Revisions in Economic History: Forest Clearance and Prehistoric Farming

Abstract

T | SHE subject of forest clearance in prehistoric Europe has suffered a neglect for which it is easy to account, but which is none the less deplorable: easy to account for, because prehistorians have believed that the early farmers avoided forests; deplorable because this belief, now demonstrably out of accord with facts disclosed by science, has obscured a proper understanding of the earliest phases of agrarian history. In this brief article examination will be made of some of the main implications of the knowledge now available about the natural vegetation which confronted the pioneers of agriculture as they penetrated the European wastes, particularly as these bear on the problem of clearance and on the character of prehistoric farming. As I have shown elsewhere,' the theory that early man was incapable of clearing forest and therefore shunned it, cultivating areas naturally devoid of trees or at most only lightly forested, was formulated by R. Gradmann at the close of the nineteenth century and sedulously fostered over a period of some forty years.2 As time passed thesis hardened into doctrine, drawing virtue from discoveries which appeared to be favourable, but sufficiently powerful to override doubts. Although not founded on a basis of solid proof, such as only palaeobotanical research could provide, the theory had the practical merit of offering an explanation which tallied with the more obvious facts. When archaeologists plotted their finds on maps showing the drift geology, they found that the symbols concentrated on the lighter, pervious soils and were absent from the heavier, impervious ones. Now, until the Forestry Commission began to change the face of our countryside, it was a matter of observation that the lighter soils were normally free from extensive tree-growth and that such forested areas as remained were as a rule situated on the heavier soils. The suggestion that the lighter soils were settled in prehistoric times because they were free from forest seemed therefore very plausible, and was more readily accepted, since it conformed to the determinist trend of geographical teaching, now happily outmoded. The alternative, that the regions first settled by farming communities are barest of trees because most completely cleared, was overlooked. At this point it should be made clear that no attack is intended on the method of distributional study pioneered in this country by 0. G. S. Crawford and Cyril Fox, whose maps yield information of permanent value. In his Archaeology of the Cambridge Region,3 Fox showed beyond cavil how, by plotting the finding-places of archaeological material relating to successive periods