea defences

Rare until the Relatively rare later Iron Age

No

No

Abundant

Yes

No

Rare

Relatively rare Abundant, Yes especially from ad 600 to 900

Rare until the very end of this period

Seasonal salt marsh grazing and occupation, ritual deposits. Salt making. Evidence for this period is, overall, scarce. Fishing on a substantial scale

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Table 10.1  Basic summary of intertidal zone evidence from across England, 1500 bc to ad 1086

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356  English Landscapes and Identities boats over the EngLaId period). There is also occasional evidence for early (later Bronze Age) salt making (e.g. at South Woodham Ferrers, Essex, Murphy 2009: 37). By contrast, salt-making sites dominate intertidal archaeology for the later Iron Age and Roman periods, particularly along the east and south coasts (Bell  2013a: 476; also see Kinory  2012). The scarcity of intertidal evidence more broadly for the Roman period is, however, seen as something of a mystery that requires further investigation (Murphy 2014: 115). Fishing structures of wood and/or stone are widespread in the early medieval period, particularly in the period from ad 600 to 900 (O’Sullivan 2003: 463; Murphy 2009: 47). Some fishing structures are substantial, and there is evidence that they were repaired and used over relatively lengthy periods (O’Sullivan 2003: 452; Murphy 2014: 75). Early medi­ eval intertidal trackways, other wooden structures, and salterns are relatively scarce. Meanwhile evidence for the construction of sea defences occurs only occasionally before the very end of the early medieval period. Regarding the broader temporal qualities of the intertidal area and its archaeology, Bell contrasts the rhythmic character of everyday tidal movements with the dramatic and devastating effects of occasional inundations (2013a: 467–8). He also compares the episodic and opportunistic character of prehistoric activities in such locations with the more sustained attempts to occupy and control intertidal areas from the Roman period onwards (ibid. 478). O’Sullivan (2003: 466) suggests that people living in estuarine landscapes would have worked not only to the daily, monthly, and seasonal cycles of tides but also to the seasonal rhythms of the birds, fish, and flora that shared these landscapes. Additionally Murphy (2014: 7) distinguished the ‘low energy’ (slow) environments of estuaries, mudflats, and salt marshes from the ‘higher energy’ environments of beaches and sand dunes where change can be rapid and substantial. Intertidal evidence from the Isle of Wight both resonates with this broader picture and is unique in its specific composition. Figure 10.2 presents a broad-brush plot of all intertidal archaeology (from across England) recorded within the EngLaId database. Figure 10.3 shows the national distribution of the main evidence types recorded on the Isle of Wight by period from 1500 bc to ad 1086. These include post-built structures, post alignments, fishing structures, trackways, bridges, and salt-making sites. See Chapter 9 for further characterizations of the geographical and archaeological makeup of the Isle of Wight.

Intertidal Wooden Structures on the Isle of Wight Intensive survey and keyhole excavation along a 6-km stretch of the north Isle of Wight coast at Wootton-Quarr (see Figure 10.4) during the early 1990s identified over 150 wooden structures within the intertidal area dating from the Neolithic to post-medieval periods, together with two Romano-British salt-drying kilns (Darrah et al. 2012; Westmore  2012) (Figure 10.4). This study focuses mainly on the dated wooden structures. Following a brief summary of how the intertidal setting and its immediate hinterland developed from 1500 bc to ad 1086, we will outline the broad makeup of the wooden structures from this period before considering some of their temporal qualities. It is worth stating at the outset that given the meticulous character of the original analysis (Darrah et al. 2012), what follows represents primarily a reframing of this evidence for the purposes of considering continuity and change over an extended time frame. Detailed high-resolution geophysical survey and sea level investigation along this coastline suggested that the most dramatic shifts in its development occurred before the main

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Figure 10.2  Intertidal archaeology recorded within the EngLaId database.

