Mark Edmonds

Who said romance was dead

This article uses recent work in the central Lake District to explore current approaches to prehistoric landscapes in Britain. It argues that those approaches owe much to ways of seeing, which have their roots in the Romantic tradition, in particular, a tendency to privilege vision over the other senses. The more recent history of the area is drawn upon to argue for approaches which deal more directly with the physical engagement with landscape at varied scales. Such an approach has implications for the ways that the area has been, and remains, caught up in discourses of identity.

Fieldwork at Great Langdale, Cumbria, 1985-1987: Preliminary Report

The Lake District mountains have long been known as the source of Neolithic artefacts belonging to petrological group VI. The study of their wider distribution has played a central part in investigations of the ‘axe trade’. Unfortunately, it is not clear that all Group VI axes originated in this area and in any case it is now known that there is no direct relationship between different fall-off patterns and the processes that led to their creation. At the same time, it is not possible to compare work at Neolithic flint mines with current knowledge of how non-flint axes were distributed. Recent fieldwork, in the wake of a survey carried out by the National Trust and the Cumbria and Lancashire Archaeological Unit, has tried to investigate the ways in which stoneworking at Great Langdale was organized and the relationship between methods of exploiting the raw materials on site and changes in the distribution of Cumbrian axes across Britain as a whole. This has involved experimental archaeology, technological analysis, environmental investigations and small-scale excavation. This work has resulted in the recognition of two distinct modes of production. These are discussed in relation to the environmental history of the surrounding region.

When they come to model Heaven: big science and the monumental in post-war Britain

How useful is the archaeology of the present? In this tour de force the author takes an iconic structure of modern times – the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank – and reveals the conjuncture of its origins and its subsequent parallel lives in science, war, politics and the imagination. The modern example allows us to get behind the scenes and under the covers – into the mentality of monumentality, as it has probably always been, proxy for the zeitgeist. Sceptics should read on…