The significance of the landscape: towards a non-hierarchical approach to heritage protection
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-05-11

Heritage agencies usually approach the protection of archaeology in terms of individual sites that are determined to be of particular significance. In England assessments of significance depend on various hierarchical processes: categorising a site or monument, defining its boundaries and determining its importance. This tends to produce an atomised view of archaeological landscapes, juxtaposing a few scheduled sites with a mass of undesignated
archaeology, which is not representative of the ways those landscapes were inhabited in the past. The concept of 'national importance' is often applied in a way that pays little attention
to the heterarchical relationships implicit in the creation of local context or character. Such hierarchical landscapes of heritage protection might seem largely irrelevant to academic narratives of past landscapes, but they matter because they are instrumental in planning policy and development control, often determining the nature of our interventions in those landscapes.
Drawing on the results of a recent project in Wiltshire, this paper begins to explore the application of more heterarchical ideas to heritage protection in a landscape context. I will suggest that a contextual approach could be developed on the basis of a better articulation of local character and place, reflecting changing patterns and perceptions of landscape, combined with a more sophisticated understanding of significance. This could in turn lead to planning tools that are more commensurate with the past social organisations reflected in the archaeological record.

Jonathan LAST (Historic England)