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Why is Waulud's Bank empty? (Pre-History)
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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the main structures within a village such as a church and later manor house become stone and better define a site. In timber they are far easier to move/ rebuild.

Quite so. Buildings and roads in durable materials are self-perpetuating. (But what is the evidence for things we have no evidence for...?)

If there is anything to the suggestion that churches are typically placed at ancient holy sites such as springs and sometimes must have been built within the ring of far older yew trees, then 'churches' were not generally movable, despite what their materials of construction would have allowed.

This I believe to be problematic as 1000 yr old churches, or indeed younger ones could have timber predecessors, so an old yew may just be contemporary.

Spring sites etc bring in the question of continuity of religious observance or renewal of such - difficult to tell. Only churches in stone become less movable, timber structures are relatively easily moved.


As far as I know this development is also related to the Christianisation of Britain and again I would suggest taxation which could only happen when national identity developed as opposed to the seven kingdoms of earlier times, later three (Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria).

I take it you mean the UNIFORMITY of 'the history of villages in England' suggests a nation-wide scheme as opposed to disparate practices evolving in separate kingdoms. Surely there is nothing to prevent each kingdom raising its own taxes: otherwise, how does each kingdom, seeing itself as a political unity distinct from the others, differ from a 'nation' distinct from its neighbours?

I am sure each kingdom did, and down to each village and Church therein, but nationally it was a Late Saxon institution. I even believe to have read that it was one favoured by the Normans (consequently, Domesday Survey)!

I equate Domesday villages with Late Saxon foundations, but that is my interpretation.

What is the EVIDENCE this rule of thumb is based on?

Not based on much but what I generally (and specifics may be different) believe is that villages came about in the Late Saxon period (as previously) for a variety of reasons. Not least centralised control of the population.

This explains the continued foundations of sites, these can go out of use for a variety of reasons, but one has to be chronological with a change in culture.

Do you mean to say that settlements studied in England can be characterised as having periods of occupation, followed by abandonment and later re-occupation along different lines (literally and metaphorically)?

The holy grail is to find continuous occupation and I tried at Verulamium for 10 years, but I would now suggest formal occupation (Town Life) became informal (Life in Towns), to then, in some cases to be Town Life (London).

Also burials in Churchyards rarely exceed a Late Saxon period foundation

That's fair enough, but burials in round barrows never exceed Bronze Age dates.

Not quite true - barrow burials occur in Roman and Saxon periods as does the reuse of barrows (?Repton - M. Biddle excavation - ?Vikings)

In my opinion agriculture is first as it is a pre-requisite for survival.

I don't follow. A vanishingly small proportion of the surviving done on Earth owes anything to agriculture.

Agriculture in the sense of food production allowing for a surplus, then population growth, specialisation, sedentism.

Once this has been achieved growth leads to specialisation, warfare and a need to congregate for all sorts of reasons (market, breeding, safety, culture, biological imperative of humans to interact etc).

Do you see the flat contradiction in that? The biological imperative came first... and all the rest follows from it.

Agree, did not put in right order, train of misthought

Although agriculture may not directly lead to villages, towns etc. without it these could not exist so it is the egg.

On the contrary, Jacobs shows that agriculture can not exist without economically active networks of people to invent and implement it. I highly recommend 'The Economy of Cities'.

Read that one years ago for my degree, or at least one with a similar title, I disagreed with it then, agriculture leads to surplus and specialisation, but also agriculture in its widest sense, not much more than hunter gathering creates social and economic networks as people travel. Eventually leading to gift exchange, bartering, consumerism and economies. Places (i.e. villages) without certain resources create a need for it, hence consumerism.

we have water and wood and other resources scattered so villages could move easily. This leads to a dispersed pattern of sites rurally, and not centralised sites until areas become walled and defined.

I'm sure we can all think of reasons for settlements to be scattered across the English countryside, but we don't have the evidence that they *were*.

