Investigating landscape and identity in Neolithic and Bronze Age Suffolk

Principal investigator: Liam
Level: Masters degree

In my masters dissertation, I am going to be investigating landscape and identity in Neolithic and Bronze Age Suffolk. The key issues I aim to explore are:

1. How the Suffolk landscape was first utilised by people to construct long-standing social groupings
2. How these patterns of activity relate to those seen both regionally and nationally at the same time, to determine how wider concerns were articulated in this area
3. How this landscape was used to construct and negotiate changing social identities and relations both within and between groups
4. How an awareness of group identities would have affected landscape experience and interaction
    

I will be using GIS to produce a regional survey of archaeological evidence for this county in these periods to enable me to begin to explore current ideas about the existence of a social divide present between the north and south of Suffolk in prehistory. A landscape approach will facilitate a consideration of social practice at a variety of temporal and geographical scales to explore how and why these social groupings were first established. This allows us to consider how Iron Age tribal groupings were able to draw upon existing social identities present in this landscape. I will integrate HER, NMR and PAS data to allow a comparison of site form and function, the location of sites, the relationship of sites to natural landscape features, material culture practices in the landscape, levels of site continuity and change, landscape organisation, landscape cosmology and how social change was played out in the two study areas, to establish whether we can identify a significant difference between them in terms of how the groups occupying them engaged and interacted with the landscape. Applying a social analysis to particular sites in each area will then allow a more detailed investigation of how each group used landscape to construct and produce shared identities and in do so construct difference between other regional groups.

Audit data

• Created: 14 years ago
• Created by: D P