| Popis: |
It has become an axiom of British archaeology that the results of developer-funded fieldwork are under-utilised in research and several projects carried out at British universities have attempted to redress this perceived imbalance. These projects, including those on British and Continental prehistory carried out by Richard Bradley, the Roman Rural settlement project, the Fields of Britannia project, John Blair's work on early medieval England and the EngLaId project, of which this thesis forms a component, have all demonstrated beyond doubt the transformative effect of the data produced by developer-funded work on our understanding. However, to date no project has sought to utilise artefact and ecofact data produced by developer-funded work on a similar scale. This thesis is partly an attempt to fill this gap, by using ceramic, animal bone and charred plant data from digital archives generated by developer-funded archaeology, to address a series of questions about food production/consumption over the later prehistoric and early historic periods in Southern England. These three datasets have very varied characteristics and their integration in a single database was, therefore, one of the major challenges of the thesis. However, this also provided the opportunity to ask new questions and to address old questions with new data. The thesis argues that regional ecosystems had a long-term influence on processes of food production/consumption, which displayed considerable continuities across the boundaries of traditional archaeological periods. Landscape, settlement, ceramic, animal bone and charred plant data from three regional case studies, encompassing the Upper Thames Valley, the Middle and Lower Thames Valley and the route of HS1 in Kent were investigated using a Filemaker database and QGIS mapping. It is argued that, while there were long-term continuities in the use of plants and animals, the expression of social relationships expressed in fields, settlements and ceramics followed a cyclical pattern. |