Scattered evidence is not evidence that everyone was scattered: there is just too little of it. Surely. We have miles of open country with no evidence whatsoever; and fieldwalking can suggest a site for further investigation only because finds are in fact clustered into small areas.

(Centralisation is easier if there are no walls to limit growth and encourage resettlement elsewhere!)

Centralisation is easy with larger settlements and limits to physical rather than population growth. And things such as walls have other uses such as control and taxation at the gates

we do have tells but not ones that necessarily stick up in the landscape... particular circumstances... Continuous occupation is probably not more than 1,200 years or so

Yes, the particular circumstances are that the materials and mode of life employed in the English countryside have caused villages to gain ZERO height in 1200 years. Villages seem to be rather good at obliterating their own pasts. So how much height should be achieved in 2000 years... or 3000... or 10000? None at all?

How far back can we expect evidence on a continuously occupied site to last? From what I hear, nothing much older than Late Saxon survives. At abandoned sites, there are the odd bits and bobs up to half a million years ago.

For continuous uninterrupted occupation I would not push most sites beyond the Late Saxon period, although St Albans Abbey may go back to the late middle period with the foundation of the Abbey and its re-build under Offa. In theory it could go back to the Late Roman period as the site of the martyrium of Alban. However, later occupation may only have re-occupied a site where 'oral history' suggested Albans was martyred or buried.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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The holy grail is to find continuous occupation and I tried at Verulamium for 10 years

I am suggesting that you might well have seen what continuous occupation looks like, but that we should NOT necessarily expect that to be a succession of neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, Norman, etc. remains. The vast majority of what we know about those phases of history individually or in short trains comes from ABANDONED sites, which have necessarily had different experiences from anywhere (if there is anywhere) occupied continuously for several thousand years, up to the present day.

If the evidence does not match the expectation, it could be because the situation did not obtain and no evidence was ever left; but it might also be that the expectation is wrong. Who stops to check?


Not quite true - barrow burials occur in Roman and Saxon periods as does the reuse of barrows (?Repton - M. Biddle excavation - ?Vikings)

As you say, but the point is that churchyard burials coming in during the Late Saxon period says nothing at all about where the people were living before that. It is CONSISTENT with the villages being founded at that time, but also with any number of other models, including the one that says the villages were already there.

Agriculture in the sense of food production allowing for a surplus, then population growth, specialisation, sedentism.

I would only say that this has never been observed, there is no archaeo-evidence for it and this model is completely backwards. However, this is the tip of an iceberg that I do not propose we should explore together.

I'm afraid we have reached the point, as was inevitable, where we are each contradicting the other: arguments have run out and we are just re-stating our original positions.

Thank you for your time...


No problem
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Ray wrote:
Just give us the overview of what you've found out, then we'll see what significance we can wring from it.

Not a lot as you're about to learn.

Where are these houses?

In the submerged bits between the Scilly Isles. Some are above the low tide line.

How big are they? How are they arranged? Which way do they face? How much do these things vary? Are there gaps where they should be found...?

I've only ever seen them in a photo, and that was long before I joined AE. I had to ask a friend who's seen them for real and he's positive they're rectangular.


I wonder if the photos came before or after Explorations In A Drowned Landscape ? That mentions round, rectangular and square pre-Roman buildings, all now below sea level.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Is the consensus that the sea level rise was sudden or gradual as per the so-called Flandrian Transgression?

As Ray explained it, the Flandrian Transgression is "an 'overshoot' phenomenon circa 6000 - 3000 years ago, when sea levels continued to rise three, four, or even five metres above their present levels, before slowly settling back. The reason - a dramatic rise in global temperatures 8,400 years ago (up to 6 degrees above today's temps over a period of 50 years) This caused a rapid polar meltdown which took the world a few millennia to recover from. Most of the Scillies would have been inundated by this rise and covered with sand as a consequence."

Don't know if this theory is the accepted orthodoxy, seems just too pat.
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