Upland Archaeology

Ice Patch Archaeology in Alaska: 2000 – 10

Richard Vanderhoek, E. James Dixon, Nicholas L. Jarman, and Randolph M. Tedor


In the past decade, ice patch archaeological research has been initiated in several areas of Alaska, including Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the Amphitheater Mountains, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Denali National Park and Preserve, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Chugach National Forest, and Katmai National Park. Although still in its formative stages, this research demonstrates that high-altitude ice patches have been an important part of the annual subsistence cycles of Alaskan people for at least 4000 years. Researchers have found cultural materials at 13 Alaskan ice patches. Most artifacts recovered are related to caribou hunting; however, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that ice patches were the foci for a wide range of subsistence activities, such as hunting birds, harvesting berries, and snaring small mammals. Site interpretations are based on ethnographically documented cultural practices, animal behavior, alpine ecology and geology, and archaeological analyses.

West Penwith, the Land’s End, the south western extremity of the British Isles has long attracted the attention of archaeologists, landscape historians, writers and artists. Still largely a rural landscape of ancient farmsteads and churchtowns, it also has a famous mining history interwoven into the distinctive character of this rugged peninsula. Across the moorland spine lie numerous prehistoric ceremonial monuments whilst in the surrounding farmland deeply embedded imprints of early settlement reveals extraordinary and rare time-depth. Today’s fields, particularly across Zennor and Morvah parishes, preserve boundaries that were laid out over 2,000 years ago. For centuries these patterns determined tenure and land use, yet in the early 19th century mining transformed the landscape of the St Just and St Ives districts. Abandoned engine houses, iconic symbols of this once great industry lie scattered along the northern coast amid mine waste and moorland between villages of terraced houses dotted with nonconformist chapels. This book is the result of over 270 pioneering archaeological surveys and conservation projects carried out over the past 35 years. It seeks deeper understanding of this amazing historic landscape and is a celebration of its unique qualities. It lays down a sound foundation for increased understanding and protection and hopefully will prove an inspiration and a source of information for all who love and care for this special place.

The initial phase of the Understanding Exmoor’s Barrows Project made direct contact with or explored the online catalogues of a total of 23 museums and archives potentially holding archaeological material relevant to improving understanding of Bronze Age barrows and associated funerary traditions on Exmoor and in the wider area around Exmoor. These enquiries identified a number of relevant collections and produced detailed inventories of the material available.
The information obtained includes a number of unusual and intriguing elements and will make a significant addition to the data currently held by the Exmoor Historic Environment Record and other relevant repositories.
Additionally, the Project has demonstrated that the material identified has potential for further analysis through, for example, examination by pottery, lithics, bone and charcoal experts, and for radiocarbon dating. The prospective results from these analyses and determinations are likely to substantially advance current understanding of Bronze Age burial traditions across Exmoor and its wider region and to provide an enhanced foundation for future research.

A general introduction to the Kentmere Archaeological Project carried out in the Kentmere Valley in the southern English Lake District: which lays out the scope of the fieldwork programme and gives an interim statement regarding the archaeological excavation of the Viking Age structures at Bryant's Gill, citing one of three radiocarbon dates that fixed the the date range of the site. Updated subsequently (see author's papers).

The excavation of the Whitehorse Hill cist took place in the late summer of 2011. It had been assumed that the most significant aspect of the project would be the environmental recording and that the cist itself would be empty. In the final event, the cist was found to contain one of the most significant Early Bronze Age burials to have been found in southern Britain.

This article builds on recent archaeological theorizing about early complex societies to analyze the political anthropology of Neolithic and Bronze Age China in a culture-specific trajectory over the longue durée. Synthesizing the latest archaeological discoveries, I show that a series of successive declines, beginning around 2000 BC, took place throughout lowland China. This put an end to the lowland states of the Longshan period (2400–1900 BC) and provided the context for the constitution of the Erlitou secondary state (1900–1500 BC). Following the shift in “archaic states” studies from identifying “what” to investigating “how,” I focus on the strategies, institutions, and relations that undergirded and sustained the Erlitou secondary state. I explore how heterogeneous lowland populations were reorganized after collapse, how a new collective identity was created through ritual and religious performance at the household level at Erlitou, and how Erlitou’s ideologies, political system, and economic network were shaped by the upland polities and societies. Through a series of innovative practices, the Erlitou secondary state did not replicate the preceding Longshan states but instead pioneered a sociopolitical order that was repeatedly reenacted and referred to as a source of legitimacy in successive Bronze Age Central Plains polities.

