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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2020

Andrew Gardner  and
Lacey Wallace Open the ORCID record for Lacey Wallace [Opens in a new window]
Andrew Gardner
Affiliation:
UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31–34 Gordon Square, LondonWC1H 0PY, UK Email: [email protected]
Lacey Wallace
Affiliation:
School of History and heritage, University of Lincoln, LincolnLN6 7TSUK Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focused on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge preconceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materializing of time, the future has a very significant part to play.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 327 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2020

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