Download or read book Bronze Age Landscapes written by Joanna Bruck and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of essays, which exemplify the range and diversity of work currently being undertaken on the regional landscapes of the British Bronze Age and the progress which has been made in both theoretical and interpretive debate. Together these papers reflect the vibrancy of current research and promote a closer marriage of landscape, site and material culture studies. CONTENTS: Settlement in Scotland during the Second Millennium BC (P Ashmore) ; Place and Space in the Cambridgeshire Bronze Age (T Malim) ; Exploring Bronze Age Norfolk: Longham and Bittering (T Ashwin) ; Ritual Activity at the Foot of the Gog Magog Hills, Cambridge (M Hinman) ; The Bronze Age of Manchester Airport: Runway 2 (D Garner) ; Place and Memory in Bronze Age Wessex (D Field) ; Bronze Age Agricultural Intensification in the Thames Valley and Estuary (D Yates) ; The 'Community of Builders': The Barleycroft Post Alignments (C Evans and M Knight) ; 'Breaking New Ground': Land Tenure and Fieldstone Clearance during the Bronze Age (R Johnston) ; Tenure and Territoriality in the British Bronze Age: A Question of Varying Social and Geographical Scales (W Kitchen) ; A Later Bronze Age Landscape on the Avon Levels: Settlement: Settlement, Shelters and Saltmarsh at Cabot Park (M Locock) ; Reading Business Park: The Results of Phases 1 and 2 (A Brossler) ; Leaving Home in the Cornish Bronze Age: Insights into Planned Abandonment Processes (J A Nowakowski) ; Body Metaphors and Technologies of Transformation in the English Middle and Late Bronze Age (J Bruck) ; A Time and a Place for Bronze (M Barber) ; Firstly, Let's get Rid of Ritual (C Pendleton) ; Mining and Prospection for Metals in Early Bronze Age Britain - Making Claims within the Archaeological Landscape (S Timberlake) ; The Times, They are a Changin': Experiencing Continuity and Development in the Early Bronze Age Funerary Rituals of Southwestern Britain (M A Owoc) ; Round Barrows in a Circular World: Monumentalising Landscapes in Early Bronze Age Wessex (A Watson) ; Enduring Images? Image Production and Memory in Earlier Bronze Age Scotland (A Jones) ; Afterward: Back to the Bronze Age

Download or read book The Fields of Britannia written by Stephen Rippon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been recognized that the landscape of Britain is one of the 'richest historical records we possess', but just how old is it? The Fields of Britannia is the first book to explore how far the countryside of Roman Britain has survived in use through to the present day, shaping the character of our modern countryside. Commencing with a discussion of the differing views of what happened to the landscape at the end of Roman Britain, the volume then brings together the results from hundreds of archaeological excavations and palaeoenvironmental investigations in order to map patterns of land-use across Roman and early medieval Britain. In compiling such extensive data, the volume is able to reconstruct regional variations in Romano-British and early medieval land-use using pollen, animal bones, and charred cereal grains to demonstrate that agricultural regimes varied considerably and were heavily influenced by underlying geology. We are shown that, in the fifth and sixth centuries, there was a shift away from intensive farming but very few areas of the landscape were abandoned completely. What is revealed is a surprising degree of continuity: the Roman Empire may have collapsed, but British farmers carried on regardless, and the result is that now, across large parts of Britain, many of these Roman field systems are still in use.

Download or read book A Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscape in Northamptonshire written by Jan Harding and published by English Heritage. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Raunds Area Project investigated more than 20 Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in the Nene Valley. From c 5000 BC to the early 1st millennium cal BC a succession of ritual mounds and burial mounds were built as settlement along the valley sides increased and woodland was cleared. Starting as a regular stopping-place for flint knapping and domestic tasks, first the Long Mound, and then Long Barrow, the north part of the Turf Mound and the Avenue were built in the 5th millennium BC. With the addition of the Long Enclosure, the Causewayed Ring Ditch, and the Southern Enclosure, there was a chain of five or six diverse monuments stretched along the river bank by c 3000 cal BC. Later, a timber platform, the Riverside Structure, was built and the focus of ceremonial activity shifted to the Cotton 'Henge', two concentric ditches on the occupied valley side. From c 2200 cal BC monument building accelerated and included the Segmented Ditch Circle and at least 20 round barrows, almost all containing burials, at first inhumations, then cremations down to c 1000 cal BC, by which time two overlapping systems of paddocks and droveways had been laid out. Finally, the terrace began to be settled when these had gone out of use, in the early 1st millennium cal BC.

