Opening the Woods: Towards a Quantification of Neolithic Clearance Around the Somerset Levels and Moors

Michelle Farrell,Gerard Aalbersberg,Denise Druce,Arthur Hollinrake,Julie Jones,Fraser Sturt,Suzi Richer,Rob Batchelor,Tom Hill,Alasdair Whittle,M Jane Bunting,Alex Brown,Michael Grant,Alex Bayliss,Heather Tinsley,Peter Marshall

doi:10.1007/s10816-019-09427-9

Abstract

Environmental reconstructions from pollen records collected within archaeological landscapes have traditionally taken a broadly narrative approach, with few attempts made at hypothesis testing or formal assessment of uncertainty. This disjuncture between the traditional interpretive approach to palynological data and the requirement for detailed, locally specific reconstructions of the landscapes in which people lived has arguably hindered closer integration of palaeoecological and archaeological datasets in recent decades. Here we implement a fundamentally different method for reconstructing past land cover from pollen records to the landscapes of and around the Somerset Levels and Moors—the Multiple Scenario Approach (MSA)—to reconstruct land cover for a series of 200-year timeslices covering the period 4200–2000 cal BC. Modelling of both archaeological and sediment chronologies enables the integration of reconstructed changes in land cover with archaeological evidence of contemporary Neolithic human activity. The MSA reconstructions are presented as a series of land cover maps and as graphs of quantitative measures of woodland clearance tracked over time. Our reconstructions provide a more nuanced understanding of the scale and timing of Neolithic clearance than has previously been available from narrative-based interpretations of pollen data. While the archaeological record tends to promote a view of long-term continuity in terms of the persistent building of wooden structures in the wetlands, our new interpretation of the palynological data contributes a more dynamic and varying narrative. Our case study demonstrates the potential for further integration of archaeological and palynological datasets, enabling us to get closer to the landscapes in which people lived.

Highlights

Despite a long history of collaboration between palaeoecologists and archaeologists in Britain and Ireland (e.g. Clark and Godwin 1962; Coles et al 1973), it is often argued that closer integration of palaeoecological and archaeological datasets is still required in order to fully interpret past landscapes (e.g. Chapman and Gearey 2000)
Just as earlier headlines were hogged by discussions of landnám, the pollen record in Britain and Ireland currently tends to only be referenced in discussion of specific horizons, such as in recent debate about possible discontinuity of cereal cultivation in the later fourth millennium cal BC
One recent account does engage with a wide range of evidence for the nature of Neolithic woodland, including conventional pollen analysis, and with local case studies, but the overriding emphasis is in the end on the conceptual and symbolic relationships between groups of people and the wooded environments which they inhabited (Noble 2017)

Summary

Introduction

Despite a long history of collaboration between palaeoecologists and archaeologists in Britain and Ireland (e.g. Clark and Godwin 1962; Coles et al 1973), it is often argued that closer integration of palaeoecological and archaeological datasets is still required in order to fully interpret past landscapes (e.g. Chapman and Gearey 2000). Tilley 1994; Edmonds 1999) and detailed, locally specific reconstruction of the settings in which Neolithic people lived One symptom of this is that the majority of recent archaeological syntheses of the Neolithic period in Britain do not much exploit the pollen record (Bradley 2007; Thomas 2013). Just as earlier headlines were hogged by discussions of landnám (or initial land taking and clearance of woodland for agriculture: Iversen 1941, 1949), the pollen record in Britain and Ireland currently tends to only be referenced in discussion of specific horizons, such as in recent debate about possible discontinuity of cereal cultivation in the later fourth millennium cal BC Interpretation of radiocarbon-dated pollen diagrams has been part of the Cultivating Societies project in Ireland (Whitehouse et al 2014), though that too has tended to operate at a high level of synthesis within a fairly broad chronology, focusing on specific horizons such as the elm decline

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion