Scenes From Prehistoric Life
As material barriers, many of the larger linear earthworks of the Early Medieval landscape functioned most effectively to control the movement of livestock. Small armies might ignore a ditch and bank or climb over or around it; cattle and sheep are much less inclined to scale something as massive as the Wansdyke, especially if they are being herded
... See moreMax Adams • The First Kingdom
In the middle of an open and rather marshy plain, nine parallel lines of substantial stone packings had been laid out and then buried beneath a layer of clay. The resulting rectangular construction appears to have had a slightly bowl-shaped depression at the centre and been bounded by a fence. Chemical analyses show that a great deal of blood had b
... See moreNeil Price • The Children of Ash and Elm
political and social tensions that are even more dramatically chiselled onto the landscape by the great, enigmatic earthen dykes that belong to the centuries after Rome’s province cut itself adrift. From Wansdyke, striding across Wiltshire’s downs, to the Fleam Dyke of Cambridgeshire, apparently built to block the lines of prehistoric trackways and
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of imagination. It has succeeded beyond expectation in extracting and describing sequences from material processes: how walls collapse; how ditches fill with silt, how organic materials can be dated and used to describe environmental change, diet, disease and injury. But it cannot get to grips with empty space and time: the unknown months, weeks, y
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During interglacials, when the ice had melted away, the sea level rose, cutting off Britain. It was during the transitions – in and out of glaciations – when this landscape was both accessible and attractive to large herbivores and the humans that hunted them. Two hundred and thirty thousand years ago, then, the landscape of Britain was reachable –
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