Prehistoric Britain from the Air: A Study of Space, Time and SocietyThis book provides a bird's-eye look at the monumental achievements of Britain's earliest inhabitants. Britain had been occupied by prehistoric communities for over half a million years before the Roman Conquest. During this time many changes were wrought in the landscape, some of them so indelibly scored that they are still visible today. The unique bird's-eye perspective offered by the aerial camera brings to life many of the familiar sites and monuments that prehistoric communities built, and exposes to view many thousands of sites that simply cannot be seen at ground level because they have become buried or levelled by centuries of ploughing and cultivation. In this book, Timothy Darvill introduces the ways in which aerial photographs reveal traces of the prehistoric past, illustrating and describing a wide selection of archaeological sites and landscapes, and, for the first time, applying social archaeology to the field of aerial photography. |
Contents
Prehistory from the air | 1 |
Hunting gathering and fishing communities | 18 |
Farmsteads and fields | 41 |
Villages and towns | 82 |
Forts and strongholds | 103 |
Frontiers boundaries and trackways | 132 |
Tombs burial grounds and cemeteries | 150 |
Common terms and phrases
aerial photography archaeological Avebury bank barrow cemeteries bottom left boundary bowl barrows Britain Bronze Age burial monuments cairn causewayed enclosure central ceremonial Chapter circular communities construction Crown Copyright cursus dark crop-mark Dartmoor defined diameter ditch Dorchester Dorset dyke early earthwork east edge enclosed entrance evidence example excavations farmsteads fields fieldsystem foreground graves ground Gussage henge Hill hillfort houses Iron Age Kilmartin known landscape later Neolithic later prehistoric linear long barrow looking south looking southwest millennium BC mound Neolithic northeast oblique view looking occupation outer oval barrow Oxfordshire perhaps phase Photograph picture portal dolmen postholes radiocarbon dates rampart RCAHMS RCHME rectangular remains represented ring ring-ditch River Roman round barrow seen settlement shows an oblique side Skomer Skomer Island slope social southeast southern space stone circle Stonehenge structures suggest Taken Tayside timber top right trackways Uffington valley view looking northwest visible walls wide Wiltshire