The past in the past: patterns of interaction with prehistoric landscape features in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain

Abstract

With the beginning of Roman influence over Britain in the late Iron Age, and direct political and administrative control from A.D. 43 onwards, Britain underwent dramatic transformations in both social structures and ideologies. The remains of prehistoric constructions in the landscape may have been an integral part of these transformations, used as anchors of stability in a rapidly changing and expanding world. Over the past two decades, there have been a number of publications which have highlighted the ways in which later interactions with certain prehistoric funerary sites could be linked with a sense of respect or reverence of the past, focusing on the way in which later interactions could be used to manipulate the perceptions of a society in order to achieve certain goals, such as legitimising inequalities between certain social groupings. A group of studies, presented as papers to the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference in Leicester in 2003, discussed aspects of ephemeral and experienced landscapes and the roles which prehistoric monuments may have assumed during the late Iron Age and Roman periods. This research attempts to build upon those papers and looks at the evidence for later interactions with prehistoric monuments, or earthworks, during the period in which Mediterranean-centred material culture influenced the development of the landscape and social structures in the British Isles. It correlates a sample of the archaeological evidence regarding the repurposing of both singular features and wider landscapes from the end of the 2nd century BC, through to the beginning of the 5th century AD, in order to establish if any significant patterns of interaction can be ascertained.

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ORCID for Josh Pollard: orcid.org/0000-0002-8429-2009

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