Lines Across the Land: A Biography of the Linear Earthwork Landscapes of the Later Prehistoric Yorkshire Wolds

Abstract

During the first millennium BC, the people of the chalk landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds began carving up their world with monumental linear earthworks. This project explores the meanings of the later prehistoric boundary systems of the Yorkshire Wolds. It writes a biography of the linear earthwork landscapes of the north-central Wolds, using geographic information systems (GIS), original fieldwork and theories of agency and memory. Tracing the construction, use and modification of particular linear earthworks, it examines how these monuments would have related to other features in the landscape, and how they could have exercised agency within networks of interconnected people, animals, objects and other places. Finally, the project attempts to situate these boundary systems within the larger context of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age society in order to understand how the later prehistoric people of East Yorkshire would have experienced their world. Taking a biographical approach to landscape and allowing linear earthworks to become the protagonists of this narrative, the project charts the life histories of the earthworks at Wetwang-Garton Slack and Huggate Dykes and investigates the collective authorship of the wider landscape. To understand the rural, monumental landscapes of the Wolds, we must consider the agency of not only people, but also of animals and of monuments themselves. By focussing on the relationships which bound together linear earthworks and other agents, we can begin to understand the ways in which monumentalised landscapes both reflected and generated the cosmologies of prehistoric communities.