In 2017 archaeological investigations were carried out on an enclosed prehistoric settlement at West Northwood Farm on Bodmin Moor. The settlement was surveyed by plane table and a roundhouse and the enclosure bank were excavated. Initial results from the excavation of the roundhouse suggested that there were at least two distinct phases of habitation. The first comprised a stone-walled roundhouse with a south facing doorway and the second involved the insertion of an opposing entrance through the north wall. The floor was very heavily disturbed or ‘poached’, probably by the feet of animals which had been kept within the roundhouse. However, analysis of the artefactual assemblage revealed that the occupation was even more complex. Finely-worked Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age flints show that the area had been occupied prior to the construction of the roundhouse. The sequence of activity associated with the house itself is dated by the recovery of a large number of redeposited ceramic sherds. The earliest date to the Middle Bronze Age and are followed by pottery dating to the Middle and Late Iron Age, and the Roman period. Three radiocarbon determinations fell in the Roman and early medieval periods. The ceramic sequence and the radiocarbon determinations on ceramic residue and charcoal from a floor deposit suggest that rather than having two distinct phases, there were at least four representing a long, if perhaps intermittent and changing use of the roundhouse, which is likely to have spanned some two millennia.

[ES] Los pastizales de altura de la Cordillera Cantábrica han sido un importante recurso para las comunidades que han ocupado estos territorios a lo largo de los siglos. En este artículo presentamos los resultados iniciales de un proyecto de investigación que tiene como objetivo comprender los procesos históricos de formación de los paisajes culturales del Noroeste peninsular. Para ello, se presta especial atención a los procesos de antropización de las zonas de montaña, interpretadas en el marco de un sistema de aprovechamiento complementario entre la ganadería y la agricultura. Los datos para época prehistórica ya permiten documentar la utilización de estos espacios, aprovechamiento que se intensificará a partir de la Edad Media. La atención a diversos tipos de fuentes (arqueológicas, documentales, etnográficas y paleoambientales) para este período nos permite calibrar la fuerte presión a la que fueron sometidos los espacios de pasto en relación con los intereses de distintos grupos sociales que competían por su control de cara al desarrollo de distintos modelos de aprovechamiento económico.

[EN] The upland pastures in the Cantabrian Mountains have been a significant resource for the communities which inhabited this territory during the last centuries. In this paper, the preliminary results of our on-going research project are presented. Our research tries to understand the historical formation processes of the cultural landscapes in the North-West of Iberia. A special attention is paid to the anthropization processes in the mountains, which is discussed in relation to the complementary exploitation system including agricultural and pastoralism practices. The archaeological data allow us to consider the exploitation of the uplands since the Later Prehistory, which will be intensified since the Middle Ages. Taking into consideration of several types of data for the medieval period —such as archaeological remains, written sources, ethnographic information or palaeoenvironmental record— we can assess the important pressure that different social groups performed for controlling the upland pastures. All of them tried to manage the grazing areas management for developing their own economic exploitation model in relation to pastoralism.

In September 2011 archaeological investigations were carried out on a Bronze Age settlement at Bosiliack, near Lanyon in West Penwith. The project was undertaken to gain further information by excavating one of the roundhouses and to ascertain the effects of bracken rhizomes upon buried archaeological deposits. During the course of the project, eight 1m square test pits and a small structure, house 3, were excavated.
Excavation revealed the substantial impact of bracken but also led to the recovery of Middle Bronze Age pottery which suggests a second millennium cal BC date for the roundhouse. Later activity dating to the Middle Iron Age was revealed by two radiocarbon determinations.
In 1984 two roundhouses and an Early Bronze Age entrance grave were investigated in the same area.  These sites have been published elsewhere. However, a summary is included in this paper to provide a wider context for the 2011 excavations and to make the results more widely available.

This edited volume featured 22 papers by landscape archaeologists and historians - Oscar Aldred, John Barnatt, Bill Bevan, Eleanor Breen, Adrian Chadwick, Lee Elliott, Helen Evans, Chris Fenton-Thomas, Peter Herring, Bob Johnston, Jon Kissock, David Knight, Helen Lewis, Richard Muir, Susan Oosthuizen, Maria Petersson, Ian Roberts, Hannah Sackett, John Thomas, Helen Wickstead and Tom Williamson. It investigated land allotment and land division in British archaeological periods from later prehistory through to the early modern period; along with Iron Age and early medieval Sweden and early medieval and medieval Iceland. 

