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

该奖学金将尝试一种新的跨部门研究模式，探索更晚的史前野生动物及其与当代生态学辩论的相关性。为了揭示考古野生动物的神奇和迷人之处(Monbiot 2013)，当前的自然保护概念将被重塑。野生动物是一个紧迫的话题。人们越来越意识到人类在很大程度上是自然过程的一部分，野生动物是人类福祉的核心，这引发了强烈的反应。重新野化运动就是一个突出的例子。全球各地正在进行大胆的实验，以恢复当地被人类活动破坏的动植物，恢复野生地区，并重新将人与自然联系起来。在智力上，社会科学家试图唤起“非人类”生物--植物、动物和物体--在世界上扮演的活生生的角色，并质疑野生动物是什么，它做什么。然而，在考古学中，自然在很大程度上仍然被视为人类生活的一个衰落的背景。荒野被认为是开垦前风景的一种特征；过去关于野生动物的想法只有在有文字记载的历史时期才会得到检验。对野生动植物的评论主要集中在损失--林地的破坏和动物的灭绝。林地更新和在人类环境中发现奥罗克、鲸鱼、鹈鹕等的例子被视为有趣的，但大多是未被探索的。从公元前2500年到公元43年，跨越英国青铜和铁器时代(B/IA)，被认为是从自然景观向耕作景观转变的一个主要转折点。它也被誉为一个人们对自然的理解与我们的相去甚远的时代。令人惊讶的是，这一时期没有整体的生态账户。对B/IA生活的总结一再聚焦于故事中人性的一面--农业革命和驯化的证据。尽管B/IA可能是理解人与自然关系的关键，但我们目前对自然世界和人类在其中的地位的欣赏还很少。野生动物被忽视了。本奖学金将首次对B/IA英国的野生动物进行全面的研究。它将研究这一时期动植物组成的变化，在多大程度上可以接近考古野生动物，以及野生动物是否在后来的史前作为一种观念存在。大量的动植物遗骸数据将从不同的研究区域--泰晤士河上游、芬盆地和诺森伯兰--整理出来。将野生动物置于分析的中心舞台，将开发一种原创的多链工具包，用于研究考古野生动物。尖端科学方法将与考古“空白地带”(B/IA野生区域？)的景观尺度证据并列。以及由野生物种制成的物品--荨麻、狼牙等。通过给予野生动物应有的关注，将建立对后来史前的更丰富和更有活力的理解，不仅对现有的以人类为中心的历史记载提出严重挑战，而且还将与当前的生态实践联系在一起。建立一个新的常规采伐动植物遗骸数据系统，将解决改善获取古生态数据和采用开放科学方法的紧迫学科议程。与目前的野生动物保护从业者的联合工作将使自然保护者能够为研究提供信息，探索深层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性转变。该项目在考古学方面独树一帜，将由非学术机构牛津考古与埃克塞特大学、牛津大学、图卢兹大学、历史英格兰大学、考古数据服务中心和Knepp ReWilding Hub合作领导。

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.