Paper short abstract:

There have been many theoretical discussions in recent decades within archaeology, anthropology and cultural geography of the cultural significance of place; and of the role that memory and the past played/plays within communities. There has been much less consideration of how and why many astonishing persistences of place and practice were possible in the past. As part of a general introduction to the session, this paper briefly considers some of the major theories advanced for the social construction of time and memory, illustrated with archaeological examples drawn from everyday Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes in central and northern England, including the results of developer-funded investigations.

Paper long abstract:

There have been theoretical discussions in recent decades within archaeology, anthropology and cultural geography of the cultural significance of place; and of the role that memory and the past played/plays within communities. Particularly since the development of commercial developer-funded archaeology, there has been increasing evidence on archaeological sites across Britain for spatial and chronological links established between different monuments, features or groups of artefacts, spanning many human generations or even many centuries. People returned again and again to particular places and made deliberate 'references' to earlier features and events. At the same time, theoretical approaches to the archaeological evidence have made much of the 'afterlife' of monuments and features, and the importance of the past in the past.

To date, however, there has been much less consideration of how and why many astonishing persistences of place and practice were possible in the past. What social processes did this 'referencing' actually constitute, and how was it possible to maintain knowledge of distant events or sometimes quite physically unremarkable features over such surprisingly lengthy periods of time?

As part of a general introduction to the session, this paper briefly considers some of the major theories advanced for the social construction of time, memory and forgetting within communities. Several different social and temporal scales of mnemonic practices actively at work in human societies may be detectable in the archaeological evidence from everyday Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes of fields and settlements in central and northern England.