Landscape Plotted and Pieced: Landscape History and Local Archaeology in Fyfield and Overton, WiltshireThis book presents the results of study in the two Wiltshire parishes of Fyfield and Overton Down. The project used a diverse range of research methods, from archaeological excavation and experimental archaeology through the study of environmental and documentary evidence to the non-invasive techniques of geophysics and air photography, to try to elucidate how and when the landscape came by its present appearance. The author draws three illuminating conclusions from this investigation. First, very little, if any, of this landscape is now `natural'; it has been created by the agricultural activities of successive communities over the last 6,000 years. Second, the nature of this `artefact' has been, and continues to be, influenced by the geology, hydrology, soils and climate of the area. Finally, the principal land-use features of the present landscape were established at particular times over the last four millennia, and that what has come to be seen as a quintessentially `English' landscape was in fact set some fifteen hundred years ago. |
Contents
A landscape and its setting | 3 |
Aerial photography and cartography | 16 |
theory and practice | 30 |
Copyright | |
12 other sections not shown
Common terms and phrases
acres air photographs Anglo-Saxon arable archaeological archive Avebury Barn barrow groups boundary Bronze Age buildings burial chalk lumps Chapter church civil parish Clatford complex cropmarks cultivation Dene downland earlier earthworks edge enclosure environmental evidence excavation existed Farm field system Figure flints Fowler Furlong Fyfield and Overton ground Headlands historical hollow-way indicate interpretation Iron Age Kennet valley land land-use landscape late later Lockeridge long barrow lynchet manor Manton Marlborough Marlborough Downs medieval millennium BC Overton and Fyfield Overton Downs Overton Hill pasture pattern perhaps phase Plate possible prehistoric probably Raddun RCHME Ridgeway River Kennet Roman road Romano-British round barrows sarsen Savernake Saxon settlement Shaw sheep side significant soil southern study area suggests Templars tenth century tenurial thirteenth century tithing Totterdown track VCH XI Wansdyke Wessex West Overton West Woods Wiltshire woodland World Heritage World Heritage Site Wroughton Wroughton Copse