The Peopling of Britain: The Shaping of a Human Landscape. The Linacre Lecture 1999. - book review

Contemporary Review, August, 2002

The Peopling of Britain: The Shaping of a Human Landscape. The Linacre Lecture 1999. Paul Slack and Ryk Ward, editors. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]50.00. 295 pages. ISBN 0-19-829759-9. This collection of essays, which began life as the ninth series of Linacre Lectures before the University of Oxford, is concerned with those who came to the British Isles (described rather oddly as 'the small marginal fringe of western Europe').

In all the subjects covered, the main themes are the 'interactions between humans and their landscape' and the need for experts to share their latest researches with others in the field. Clive Gamble discusses the earliest migrants from 500,000 to 35,000 B.C. while Paul Mellars looks at 'The Homo Sapiens Peopling of Europe'. There are essays on the Coming of Agriculture between 4000 and 1500 BC; Tribes and Empires from ca. 1500 BC to AD 500 (by Prof. Barry Cunliffe); Kings and Warriors, which surveys the effects of human settlement from the post-Roman world to the eleventh century; the importance of plagues from 1250 to 1670; the relationship between towns and countryside in the early modern period; and, finally, a look at the Empire, the economy and immigration between 1850 and 2000. This is a valuable collection of the latest work and a book that will interest historians as well as geographers and archaeologists. (G.F.B.)