English Landscapes

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeOnline Review ArticleEnglish Landscapes English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086, by Chris Gosden, Chris Green, Anwen Cooper, Miranda Creswell, Victoria Donnelly, Tyler Franconi, Roger Glyde, Zena Kamash, Sarah Mallet, Laura Morley, Daniel Stansbie, and Letty ten Harkel. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. Pp. 496. $115. ISBN 9780198870623 (cloth). The Shaping of the English Landscape: An Atlas of Archaeology from the Bronze Age to Domesday Book, by Chris Green and Miranda Cresswell (Oxford University School of Archaeology Monographs 82). Oxford: Archaeopress 2021. Pp. 134. £35. ISBN 9781803270609 (paper).Matthew H. JohnsonMatthew H. JohnsonDepartment of Anthropology Northwestern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThese two books represent key publications of the English Landscapes and Identities project (shortened in the team’s publications to “EngLaId”). There is also an associated website which presents “a simplified version of the main project database.” The project ran from 2011 to 2016 and was directed by Chris Gosden; it was funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant. The stated aim was to examine “the long-term history of the English landscape from 1500BC to AD1086” (v). Its temporal scope, then, starts with the abandonment of the great henge monuments of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, takes in the settlement shifts and establishment and expansion of field systems of later British prehistory, moves through the periods of Roman occupation and “Anglo-Saxon” or early medieval settlement, and ends at the landmark date of the Domesday survey of ca. 1086. The project took all digitally available datasets from across England and integrated more than 900,000 records into a GIS framework. As such, the team is correct to claim that it is the most ambitious research project ever to have taken place in English archaeology. It represents a key milestone in the study of later prehistoric and early historic Britain.The first book, English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086 (shortened to Landscapes below), is cowritten by 12 authors, presenting the theoretical foundations, methods, findings, and conclusions of the project. Landscapes is, by necessity, a rich and complex piece of work, theoretically deep and full of detailed arguments. The second, The Shaping of the English Landscape: An Atlas of Archaeology from the Bronze Age to Domesday Book (Shaping below), is in a much slimmer but larger format. The latter book presents a series of maps and accompanying discussions, interleaved with artwork by Miranda Cresswell inspired by the project. My recommendation to the reader is to start with Shaping as an introductory overview before moving on to the more in-depth Landscapes. Among its many qualities, Shaping is centered around maps and artworks that in different ways are beautiful and thought-provoking. A perfect book to dip into, casually browse, and enjoy, it also constitutes an important piece of research.Landscapes starts with a methodological discussion of the data. The surface of Britain must be the most intensively studied and excavated landscape in the world, for a combination of historical reasons. Landscapes relates how over the last 100 years, each generation of archaeologists has seen, and commented on, an exponential increase in evidence. The reasons for this are many: the rise of air photography from the 1920s onward; traditions of “field archaeology,” which O.G.S. Crawford famously called, in his Archaeology in the Field (Phoenix House 1953, 208), “an English form of sport”; and in the last 30 years or so, the impact of U.K. government policy. Planning Policy Guidance 16 (PPG16) led to an exponential rise of “developer-funded” excavation and research and a resulting explosion in “gray literature,” while the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), focused on recording finds made by metal detectorists, has seen a parallel explosion in the quantity of data relating to metal finds across the country.An important element of the book’s analysis is the concept of landscape character, discussed in chapter 2. This is a complex idea that is partly wrapped up with an evaluation of the biases and affordances of particular kinds of data. To put it another way, the EngLaId team wants to understand whether and how the patterns they have mapped (concentrations or relative absences of settlement evidence, field systems, distributions of ceramic and metalwork finds) are the product of different kinds of evidentiary bias (different soil types making evidence more or less visible from the air, modern agricultural use and urban development, regional variation of modern archaeological research). The authors do not state this, but I find that a critically important achievement of the project is not simply or only to have collected all these data into a single database and set of maps, but to have come up with a meaningful evaluation of their quality and their biases. In this sense, real progress toward the old processual project of grasping and understanding variability in a meaningful way has been achieved here in a remarkable manner, for example in the monument and PAS affordance maps (52).Landscapes moves on to discuss broader patterns in terms of a range of concepts drawn from recent theory. We are on familiar ground here: the later prehistoric archaeology of Britain has been the stamping ground for a succession of theoretical developments, from processual engagements with “chiefdoms” and state formation to postprocessual studies of identity, meaning, and ritual practice to posthumanist understandings of object and landscape agency and “lifecourse” across monuments and landscapes. Landscapes gathers up these insights and presents a coherent, synthesized view of later prehistory.Ecology and the physical environment