period of interest here (Long and Scaife 2012). Areas of damp oak- and hazel-dominated woodland were inundated progressively from c.7000 to 1500 bc, leading to the development of an active coastal salt marsh characterized by a receding coastline and accreting mineral-rich sediments (Long et al. 2012: 133). The pace of sea-level rise slowed after 1500 bc: it is estimated that levels have risen more gradually by c.2 m in the past 2,000 years (Long and Scaife  2012: 127–8). Within the period 1500 bc to ad 1086, pollen evidence offers occasional glimpses of more subtle shifts. For instance, an increase in freshwater pollen taxa was recorded in the Roman period at Quarr, possibly indicating a higher flow of freshwater from a nearby inlet at this time (Scaife 2012b: 37). Some of the most remarkable intertidal wooden structures recorded at Wootton-Quarr (in terms of their rarity) date to the Neolithic and early Bronze Age. These included the remains of a wooden trackway and other, now less coherent, structures. Importantly this emphasizes that the wooden structures considered in detail here were built in a coastal setting that had been occupied for some time and which was already scattered with res­ idues of earlier activities (Loader 2007; Darrah et al. 2012: 192–200). Intertidal wooden structures dating to the period 1500 bc to ad 1086 were varied in their exact forms (Table 10.2). Most identifiable examples, however, were seemingly built

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Figure 10.3  National distribution of intertidal wooden structures (post alignments, fishing structures, landing stages, trackways and bridges) and salt-making sites dating to the period 1500 bc to ad 1086, as known from archaeological sources. 440000

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Time  359 Table 10.2  Intertidal wooden structures recorded in the Wootton-Quarr survey, 1500 bc to ad 1086 Broad period

Overall span of radiocarbondated stakes

Site name (Structure ID)

Middle Bronze Age Late Bronze–Iron Age Late Bronze–Iron Age Middle Iron Age

1530–1220 cal bc 840–400 cal bc

400–190 cal bc

Pelhamfield (P180) Double row of stakes Fishbourne Post alignment (F32/34) Binstead (B77–81) Rectangular post-settings Binstead (B18) Post alignment

Late Iron Age–Roman Late Iron Age–Roman Early medieval

110 cal bc–cal ad Fishbourne (F35) 130 110 cal bc–cal ad Quarr (Q4) Bridge 130 cal ad 540–790 Pelhamfield (P103) Post alignment

Early medieval

cal ad 560–780

Early medieval

cal ad 680–1020

Early medieval Early medieval

840–190 cal bc

Evidence type

Interpretation

Trackway Fishing structure? Fishing structure? Fishing structure? Double row of stakes Trackway

Quarr (Q137, Q14–15, K16, B17) Quarr

Post alignment

cal ad 810–1040

Tidal pond revetment Binstead (B48/110) Fish weir

cal ad 890–1160

Quarr (Q44)

Post alignment

Bridge Fishing structure? Fishing structure? Fishing structure? Fishing structure Fishing structure?

for a fairly narrow range of purposes—for trapping fish (and possibly also oysters and marine birds), and for crossing intertidal channels or allowing access to the foreshore. It is also worth noting that the overall range of structures identified, the practices they pertain to, and their broad temporal distribution (with an emphasis on later prehistoric and early medieval activity) resonate with evidence from intertidal contexts across England (see earl­ ier discussion) and more widely (e.g. Rippon 2000; O’Sullivan 2003). It is certainly possible that there were strong commonalities in the types of activities undertaken in the intertidal zone and the structures these activities gave rise to over very long time periods, along much of the British coastline. Alongside this broad resonance, there are aspects of the evidence from the Isle of Wight that are particular to this setting (e.g. the emphasis on fishing and fowling structures both in prehistory and in the early medieval period). Later prehistoric (later Bronze and Iron Age) structures were identified at four separate locations in the Wootton-Quarr survey area. The earliest of these (1530–1220 cal bc) comprised two parallel double rows of stakes interlaced with fragile hurdling, and aligned northwest–southeast (Figure 10.5a; Darrah et al. 2012: 201). Since the stakes ran at an angle to the adjacent shoreline, the structure was interpreted as the remains of a trackway, built to traverse the soft silty mud filling intertidal channels. At two further locations— Fishbourne and Quarr/Binstead—substantial post alignments of 80 and 28 posts, re­spect­ ive­ly, were identified (Figures 10.5b, 10.5c; ibid. 202). Both alignments matched the modern mean low water mark and were interpreted tentatively as fishing structures (ibid. 207–8; see Murphy  2009: 46; Bell  2013b: 324 for discussions of the difficulties involved in

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360  English Landscapes and Identities (a)

(b)

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Figure 10.5  Prehistoric wooden structures at (a) Pelhamfield, (b) Quarr/Binstead, (c) Fishbourne, and (d) Binstead.

