The persistence of landscape

John Peterson has a treasure trove of papers on his website if you’re interested in Roman landscapes. One of his papers which I’ve been reading is a terrific demonstration of why Landscape archaeology matters. Iron Age and Roman square enclosures near Venta Icenorum (PDF) looks at the layout of Roman land divisions. What Peterson shows is if you were to say, “I’m a Roman archaeologist, I’ll just look at the Roman stuff,” then you’d be missing out on a lot of what might explain a landscape.

The paper looks at eight Roman or Late Iron Age enclosures just north of Venta Icenorum. These seem to be funerary monuments. They’re aptly placed, because they’re among Neolithic and Bronze Age burials. Further, they’re also integrated with a Roman cadastre. This would be form of land division, laid out by a Roman survey. Why would the Romans care about Neolithic use of the land? This was a period perhaps three thousand years before the Romans arrived.

Peterson thinks it makes sense in two ways. One is that these mounds would have been useful references for survey. If your system for dividing the land breaks down it’s easy enough to go back and do it again. Another suggestion he makes is that it’s about power. If these mounds have meaning then putting them within a Roman framework tames them an Romanises them. They don’t need to have kept their Neolithic meanings into the Iron Age, but they do need to have a meaning for this to matter.

It’s a strong argument against having rigid boundaries between the study of time periods, but it’s rare to see someone linking Roman use of land back to the Neolithic. At the same time it’s not a totally wild idea. Roy Loveday (1998:14-31) has commented that the routes of Roman roads tend to share the same orientations as route through nearby henges. Is that because local topography makes that the easiest direction to move in, or are the Romans following the tracks of the Iron Age Britons, who followed the tracks of the Bronze Age Britons and so on…

It’s not enough to have panoramic vision though. You also need to tie it back in to something meaningful. That’s what I like about this paper. The time scale may be epic, but Peterson brings it back to why that matters to someone studying Roman Britain.

See also: Loveday, R. 1998. ‘Double Entrance Henges – Routes to the Past’ in Prehistoric Ritual and Religion. eds. Alex Gibson and Derek Simpson. Gloucestershire:Sutton Publishing Ltd. 14-31