are seen as important resources, but the authors steer a careful course to avoid environmental determinism. A particularly important element is an analysis of the extensive evidence of later prehistoric fields as more than subsistence agriculture. Landscapes discusses these extensive field systems in terms of orientation and cosmology, and also in terms of temporality and their enduring effect on the landscape. Equally important is the action of naming the landscape. This renaming was, the team argues, part of a wider process of territorial division and social change that unfolded in the Early Medieval period.Smaller-scale case studies are presented within this overall framework. The project selected 14 areas for more intensive study, some in the form of regional areas (the Isle of Wight, Cornwall) and some in the form of transects or border areas (the Welsh Marches, a transect through Wessex). All these case studies are fascinating, but some are a little clunky and not as well integrated with the overall argument as they might be. Similarly, as chapters are written by different members of the project team, the different elements of the text sometimes do not mesh as well as they might. Part of the reason for this is a laudable desire not to impose a single voice on the project, but part is also a matter of editing. There is an odd discussion of villa sites on the Isle of Wight, and the way in which building materials reflect the wider landscape, that in itself is fascinating but is not closely related to broader themes.Both Landscapes and Shaping present innovative techniques of mapping: heat maps, the juxtaposition of mapping and artistic representation, the use of temporal mapping (fig. 10.20 shows the “tempo of later activity” at round barrows). In other ways, both books are quite old-school in their geographical emphasis and in their intellectual references. The EngLaId project stands in the shadow of two great 20th-century figures, W.G. Hoskins and Cyril Fox. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape (Hodder & Stoughton 1955) established and popularized the idea of the English landscape as ancient, and his Romantic celebration of the landscape was shot through with a sense of English national identity. (One of the selected study areas is entitled “Hoskins’ Leicestershire,” and the Early Medieval period is termed “The Great Renaming,” all of which plus the title of Shaping are clearly intended as deliberate nods to Hoskins.)Fox’s The Personality of Britain (National Museum of Wales 1932) presented a series of maps showing the distribution of archaeological material across the British Isles (Ireland moved confusingly in and out of his maps) and presented a geographical distinction between a southern and eastern “Lowland Zone” and a northern and western “Highland Zone.” Fox saw the former as open to influence and invasion from the Continent, while the latter was an area of fusion and adaptation. Both were conditioned by their physical geography and geology, the Highland Zone being an area of older, harder rocks and more rugged, less fertile terrain. The importance of distribution maps, and the environmental determinism of Fox’s work as developed in successive editions after 1932, was hugely influential on subsequent generations of scholars, many of whom (in my view) simplified and vulgarized the highland-lowland model into one of southeastern progress and northwestern poverty and conservatism. The EngLaId project is an amplification and nuancing of Fox’s model rather than a rejection or transformation of it. The highland-lowland distinction is confirmed, with northern and western areas having much more woodland surviving later, while the landscape of the south and east was cleared relatively early. An important element here is the sheer quantity of data and relative differences between regions—there is, to put it crudely, lots of archaeology in the south and east, much less in the north and west. This difference is cogently argued to be a “real” difference in past population density, modes of land use, and settlement rather than solely the result of modern investigative bias.The highland-lowland distinction is nuanced, however, for example with reference to lowland areas in the north and west. Further, there is a replacement of environmental determinism with the looser and more sophisticated notion of affordance and, more generally, drawing on posthumanist approaches to political ecology, a stress on complexity in human-environment relations (48). For example, fields are seen not simply or only as being about subsistence agriculture; their orientation is analyzed in such a way as to suggest a wider cosmological significance and articulation with particular social practices. Enclosure is recast as “a cognitive act” (260) that extended to houses and settlements themselves.This project, and its publications, then, represent a massive achievement, a generational milestone in the study of later prehistoric and early historic Britain. They stand toe-to-toe with Fox and Hoskins in terms of their scope, intellectual importance, and impact on the field. If I have issues and criticisms with the two books, they must be seen within that overall assessment and context.First, practical issues. Landscapes has a consistent problem with over-reduced maps, particularly where period-by-period maps of England are presented, six or more to a page. There is a level of detail on these maps that is potentially fascinating but which cannot be seen properly, even with a magnifying glass. The accompanying website is a helpful aid, but I and others have not found it easy to use. There are occasional glitches beyond this (where is the red on figure 7.17 and 8.16? What do figures 10.5 and 10.6 show us beyond a context-free scatter of red spots?).Then there is the first word of the title of Landscapes: “English.” “England” did not exist until the last few centuries of the study period, and only arguably so even