Department of Archaeology

McBurney Laboratory

The Wyke Down Project

Wessex, traditionally the basis for large-scale models of cultural changes in prehistoric Britain, is an important region regarding the relationships between land use and landscape because of a major juxtaposition in regional archaeological record. While there is a relative plethora of information on monumental landscapes, standard archaeological methods and approaches have produced little contemporaneous settlement and land-use evidence up to at least the middle Bronze Age. At this point, the 'appearance' of field systems and domestic settlement is held to mark a major landscape transition related to changes in land-use practices. Recent investigations in the Wyke Down (Cranborne Chase) area mark the beginning of a project with a different approach to landscape interpretation, one aimed at exploring the ancient landscape in this region from a perspective focused on land use.

This project was designed to investigate landscapes through studying signatures of land-use practices in soils found underneath monuments and within barrows in their landscape setting, on the principle that major changes in prehistoric land-use practices are best discussed through land-use evidence itself, and not solely through an architectural perspective. The barrows examined to date show that patterns of erosion and soil change often associated with intensification of agricultural land use and settlement during the middle-later Bronze Age, appear to be seen at earlier dates (pre-barrow construction, i.e. during the Neolithic-earlier Bronze Age or earlier). This contradicts the present model for the region, and has major implications for the interpretation of land-use practices in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, as well as for assumed relationships of types of land-use and agricultural practices with barrows, and with later Bronze Age field systems and associated settlement evidence.