Fields of view in landscape archaeology.

Bell, Martin

A growing literature in landscape archaeology reflects moves away from a long-standing preoccupation with excavation of individual sites and confronts much wider issues of multi-period past landscapes, the date and social role of fields and boundaries and the considerable problems of conservation and management which these spatially extensive resources present.

In the vanguard of current prehistoric approaches is the Wessex Linear Ditches Project, a landscape survey linked to strategic small-scale excavations designed to help date ditches, establish their relationships to adjacent artefact scatters and obtain environmental evidence. The survey concerns the military training area of Salisbury Plain which occupies 93,000 acres where the archaeology is much better preserved than in surrounding landscapes of intensive agriculture which is destructive of both earthworks and fragile prehistoric pottery.

Keys to the landscape are provided by the hillforts at Sidbury and Quarley from which linear ditches radiate. Both pottery and radiocarbon dates demonstrate that the ditches are late Bronze Age with specific stretches being refurbished during the Iron Age at the time of the hill-forts, the nature of activity preceding hill-fort construction on these sites remains unclear. Little evidence was found for fields pre-dating the ditches; many were overlain and destroyed by Iron Age and, particularly, Romano-British field systems, which are to be investigated during a separate, successor project. Pottery is considered in an innovative way by Raymond. Styles and fabrics, it is argued, may have encapsulated and helped to consolidate the organized perception of territory (Raymond, p. 87) yet the settlements that defined their territory with ditches still shared a common ceramic tradition with those that did not.

The Foster & Smout volume is the outcome of two originally unconnected seminars held in Scotland, one on soil history and the other on medieval and later fields. The combination, in 12 contributions, provides a useful, well-priced publication which highlights the benefits of linking an ethnohistorical dimension pioneered by Fenton with new analytical approaches to field remains and soils. Chapters include a rethink of Highland field systems (by Dodgshon) and evidence for humanly-created plaggen soils (by Davidson & Simpson) and much evidence of post-Medieval manuring, although without much discussion of the extent to which these practices may go back to earlier periods and their relevance to topics of soil exhaustion and erosion. Catt's essay provides relevant evidence from the world's longest-running scientific experiments at Rothamstead, where sustained yields have been recorded on manured and unmanured plots since 1843. Though achievable on good Rothamstead soils, the story was different on sandy soils of the Woburn experiment where acidification has led to declining yields. It would have been interesting to have some observations, however speculative, on how these experimental results may relate to the Scottish soils considered in other chapters.

Aston & Lewis' medieval Wessex volume is a series of 14 closely linked complementary essays, an excellent introduction attractively produced in hardback by Oxbow. The area straddles the interface between Anglo-Saxon and Celtic / sub-Roman areas, so continuity and change are recurrent themes in the early chapters which consider these problems in terms of burials, communication routes and linear earthworks. What was happening in the ordinary rural farmstead remains elusive, with some evidence of changing crop types but rather little exploration of the potential of palaeoenvironmental evidence to provide an alternative and independent perspective on continuity and change (Bell 1989). Later chapters include agriculture and rural settlement, settlement and villages in Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset and an excellent essay (by Rippon) on reclamation of the Somerset clay Levels.

The picture of landscape which we get from these volumes is somewhat dominated by the map and air photograph, without much sense of how people actually moved through the landscape and articulated its various components, which tend to be described in separate essays on particular categories of field remains. Communication routes may help to provide the key. They govern the way in which people habitually move through landscape and thus how it is encountered and perceived by successive generations (Ingold 1993). Thus networks of social relationships are expressed which link different spatial dimensions but also have significant time depth. Arguably communications should have a central integrating role in landscape archaeology but that will only be achieved if the field study of roads and tracks can be lifted beyond antiquarianism to rigorous analytical investigation. There are signs of potential, particularly in the Aston & Lewis volume, where communications are touched on by the contributions of Eagles and Costen who acknowledge their role in expressing social relationships. Given the emphasis of the Linear Ditches Project on the social role of the earthworks and confusion by earlier generations of their boundary or communication roles, it is surprising that trackways do not receive greater attention by Bradley et al. They are marked on some figures, e.g. 22, 24, 33, and the picture is no doubt a very fragmentary one, but routes must surely contain important clues as to how this remarkable landscape actually worked.

