Wild Wetlands and Domestic Drylands?

Description

Well-preserved prehistoric wetland sites have the potential to transform our understanding of past life, yet in the UK wetlands and their inhabitants are often studied in isolation from surrounding drylands. As a result, fundamental questions remain unanswered: who were past ‘wetlanders’, what role did they play in the wider landscape, and how did they relate to neighbouring ‘drylanders’?

This book addresses these questions by contextualising later prehistoric (c. 4000 BC–100 AD) wetland sites and communities in the East Anglian Fens (UK). It examines wetland(er)s’ role within the wider socio-cultural and physical landscape by considering human-environment interaction and its social outcomes through time. Drawing on a comparative analysis of food remains from 145 sites across wetlands, the fen-edge and adjacent drylands, it explores how people engaged with different environments and how these interactions shaped identities and social relations over time. The results demonstrate that the Fens were never marginal or isolated, but a dynamic and fully integrated part of the wider socio-cultural landscape, in which wetland and dryland communities were deeply interconnected.