My introduction to the book is reproduced here - I would like to thank David Davison and Rajka Makjanić at Archaeopress for supplying me with the pdf of this.

Introduction Bronze Age field systems have been identified in Dartmoor through the remains of field boundaries. They can be used to explain Bronze Age society alongside other types of evidence. We describe these field systems. We will consider the environment and economy at the time of construction and abandonment. We also consider other Bronze Age archaeology within the local region and other parts of Britain.

During the excavations in 1983-1985 carried-out by
Sławomir Jastrzębski on Site 1C in Gródek, Hrubieszów
district, 44 settlement structures of the Funnel Beaker
culture and also an ditch and a pit of the Lublin-Volhynia
culture were discovered. There was also revealed a few
pottery concentrations linked with the Funnel Beaker
culture and potsherds of the Tripolye culture. Samples
of organic material from 9 Funnel Beaker structures
and the ditch of the Lublin-Volhynia culture gave 12
radiocarbon dates. The paper presents assemblages of
artifacts from Neolithic structure, taking into account
their chronology.

A revised and extended bibliography organised both on a broadly thematic basis, by topic or by site, and also in reverse chronology by decade. 
It includes a number of conference presentations, in PPT format, which give additional illustrations to support the published versions. It also includes papers by other authors, which relate to our sites and projects, especially environmental studies, by Tim Mighall and his colleagues, and studies of the experimental and archaeological slags, by Mike Charlton.
Where possible links are given which lead directly to the relevant pages on the academia.edu site. Copies of papers which do not have links can be supplied on request ([email protected]). This bibliography will be updated periodically.

The Hirwaun Common and Rhondda Uplands archaeological survey, undertaken in 2009, covers approximately 15 square kilometres of mainly unenclosed land near the north end of the South Wales Coalfield. The landscape, consisting of a high plateau between the two Rhondda valleys, and Hirwaun Common beyond it at the north end, lies almost entirely between the 300m and 500m contours. The survey was conducted by walking regular 30m transects and aimed to identify sites of all periods. A total of 549 sites was recorded, 24 of which had been recorded previously in the National Monuments Record.
Prehistoric funerary and ritual monuments form a minor component of the archaeology but they occupy the highest ground, including the prominent ridge overlooking Hirwaun Common. The other important prehistoric site is an Iron Age settlement on Mynydd Cefn-y-gyngon, on the relatively sheltered eastern side of Hirwaun Common, which established a pattern of settlement that was to continue into the post-medieval period.
Evidence of medieval dwellings, in the form of building platforms, was found on the Rhondda Uplands and Hirwaun Common. Later occupation evidence, in the form of numerous huts and settlements, was found mainly on Hirwaun Common, usually in sheltered positions, some of which could have been occupied throughout the year. Less post-medieval settlement evidence was found on the Rhondda uplands, which by the nineteenth century had been parcelled out into sheepwalks of the various neighbouring lowland farms.
Archaeology associated with coal mining was found in abundance. Above the valley floors, where most of the deep mines were situated, is evidence of small coal levels and drifts, with associated tramways and inclines. These date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the quarries date from the same period. Quarries are a conspicuous feature of the valley sides and their transport systems demonstrate how they supplied building stone for individual collieries and their associated settlements.

The aim of the article is to show the high learning value offered by interdisciplinary research of the Ore Mountains in the Central European historical context. Interest is focused on the (1) basic overview of three main approaches to the study of the Central European mountainous areas and their populations, (2) a brief account of the research and the knowledge so far for the Bohemian Ore Mountains and (3) the conception of the currently ongoing research project in the Ore Moun¬tains, which is being jointly implemented by the Institute for Prehistory and Early History of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and the Institute for Archaeological Monument Care of North-Western Bohemia in Most.

Cílem příspěvku je ukázat na vysokou poznávací hodnotu, kterou nabízí interdisciplinární výzkum Krušných hor ve středoevropském historickém kontextu. Zájem se soustředí na (1) základní přehled tří hlavních přístupů ke studiu středoevropských horských oblastí a jejich populací, (2) stručnou bilanci dosavadního výzkumu a poznatků pro české Krušnohoří a (3) koncepci aktuálně probíhajícího výzkumného projektu v Krušných horách, který společně realizují Ústav pro pravěk a ranou dobu dějinnou FF UK v Praze a Ústav archeologické památkové péče severozápadních Čech v Mostě.

