Introduction

Summary

Cranborne Chase: the stunted aboriginal forest trees, scattered, not grouped in cultivations; anemones, bluebells, violets, all pale, sprinkled about, without colour,… for the sun hardly shone. Then [the] Vale; a vast air dome and the fields dropped to the bottom; the sun striking, there, there; a drench of rain falling, like a veil streaming from the sky, there and there; and the downs rising, very strongly scarped (if that is the word) so that they were ridged and ledged – and all the cleanliness of [the] village, its happiness and wellbeing, making me ask … still this is the right method, surely?

Virginia Woolf, Diary, 30 April, 1926

The title and subtitle of this book have been selected with special care, and this is the obvious point at which to explain why they were chosen. This volume presents the main results of a project which took its own authors by surprise. Our fieldwork in Cranborne Chase, on the edge of the southern English downland, began as a contribution to landscape archaeology, and also owed something to the tradition of culture history. The subtitle of this volume sums up the original intention of that research, but as the project developed, our work took a different course.

Although the title reflects this change in the character of our research, this work was never intended as a comprehensive regional study. The original nucleus was the excavation of a Bronze Age site at South Lodge Camp, which began in 1977. This site was selected, not because it was situated in Cranborne Chase, but because work in the 1890s had documented a large body of diagnostic material (Excavations IV, 1–41).