‘The Stubborn Light of Things’. Landscape, Relational Agency, and Linear Earthworks in Later Prehistoric Britain

Abstract

Several regions in Britain saw the construction of large, linear earthworks of banks and ditches during the later Bronze Age and in the Iron Age, often extending for many kilometres. In the light of recent theoretical discussions of materiality and relational agency within archaeology and other social sciences, and through an avowedly discursive poetics of place, examples of these earthworks are re-assessed as actants, capable of affecting and directing the lives of people, animals, and plants. These linear earthworks were not static monuments, but were active assemblages or meshworks of materiality, movement, and memory.

De grands ouvrages de terre linéaires furent construits dans plusieurs régions de Grande-Bretagne vers la fin de l’âge du Bronze et pendant l’âge du Fer; il ’s'agit de talus et de fossés atteignant souvent une longueur de plusieurs kilomètres. En prenant les débats théoriques récents sur la matérialité et l'agentivité relationnelle en archéologie et dans les sciences sociales comme point de départ, et en suivant une approche délibérément axée sur la poésie des lieux, cet article réexamine ces levées de terre en tant qu'acteurs capables d'influencer et d'orienter la vie des gens, des animaux et des plantes. Les ouvrages de terre n’étaient pas des monuments statiques ; au contraire ils avaient le potentiel d'agir comme un ensemble actif, ou trame de matérialité, de mouvement et de mémoire. Translation by Madeleine Hummler.

Große, geradlinige Erdwerke, d.h. Wälle und Gräben die sich auf mehreren Kilometern erstreckten, wurden in der späten Bronzezeit und Eisenzeit in mehreren Gegenden von Großbritannien gebaut. In Zusammenhang mit der Anwendung von neueren Theorien über Materialität und relationale Handlungsfähigkeit in der Archäologie und den Sozialwissenschaften, und durch eine absichtlich diskursive Einstellung gegenüber die Poetik von Landschaften, werden hier Erdwerke als aktive Teilnehmer, die das Leben von Menschen, Tieren und Pflanzen beeinflussen können, neu betrachtet. Die Erdwerke waren nicht passive Denkmäler, sondern aktive Komplexe oder Netzwerke, in welchen Materialität, Bewegung und Erinnerung tätig waren. Translation by Madeleine Hummler.

Keywords:

• landscape
• agency
• linear earthworks
• meshworks
• assemblages

Mots-clés:

• paysage
• agentivité
• ouvrages de terre linéaires
• trame
• ensembles archéologiques

Stichworte:

• Landschaft
• Handlungsfähigkeit
• lineare Erdwerke
• Netzwerke
• Befunde

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Anwen Cooper, Chris Gosden, Laura Morley, and Letty Ten Harkel of the EngLaId Project for inviting me to be a discussant at the seminar on Landscape and Agency at the University of Oxford in June 2013, and to Ben Jervis and Harold Mytum for allowing me to present a version of this paper in their session at TAG in Bournemouth University in December 2013. This paper is part of a diptych or linked exploration of issues regarding relational agency, the other examining animality and trackways (Chadwick, forthcoming).

Over the years, I have benefited enormously from the help, ideas, and advice of friends and colleagues, including Oscar Aldred, Chris Cumberpatch, Patrick Daniel, Mark Edmonds, Helen Evans, Chris Fenton-Thomas, Catriona Gibson, Melanie Giles, Daniela Hofmann, Mark Knight, Lesley McFadyen, Joshua Pollard, Gary Robinson, Helen Wickstead, and Gwilym Williams. Anwen Cooper, Catriona Gibson, and Patrick Daniel kindly commented on early drafts of this paper. Any remaining mistakes and misconceptions are my own. I am grateful to Colin Merrony, Chris Grimbley, and Robert Johnston of the University of Sheffield for allowing me access to the Sheffield Library of Aerial Photographs (SLAP) that belonged to the late Derrick Riley, and for permission to reproduce some of his images here. I am also extremely grateful to Patrick Daniel and Network Archaeology, Jane Richardson, Ian Roberts, and Archaeological Services WYAS; and Jason Dodds, Ian Sanderson, and the West Yorkshire Archaeology Advisory Service for allowing me to reproduce photographs held by them.

Notes

¹ For details of the radiocarbon dates reproduced in this paper, including calibration curves, their sigma and percentage confidence ratings, please refer to the original published site reports cited in the text.

² The name ‘Roman Ridge’ or ‘Roman Rig’ seems to be a nineteenth-century appellation, and probably derived from the mistaken belief that the raised bank was the line of a Roman road (Hunter, 1819: 24; Addy, 1893: 241), the term ‘rig’ being a local dialect term for a raised road.

³ A small sub-circular earthwork enclosure surviving as a curvilinear ditch on the south-eastern slope of Wincobank Hill was identified following tree felling during the 1920s, and subsequently marked on the Ordnance Survey map of 1935 (Cronk, 2004: 47; Stenton, 2011: 5–6). This feature has since been buried and/or destroyed by landscaping, and its date and relationship to both Wincobank and the Roman Rig is thus unknown. It is however possible that it constituted a more ‘formal’ terminal of the linear earthwork.

⁴ This evidence is emerging from study of National Mapping Programme plotting (Stoertz, 1997) and Historic Environment Record data, and also recent landscape analyses of recorded coin hoard find spots through the ongoing research work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Hoarding in Iron Age and Roman Britain project (http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/archaeology/research/projects/hoarding-in-iron-age-and-roman-britain).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian M. Chadwick

Biographical Note

Adrian M. Chadwick is currently a research associate at the University of Leicester, working on the Hoarding in Iron Age and Roman Britain project. He has worked for many British commercial archaeological field units, most recently as a Senior Project Officer with AC Archaeology. His research interests include landscape archaeology, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Roman Britain, land allotment and field systems, depositional practices, human–animal relations, and the intersections between archaeological theory and practice. Along with Catriona Gibson, he edited Memory, Myth and Long-term Landscape Inhabitation (2013).

Address: School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK.