Andrew Fleming

The primitive race of Soay sheep from the St Kilda archipelago in northwest Scotland has played an important role in narratives of the history of domestic sheep. The Soays, apparently a ‘Bronze Age’ race of sheep, were probably confined to the precipitous isle of Soay as soon as ‘Iron Age’ sheep were introduced to Hirta, St Kilda's main island, owi...

Stephen Rippon , Chris Smart & Ben Pears . The fields of Britannia. 2015. xix+445 pages, numerous b&w illustrations, 34 tables. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-964582-4 hardback £90. - Volume 90 Issue 351 - Andrew Fleming

Gosling Paul , Manning Conleth & Wadell John (ed.). New Survey of Clare Island. Volume 5: archaeology. x+326 pages, over 200 b&w & colour illustrations. 2007. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy; 978-1-904890-16-4 paperback €40. - Volume 82 Issue 318 - Andrew Fleming

Book reviews - Harden Jill & Lelong Olivia . Winds of change: the living landscapes of Hirta, St Kilda. xx+216 pages, 167 colour & b&w illustrations, 8 tables. 2011. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland; 978-0-903903-29-5 hardback £25 (Fellows £20). - Volume 85 Issue 330 - Andrew Fleming

This paper, written at the invitation of the editors of Landscapes, responds to the re-interpretation (published in this issue of Landscapes) following new field survey of the date of a linear earthwork which formed part of my thesis that an early English ‘kingdom’ can be identified in the upper Swaledale valley. The purpose of the response is not...

Riley Hazel & Wilson-North Robert . The field archaeology of Exmoor. xii+192 pages, 191 figures 2001. Swindon: English Heritage; 1-87359-258-2 paperback £12.95. - Volume 76 Issue 291 - Andrew Fleming

Discusses the landscape pattern made by the reavens - second millennium BC boundaries - of S Dartmoor. The upper moorland of the S Moor was probably used as common grazing by 6-7 major sociopolitical units. Each possessed its own grazing land, in a valley zone near settlement enclosures. Each group had a parallel system of reaves used partly for cu...

The work presented in this paper arose from an attempt to study society and economy in England during the period conventionally referred to as the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. The discussion of questions of this sort is traditionally supposed to be less reliable and important than taxonomic studies aimed at the construction of a relative chronolog...

This paper describes the distribution of reaves (Bronze Age land boundaries) on North and East Dartmoor (cf. Fleming 1978a for South Dartmoor). It is suggested that they form a pattern which reflects the territorial arrangements of several communities distributed around the edge of Dartmoor. Each of these territories tended to be about 3–4 km in br...

At Walkhampton, west Devon, a continuous line of field boundaries apparently represents the remains of two sides and three corners of a roughly rectangular enclosure of c. 175 hectares. We argue on stratigraphic grounds that the Walkhampton Enclosure (WE) pre-dates the Norman Conquest. It was sited strategically — defended by watercourses to the we...

Farming Practice in British Prehistory. Edited by MercerRoger. 23 × 15 cm. Pp. xxvi + 245 + 46 figs. + 23 pls. + 14 tables. Edinburgh: University Press, 1981. £9·50 (paperback). - Volume 62 Issue 2 - Andrew Fleming

Ancient Exmoor. By Eardley-WilmotHazel. 21 × 15 cm. Pp. 72, 17 pls., 2 maps. Dulverton: The Exmoor Press, 1983. ISBN 0-900131-44-6. £2·50. - Volume 64 Issue 1 - Andrew Fleming

An east-west route across Dartmoor, marked by a series oflate medieval granite crosses, probably goes back at least to the eighth century; it is the moorland component of the pre-Conquest road from Ashburton (and Exeter) to Tavistock and then through Horsebridge and into central Cornwall. The road links up with, and partly follows, another road lin...

The hypothesis is presented that in the early Middle Ages there was a complex and long-lasting relationship between elites, horse-riding (within a high prestige horse culture) and the creation of long-distance roads suitable for riding. This is an approach which may be applied far beyond mid Wales, where it was developed. Conventionally, historians...

The Monks' Trod is a well-preserved, constructed medieval road across the Cambrian mountains of mid Wales, linking the late 12th-century Cistercian houses of Strata Florida and Abbey Cwmhir, with a branch to Strata Marcella near Welshpool. Much of the road was constructed by the cut-and-fill technique, producing long stretches which run around or a...

