Foot-fall and Hoof-hit. Agencies, Movements, Materialities, and Identities; and Later Prehistoric and Romano-British Trackways

Abstract

In archaeological considerations of Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes, trackways are usually interpreted in purely normative terms, merely as means of getting from one settlement to another, or as functional features to assist with the herding of animals. In these somewhat static expositions, the role of trackways as places in themselves, and their long-term importance in constructions of social identity and memory, are often overlooked, as are the complex relationships between people and animals within the landscape. Recent theoretical ideas concerning relational agency and identity, materiality and movement have much to offer in terms of our archaeological understandings of these features. This paper explores the interpretative potential of such approaches using case studies of Iron Age and Romano-British trackways from Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Integrating theories of identity, embodiment, materiality, relationality and practice highlights the sedentarism of previous explanations, and allows for much more nuanced accounts of highly dynamic, mobile meshworks, where agency resided in complex constraints and affordances between people, animals and the materiality of the lived-in landscape.

Iron Age ‘Predatory Landscapes’: A Bioarchaeological and Funerary Exploration of Captivity and Enslavement in Britain

“…The physical environment of IA Britain is most familiar to us as one of farms, grazing land and wild uncultivated areas (O'Connor & van der Veen 1998). The evidence for ritual activity in certain locations, such as bogs and rivers (Schulting & Bradley 2013; Williams 2003) and the importance of track-ways (Chadwick 2016), suggests that the landscape was also understood and used in a psychogeographical way 4 . Being open to landscapes as having value beyond agricultural production means that we can also regard them as ‘predatory’, whereby the practice of captive taking and enslavement shapes and negotiates how different communities engage and connect socially, economically and politically (Cameron 2008a).…”

Making Space for Past Futures: Rural Landscape Temporalities in Roman Britain

“…Whether considering the practical and metaphorical associations of different spaces within a roundhouse, and their orientation within enclosures, or these enclosures themselves and the trackways which connected them, there seem to be recurrent patterns. These link seasonal activities and repeated routines of movement to associations with light and dark, life and death, and growth and decay, which seem all-pervasive (Chadwick 2004; 2016; Giles & Parker Pearson 1999; McCarthy 2013; Taylor 2013; M. Williams 2003). The repetition of many agricultural practices manifests a series of attitudes to the future based upon reproduction of what was done in the past to secure the continuation of food production, minimizing risk and entailing perhaps another set of cyclical concepts to do with reciprocity, in terms of the social relationships connecting inter-dependent communities (Grey 2011).…”

Farming practice, ecological temporality, and urban communities at a late Iron Age oppidum

“…Whilst relational approaches in archaeology commonly consider material culture and more recently animals (Chadwick, 2016), plants have played a limited role in such discussions. This may well be due to the theoretical backgrounding of plants across academic disciplines (Head and Atchison, 2009; Jones and Cloke, 2008), arguably attributed to the Western world view of plants as a lower form of life to humans and animals (Hall, 2011).…”

“…This is despite more recent calls to study farming as a social practice in order to inform upon social identities. Such approaches have been clearly articulated for pastoral farming; for example -drawing on Ingolds's work on taskscapes - Chadwick (2004Chadwick ( , 2016 has seen the movement of people and animals around enclosures and along trackways as meaningful activities for the creation of individual and group identities. Chadwick has touched upon aspects of arable farming, such as manuring, and animal and crop interaction, but not specified any examples or suggested how these could be studied.…”