Abstract
Land divisions are ubiquitous features of the British countryside. Field boundaries, enclosures, pit alignments, and other forms of land division have been used to shape and delineate the landscape over thousands of years. While these divisions are critical for understanding economies and subsistence, the organization of tenure and property, social structure and identity, and their histories of use have remained unclear. Here, the authors present the first robust, Bayesian statistical chronology for land division over three millennia within a study region in England. Their innovative approach to investigating long-term change demonstrates the unexpected scale of later ‘prehistoric’ land demarcation, which may correspond to the beginnings of increasing social hierarchy.
Highlights
From later prehistory to the present day, land divisions are ubiquitous features of the British countryside, providing evidence for cultivation, animal husbandry, political power, and social identity
Land division began in 1815–1490 cal BC (95% probability; Start_Start_Dividing_the_Land; Figure 5), but the timescale of the beginnings of land division was very drawn out, spanning 785–1280 years (95% probability; distribution not shown)
Aggregated field systems were the first class of land division to appear in the second quarter of the second millennium cal BC, followed by features identified by excavators as individual ditches and enclosures
Summary
From later prehistory to the present day, land divisions (field systems, boundaries, trackways, and enclosures) are ubiquitous features of the British countryside, providing evidence for cultivation, animal husbandry, political power, and social identity. Even the highest and most remote landscapes have been divided into parcels, while lower-lying regions are shaped by deep histories of enclosure and agricultural transformation (Figure 1). This makes England, and Britain and Ireland more broadly, an important region in which to observe and understand the relations between land enclosure, agriculture, and society from a long-term perspective. The time-depth of these preserved land divisions has been long recognized. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians, such as William Stukeley and Richard Colt Hoare, first identified later ‘prehistoric’ field systems
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