identifying fishing structures that do not conform to standard typologies). Five, broadly contem­por­ary, rectangular post arrangements (c.6–7 m long and 1.5 m wide) identified at Binstead were also interpreted as fishing (or potentially fowling) structures (Figure 10.5d; Darrah et al. 2012: 205). These included both upright and horizontal timbers and were associated with occupation debris—worked flint and large fragments of late Bronze–early Iron Age pottery. Two wooden structures were dated to the late Iron Age–early Roman period—a trackway located close to a contemporary salt-drying kiln (thus possibly above the tideline) at Fishbourne, and a bridge at Quarr (Darrah et al. 2012: 209–10). The latter included a jointed pole, comprising 19 lap joints and a single lap post. Iron oxide-stained nail sockets marked the position of other lap posts. Four further groups of structures were of early medieval date. An early Anglo-Saxon interrupted alignment of 384 stakes stretched over a distance of c.1.25 km between Quarr and Binstead (Figure 10.6; Darrah et al. 2012: 210, 215–16). A shorter post alignment was recorded 700 m to the east of this at Pelhamfield. Like the prehistoric examples, these arrangements followed the modern mean low water mark, and probably represent fishing structures (ibid. 211). Three later early medieval (Saxo-Norman) structures were almost certainly also fishing-related. A substantial L-shaped fish weir— defined by double rows of wattle fencing filled with blocks of high-quality Quarr limestone—was positioned close to the modern low tide mark at Binstead (Figure 10.6; ibid. 219–21). Two more ambiguous (and less substantial) structures were recorded at Quarr. These included a post alignment probably representing a fish weir, and a curious ridge of

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Time  361

0

m

50

Figure 10.6  Early Anglo-Saxon post alignment stretching from Quarr to Binstead.

black gravel revetted with hurdles on the landward side that extended the line of a natural limestone outcrop. The latter is thought to represent an artificial sea pond for trapping fish or for raising oysters. Having summarized the broad makeup of intertidal wooden structures in the WoottonQuarr survey area, we will now explore in more detail their temporal qualities, focusing in particular on the possibilities for, and the effects of, framing this evidence using the notions of continuity and change.

Emphasizing Continuity Clearly the evidence outlined above does not straightforwardly represent continuity of practice over the period 1500 bc to ad 1086. To begin with, there are clear gaps in the overall sequence of activities (e.g. fishing structures are absent in the Roman period). There are variations in the form and also in the scale of trackways and fishing structures made at different times over the study period. Certain practices are also unique to specific time periods (e.g. late Iron Age–early Roman salt making). In considering this evidence it is also vital to highlight that very few of the 150 wooden structures recorded in the WoottonQuarr survey are closely dated. As Tomalin (2012: 236) pointed out, the dated structures represent only ‘a series of isolated episodes’ within a very broad timespan from the Neolithic to the present day (Figure 10.7). Based on this evidence, it is very difficult to determine exactly how continuous, and also how similar, the occupation of the intertidal zone on the Isle of Wight actually was. Even so, as already alluded to, it is certainly possible to emphasize broad elements of continuity both in the range of practices undertaken in the intertidal zone of the WoottonQuarr survey area and in the wooden structures that these gave rise to, over the period from 1500 bc to ad 1086 (Table 10.3). The vast majority of wooden structures relate either to episodes of small-scale fishing (and fowling) or to crossing the intertidal mud or channels either whilst herding or to access the foreshore for fishing and fowling. In this context, the Romano-British salt-making kiln at Quarr and the much more substantial SaxoNorman L-shaped fish weir at Binstead stand out in that they mark clear shifts in the character and/or the scale of activity.

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362  English Landscapes and Identities Summed radiocarbon dates by group 1.2

1

0.8

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–1500

–1250

–1000

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–750

–500

Fishing structure

–250

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0

250 Bridge

500

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1000

1250

Tidal pond revetment

Figure 10.7  Broad tempo of wooden structures recorded in the Wootton-Quarr survey. Table 10.3  Evidence for different activities undertaken in the Wootton-Quarr intertidal survey area, 1500 bc to ad 1086 Activity

Later Bronze Age

Iron Age

Roman

Early medieval

Fishing (and fowling) Crossing intertidal mud/channels Salt making

Yes Yes —

Yes Yes —

— Yes Yes

Yes — —

It is also worth noting that the sense of continuity in the broad makeup of intertidal zone activities that we have highlighted here pervades discussions about intertidal archaeology much more widely (see also O’Sullivan 2003: 451). In describing the very similar character of the fabric used for both Neolithic Grooved Ware and late Bronze–Iron Age shell-tempered pottery recovered in association with intertidal wooden structures on the Isle of Wight, Tomalin comments that ‘despite the great passage of time the possibility remains that the occupants of this coastline were bound by the manner of their subsistence to certain traditions which had never demanded change’ (2012: 237). In summarizing evidence from around the English coast, Murphy notes how the salt marsh-grazing patterns established in the Bronze Age ‘persisted, on some marshes, for millennia’ (2009: 42), as did the basic form of most foreshore fishing structures (ibid. 46).

