Article created on Thursday, January 17, 2013 from ScienceNordic
The hedge around your property marks the boundary between what’s mine and what’s yours and the idea for this division is actually an ancient one.
Some of the first archaeological evidence of landscape boundaries dates back to around 1,500 BC during the Bronze Age in the UK, but 500 years later it also appears in the rest of Northwestern Europe.
“From being a predominantly open landscape with large commons with scattered trees, the landscape of Northwest Europe became dominated by linear demarcations.
“People started to enclose their fields and suddenly started building embankments and trenches around their houses and villages,” says PhD student Mette Løvschal, who works at Aarhus University’s Department of Culture and Society – Section for Prehistoric Archaeology, where she is using archaeological finds and anthropological theories to try and solve the riddle of when, how and why enclosure and boundaries became so important.
On the theoretical level, she uses cognitive theory and anthropological studies of various cultures’ and societies’ relationship to demarcation, which is slightly different to the way that archaeology is normally conducted.
She goes on to suggest that the fence went from simple enclosure and demarcation to become a sign of ownership of land or home.
Delineation went from signifying that somebody was using the land or keeping animals in this area to showing who owned the land, regardless of whether or not they used it.
Source: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/
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