Settlement and economy in a changing prehistoric lowland landscape: an East Yorkshire (UK) case study

Citation: Halkon, Peter, and Jim Innes (2005) Settlement and economy in a changing prehistoric lowland landscape: an East Yorkshire (UK) case study. European Journal of Archaeology 8.3 (2005): 225-259 (RSS)
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Tagged: Anthropology (RSS)

Summary

This article explores the connection between natural geological and environmental changes on past human behavior, using Foulness Valley in England, UK as a case study. This valley is unique because it exhibits multiple ecological/environmental zones and a deep history of occupation from the beginning of the Holocene up through the Iron Age.

Halkon and Innes believe that Foulness Valley is a great case study in which to correlate the distribution of artifacts with the various ecological and cultural phases present in the study region, as well as paleoenvironmental data to determine what environmental changes were occurring during each phase. This article represents the first phase of these larger research aims, consisting of a surface survey of the various zones of the valley to determine a rough distribution of diagnostic artifacts types for the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Iron Age occupation periods.

The authors refer to their theoretical framework as geographical determinism, drawing from a pragmatic approach which calls for contextualized explanations. In reference to archaeology, this refers to explanations of past human behavior that are fully contextualized and relevant, in this case, to the environmental variability of Foulness Valley.

Based on the initial surface survey, the distribution of artifacts around the waterways of this valley are explained by the authors as patterns of ritual deposition. This interpretation and explanation of the human behavior to place artifacts near waterways is relevant to Foulness valley because of its various wetland environments. From a pragmatic approach, such an interpretation would not be well supported in a different context, such as a desert (to be hyperbolic). Aside from the unusual distribution of artifacts near waterways, otherwise the artifact distributions indicate that people were carrying out daily activities in what would have dryer, more favorable environments such as the hinterland mixed forests.