Woods, trees, clearings and contemporary archaeology
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2023-05-15

Andrew Hoaen (Open University)

How do we approach the non-human in the past and in the present? Since 2012 I have been 
conducting a series of projects looking at this question as it applies to trees and woodlands. 
These have included individual trees such as the Borrowdale Yews memorialised by 
Wordsworth, the woodlands planted at the important mental hospital (now closed) at St. 
Wulstans and the now vanished woodlands (removed to create heathland) at the nature reserve 
of Devils Spittleful, near Kidderminster. I have just completed a survey of an ancient holly 
wood in the largest area of ancient woodland in England in the Forest of Dean.
I have attempted in these studies to draw out what we can of the archaeology of the history of 
these long lived non-human life forms. In this paper I wish to discuss how we might theorise 
the archaeology of life based on the ideas of Jane Bennet, Arne Naess and the poet/philosopher 
Gary Snyder’s ideas around the non-human and the wild. Trees are adept at creating not only 
their own ecology but they present obstacles and opportunities for both humans and nonhumans. Ancient trees by their sheer size represent challenges and opportunities both in the 
past and the present and can come to structure human and non-human activities. Equally, 
woodland scrub can cover abandoned spaces in favourable conditions in 10-15 years, such that 
they are no longer part of the domestic human world and move from wastes to wilds. How 
these dynamic processes interact with human projects in the present has lessons for our studies 
of the deep past.