Landscape Stability and the Formation of Social Memory in Prehistoric Britain

REVIEW BY RICHARD BRADLEY Archaeologists study memories in prehistory and help to create them in the present. Ancient people must have had a sense of the past, just as we do today. That is why older monuments were visited and rebuilt, and the same places in the landscape were occupied time and again. Traces of earlier activities might have been identified, but we cannot know how they were understood. Even if they were deliberately ignored, that says something about the past in the past. Early landscapes prompted this kind of speculation. They contained ruined structures, abandoned earthworks, and in some cases artefacts that could be recognised and reused. They also included topograph