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

该奖学金将试行一种跨部门研究的新模式，以探索史前野生动物及其与当代生态辩论的相关性。为了揭示考古野生动物的“奇迹和魅力”（Monbiot 2013），目前的“重新野生化”自然保护概念将被重新塑造。野生动物是一个紧迫的话题。人们日益认识到，人是自然过程的重要组成部分，野生动物是人类福祉的核心，这引发了强烈的反应。野化运动就是一个突出的例子。世界各地正在进行大胆的实验，以恢复在当地被人类活动破坏的动植物，恢复野生地区，并使人与自然重新建立联系。在智力上，社会科学家试图引出“非人类”生物——植物、动物和物体——在世界上扮演的生动角色，并质疑野生动物是什么，它做什么。然而，在考古学中，大自然在很大程度上仍被视为人类生活的衰落背景。野性被视为农耕前景观的特征；过去关于野生动物的观念只有在有“野生”文字记载的历史时期才会被研究。对野生动植物的评论主要集中在损失上——林地的毁灭和动物的灭绝。林地的更新和在人类环境中发现的野牛、鲸鱼、鹈鹕等，被认为是有趣的，但大多是未经探索的。从公元前2500年到公元43年，跨越了英国青铜和铁器时代（B/IA），被认为是从自然景观向农业景观过渡的一个重要转折点。它也被誉为一个人们对自然的理解与我们自己的理解相去甚远的时代。令人惊讶的是，这一时期没有一个整体的生态解释。对B/IA生活的总结反复关注故事的人类方面——农业革命和驯化的证据。虽然B/IA可能是理解人与自然关系的关键，但我们对自然世界和人类在其中的地位的认识却很少。野生动物被忽视了。该奖学金将首次全面考虑英国B/IA地区的野生动物。它将研究这一时期植物和动物的整体构成的变化，在多大程度上可能接近考古野生动物，以及野生动物在史前后期是否作为一种观念存在。大量的植物和动物遗骸数据将从不同的研究区域-泰晤士河谷上游，芬盆地和诺森伯兰郡进行整理。将野生动物置于分析中心，将开发一个原始的多链工具包，用于调查考古野生动物。尖端的科学方法将与景观尺度的考古“空白地带”（B/IA野生地区？）以及由野生物种（荨麻、狼牙等）制成的物品并置。通过给予野生动物应有的关注，将建立对史前后期更丰富、更有活力的理解，不仅对现有的以人类为中心的历史叙述提出了严峻的挑战，而且还为当前的生态实践提供了重要的联系。研究金的更广泛成果将是三重的。建立一个定期记录动植物遗骸数据的新系统将解决紧迫的学科议程，以改善对古生态数据的获取，并采用开放的科学方法。与目前的野生动物重建工作者的联合工作将使自然保护主义者能够为研究提供信息，探索深度野生动物视角的当前价值，并与考古学家一起为未来的合作制定议程。该奖学金还将引发学科研究动态的根本转变。该项目将由一个非学术机构牛津考古牵头，与牛津大学埃克塞特大学、历史悠久的英格兰图卢兹大学、考古数据服务中心和克内普野生动物重建中心合作。

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.