Properties of ancient landscape: the present prehistoric in twentieth-century Breckland

Abstract

The paper considers the presence of prehistory in the Breckland region of East Anglia in the twentieth century, addressing the ways in which ancient landscape became bound up with definitions of regional identity and claims to cultural and/or archaeological authority, and contributing to debate over the animation of landscape. Sites considered include the flint mines of Grimes Graves, with its controversial mid-twentieth-century Neolithic ‘chalk goddess’, and the ancient trackways of the region. Grimes Graves and the Brandon flint-knapping industry focus discussion concerning the poetics of flint. Archaeological debate is set within the wider characterisation of Breckland as a ‘primitive’ landscape. While some found in prehistory equivalents for a progressive modernity, others found an escape from or antidote to a fallen modern world, a sensibility continued in recent imaginings of the ancient landscape. The paper concludes by exploring the parallel presence of the twentieth-century past in the region via selected monuments and relics.