Landscape, Community and Colonisation: the North Somerset Levels during the 1st to 2nd millennia AD

Abstract

[SUMMARY] This innovative study examines the changing ways that human communities chose to exploit, modify and ultimately transform their environment over two millennia. Using field archaeology and documentary sources to explore the origins and development of today's historic landscape, it shows how this individual area - in North West Somerset - cannot be understood in isolation, but must be seen in its wider regional context. It is also shown how individual landscape studies can inform wider debates with regard to the development of society, such as the reasons for local and regional variation in settlement patterns and field systems.