Landscape, Community and Colonisation

Book excerpt: Oxbow says: From 1993, the North Somerset Levels Project sought to investigate the origins and development of this area of reclaimed coastal marshland during the first and second millennia AD. The inter-disciplinary approach taken has added archaeological (survey and excavation) data, palaeoenvironmental evidence, studies of documentary sources, architecture, cartography and field- and place-names, to what was already known about the historic landscape. This report, which publishes the findings of the project, examines local and regional changes and variations in the landscape, focusing on two major phases of exploitation, modification and transformation during the Roman and medieval periods. Factors such as agriculture, grazing, salt production, fishing, draining, flood defence, and the establishment of settlements, roads, commons, field systems, as well as cultural factors, are all discussed, as evidence from the local area is placed within a wider regional context. An excellent study which exemplifies all that is new and exciting in landscape study.