Recent Approaches to the Archaeology of Land Allotment (Paperback)

The idea of this volume came out of two research gatherings that focused on land allotment and field systems. The first was a day seminar on Ancient Fields, held at the National Monuments Record centre at Swindon, England, in June 2002, and organised. The second was the session on Land Allotment at the 24th annual conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, held at Manchester University in December 2002. Contents: 1) Land, landscape and Englishness in the discovery of prehistoric land division (Helen Wickstead); 2) From clearance plots to 'sustained' farming: Peak District fields in prehistory (John Barnatt); 3) Commons, fields and communities in prehistoric Cornwall (Peter Herring); 4) Encounters with place in prehistory: writing a case study for Shipman Head Down, Isles of Scilly (Eleanor Breen); 5) The place and materiality of an upland field system at Cwm Ffrydlas, North Wales (Robert Johnston); 6) After the axe: ways into the upland landscapes of Cumbria (Helen Evans); 7) An empty hole, or a meaningful whole? Approaches to the study of pit alignments (John Thomas); 8) Towards a bounded landscape. Excavations at Gonalston, Nottinghamshire, and the development of the earliest field systems in the Trent Valley (David Knight and Lee Elliott); 9) Late prehistoric and Romano-British land division in South and West Yorkshire: an overview of the evidence (Ian Roberts); 10) Fields for discourse? Towards more self-critical, theoretical and interpretative approaches to the archaeology of field systems and land allotment (Adrian M. Chadwick); 11) 'The pleasant land of counterpane': linking site-specific archaeological land use to the landscape of prehistoric field systems (Helen Lewis); 12) Mobile and enclosed landscapes on the Yorkshire Wolds (Chris Fenton-Thomas); 13) Stone walls in west Ostergotland - their dating and its consequences (Maria Petersson); 14) Unfamiliar landscapes: infields, outfields, boundaries and landscapes in Iceland (Oscar Aldred); 15) Field-names in reconstructing late Anglo-Saxon agricultural land-use in the Bourn Valley, West Cambridgeshire (Susan Oosthuizen); 16) Not so common fields: the making of the East Anglian landscape (Edward Martin); 17) The co-axial field systems of Pembrokeshire revisited: towards an ekistic explanation (Jonathan Kissock); 18) Woodland and Champion: farming, 'the social', and the origins of medieval landscapes (Tom Williamson); 19) Parks and perceptions of parkland (Richard Muir); 20) Parliamentary Process: the creation of farming landscapes in eighteenth and nineteenth century Buckinghamshire (Hannah Sackett); 21) The irregularity of fields: historic piecemeal enclosure and dispersed settlement in upland England at the Upper Derwent, Peak District, and Great Langdale, Lake District (Bill Bevan).