Mick Aston and Chris Gerrard. 2013. Interpreting the English Village: Landscape and Community at Shapwick, Somerset. Oxford, England: Windgather Press. ISBN 978-1-905119-45-5. 456 pages, ten chapters, notes, bibliography and index.
Landscape Archaeology for the Public
Interpreting the English Village is the public archaeology publication of the results of a 10-year-long study in landscape archaeology in Somerset parish of southwest England. Mick Aston, lead author of the study (frequently seen on the Time Team), was one of the modern pioneers of landscape studies, which today use intensive surface and subsurface archaeological investigations of large tracks of land to gain a broader understanding of the way people lived within their environment. Interpreting the English Village is landscape archaeology at its best.
A Processual/Post-Processual Sidebar
The English village of the title is Shapwick, a small town in Somerset that was part of the estates of the Glastonbury Abbey during the Middle Ages. The "interpreting the village" title itself is a hint that this new book and the research that produced it is in some ways a direct response to the criticisms directed at Aston's 1985 book, called Interpreting the Landscape. That book, and the research it describes, came under fire from post-processualists for being explicitly distanced from the people who inhabited the landscape. That argument is part of a perennial struggle in archaeology about how much you can actually learn about people's behavior from archaeological remains: see processual archaeology for more information about that. Interpreting the English Village, however, is decidedly focused on the people.
Chapter Summary
There are ten chapters in Interpreting the English Village: two introduce the practices of the Shapwick project, seven describe the discovered chronological history of Shapwick, and the final chapter provides a broad-based interpretation. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 color illustrations are included in this nearly 500 page book, including photos, maps, and imagined reconstructions, artist conceptions of the various periods produced by Victor Ambrus. Extensive notes, bibliography and an index provide scholarly background to the accessible language of the text.
Chapter 1, "Starting Points", describes how the project came about, why the researchers selected Shapwick as a region to study, previous research in the vicinity, what people believed about Shapwick history prior to the research, and how the project strove to involve the public at each step of the process. Chapter 2, "Ways of Seeing: Methods for the Analysis of a Landscape", describes the methods used in the project, beginning with the examination of the historical documents, geological bedrock and local environment. Archaeological techniques used at Shapwick are described here, including field walking, aerial photography, geophysical survey, soil analysis, metal detecting, test pits, trenching, artifact processing and analysis, and technical reporting.
Chronology of Shapwick
The meat of the book is the next seven chapters: chronological information collected about each of the periods in evidence in the county. Chapter 3, called "Once Upon a Time", a sly reference to how little direct knowledge we have about ancient human societies, covers Mesolithic, Neolithic and early Iron Age occupation (the 4th millennium BC trackway known as Sweet Track falls within the area of study). Chapter 4, "In the Shadow of the Empire" covers the Roman Empire's presence in Shapwick. Chapter 5, "Postholes and People" takes the reader through the period once known as the "dark ages": from the fall of the Roman Empire up to the early middle ages. Chapter 6, "A Village Moment?" covers Shapwick prior to the Norman conquest.
Chapter 7, "Manor and Abbey" includes the first historical documentary evidence of Shapwick, in the later Medieval period, when Shapwick was part of the estate of the monastic abbey at Glastonbury. Chapter 8, "After the Dissolution" reports what happened to the people of Shapwick after the churches were forced to surrender their lands, to about 1750. Finally, Chapter 9, "Make Way for Tomorrow", begins with the Napoleonic era and takes us into today.
The final chapter in Interpreting the English Village,"Wider Contexts" addresses the long view, summarizing long term change and continuity in Shapwick, evolving settlement plans and environmental changes. The chapter also addresses the main question: when was the village of Shapwick founded, and why.
Bottom Line
The field of landscape archaeology still has a somewhat disreputable odor to it in some circles, which, as far as I'm concerned (and coming from a public background as I do), is too bad. If you believe that one of the responsibilities of archaeology is to communicate what you've learned and newly understand about the past, you have to stop counting potsherds and wasteflakes and make some brave attempts to explain and illustrate what you've found in a human sense. Such illustrations are always flawed, in that they must be in part based on what has been called the "archaeological imagination". If you are careful to identify where your story telling starts and stops, as Aston and Gerrard do here, the result is a nuanced, dense, informative and (oops, there's that word) entertaining exploration of the past.
The technical report for the Shapwick Project (Shapwick Project Somerset: a Rural Landscape Explored, 2007: also from Oxbow Books/David Brown) ran over 1,000 pages long and included a CD of data and was well reviewed by many in the archaeological community. Interpreting the English Village, as the public archaeology version of the report, is an interesting, informative and entertaining description of the results of a 10 year study into the wilds of Somerset. Its plentiful full color images and sidebar stories assist in making the story come alive, and, by the way, passing along the wider history of the British Isles.