The capacity of environmental evidence to provide another integrating theme is shown by Mercer & Tipping's large-scale landscape survey of the Cheviot Hills (in Foster & Smout), where pollen and valley sediments demonstrate two periods of major prehistoric landscape instability. One, in the early Bronze Age, is tentatively associated with climatic change, although that does seem questionable since the other, around 400-200 BC, very clearly relates to a major period of deforestation, seen not just in this study area, but widely across northern England and Southern Scotland. This dramatic period of change still remains to be evaluated in terms of its relationship to changes, or lack of them, in material culture or settlement patterns. In the Cheviots it is argued that the cord rig and extensive terracing, previously thought to be early medieval, are actually associated with successive settlement types in the 1st millennium BC. This highlights the considerable benefits of large-scale survey in identifying frequently recurring relationships.

Detailed analysis of biological evidence in these volumes is limited to Entwistle's work on the molluscs from the Linear Ditches which provide a range of buried soil, ditch fill and colluvial contexts in a topographic transect. A spatial dimension helps to overcome the inherently local nature of mollusc evidence by demonstrating that both hill-top and valley sites were open, mainly grassland, at the time of ditch construction. More detailed and subtle conclusions may be inhibited by a tendency to base interpretations on other archaeological assemblages (with inherent dangers of circular reasoning) rather than on either analogy from present-day ecology or population structure (Evans 1991).

Other essays deal with environment much more from a historical perspective, such as Bond (in Aston & Lewis) who gives a fascinating survey of forests, parks and warrens. Some assumptions in other chapters about past environments certainly need critical examination. Hase's maps of early church locations (in Aston & Lewis: figures 3.4-3.11) mark great tracts of woodland without explanation of their source or discussion of the possible complexities of ancient woodland identification (Rackham 1980). The possibility of regeneration and woodland development at various dates needs consideration, as highlighted by recent work at Sidlings Copse, Oxfordshire where a wood with plant indicators suggesting its ancient origin has been shown by pollen analysis to be the result of regeneration within the last 1000 years (Day 1993).

Archaeology beyond the confines of the individual settlement or funerary site raises major conservation issues, which existing legislation and management practices in Britain have difficulty accommodating. These books address the problem in relation to field-systems and rural settlement in Scotland, the ridge-and-furrow of the English Midlands and late Bronze Age land-allotment boundaries in Wessex. Hall's booklet and his contribution to Foster & Smout highlight the importance of open fields and ridge-and-furrow which encapsulate the agricultural system of a millennium from around AD 700 to about the 17th century. For the surviving traces a conservation strategy is urgent, destruction is currently occurring at 3% per annum and most, or all, of the significant examples in Northamptonshire are expected to he lost in five to ten years. Hall provides an excellent guide to issues of terminology, historical sources and the interpretation of field evidence. In Northamptonshire, a conservation strategy is advocated which particularly favours those parishes with good map and historical records, but this depends on local circumstances. A pilot study in Scotland (Foster & Hingley in Foster & Smout) conversely suggest that there historical sources are not the key to conservation policy; they advocate an approach based mainly on the quality of the field evidence.

Non-statutary protection offers generally inadequate safeguards for field systems and past landscapes, although in Scotland fields are being protected in partnership with farmers in Environmentally Sensitive Areas. Protection is obviously much more difficult to achieve in areas where there are strongly competing land-use pressures, such as the English Midlands or the Wessex military ranges. The latter survey is particularly coy about the extent of damage currently being inflicted by military operations which are very apparent on some photographs. Given the importance of the remains of ancient fields to archaeology, the teaching of history and the maintenance of landscape diversity, it is to be hoped that the greater academic interest and understanding represented by these volumes will help to encourage more effective conservation.

References

BELL. M.G. 1989. Environmental archaeology as an index of continuity and change in the Medieval landscape, in M. Aston. D. Austin & C. Dyer (ed.), The rural settlements of medieval England: 269-86. Oxford: Blackwell.

DAY, S.P. 1993. Woodland origin and ancient woodland indicators: a case study from Sidlings Copse, Oxfordshire, UK, The Holocene 3: 45-53.

EVANS, J.G. 1991. An approach to the interpretation of dry-ground and wet-ground molluscan taxocenes from central-southern England, in D. Harris & K. Thomas (ed.), Modelling ecological change: perspectives from neoecology, palaeoecology and environmental archaeology: 75-89. London: Institute of Archaeology.

INGOLD, T. 1993. The temporality of the landscape, World Archaeology 25(2): 152-74.

RACKHAM, O. 1980. Ancient woodland. London: Arnold.