Bronze Age Fieldsystems - Dividing Land

As it has been illustrated the Bronze Age agricultural landscape seems 'familiar' - a world of small settlements set amid well-tended fields. But is this really the case?

The Needingworth fieldsystem is now know to extend over many hundreds of hectares. Its discovery in 1995 was of great importance, both for our own coming to terms with the local prehistoric landscape but also because it was the first time since the Fengate excavations of the 1970s that another major Bronze Age fieldsystem had been widely exposed in Eastern England. Since then, during the later 1990s many more such systems have been found in the region.

The Needingworth system is, in fact, remarkably similar to that at Fengate; in that they share the same northwest-southeast orientation. Main ditch boundaries, many hundreds of metres in length, cross the landscape and run back from the river. These great strips are sub-divided into small field plots by further ditches and at points there is also evidence of hedge-lines. Unlike Fengate, however, there is little evidence of formal droveways which would have allowed for the uninterrupted passage of herds through the fields. The system here seems more self-contained, whereas at Fengate - arranged around Peterborough's fen-edge - there would have been a greater need to allow distant hinterland communities to take their animals through the fields to gain access to seasonally available fenland grazing.

Yet just how 'familiar' or 'natural' is this picture? In Britain such fieldsystems were essentially an invention of the Middle/later Bronze Age (1600/1500-1000/800BC) and previously the 'world' was not divided in this manner. Yet the key point here is that these systems are not strictly economically necessary. They do not, for example, occur on the Continent where, if anything, Bronze Age society was much more developed and population densities were probably higher. Arguably such systems represent as much a social adaptation by which land was sub-divided and were a framework both uniting and separating what had been previously small dispersed groups of people practising modes of greater residential mobility (i.e. moving around the land - see Early Pit Settlements).