Making Sense of Past Futures: Rural landscape temporalities in Roman Britain
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-03

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focussed on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation, and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge pre-conceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materialising of time, the future has a very significant part to play. 

 Lacey Wallace (University of Lincoln) and Andrew Gardner (UCL)