Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the contribution of palaeoenvironmental analytical techniques to the study of the landscape context of prehistoric rock-carvings in northwest Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Studies of the landscape context of prehistoric monuments, focused largely on megalithic chambered tombs, emphasise the significance of the relationship between archaeological sites and features within the surrounding landscape (such as alignments on mountain peaks, rivers, valleys and views of the sea). It is a potential weakness of these studies that they have largely ignored the probable impact that vegetation (e.g. trees) may have had on the visibility, and thus significance, of specific landscape features around archaeological sites (see Cummings and Whittle 2003, 2004); vegetation can also serve to separate and isolate sites from settled areas of the landscape. These issues can be explored using palaeoenvironmental data, such as pollen, but where cores are located up to several kilometres distance, they provide only generalised 'regional' vegetation data that should not be used to make comment on the environment of specific sites. However, it is possible to test hypotheses regarding the landscape context of specific sites, but this requires a methodology that derives palaeoenvironmental data from meaningful contexts related to the use-history of that site. Here we illustrate this using two examples from rock-carvings in south-west Sweden and Scotland. The two sites are located in radically different environments and are considered to relate to their landscape in different ways. In both cases, targeted palaeoenvironmental analysis has supported and advanced our understanding of the landscape context hypothesised on the basis of the archaeological/phenomenological data.

Reference

Cummings, V. and Whittle, A. 2003. Tombs with a view: landscape, monuments and trees. Antiquity 77, 255-266.