Archaeology of Trees, Woodland, and Wood-Pasture

‘Virgin Forest’, like ‘Primitive Man’, is one of those phantoms that haunt the imagination of scholars. The belief that there exist in remote parts of the world, and even in Central Europe, areas of forest that have never been affected by human activity is a powerful idea. One meets the doctrine that conservationists ought to abandon whatever else they are doing and turn all their attention to preserving virgin forests, or in countries where none is left to restoring virgin forest (Hambler and Speight, 1995). ‘Unaltered’ forest is sometimes used as a baseline against which to estimate the success of conservation practice.

In reality, woodland ecology is not so easily separable from human culture. The category of virgin forest recedes in the face of archaeological discoveries, which establish the antiquity and pervasiveness of people’s land management almost everywhere except on remote islands. Nearly all the world’s forests have been used by people and altered in some way, usually since prehistoric times. Homo sapiens, even in Palæolithic times, had the unique power to act at a distance, if only by exterminating significant animals, such as the super-elephants that lived in previous interglacials, and by altering the natural frequency of fire where fire is possible.

The last large areas of wildwood to have been affected by humanity would have been on New Zealand, which appears to have had no human contact before about 750 years ago. A few smaller forested islands seem to have had no human contact until Europeans discovered them in the eighteenth century.

The American concept of ‘old growth’ is not quite the same as ‘virgin forest’. In practice it usually means forests that appear to have grown up without ‘significant’ direct human influence for a century or more, or (in America) since European settlement (Peterken, 1996). However, they often have been used and managed in earlier periods, especially by Aboriginal peoples, and may have been much changed by withdrawal of these earlier activities, even within the lifetime of existing trees.

Relations between people and trees are to be found almost everywhere; this chapter is on how to investigate them. Usually such investigations should be based on individual sites, only later (if at all) drawing generalized conclusions.

The archaeology of trees is usually a matter of the last few hundred years, sometimes extending back into prehistory, and at most to the beginning of the Holocene (the period of about 12,000 years since the last ice age). However, the inherent properties of trees are based on evolution over a much longer period, including adaptation to ecological factors that no longer operate, such as elephants.

Relations between people and trees are to be found almost everywhere; this chapter is on how to investigate them. Usually such investigations should be based on individual sites, only later (if at all) drawing generalized conclusions.

The archaeology of trees is usually a matter of the last few hundred years, sometimes extending back into prehistory, and at most to the beginning of the Holocene (the period of about 12,000 years since the last ice age). However, the inherent properties of trees are based on evolution over a much longer period, including adaptation to ecological factors that no longer operate, such as elephants.