What has been the contribution of wet sites to our understanding of landscapes and settlements in the past?

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What has been the contribution of wet sites to our understanding of landscapes and settlement in the past?

Introduction

Landscape archaeology has the main interest of understanding the relationships between the extended area surrounding the site and the people who lived within the site. This helps aid archaeologists to discover whether the natural landscape helped shape the activities of the people who lived there or whether there was exploitation of the landscape to ensure survival. From this archaeologists look to discover whether the landscape surrounding a site was a cultural landscape or a natural landscape, each with its own key signatures. From the perspective of settlement archaeologists are interested in patterns that help to differentiated whether the site was a nucleated, rural or village settlement. This can be discovered by studying the space and practice within the site such as houses or domestic practices or through application of geographical models such as central place theory or XTENT modelling to look for standardised patterns of settlement in the landscape. This essay will aim to consider wet sites such as Star Carr, Bouldner Cliff and The Fen’s to try and establish whether given the tools that archaeologists have at their disposal for landscape and settlement archaeology these sites offer an increase or decreased understanding of the archaeological record.

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