Understanding the chronologies of England’s field systems

The chapter presents the outcomes from a project funded by Historic England to collate and analyse scientific dates for field systems in England. The project identified 393 scientific dates from more than 120 excavated field systems. The analysis provides a constructive critique of fieldscape chronologies and recommends methodological improvements and directions for future research. The results indicate that bounded fields appeared in the English landscape during the first quarter of the second millennium BC, and that subsequent enclosure was an ongoing, geographically discontinuous process. The active apportionment of land and maintenance of field systems was possibly interrupted during c. 1000–600 BC, as a hiatus was observed in the project’s data. Post-Roman and medieval field systems are rarely targeted for scientific dating, with the consequence that the continuity of field systems from the Roman period into later landscapes remains ill-defined. There are major biases in the current dataset of scientific dates. The project has illustrated the requirement for standardised reporting of scientific dates in grey literature reports, publications, and data archives. Geographical biases within the data occur due to regional concentrations in the application of development-led archaeology, and the impacts of regional priorities and research agendas. Future legislative protection, research frameworks and fieldwork strategies should prioritise understanding the long chronologies of field systems and rebalance our current attention towards periodised perspectives.