then. At times, Landscapes seems to have its cake and eat it too on this question. On the one hand, the text opens with the words “Histories of England” (1). But then we learn that “England is not a real unit of analysis in any period of the past with which we are dealing,” and are told weakly that “we can only hope that people in Scotland, Wales and Ireland feel moved to carry out similar work” (2). Elsewhere, statements like “it is likely that these areas share much in common with the long-term histories of adjacent areas of Wales and Scotland, but this is unfortunately beyond our purview” (77) are deeply frustrating.So, is the defined area—the modern political unit of England—meaningful? Or is it simply an arbitrary unit of analysis determined by the nature of the database? This tension continues, with extensive reference to the English nationalism of Hoskins. On the very last page of the book we learn that “Englishness is an inclusive and ever-changing category…. We cannot dig back into any period of the past and discover a state of original Englishness” (410). I entirely agree, but I draw attention to the context of this statement in 2021. The EngLaId project started some years before Brexit, as a political project fueled by a backward-looking English nationalism and xenophobia. It has been published at Brexit’s completion, when one political consequence has been that the Union with Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and with it the very concept of “Britain,” is being freshly questioned.There is an archaeological problem here as well as a set of political and cultural issues. Insofar as the exploration of English identity and identities is a stated project aim, these cannot, by definition, be explored without examining borders between England and its neighbors, and what happens on the other side of borders. A relational view of this kind, in which social identities are framed with reference to the Other and are always in a state of “becoming” rather than dependent on some core or inner essence, is theoretically current—though it could be said to go back to Rudyard Kipling’s dictum “What do they know of England, who only England know?”The problem is a very practical one. The EngLaId project chose not to include data from Scotland or Wales, or for that matter Northern Ireland. Part of the reason for this decision seems to be the sheer quantity of data such an exercise would involve, though I wonder also about whether the databases would be commensurate. The “big data” that has been acquired and digitized since 1990 has been made available in the context of political devolution. Institutions created to manage the archaeological “heritage”—English Heritage (previously Historic England), Historic Scotland, Cadw—were created in the 1980s as part of a wider project to move powers away from “Britain” to England, Scotland, and Wales. These devolved bodies have, in turn, adopted different monument and landscape classifications that are deeply embedded in the structuring of their respective databases and as a result are not easily comparable. Of course, the unintended consequence is that modern, national political boundaries and identities have been inscribed into the very fabric of the “archaeological record” as it is experienced on an everyday level by any researcher working with databases and monument records. By contrast, Fox’s 1932 maps plotted archaeological material against the physical geography of the British Isles with little reference to political boundaries (arguably these maps themselves are politically freighted, in his case, with an implicit British Unionism).In this sense, each and every map contained in the two volumes has a problem that hides in plain sight, in that the top half of Scotland is cut off, Wales is a blank area, and Ireland (and for that matter the adjacent coast of the Continent) is entirely omitted. All are rendered as terra nullius. Figure 10.0 is especially jarring: a regional map of the Welsh borderlands in which a wiggly boundary separates a complex pattern of dots set against terrain in shaded detail to the east from a vast expanse of gray blankness to the west. It would be unreasonable to demand a resolution of this problem by the project team, but I was surprised not to see more discussion of the issue and at least some attempt to map “England” in its context, or even some discussion of the most obvious cultural border within the study area, namely Cornwall.In conclusion, I want to stress that these selective and critical comments are made in the context of an overall evaluation of the EngLaId project, and of these two books, as of the highest quality and scholarship, and of the very first intellectual importance. The EngLaId team have produced a landmark achievement in the archaeological understanding of the later prehistoric and early historic landscape of England. The nature of their work, driven by big data, is very different from Hoskins’ Romantic narrative and Fox’s hand-drawn distribution maps, but it is of comparable rank and significance in terms of its importance to the field. Further, Landscapes and Shaping are extraordinarily rich in terms of the number, breadth, and variety of the ideas presented, both textually and visually; I have had space in this review to address only a small fraction of them. These two books are compulsory reading for anyone seeking to understand the later prehistory and early history of the political and cultural unit now known as England, and in their methodological and theoretical sophistication represent a model project in marrying big data to the theoretical themes and concerns of contemporary archaeology as a whole.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 126, Number 2April 2022 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 664 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719395 Views: 664 HistoryPublished online February 08, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.