A report on the first four seasons of excavation at the prehistoric settlement at Crawcwellt. A succession of stake-wall roundhouses contained evidence for intensive ironworking, with a sequence of well-preserved furnaces and an external dump of some 1400kg of slag. Finds include burnt stone, spindlewhorls, glass beads and a fragment of a decorated blue glass bangle.
A detailed quantification of the ironworking debris suggests that some 300 smelts were carried out, producing blooms of 2kg each, which were refined to a total of some 300kg of artefacts.

This paper examines evidence for transhumance in the Galtee Mountains during the post-medieval period, c.1600–1900AD, and attempts to explain the reasons for its decline. The results of field survey into seasonal upland structures (or booley houses) occupied during this time are discussed while considering the difficulties involved in their identification and dating. In the parish of Kilbeheny, it is shown how a number of these booley houses were used in a nineteenth-century system of small-scale transhumance, contrasting this with what appears to have been a more important form of the practice in the mid-seventeenth century. The paper then goes on to demonstrate how population growth and the commercialisation of farming in the intervening period contributed to the marginalisation of transhumance in the regional farming economy. It is speculated that much of the extant archaeological evidence for seasonal settlement belongs to a post-1750, reduced, form of transhumance in which the produce of dairying was vital to the semi-subsistence farming carried on by tenants relatively new holdings in the foothills.

This paper try to check changes in the pattern of settlement in the high mountain areas of Central Pyrenees. The study area was given National Park Aigüestortes and St Maurice and the chronological framework is between prehistory and the twentieth century. In this research we compare the ethnographic data collected in the early twentieth century with the record obtained in several campaigns of archaeological exploration in the area. The results we report the existence throughout the history of several different models of livestock population that the traditional transhumance

"Resumen: Las pautas de movilidad ganadera pueden ser entendidas como una excelente herramienta interpretativa para comprender los sistemas de poblamiento, territorialización y subsistencia de las comunidades prerromanas del Occidente cantábrico. Debido al aprovechamiento de zonas de pastos estivales, las zonas montañosas se poblaron con cierta densidad, desarrollándose procesos particulares en la construcción del paisaje sociopolítico y subsistencial. Se reconocen discursos materiales dirigidos a afianzar y reclamar el usufructo de las zonas de pastos por parte de los distintos grupos y en las distintas fases diacrónicas de la Prehistoria, en una perspectiva de tiempos largos. En el presente trabajo, se presentan sintéticamente algunas hipótesis de trabajo con el
apoyo de una serie de lecturas etnoarqueológicas que iluminarán la elaboración del discurso interpretativo.
Palabras Clave: Edad del Hierro, megalitismo, Arqueología del paisaje, movilidad ganadera, Occidente Cantábrico.
Abstract: Herding mobility can be understood as an excellent interpretive tool for understanding settlement, subsistence and territorialization patterns of pre-Roman communities in West Cantabrian area (North of Spain). Due to the use of summer pasture areas, mountains were populated with certain density and particular processes in the construction of socio-political and subsistencial landscape were developed up there. Material speeches are recognized aimed at strengthening and claiming the usufruct of the pasture areas by different groups and at different stages of Prehistory in a long durée perspective. In this paper, several working hypotheses which rely on some ethnoarchaeological readings will be presented synthetically. That will illuminate the interpretive discourse.
Keywords: Iron Age, megalithism, Landscape Archaeology, herding mobility, Western Cantabrian area (North of Spain)."

Abstract: In the Sierra de Carondio is one of the largest megalithic burial grounds in Asturias. It forms a complex of special interest, because it could offer new data about forms of seasonal settlement of megalith builders groups. The construction of a wind farm in this area serves to raise some reflections on Heritage Management and the relationship between Archeology and Society.

This article responds to calls for the historical sciences to inform adaptation in the Anthropocene, in this case, the sustainability of hill farming in view of EU habitat conservation. Focusing on Kerry, Ireland, it highlights the difficulties that conservation of upland bog, heath and grassland habitats faces due to rural depopulation. It then uses landscape history to assess the long-term feasibility of conserving/restoring these habitats according to EU directives, pointing to the remarkably recent disappearance of woodland due to grazing and deforestation. Instead of being ‘traditional’, as conservation discourse holds it to be, historical management of uplands by farmers could vary greatly depending on sociopolitical factors and economic trends. I discuss how this historical ecology of change helps to explain the failure of conservation in parts of Ireland, and outline how ‘lessons from the past’ may contribute to sustainable upland management if co-evolution is accepted as an on-going process.

