The Wandering Herd

The Wandering Herd PDF Author: Andrew Margetts
Publisher: Windgather Press
ISBN: 1911188828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The British countryside is on the brink of change. With the withdrawal of EU subsidies, threats of US style factory farming and the promotion of ‘rewilding’ initiatives, never before has so much uncertainty and opportunity surrounded our landscape. How we shape our prospective environment can be informed by bygone practice, as well as through engagement with livestock and landscapes long since vanished. This study will examine aspects of pastoralism that occurred in part of medieval England. It will suggest how we learn from forgotten management regimes to inform, shape and develop our future countryside. The work concerns a region of southern England the pastoral identity of which has long been synonymous with the economy of sheep pasture and the medieval right of swine pannage. These aspects of medieval pastoralism, made famous by iconic images of the South Downs and the evidence presented by Domesday, mask a pastoral heritage in which a significant part was played by cattle. This aspect of medieval pastoralism is traceable in the region’s historic landscape, documentary evidence and excavated archaeological remains. Past scholars of the South-East have been so concerned with the importance of medieval sheep, and to a slightly lesser extent pigs, that no systematic examination of the cattle economy has ever been undertaken. This book represents a deep, multidisciplinary study of the cattle economy over the longue durée of the Middle Ages, especially its importance within the evolution of medieval society, settlement and landscape. It explores the nature and presence of vaccaries, a high status form of specialized cattle ranch. They produced beef stock, milk and cheese and the draught oxen necessary for medieval agriculture. While they are most often associated with wild northern uplands they also existed in lowland landscapes and areas of Forest and Chase. Nationally, medieval cattle have been one of the most important and neglected aspects of the agriculture of the medieval period. As part of both a mixed and specialized farming economy they have helped shape the countryside we know today.

The Wandering Herd

The Wandering Herd PDF Author: Andrew Margetts
Publisher: Windgather Press
ISBN: 1911188828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
The British countryside is on the brink of change. With the withdrawal of EU subsidies, threats of US style factory farming and the promotion of ‘rewilding’ initiatives, never before has so much uncertainty and opportunity surrounded our landscape. How we shape our prospective environment can be informed by bygone practice, as well as through engagement with livestock and landscapes long since vanished. This study will examine aspects of pastoralism that occurred in part of medieval England. It will suggest how we learn from forgotten management regimes to inform, shape and develop our future countryside. The work concerns a region of southern England the pastoral identity of which has long been synonymous with the economy of sheep pasture and the medieval right of swine pannage. These aspects of medieval pastoralism, made famous by iconic images of the South Downs and the evidence presented by Domesday, mask a pastoral heritage in which a significant part was played by cattle. This aspect of medieval pastoralism is traceable in the region’s historic landscape, documentary evidence and excavated archaeological remains. Past scholars of the South-East have been so concerned with the importance of medieval sheep, and to a slightly lesser extent pigs, that no systematic examination of the cattle economy has ever been undertaken. This book represents a deep, multidisciplinary study of the cattle economy over the longue durée of the Middle Ages, especially its importance within the evolution of medieval society, settlement and landscape. It explores the nature and presence of vaccaries, a high status form of specialized cattle ranch. They produced beef stock, milk and cheese and the draught oxen necessary for medieval agriculture. While they are most often associated with wild northern uplands they also existed in lowland landscapes and areas of Forest and Chase. Nationally, medieval cattle have been one of the most important and neglected aspects of the agriculture of the medieval period. As part of both a mixed and specialized farming economy they have helped shape the countryside we know today.

Marking Place

Marking Place PDF Author: Jonathan Last
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789257123
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Latest in the Neolithic Studies Group Seminar Papers series arising from the NSG conference of November 2019. This collection showcases and explores the wide range of current work on causewayed enclosures and related sites, and assesses what we still want to know about these sites in light of the monumental achievement of the seminal publication Gathering Time (2011). Papers comprise reports on recent development-led fieldwork, academic research and community projects, and the volume concludes with a reflection by the authors of Gathering Time. Much archaeological work is concerned with identifying gaps in our knowledge and developing strategies for addressing them; we perhaps spend less time thinking about how research should proceed when we already know, relatively speaking, quite a lot. The programme of dating causewayed enclosures in southern Britain that was published in 2011 as Gathering Time (Oxbow Books) gave us a new, more precise chronology for many individual sites as well as for enclosures as a whole, and as a consequence a far better sense of their significance and place in the story of the British Early Neolithic. Arguably causewayed enclosures are now the best understood type of Neolithic monument. Yet work continues, and in the last few years new discoveries have been made, older excavations published and further work undertaken on well-known sites. Viewing this research within the new framework for these monuments allows us to assess where our understanding of enclosures has got to and where the focus of future research should lie.

Personifying Prehistory

Personifying Prehistory PDF Author: Joanna Brück
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191080926
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The Bronze Age is frequently framed in social evolutionary terms. Viewed as the period which saw the emergence of social differentiation, the development of long-distance trade, and the intensification of agricultural production, it is seen as the precursor and origin-point for significant aspects of the modern world. This book presents a very different image of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the wealth of material from recent excavations, as well as a long history of research, it explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment 'othering' of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. There is much to suggest that the conceptual boundary between the active human subject and the passive world of objects, so familiar from our own cultural context, was not drawn in this categorical way in the Bronze Age; the self was constructed in relational rather than individualistic terms, and aspects of the non-human world such as pots, houses, and mountains were considered animate entities with their own spirit or soul. In a series of thematic chapters on the human body, artefacts, settlements, and landscapes, this book considers the character of Bronze Age personhood, the relationship between individual and society, and ideas around agency and social power. The treatment and deposition of things such as querns, axes, and human remains provides insights into the meanings and values ascribed to objects and places, and the ways in which such items acted as social agents in the Bronze Age world.

