The Landscape Context

The archaeological landscape of Wessex is one of the best known in Europe. There are very few students of archaeology who have not been taken to see sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury, Maiden Castle, and Danebury. Most archaeology departments insist that an in-depth knowledge of the region is essential for the training of an archaeologist, and as a student at Glasgow in the 1970s, one of the most distant departments from the region, it was considered a prerequisite for me to visit Wessex. I was loaded on to a coach and after a long journey I arrived at Devizes, where we stayed for a week of site and museum visits. I remember very little of what we saw, certainly the sites named above, but I do remember that I was tremendously excited by certain road signs. As we drove across the landscape I was confronted by names that were exotically familiar: All Cannings Cross, Gussage All Saints, Tollard Royal, and Overton Down. These names were exotic, particularly for a northerner brought up on names like Milngavie and Auchenshuggle, but very familiar since they cropped up frequently in the lectures and text books that were a feature of my course. It should be stressed that this course was untouched by the new ideas of statistical and behavioural studies that were so popular in other universities. My lectures were dominated by site and sequence and at this time, the late seventies, the sites that were available to us were the sites of Wessex that had been excavated and published by the great excavators of the previous generation. Today I am regularly involved in two trips to the region for the undergraduates studying archaeology at Cardff University. The first trip involves a visit to the hillforts of Maiden Castle and South Cadbury and the chalk figure at Cerne Abbas. These visits are very site focused and involve standing around listening to me giving a lecture on the context of hillforts—when they were built, what they were for, their distribution and the specific sequence of the particular site we are visiting.