Considering the Character of Continuity

If we accept that intertidal wooden structures from the Isle of Wight (and also perhaps more broadly) can be viewed at one level as representing broad continuity in practice, it is important to ask what we mean by this. As Riles suggests (albeit in a rather different ana­­ lytic­al context), ‘to understand how things fail to change . . . requires an inquiry into how things are measured—into the nature of what [is taken] as information’ (2001: 95–6). One key factor contributing to the sense of continuity described above is undoubtedly the general level at which these intertidal wooden structures have thus far been considered.

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Time  363 By placing an interpretative emphasis on the structures’ broad physical makeup, immediate settings, periods of construction and use, and direct purpose, an overall picture of sameness or timelessness has been generated. This sense of continuity is arguably compounded by five further factors. First, there is no clear directional change in the makeup of the wooden structures from the Isle of Wight, at least until the very end of the early medieval period (see O’Sullivan 2003 for a summary of shifts in the character of fishing structures specifically over the early medieval period in Britain). Structures from the Isle of Wight vary in form and construction, but very similar configurations can be found in both prehistory and the early medieval period (e.g. fishing structures defined by post alignments). Secondly, although the contours of this intertidal setting have shifted over the study period, these shifts have been relatively slight and slow (a gradually receding shoreline, morphing intertidal channels: Scaife 2012b: 37; Long et al.  2012: 133). This accords with the ‘low energy’ characterization of estuarine, mudflat, and salt marsh environments more broadly (see the earlier section ‘Intertidal Archaeology in England’). Alongside the somewhat sluggish nature of coastal change in the Wootton-Quarr survey area, there exists a broader sense that the sea and its many ‘natural assets’ (fish, wildfowl, etc.; see Rippon 2000: 39–46; Murphy  2009: 36–51 for useful summaries) have been ever-present and available for ‘exploitation’. Since most of the wooden structures discussed here were built directly in response to aspects of this environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that they were broadly similar over very long time periods. Thirdly, even the few stakes from wooden structures that are radiocarbon dated have very broad date ranges, typically spanning several hundred years. This temporal ambiguity contrasts with the ‘quick architecture’ (McFadyen 2006a) of the wooden structures themselves, most of which were probably built and used over short time periods. The temporal qualities of this dataset have therefore proved difficult to grasp archaeologically. Fourthly, there are few clear connections between separate sets of intertidal structures. In discussing intertidal structures from the Severn Estuary, Chadwick and Catchpole observe that those involved in building these structures would have become ‘adept at recognizing the small eroded stumps and fragments of hurdle and basketry from earlier structures in a manner akin to archaeologists’ (2010: 73; see also O’Sullivan 2003: 466). This idea is certainly compelling and it is important also to acknowledge that many wooden structures from the period 1500 bc to ad 1086 will have perished. However, the scarcity of evidence for any clear associations between sets of intertidal wooden structures—positioning relative to one another, the reuse of timbers from earlier structures, and so on—certainly suggests that those who built the intertidal structures at Wootton-Quarr rarely engaged directly with the remains of earlier structures. Lastly, based on the evidence presented thus far, it is very difficult to relate evidence from the intertidal zone at Wootton-Quarr to shifts in the evidence base more broadly on the Isle of Wight over the period 1500 bc to ad 1086. The failure to integrate ‘wetland’ and ‘dryland’ archaeological narratives in England has been raised as a problem at a national level (e.g. Murphy 2014: 121). Bell’s recent (2013b) study of coastal communities along the Severn Estuary for one specific period (the Bronze Age) is an important departure in this respect. More broadly, however, there has been a tendency to link, somewhat abstractly, shifts in the character and intensity of intertidal zone activity (e.g. the greater intensity of activity in the later Bronze Age and early medieval periods) with what might be described as ‘universal prime movers’ (Robb and Pauketat 2012: 9)—agricultural intensification, climatic decline/improvement, and population growth (see, for example, Wilkinson and

