| Abstract: |
Britain’s historic landscape provides a remarkably detailed record of past human endeavour over many millennia that has created the networks of fields, settlements, communication systems, and patterns of land use and resource exploitation that make up the countryside and townscapes of today. Local and regional variation in the character of this landscape also forms an important part of our modern sense of place and community: the compact, nucleated villages of the Northamptonshire, for example, are very different from the scattered farmsteads and hamlets of Devon. Between 1993 and 2004 the North Somerset Levels Project (NSLP) set out to explore how such local and regional variation in landscape character came into being, with a time frame extending from the late Iron Age through to the 19th century. A series of nested study areas are focused on some one hundred square kilometres of reclaimed marshland beside the Severn Estuary in south-west England. This study shows both how the origins and development of an individual landscape can only be understood in its wider context, and equally how the study of individual landscapes can be used to address issues of far wider significance. A highly interdisciplinary approach is adopted, with archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, documentary and field- and place-name evidence being integrated within the context of an analysis of the historic landscape as it survived into the 19th century. Various techniques of survey and excavation are in turn used to test hypotheses derived from historic landscape analysis, leading to a series of maps reconstructing how the landscape changed over the 1st and 2nd millennia AD. |