Download or read book Transforming Townscapes written by Neil Christie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This monograph details the results of a major archaeological project based on and around the historic town of Wallingford in south Oxfordshire. Founded in the late Saxon period as a key defensive and administrative focus next to the Thames, the settlement also contained a substantial royal castle established shortly after the Norman Conquest. The volume traces the pre-town archaeology of Wallingford and then analyses the town's physical and social evolution, assessing defences, churches, housing, markets, material culture, coinage, communications and hinterland. Core questions running through the volume relate to the roles of the River Thames and of royal power in shaping Wallingford's fortunes and identity and in explaining the town's severe and early decline."

Download or read book Peasant Perceptions of Landscape written by Stephen Mileson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants' spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

Download or read book Anglo Saxon Graves and Grave Goods of the 6th and 7th Centuries AD written by Alex Bayliss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 1121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Early Anglo-Saxon Period is characterized archaeologically by the regular deposition of artefacts in human graves in England. The scope for dating these objects and graves has long been studied, but it has typically proved easier to identify and enumerate the chronological problems of the material than to solve them. Prior to the work of the project reported on here, therefore, there was no comprehensive chronological framework for Early Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, and the level of detail and precision in dates that could be suggested was low. The evidence has now been studied afresh using a co-ordinated suite of dating techniques, both traditional and new: a review and revision of artefact-typology; seriation of grave-assemblages using correspondence analysis; high-precision radiocarbon dating of selected bone samples; and Bayesian modelling using the results of all of these. These were focussed primarily on the later part of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period, starting in the 6th century. This research has produced a new chronological framework, consisting of sequences of phases that are separate for male and female burials but nevertheless mutually consistent and coordinated. These will allow archaeologists to assign grave-assemblages and a wide range of individual artefact-types to defined phases that are associated with calendrical date-ranges whose limits are expressed to a specific degree of probability. Important unresolved issues include a precise adjustment for dietary effects on radiocarbon dates from human skeletal material. Nonetheless the results of this project suggest the cessation of regular burial with grave goods in Anglo-Saxon England two decades or even more before the end of the seventh century. That creates a limited but important discrepancy with the current numismatic chronology of early English sceattas. The wider implications of the results for key topics in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and social, economic and religious history are discussed to conclude the report.

Download or read book Imperial College Sports Grounds and RMC Land Harlington written by Andrew B. Powell and published by Wessex Archaeology. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the results from the excavations at the former Imperial College Sports Ground, RMC Land and Land East of Wall Garden Farm, near the villages of Harlington and Sipson in the London Borough of Hillingdon. The excavations revealed parts of an archaeological landscape with a rich history of development from before 4000 BC to the post-medieval period. The opportunity to investigate two large areas of this landscape provided evidence for possible settlement continuity and shift over a period of 6000 years. Early to Middle Neolithic occupation was represented by a rectangular ditched mortuary enclosure and a large spread of pits, many containing deposits of Peterborough Ware pottery, flint and charred plant remains. A possible dispersed monument complex of three hengiform enclosures was associated with the rare remains of cremation burials radiocarbon dated to the Middle Neolithic. Limited Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age activity was identified, which is in stark contrast to the Middle to Late Bronze Age when a formalized landscape of extensive rectangular fields, enclosures, wells and pits was established. This major reorganized land division can be traced across the two sites and over large parts of the adjacent Heathrow terraces. A small, Iron Age and Romano-British nucleated settlement was constructed, with associated enclosures flanking a trackway. There were wayside inhumations, cremation burials and middens and more widely dispersed wells and quarries. Two possible sunken-featured buildings of early Saxon date were found. There was also a small cemetery. Subsequently, a middle Saxon and medieval field system of small enclosures and wells was established.

