Landscape Stability and the Formation of Social Memory in Prehistoric Britain

a GIS-based study on the nature of fast and slow-changing landscapes

Dwan, Christopher

People know places through inhabiting their textures and contours and relating places in space and time. Historically significant places come into being through inhabitation, and the world becomes sedimented with memories. These memories may be manifest within and referenced by materials.
Prehistorians often interpret the creation and maintenance of social memory in evidence of long-term continuities of inhabitation and the veneration of ancient structures and the people who built and inhabited them. This study focuses on GIS methods in landscape archaeology, using case studies from Bodmin Moor and the Somerset Levels in southwestern Britain. By treating the landscape as an active participant in the processes of memory-making the book asks how a landscape's rate of change will affect the maintenance of memories across short and long timescales.