Abstract
This paper reviews the Society of Antiquaries’ Evolution of the Landscape project, which started in 1974, and the project’s Sarsen Stones in Wessex survey. The survey was an ambitious public archaeology undertaking, involving c 100 volunteers led by Fellows of the Society during the 1970s. Its aims, objectives and outcomes are described in this article. The survey’s unique dataset, produced for the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset, has now been digitised. Drawing on the dataset, the paper situates the Evolution of the Landscape project in the context of later twentieth-century British archaeology. It demonstrates the importance not only of individual Fellows, but also contemporary movements in academic and development-led archaeology, to the direction of the Society’s activities in this formative period for the discipline today, and shows how the Society’s research was engaged with some of archaeology’s most pressing cultural resource management issues.
Highlights
THE ‘EVOLUTION OF THE LANDSCAPE’ PROJECT. This project was one of two schemes introduced by Fellows H Collin Bowen and Barry Cunliffe in, following suggestions that the Society become proactive in research
Intended to be the pilot scheme of the Evolution project, Collin Bowen proposed that a sarsen survey ‘could be done by dividing the area between individuals and groups who would undertake to look everywhere within their individual pieces of jig-saw’
His concern with stone clearance was underpinned by his assumptions about what the first farming looked like: the lowest layer of the palimpsest had to have been inscribed by clearing and breaking up ground, because, according to Bowen, that was the first requirement of agriculture ‘for all periods’
Summary
[It] might be useful to suggest a particular task which could be defined and probably achieved within a year. Whilst the survey’s outputs were limited and are physically compromised, a newly digitised dataset means that the project can play a part in answering recent calls to make a more effective exploration of past sarsen-scapes This project was one of two schemes introduced by Fellows H Collin Bowen and Barry Cunliffe in , following suggestions that the Society become proactive in research (the other, the proposed archaeological investigation of churches, was prompted by threats to the Church of England estate from redundancy following the Pastoral Measure). Collin Bowen made a separate project proposal to his associates Richard Atkinson, Desmond Bonney, Richard Bradley, Geoffrey Kellaway and Isobel Smith He proposed recording all the sarsen stones, whether extant or lost, in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset, ‘in order that archaeologists can assess the problems of clearance and the range of utilisation in geographical and functional terms from the earliest times’. Collin Bowen withdrew from further involvement in late in anticipation of his retirement
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