Download or read book English Landscapes and Identities written by Chris Gosden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the Norman Conquest of 1066, England saw periods of profound change that transformed the landscape and the identities of those who occupied it. The Bronze and Iron Ages saw the introduction of now-familiar animals and plants, such as sheep, horses, wheat, and oats, as well as new forms of production and exchange and the first laying out of substantial fields and trackways, which continued into the earliest Romano-British landscapes. The Anglo-Saxon period saw the creation of new villages based around church and manor, with ridge and furrow cultivation strips still preserved today. The basis for this volume is The English Landscapes and Identities project, which synthesised all the major available sources of information on English archaeology to examine this crucial period of landscape history from the middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC) to the Domesday survey (c. 1086 AD). It looks at the nature of archaeological work undertaken across England to assess its strengths and weaknesses when writing long-term histories. Among many other topics it examines the interaction of ecology and human action in shaping the landscape; issues of movement across the landscape in various periods; changing forms of food over time; an understanding of spatial scale; and questions of enclosing and naming the landscape, culminating in a discussion of the links between landscape and identity. The result is the first comprehensive account of the English landscape over a crucial 2500-year period. It also offers a celebration of many centuries of archaeological work, especially the intensive large-scale investigations that have taken place since the 1960s and transformed our understanding of England's past.

Download or read book Confronting Scale in Archaeology written by Gary Lock and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-11-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without realizing, most archaeologists shift within a scale of interpretation of material culture. Material data is interpreted from the scale of an individual in a specific place and time, then shifted to the complex dynamics of cultural groups spread over time and place. This book discusses the cultural, social and spatial aspects of scale and its impact on archaeology, and shows how an improved awareness of scale offers new and exciting interpretations.

Download or read book Lives in Land Mucking excavations written by Christopher Evans and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The excavations led by Margaret and Tom Jones on the Thames gravel terraces at Mucking, Essex, undertaken between 1965 and 1978 are legendary. The largest area excavation ever undertaken in the British Isles, involving around 5000 participants, recorded around 44,000 archaeological features dating from the Beaker to Anglo-Saxon periods and recovered something in the region of 1.7 million finds of Mesolithic to post-medieval date. While various publications have emerged over the intervening years, the death of both directors, insufficient funding, many organizational complications and the sheer volume of material evidence have severely delayed full publication of this extraordinary palimpsest landscape. Lives in Land is the first of two major volumes which bring together all the evidence from Mucking, presenting both the detail of many important structures and assemblages and a comprehensive synthesis of landscape development through the ages: settlement histories, changing land-use, death and burial, industry and craft activities. The long time-gap since completion of the excavations has allowed the authors the unprecedented opportunity to stand back from the density of site data and place the vast sum of Mucking evidence in the wider context of the archaeology of southern England throughout the major periods of occupation and activity. Lives in Land begins with a thorough evaluation of the methods, philosophy and archival status of the Mucking project against the organizational and funding background of its time, and discusses its fascinating and complex history through a period of fundamental change in archaeological practice, legislation, finance, research priorities and theoretical paradigms in British Archaeology. Subsequent chapters deal with the prehistoric landscape, each focusing on the major themes that emerge by major period from analysis and synthesis of the data. The authors draw on archival material including site notebooks and personal accounts from key participants to provide a detailed but lively account of this iconic landscape investigation.

