'Rewilding' later prehistory: Bronze and Iron Age ecologies from the perspective of the wild

The Fellowship will trial a new mode of cross-sector research in exploring later prehistoric wildlife and its relevance to contemporary ecological debates. The current nature conservation concept of 'rewilding' will be recast in order to reveal the 'wonder and enchantment' (Monbiot 2013) of archaeological wildlife.

Wildlife is a pressing topic. Growing awareness that people are very much part of natural processes and that wildlife is central to human well-being has sparked strong responses. The rewilding movement is a prominent example. Bold experiments are underway across the globe to reinstate animals and plants destroyed locally by human activity, to restore wild areas, and to reconnect people with nature. Intellectually, social scientists have sought to elicit the lively roles that 'other-than-human' beings - plants, animals and objects - play in the world, and to question what wildlife is and what it does. Within archaeology, however, nature is still viewed largely as a waning backdrop for human life. Wildness is seen as a trait of pre-farming landscapes; past ideas about wildlife are examined only for historical periods when there are written accounts of 'the wild'. Reviews of wild plants and animals focus mainly on loss - the ruin of woodland and animal extinctions. Instances of woodland renewal and finds of aurochs, whales, pelican, etc., in human settings are treated as interesting, but mostly unexplored, asides.

The period from 2500 BC-AD 43, spanning the British Bronze and Iron Ages (B/IA), is recognised as a major tipping point in the transition from natural to farmed landscapes. It is also hailed as an era in which people's understandings of nature were far away from our own. Surprisingly, no holistic ecological account exists for this period. Summaries of B/IA life repeatedly focus on the human side of the story - evidence for farming revolutions and domestication. Although the B/IA could be pivotal to understandings of human-nature relations, our appreciation of the natural world and of people's place in it at this time is scant. Wildlife has been overlooked.

This Fellowship will consider holistically, for the first time, wildlife in B/IA Britain. It will examine shifts in the full makeup of plants and animals for this period, to what extent it is possible to approach archaeological wildlife, and whether or not wildlife even existed as an idea in later prehistory. A substantial volume of plant and animal remain data will be collated from diverse study areas - the Upper Thames Valley, the Fen Basin and Northumberland. Placing wildlife centre stage analytically, an original multi-stranded toolkit will be developed for investigating archaeological wildlife. Cutting-edge scientific methods will be juxtaposed with landscape-scale evidence of archaeological 'blank spaces' (B/IA wild areas?) and with objects made from wild species - nettles, wolf-teeth, and so on. By giving wildlife due attention, a richer and more vibrant understanding of later prehistory will be built, offering not only a serious challenge to existing human-centred historical accounts but also a vital link to current ecological practices.

Wider outcomes of the Fellowship will be threefold. The creation of a new system for logging plant and animal remain data routinely will address urgent disciplinary agendas to improve access to palaeoecological data and to embrace open science methods. Joint work with current rewilding practitioners will allow nature conservationists to inform the research, to explore the present value of deep-time wildlife perspectives, and to set an agenda, with archaeologists, for future collaboration. The Fellowship will also spark a radical shift in disciplinary research dynamics. Uniquely in archaeology, the project will be led by a non-academic body, Oxford Archaeology, in collaboration with the Universities of Exeter, Oxford, and Toulouse, Historic England, the Archaeology Data Service and Knepp rewilding hub.