Witnesses in spite of themselves

I remember my fascinated delight when, as a schoolchild, I was first shown aerial photographs revealing barrows, hutcircles and tracks which were invisible at ground level to the naked eye. The photographs conjured these evidences from what I knew as uniform cornfields as mysteriously as the magnet above a mass of iron filings pulls them into patterns. Looking back, I realise that the mysteriousness was the richer because I already responded romantically to prehistoric forts and camps on neighbouring hills. It did not I think occur to me that all the rural landscape had been worked over and remade: that farms were as historical as the ruins of Roman lead mines, that the Enclosure Acts of ‘History’ might be deciphered around me, and I did not know that hedgerows could be examined like churches to determine their age. Nor did I realise that oral history can recover the techniques, technologies and social details of labour organisation which made the more recent alterations to the landscape.

Apart from that last, very important input, this sort of historical approach, of which the historian W. G. Hoskins has been the great progenitor, seems entirely different from the interrelated focus I've been advocating on narrators, audiences and genre. I make it an example for two reasons. First, there are important ways in which material evidences are cues to recall and themselves living records of social activity.