Download or read book Is There a British Chalcolithic written by Michael J. Allen and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2012-06-09 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chalcolithic, the phase in prehistory when the important technical development of adding tin to copper to produce bronze had not yet taken place, is not a term generally used by British prehistorians and whether there is even a definable phase is debated. Is There a British Chalcolithic? brings together many leading authorities in 20 papers that address this question. Papers are grouped under several headings. 'Definitions, Issues, and Debate' considers whether appropriate criteria apply that define a distinctive period (c. 2450 - 2150 cal BC) in cultural, social, and temporal terms with particular emphasis on the role and status of metal artifacts and Beaker pottery. 'Continental Perspectives' addresses various aspects of comparative regions of Europe where a Chalcolithic has been defined. 'Around Britain and Ireland' presents a series of large-scale regional case studies where authors argue for and against the adoption of the term. The final section, 'Economy, Landscapes, and Monuments', looks at aspects of economy, land-use and burial tradition and provides a detailed consideration of the Stonehenge and Avebury landscapes during the period in question. The volume contains much detailed information on sites and artifacts, and comprehensive radiocarbon datasets that will be invaluable to scholars and students studying this enigmatic but pivotal episode of British Prehistory. Additional information originally found on included CD ROM can be downloaded here: https://books.casematepublishers.com/Is_There_a_British_Chalcolithic.pdf

Download or read book A Biography of Power Research and Excavations at the Iron Age oppidum of Bagendon Gloucestershire 1979 2017 written by Tom Moore and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the changing nature of power and identity from the Iron Age to the Roman period in Britain. It provides fresh insights into the origins and nature of one of the lesser-known, but perhaps most significant, Late Iron Age 'oppida' in Britain: Bagendon in Gloucestershire.

Download or read book Prehistoric Britain written by Ann Woodward and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pottery has become one of the major categories of artifact that is used in reconstructing the lives and habits of prehistoric people. In these 14 papers, members of the Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group discuss the many ways in which pottery is used to study chronology, behavioral changes, interrelationships between people and between people and their environment, technology and production, exchange, settlement organization, cultural expression, style and symbolism.

Download or read book Burial and Memorial in Late Antiquity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-11-20 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burial and Memorial explores funerary and commemorative archaeology A.D. 284-650, across the late antique world. This second volume includes papers exploring all aspects of funerary archaeology, from scientific samples in graves, to grave goods and tomb robbing and a bibliographic essay. It brings into focus neglected regions not usually considered by funerary archaeologists in NW Europe, such as the Levant, where burial archaeology is rich in grave good, to Sicily and Sardinia, where post-mortem offerings and burial manipulations are well-attested. We also hear from excavations in Britain, from Canterbury and London, and see astonishing fruits from the application of science to graves recently excavated in Trier.

Download or read book Beacons in the Landscape written by Ian Brown and published by Windgather Press. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all Britain's great archaeological monuments the Iron Age hillforts have arguably had the most profound impact on the landscape, if only because there are so many; yet we know very little about them. Were they recognised as being something special by those who created them or is the 'hillfort' purely an archaeologists' 'construct'? How were they constructed, who lived in them and to what uses were they put? This book, which is richly illustrated with photography of sites throughout England and Wales, addresses these and many other questions. After discussing the difficult issue of definition and the great excavations on which our knowledge is based, Ian Brown investigates in turn hillforts' origins, their architecture, and the role they played in Iron Age society. He also discusses the latest theories about their location, social significance and chronology. The book provides a valuable synthesis of the rich vein of research carried out in Britain on hillforts over the last thirty years. Hillforts' great variability poses many problems, and this book should help guide both the specialist and non-specialist alike though the complex literature. Furthermore, it has an important conservation objective. Land use in the modern era has not been kind to these monuments, with a significant number either disfigured or lost. Public consciousness of their importance needs raising if their management is to be improved and their future assured.

Download or read book Early Anglo Saxon cemeteries written by Duncan Sayer and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY licence. Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are known for their grave goods, but this abundance obscures their interest as the creations of pluralistic, multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian cemeteries, using a multi-dimensional methodology to move beyond artefacts. It offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistically focused perspective. The physical communication of digging a grave and laying out a body was used to negotiate the arrangement of a cemetery and to construct family and community stories. This approach foregrounds community, because people used and reused cemetery spaces to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased, based on their own attitudes, lifeways and live experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social archaeology.

Download or read book Prehistoric Britain written by Timothy Darvill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-07-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prehistoric Britain, now in its second edition, examines the development of human societies in Britain from earliest times to the Roman conquest of AD 43, as revealed by archaeological evidence. Special attention is given to six themes which are traced through prehistory: subsistence, technology, ritual, trade, society, and population.