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364  English Landscapes and Identities Murphy  1995: 219; Meddens  1996; Darrah et al. 2012: 231; Catchpole et al.  2013: 10; Murphy  2014: 50). The difficulties involved in making concrete connections between ­practices undertaken in the intertidal zone and those undertaken more broadly (and that did change in more tangible ways) arguably adds to the sense that intertidal activities were somewhat detached from broader social change. Indeed O’Sullivan (2003: 465) comments on the ‘peculiarity’ of estuarine landscapes and suggests that early medieval communities working in these environments would themselves have experienced a sense of separation or isolation from the broader social community. Overall, it is certainly possible that life in the intertidal zone was similar at a general level for significant parts of the period under consideration here and over wide areas. However, it is also clear that, taken at face value, intertidal wooden structures (and perhaps intertidal archaeology more broadly) are interpretatively elusive. They are difficult to date, their immediate purpose is often hard to establish, and in many contexts—especially where nearby ‘dryland’ sites have been excavated—it is difficult to establish direct links between practices represented in the intertidal zone and those represented elsewhere. This should perhaps make us wary about accepting straightforwardly the evidence these structures present for broad continuity of practice. More importantly, we suggest, this interpretative elusiveness should encourage us to ask how and whether it is possible to go beyond broad commonalities in the evidence such as those outlined above. As Barrett et al. (2011) highlight, it is vital to seek out the subtleties of the social landscape even in contexts where the modes of practice under examination seem outwardly similar and unchanging.

Emphasizing Change The shift that we will now make from highlighting continuities in the practices represented by intertidal evidence at Wootton-Quarr from 1500 bc to ad 1086 to emphasizing change was facilitated by the detailed scientific work carried out on timbers from these structures (Darrah et al. 2012; Gale 2012). We will also shift our focus from what structures were used for to how they were made. Detailed analyses of the woodland species represented by structural timbers and the woodworking technologies employed (represented primarily by tool marks and the shape of stake points) allowed the same subset of evidence to be used to explore changes in woodland practices and in the circumstances surrounding the construction of wooden structures in the intertidal zone on the Isle of Wight, which links to the broader discussion of woodlands in Chapter 4. Darrah et al. (2012: 192) stress that only a relatively small number of stakes from prehistoric structures were sampled for detailed analysis; hence their conclusions for this period are more cautious. A much larger sample of stakes from the early medieval (and later) structures were scrutinized.

Woodland Practices

Tables 10.4 and 10.5 provide a summary of the woodland species and the timber types analysed in detail from intertidal wooden structures in the Wootton-Quarr survey area over the period 1500 bc to ad 1086. Before this period, hazel was the main species used. In discussing the evidence provided by intertidal wooden structures for woodland management in the Bronze Age as a whole, Darrah et al. commented on the overall variety of woodland species represented (2012: 206–7). If we consider only analysed stakes from the later Bronze–Iron Age structures, however, it appears that after the early Bronze Age, a narrower range of woodland species was employed, with oak forming the main component.

Period

Total no. sampled timbers

Middle Bronze Age 22 Late Bronze Age–Iron Age Roman Early medieval

40

Saxo-Norman

Not specified

1 48

Woodland species—no. and (per cent) Oak

Alder

10 (45 per cent) 24 (60 per cent) 1 23 (47 per cent) —

10 (45 per cent) —

Hazel

1 (5 per cent) 8 (20 per cent) — — 2 ( 40 per cent).

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 02/02/21, SPi

APPENDIX 2

Methodology for Assessing the Morphological Structure of the Forty Field Systems Each field system had to be treated a single ‘finished’ object without internal phasing as evidence for phases was not present in the datasets employed. Clearly this is not ideal, but it was the only possible option. The data collection process worked as follows: A field system was selected according to the criteria outlined in Chapter 7. The boundary lines of the field system were redrawn schematically as a line dataset (as opposed to points or polygons) in ArcGIS, based upon the original NMP data. Generally this was done at a scale of between 1:2,500 and 1:10,000 depending on the size of the field system enclosures in question and lines were kept as simple as possible, with junctions and changes of direction added only as necessary. The resulting lines were then split at their vertices (i.e. the points which define the course of the line) so that each individual segment formed its own geometric object. The length and bearing of each line object was then calculated, on the basis of the 1936 Ordnance Survey projection. As such, true bearings might be out by up to ±3° as location heads east or west of central England: this is an acceptable level of error considering the digitization scale and precision. Bearings were defined between 0° and