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Landscape in the Longue Durée

A History and Theory of Pebbles in a Pebbled Heathland Landscape

Distributed for UCL Press

Landscape in the Longue Durée

A History and Theory of Pebbles in a Pebbled Heathland Landscape

Pebbles are typically found only on beaches, in the liminal spaces between land and sea. But what happens when pebbles extend inland? The East Devon Pebblebed heathlands of the United Kingdom has a bedrock composed entirely of water-rounded pebbles. Using archaeological and anthropological perspectives, Christopher Tilley’s new book explores this region, from the Mesolithic to the Iron Ages, concluding with a twenty-first-century analysis. Tilley examines how the first early pebble structures built here still inform our contemporary culture, demonstrating how exceptional landscapes allow us to rethink continuity and change. 
 

498 pages | 202 illustrations | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2017

Free digital open access editions are available to download from UCL Press.

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Archaeology


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Table of Contents

"Part I: The heathlands in prehistory

1 The Pebblebed landscape
2 George Carter and the archaeology of East Devon
3 Early Bronze Age pebble cairns
4 Analysis of the pebbles
5 The poetics of pebbles
6 Burnt mounds and pebble sculptures
7 The value of pebbles in an original affluent society
8 How landscape defines communities in prehistory:
an environmental reconstruction of the prehistoric
Pebblebeds landscape
9 Signing the land: Woodbury Castle and hilltop enclosures
in the Iron Age of East Devon

Part II: The heathlands in modernity
10 Landscaping the heathlands
11 Early military occupation and use of the heathlands
12 The embodied poetics of a nineteenth-century heathlands
landscape
13 A vernacular pebbled landscape
14 The heathlands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
15 Woven flame and pebble grid: an artist’s interaction with
archaeology and the heathlands
16 Conclusions: the longue durée and a theory of pebbles in a
pebbled landscape"

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