Making One's Way in the World: The Footprints & Trackways of Prehistoric People
by Martin Bell
Oxbow Books Jan 2020
£50 320pp hb isbn 9781789254020
In this important bookMa book Martin ti B Bell ll argues from a lifetime of research and experience for the significance of movement and routes in the prehistoric landscape. His case is both evidential – he is much more upbeat about the potential for identifying and dating routes than archaeologists have traditionally been – and that habitual movement was an integral part of past lives, an understanding of which can help us today see isolated ancient sites
connected in “living landscapes”.
Alfred Watkins has a lot to answer for. When he published The Old Straight Track in 1925, says Bell, he launched an ahistoric vision of imaginary lines across the countryside that repelled archaeologists as much as it attracted others drawn by the whiff of mysticism and gentle rebellion. The academic response was not to engage with Watkins and his spurious research, but to turn away from notions of prehistoric travel and routes altogether. Other popular attitudes to ancient t tracks encouraged the same approach: scared s off by such as “the chimera of o the ridgeways”, generations of archaeologists a avoided a defining aspect of o early societies whose promise in the field fi had been identified by pioneering studies – such as those of Eliot Curwen in East Sussex, where Bell grew up – before Watkins hijacked it.
Bell’s mission is to convince us that ancient population movement – whose significance has recently been highlighted by new research using isotopes and ancient dna, overturning a modern reluctance to engage with migration – left copious traces in the ground accessible to scientific study. Contrary to common assumption,
trackways can be dated. Hollow ways are more than “places of perpetual mystery”. Footprints are not just curiosities – and are probably far more widespread than we appreciate.
Key to this project is a willingness to engage with all forms of evidence, and not to rely on one, be that ecological, cultural or theoretical. In an opening chapter that doubles as a handbook of ideas about the ancient past and their proponents, Bell ranges from faecal spherulites and phenomenology to creative writing and art. Thematic chapters follow, with many illustrated case studies. We move from walking in the Pacific Northwest, to prehistoric footprints, barrow alignments and boats; from hunter-gatherers and early farmers to beavers and cattle.
In a key chapter about the Sussex Weald, Bell shows how bringing together evidence usually studied in isolation – ridgeways, Roman roads and droveways – reveals how routes may be perpetuated over long timescales, or broken by “upheaval and social change”. His concluding plea for a new understanding of past routeways that informs wildlife sustainability and the benefits of walking outdoors could not be more topical.