The Brdy Highland comprises a specific landscape division between Central, West and South Bohemia, which was always marked by a very low density of settlement, more or less contiguous woodland and unsuitable conditions for agriculture. Whereas the natural values of this territory have been the subject of professional discussions and protection for a longer time already, the extraordinary value of Brdy as a historical cultural landscape has not yet been recognized and defined.
The study summarizes the current state of the archaeological research of Brdy (in the extent of the current Protected Landscape Park) and demonstrates using the examples of the main category of local archaeological monuments. Based on a comparison with similar, better investigated areas in Europe, it also attempts a theoretical definition of Brdy as a so-called uncultivated („marginal”) landscape. For the evaluation of the archaeological potential of Brdy, it is important that the socalled uncultivated areas were only another form of cultural landscape, differing from the agricultural areas by the extensiveness of the utilization, the side offer of opportunities for alternative means of subsistence and also an important role in the former symbolic and ideological systems. It is possible to anticipate the engagement in these complex ties at the latest in the Bronze Age in Brdy. A new chapter in the use of Brdy begins in the 13th–14th centuries, both in relation with the
process of agricultural colonization to 500–650 m a.s.l. and as a consequence of the shift of iron production from the Prague Basin to peripheral areas of Central Bohemia that were much more suitable in terms of raw materials and energy, especially precisely in the Brdy Foothills. With this shift, the region gained a strategic importance, which determined the basic form of its usage until the Middle Ages. // V souvislosti se zrušením vojenského újezdu Brdy a vznikem chráněné krajinné oblasti v roce 2016 se oživila diskuse o přírodním bohatství tohoto území a o způsobech jeho ochrany. Při této, jistě nezbytné diskusi se ovšem často zapomíná, že Brdy nejsou jen cen-ným přírodním prostředím, ale mají i mimořádnou hodnotu historické kulturní krajiny, která je-na rozdíl od přírodního bohatství-podstatně hůře poznána a zdůvodněna. 1 Příčin tohoto nedostatečného stavu poznání je více. Krajinný archeologický výzkum má poměrně pomalou dynamiku, je časově a organizačně náročný, a za relativně krátkou dobu, po kterou je území bývalého vojenského výcvikového prostoru přístupné, se ještě nestačil rozvinout, nehledě na fakt, že Brdy se nacházejí na rozhraní spádových oblastí několika regionálních archeologických institucí, které své výzkumné projekty mohou jen obtížně koordinovat. Souvislé zalesnění oblasti převážně smrkovou monokulturou znač-ně omezuje použití rychlých a efektivních metod průzkumu (letecký vizuální průzkum a laserové skenování, povrchové sběry). Především však nebyla dosud plně rozpoznána hodnota středních Brd jako historické antropogenní krajiny ani samotnými archeology. Naše studie chce přispět k přesnějšímu vymezení archeologického potenciálu Brd, a to jak prostřednictvím již známých nebo předpokládaných kategorií archeologických památek, tak i obecnější úvahou nad některými teoretickými přístupy, které byly v evropském kon-textu uplatněny při výzkumu podobných oblastí jako jsou Brdy, a které by mohly podnítit kladení hlubších otázek brdské problematice. 1) Základní přehled o významu Brd s odkazy na další literaturu je možno získat ze široce koncipovaných knih CÍLEK, Václav a kolektiv: Střední Brdy. Příbram, 2005; CÍLEK, Václav-MUDRA, Pavel-SŮVOVÁ, Zdeňka a kolektiv: Střední Brdy. Hory uprostřed Čech. Praha, 2015.

This paper discusses the complexity of archaeological evidence associated with seasonal upland settlement in Ireland, a subject which has only recently started to come to light. As a result of the lack of attention, many uncertainties remain in the interpretation of upland sites compared to lowland archaeology. The paper uses a casestudy of the Galtee Mountains in the south of Ireland, where it focuses on the material culture of transhumance in the post-medieval period. It explores two important aspects of this: first, the activities of transhumant herders in the wider landscape as revealed by the various material remains they have left behind; and second, the identification of chronological depth in these landscapes, as revealed by the morphology of summer (booley) houses and the context in which they are found.