IN A ZONE of improved upland pasture some 2 km east of the Cistercian monastery of Strata Florida (Ystrad Fflur), Ceredigion, are the earthwork remains of a 'sheepcote' and four abandoned medieval farms, one probably originating as a monastic sheep-handling station. Documentary evidence and field observation suggest that these farms have preserved...

In his recent book, Ideas of Landscape, Matthew Johnson has advocated a fresh agenda for the history and archaeology of landscape (here abbreviated to LAH), mostly on the basis of a critique of conventional disciplinary approaches. He argues that LAH is over-empirical, over-anecdotal, and too concerned with 'reconstruction'; since the 'taphonomic r...

Post-processual theorists have characterized landscape archaeology as practised in the second half of the twentieth century as over-empirical. They have asserted that the discipline is sterile, in that it deals inadequately with the people of the past, and is also too preoccupied with vision-privileging and Cartesian approaches. They have argued th...

Andrew Fleming takes phenomenology by the horns.

It is argued that the field data do not support the claims made by Tilley in his A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994) for intentional relationships between the placing of Welsh megalithic tombs and natural features of the landscape. The critique relates to sample quality, observational rigour and failure to examine alternative hypotheses concerning...

The rich although very different literatures relating to two islands – Hirta (St Kilda) in north-west Scotland and the Great Blasket in western Ireland – are exploited in order to explore ideas about the cosmology of landscapes described as 'dangerous' because of the risks taken by men engaged in fowling, fishing and seal-hunting. In the case of Hi...

On the western side of Village Bay, on the island of Hirta in the St Kilda archipelago, there are extensive dolerite quarries for the extraction of stone for production of `flaked stone bars' or hoe-blades, which are closely comparable to similar tools found in Neolithic and Bronze Age contexts in the Northern Isles. Broken hoe-blades are widely di...

During most of its recorded history (essentially 1698–1930) the people of St. Kilda (a small and remote archipelago in Scotland and now a World Heritage site) were members of a closely knit, communitarian society. Their habit of locking their doors forms the starting point for an exploration of the potential role of cash in the community, intracomm...

It is 300 years since Martin Martin published hisVoyage to St Kilda, one of the most informative accounts ever published of a seventeenth-century community. Historical treatments of St Kilda have often dramatized its isolation, distinctiveness and «marginality» but Martin's writings suggest that the lifeways of the St Kildans were not very differen...

Among the most common questions asked by archaeologists who study past agrarian landscapes are the following: 1) How did farmers use land (in terms of the activities by which they made a living)? 2) On what basis did they claim the right to occupy and use land (in terms of territorial possession, ‘ownership’, common rights, etc)? 3) In what sequenc...

Several documentary references which imply the existence of medieval and later wood pasture in Upper Swaledale (North Yorkshire, UK) are complemented by various categories of evidence which make it possible to identify zones where wood pastures survived longest, on a township-by-township basis. This evidence includes one or two existing wood pastur...

St Kilda, the little group of islands far offshore from northwest Scotland, was known for its seabird subsistence in the period before its evacuation in 1930. Recent discoveries suggest that the importance of agriculture in the prehistoric period (before the 16th century AD) may have been underestimated.

This essay considers whether it is possible for landscape archaeologists, particularly those concerned with prehistory or with periods not significantly text-aided, to go beyond the pursuit of methodological virtuosity and the production of local studies, and make useful contributions to discussions on mainstream social and economic issues in human...

Curwen, writing in A NTIQUITY 60 years ago about prehistoric agriculture in Britain (Curwen 1927), found his best evidence for the fields of earliest times came from the hut-circles and enclosures of Dartmoor. Andrew Fleming has done the same in studying the large-scale land divisions made by the Dartmoor reaves. Until his work these prehistoric bo...

THESTUDYAREA, located onopen moorland, is rich in relict medieval boundaries and traces ojindustrial actioity, A sequence ojland boundary rypes can be established and the history oj colonization and land use reconstructed. The sequence stretches Jrom theestablishment ofa small pre-Conquest hamlet through a periodojexpansion in the 13th century ojco...

In April 1972 Mr Fleming, Lecturer in Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, and his colleague Dr John Collis, were able to demonstrate the prehistoric date of a system of reaves, or low walls, on south-west Dartmoor. Further research showed that the true date and function of the reaves had been suggested in the early nineteenth...

Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.

Recent work has suggested that pastoralism, nomadic or otherwise, became increasingly important in the British Isles in the second and first millennia B.C. This paper is concerned with explaining this development. It sketches a typology of land use models, pointing out that the pollen records suggest two types of early clearance ‐ large scale and s...