Fyfield and Overton Down

This book presents the results of 39 years of study by the author of the two Wiltshire parishes of Fyfield and Overton Down. The aim of the project, using a diverse array of research methods, was to elucidate a thorough understanding of the landscape and how and when it came by its present appearance. This volume summarises key primary evidence and synthesises and discusses the results of this detailed investigation.

This volume summarises key primary evidence, and synthesises and discusses matters arising, from the detailed investigation of the landscape of two parishes in Wiltshire, England, over the last fifty years. The study uses a wide range of historical and archaeological methodologies, including documentary research, air photography and question-oriented excavation.

The monograph is the most visible part of the project's total outcome, and rests on a highly structured archive of which the textual and graphic component is available electronically from the Archaeology Data Service (ADS).

Among a number of suggestions with wider implications about how, why and when the local farming landscape developed is the identification of the mid-first millennium BC for the establishment of a basically pastoral economy and of the earlier first millennium AD for the establishment of the basic structure of the local settlement pattern in a countryside which only subsequently became 'English'.

Peter Fowler has been successively Investigator with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), Reader in Archaeology at the University of Bristol, Secretary to the RCHME, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Leverhulme Fellow. He intermittently continued the research that is the subject of Landscape Plotted and Pieced while holding those positions.

Dr. Fowler has published widely, including books on prehistoric farming, and is regarded as one of the leading landscape archaeologists of his day. Now a full-time writer and consultant, he is very much involved in landscape and agrarian matters, in management and tourist aspects of the heritage and, through Unesco and ICOMOS, in the implementation of the concept of 'world heritage'.

• Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, No. 64
• ISBN 0 85431 276 5
• 260mm x 200mm 320pp 67 black and white photographs 92 line drawings (including 20 in pocket) frontispiece 6 tables
• £40 hardback
• Published December 2000
• Available from Oxbow Books

Cover illustration: Figures in a Wiltshire Landscape, a Moment 1985-7. Oil on canvas by David Inshaw (reproduced by kind permission of the artist)