‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory: Can prehistory inform our relationships with nature in the present day?

The ‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory project centres on wildlife in Bronze and Iron Age Britain (2500BC to AD43), providing a counterpoint to narratives dominated by an emphasis on advances in farming and domestication, as well as increasingly bounded and permanent settlement. Such ‘human-centred’ approaches are at odds with current environmental concerns, with ecologists, environmentalists and nature practitioners increasingly challenging the notion that domination of, and division from, the rest of the natural world by humans can be considered as synonymous with progress.

Combining zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, isotopic, archaeogenetic and palynological studies, ‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory sets out to provide a richer understanding of human relationships with wildlife in the past, with a view to building links to nature recovery efforts in the present. Current understandings of human’s role in the natural world are inevitably shaped by a recent history of industrial farming and mass resource extraction, with the idea of humanity as a globe-shaping force expressed in the term often applied to our current era: the ‘anthropocene’.

By critically evaluating the rigid divisions applied to archaeological evidence such as ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’, ‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory seeks to situate humans within nature, as part of ever-changing multi-species environments in which all human action and understanding takes place. Evidence of the ways ‘wildness’ was woven into everyday life manifests in a range of ways – from the wild plants, both utilised and resisted, which filter into fields and flourish in fallow land, to the creation of objects from animal materials, such as boar tusk pendants and decorated antler combs. This talk will address, from an archaeological perspective, a fact that bears down rapidly on us today: that humans cannot exist apart from nature.