English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086 by Chris Gosden, Chris Green, and the EngLaId Team

Abstract

Reviewed by: English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086by Chris Gosden, Chris Green, and the EngLaId Team Hans Renes English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086. Chris Gosden, Chris Green, and the EngLaId Team. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 496, maps, tables, charts, appendices, bibliography, index. $115.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-1988-7062-0. The study of the histories of English man-made landscapes has come a long way since the days of O. G. S. Crawford and William G. Hoskins. Following their leads, the interdisciplinary study of landscape history and archaeology (LHA) by archaeologists, historians, geographers, ecologists, and others developed into a popular field and became a discipline on its own with seminars, journals, and a constant flow of books [End Page 105]that appeal to the academic as well as the general reader. The huge growth of available data from commercial development–led archaeology and by the Portable Antiquities Scheme asked for systematic study on a regional and even international scale, facilitated by techniques such as geographical information systems. To cope with such new challenges, the large-scale, interdisciplinary, and long-term research project English Landscapes and Identities (acronym EngLaId) was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from 2011 to 2016. The project covered an extraordinary long period, from the Middle Bronze Age until the Domesday Book, studied by a team of archaeologists with specializations in different time periods. It is described as a big data project, as it attempted "to synthesize all the major data sets from English archaeology within a digital environment" (v). Within the discipline of archaeology I know of no other project in which big data were used on this scale. Five years after the project was finished, the present, impressive book was published. The first introductory chapter provides the backgrounds of the project, a short but clear historiography, and the main terminology. The other ten chapters are grouped into three main themes: data, broader patterns, and variability. In the first part, the creation of archaeological data is explored. It is fascinating to see the extension of the toolbox during the last century, with air photographs, new dating methods, palynology, statistics, and so on. In chapter 2 the availability and in chapter 3 the dispersion of archaeological data is analyzed. England has long been divided into a highland (gradually the northwestern half) and a lowland zone. The lowland zone has during most of the last millennia been more densely populated and more intensively used, but—as modern development is concentrated in these regions—there is also more development-led archaeology and hence more data. During the two centuries before the Domesday Book, part of the lowland zone, running from south to northeast England, developed to become the grain basket of medieval England, characterized by open fields and villages. It brought a number of authors, among them the ecologist Oliver Rackham, the geographer Brian Roberts, and the archaeologists Stuart Wrathmell and Stephen Rippon, to divide England into three major landscape regions (the mountainous Northwest, the medieval agricultural core of the Central Region, and the densely populated Southeast). Also for the EngLaId-project, these three major [End Page 106]regions were an important starting point. The sample regions and transects for which part of the data are collected cover both the twofold and the threefold division. In the second part, the researchers look for broader patterns, in chapters focusing on ecology, movement, cycles, field systems, and naming. Chapter 4 analyzes the long-term interactions between society and ecology. The text warns against determinism, which is traced within my own discipline of geography (108), yet there are of course complex relations between human society and the physical environment, and they are influenced by changes in both as well as in their interrelations. Within this theme, perhaps more could have been said about the changing demands and perceptions of the physical environment by different and dynamic societies. Later in the same chapter the important question of the chronology of forested and open landscapes is raised, partly by looking at the history of erosion and sedimentation. Although regional variation is huge, the authors conclude...