Understanding the Neolithic

Understanding the Neolithic PDF Author: Julian Thomas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134621426
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book employs contemporary theoretical perspectives to investigate the Neolithic period in southern britain. It is a fully reworked edition of the author's Rethinking the Neolithic (1991).

The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland

The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland PDF Author: Richard Bradley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462016
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
Sited at the furthest limits of the Neolithic revolution and standing at the confluence of the two great sea routes of prehistory, Britain and Ireland are distinct from continental Europe for much of the prehistoric sequence. In this landmark 2007 study - the first significant survey of the archaeology of Britain and Ireland for twenty years - Richard Bradley offers an interpretation of the unique archaeological record of these islands based on a wealth of current and largely unpublished data. Bradley surveys the entire archaeological sequence over a 4,000 year period, from the adoption of agriculture in the Neolithic period to the discovery of Britain and Ireland by travellers from the Mediterranean during the later pre-Roman Iron Age. Significantly, this is the first modern account to treat Britain and Ireland on equal terms, offering a detailed interpretation of the prehistory of both islands.

Making Journeys

Making Journeys PDF Author: Catriona D. Gibson
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 178570933X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Despite notable explorations of past dynamics, much of the archaeological literature on mobility remains dominated by accounts of earlier prehistoric gatherer-hunters, or the long-distance exchange of materials. Refinements of scientific dating techniques, isotope, trace element and aDNA analyses, in conjunction with phenomenological investigation, computer-aided landscape modeling and GIS-style approaches to large data sets, allow us to follow the movement of people, animals and objects in the past with greater precision and conviction. One route into exploring mobility in the past may be through exploring the movements and biographies of artifacts. Challenges lie not only in tracing the origins and final destinations of objects but in the less tangible ‘in between’ journeys and the hands they passed through. Biographical approaches to artifacts include the recognition that culture contact and hybridity affect material culture in meaningful ways. Furthermore, discrete and bounded ‘sites’ still dominate archaeological inquiry, leaving the spaces and connectivities between features and settlements unmapped. These are linked to an under-explored middle-spectrum of mobility, a range nestled between everyday movements and one-off ambitious voyages. We wish to explore how these travels involved entangled meshworks of people, animals, objects, knowledge sets and identities. By crossing and re-crossing cultural, contextual and tenurial boundaries, such journeys could create diasporic and novel communities, ideas and materialities.

Land and People

Land and People PDF Author: Michael J. Allen
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1782973583
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume is derived, in concept, from a conference held in honour of John Evans by the School of History and Archaeology and The Prehistoric Society at Cardiff University in March 2006. It brings together papers that address themes and landscapes on a variety of levels. They cover geographical, methodological and thematic areas that were of interest to, and had been studied by, John Evans. The volume is divided into five sections, which echo themes of importance in British prehistory. They include papers on aspects of environmental archaeology, experiments and philosophy; new research on the nature of woodland on the chalklands of southern England; coasts and islands; people, process and social order, and snails and shells - a strong part of John Evans' career. This volume presents a range of papers examining people's interaction with the landscape in all its forms. The papers provide a diverse but cohesive picture of how archaeological landscapes are viewed within current research frameworks and approaches, while also paying tribute to the innovative and inspirational work of one of the leading protagonists of environmental archaeology and the holistic approach to landscape interpretation.

The Ancient Burial-mounds of England

The Ancient Burial-mounds of England PDF Author: L.V. Grinsell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317604687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
First published in 1936 and rewritten in 1953, this book embodies the results of the author’s extensive researches and fieldwork. Part one considers types of barrows and dating, their building and the cult of the dead from Palaeolithic to Saxon times. A chapter is dedicated to maps and another to fieldwork in particular, while the final bit of the introductory material discussed barrow-digging from the time of the Romans to the twentieth century. Part two is the regional surveys, from Cornwall to Kent and northwards to the Scottish border.

Social Relations in Later Prehistory

Social Relations in Later Prehistory PDF Author: Niall Sharples
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199577714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book examines the nature of social relationships in later prehistoric Britain, taking, as a case study, the archaeology of the Wessex region of southern England in the first millennium BC. --

Land, Power and Prestige

Land, Power and Prestige PDF Author: David T. Yates
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1782974245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
A major phase of economic expansion occurred in southern England during the second and early first millennium BC, accompanied by a fundamental shift in regional power and wealth towards the eastern lowlands. This book offers a synthesis of available data on Bronze Age lowland field systems in England, including a gazetteer of sites. The research demonstrates the importance of large-scale animal husbandry in the mixed farming regimes as evidenced in the design of the field systems which incorporate droveways, stock proof fencing, watering holes, cow pens, sheep races and gateways for stockhandling. It is argued that the field systems represented a form of conspicuous production, an "intensification" of agrarian endeavour or a statement of intent, to be understood in relation to the maintenance, display and promotion of hierarchical social systems involved in exchange with their counterparts across the English Channel.