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Monthly Archive for August, 2006
Explore the Pre-Monumental Landscape
We know that people were moving across the Heathrow landscape as long ago as 500,000 BC, the Palaeolithic period, but the evidence for this is amounts to only a handful of worked flints, a battered hand-axe and the bone of a bison preserved in an ancient river channel. By the seventh millennium BC the body of archaeological evidence has grown and we see a Mesolithic woodland landscape interrupted by occasional clearings.
Scatters of struck flints offer the main evidence for Mesolithic activity but we know that sometime during the seventh millennium BC groups of people gathered in a clearing alongside a small stream that flowed across the T5 site. Here they dug a cluster of shallow pits and deposited within them burnt stone and flints, flint tools, animal bones and plants and fruits. This activity may have marked the final act of ceremonies that brought families together to negotiate agreement over rights of way in the landscape, which provided access to the resources essential to everyday survival. The rituals also ensured that the meeting places took on a special meaning in the lives and memories of the inhabitants, giving the location an enduring significance.
Explore the Monumental Landscape
From the fifth millenium BC onwards our picture of human habitation changes. Flint tools are more common and pottery vessels make their first appearance. The vast tracts of woodland that covered the site were gradually cleared and controlled. A new architecture appeared in the landscape, with monuments constructed at important locations between the period 3,600 and 1,600 BC. These include the Stanwell Cursus, a linear construction of double ditches with a central bank that stretched for almost four kilometres. This massive monument sealed the ancient site of the Mesolithic pits. The Stanwell Cursus may have been a processional route for special ceremonies and may have also served as a barrier that divided the river floodplain from the upper gravel terraces. Whatever its function, the monument brought together the inhabitants of the Neolithic landscape, both as a building project and as a venue for communal activity in a place of ancient significance.
Smaller monuments, some linear, others designed as small, less visible enclosed spaces, were constructed during the Neolithic. These also were used for communal ceremonies, probably associated with solar events, such as the mid summer and mid winter solstices. The ceremonies would have brought family groups together as communities to negotiate ownership of land and the resources of a landscape which, by now was being tamed and divided. But these ceremonies were conducted by a small elite within the secret, sacred spaces of small enclosures, hidden from general view by high internal banks. Later in the Neolithic, the locations of these by now decaying monuments were used as venues for activities which left less obvious traces in the landscape. In this later period pits were dug and filled with pottery, flints and food during ceremonies that sealed agreements between the inhabitants and marked the importance of the place.
A 3D visualisation of how parts of T5 may have looked 10,000 years ago. Click to enlarge.
Explore the Enclosed Landscape
In the period between 2,000 BC and 1,000 BC the monumental Neolithic landscape was transformed to of one of agricultural production set within fields enclosed by boundaries marked by ditches, banks and hedges. Within the fields the Bronze Age inhabitants dug waterholes for their domesticated cattle and sheep and built small settlements that were approached by trackways running between fields and animal pens.
This pattern of fields and hamlets continued to develop throughout the Bronze Age, and the shape of the rural landscape of Heathrow at about 1000 BC would be somewhat familiar to us today. The development of an enclosed landscape containing settlements suggests that there was a major social and economic revolution in the way that ownership and access to resources linked the people and the land. The land and the communities became linked by ownership
Coming soon…
People working to extend a clearing in the woods, during the Neolithic
Neolithic Clearance
The introduction of agriculture around 4,000 BC seems to have little impact on the landscape, at least at first. However, around 3,700 BC the combination of human activity and Dutch Elm Disease led to a dramatic decline in the proportion of elm trees in the forest. It is likely that disease would lead to the opportunity for people to clear patches of dead or non-viable elms. The labour required for cutting down and uprooting mature trees is considerable, and this opportunity to create clearances in the forest would have required the different family groups to come together and co-operate on a formal basis. This act of labour would have strengthened the bonds between the families, and led over time to the creation of clearings for more extensive grazing of domesticated animals and the growing of crops. How the families responded to the opportunity presented by the elm decline had a direct effect on the landscape, but also the indirect effect of starting to build a stronger community. From now on, the family groups had to negotiate who, how and where they would exploit not only the natural resources of the landscape, but also the important clearings that they had created. One of the mechanisms they employed to do this was to elaborate the oral and ritual traditions of the past into ceremonies, and then to place those ceremonies within an architectural context. For instance, at one location along the edge of the Colne floodplain a series of timber posts were erected which may have functioned as totem poles. It is likely that each family group had a particular location or locations which were historically important to them, such as the Mesolithic bunt flint pits, where they hosted meetings and ceremonies for the leading members of the other family groups. It is possible that the ceremonies involved processing from place to place, and just such a route way seems to have linked the string of small monuments and important locations along the edge of the Colne floodplain.From 100 BC the people of southern Britain came into increasing contact with the Roman Empire culminating in 43AD with the Roman invasion of Britain. For the next 370 years Britain became tied into the politic and economic structure of the Roman Empire.
One of the biggest impacts in the South East was the foundation of the city of Roman London (Londinium) and the network of roads and roadside towns that spread out from the capital. The Heathrow landscape now became part of an urban hinterland supplying agricultural produce and raw materials to the city and towns.
The Heathrow landscape was now part of a much larger and complex network, though links with earlier periods are also clear. The political power centres were now relocated to the urban centres, ultimately to Rome itself. Their influence spread along the networks of roads and changed the nature of land ownership, rental and taxation.
The orientation of the Iron Age buildings and enclosures was maintained in the construction of further enclosures, paddocks and buildings during the Roman period. These cut across the line of the Bronze Age field system and represent the first reorientation of access routes and enclosures for some one and a half millennia.
This reorganisation of the landscape seems to conform to the orientation of roads track-ways and enclosures in the west London area. Though we must assume that the earlier banks and hedges had been removed, the practice of deliberate deposition of artefacts seems to remain. A complete pot was discovered in the bottom of one waterhole and in another a large part of a lead tank or font was found.
The people undoubtedly witnessed a great deal of social and political change. New rectangular buildings, some with multiple rooms indicate a change in both building skills and the organisation of homes and farms. It is clear that though that these changes were occurring in a landscape which still held important traditional values.
Download an animation showing how the cursus might have been built in sections (requires QuickTime).
Download an animation showing the cursus (requires QuickTime).