9 Where did the countryside come from?

For many the countryside is a place for holidays, of beaches and moorlands, of mud and rain and pretty villages. It is where we go to experience stillness, away from constant urban change. Fifty years ago, archaeologists and landscape historians realised that this historic calm was an illusion: the countryside did not always look as it does, and the main cause was human interference. The country is rich with signs of earlier generations' efforts to shape it, or at least of their inadvertent meddling, and scientific evidence shows how radical change has been. Ancient farmers cleared the trees that once grew everywhere, from Dartmoor to the Pennines. A television gardener explained that an ancient squirrel could have scuttled from one end of Britain to the other, branch to branch. Increasingly, however, archaeologists are realising how complex and localised landscape history is. The idea of a "natural" environment is questioned, as we imagine hunter gatherers (present as the first forests spread after the ice age) making their own impact. Britain grew through millennia of small actions, periodically augmented by large-scale transformations. But how all this came to create what we now see, often remains to be explained.

10 Who are the British?

Victorians, Normans, Picts or Romans, there is no shortage of British names at some time or other, or in some part of the country. Some like to think they are Anglo-Saxon (but see above), others would be Celtic – though archaeologists might say Celts never existed. Few today identify with tribes named by classical writers (over 40 across Britain and more in Ireland), though some living in the territory of the Parisii (Yorkshire) might like to imagine themselves Parisii (France), who gave their name to, yes, the city of lights and love. There is no typical Briton: and perhaps there never was a typical native of Pritani, the first recorded form of our islands' name, surely an outsider's observation – the painted people. We may not be descended from a Lost Tribe of Israel, as some medieval scribes had it, but we do have a long ancestry. The richness of that inheritance is being laid open by DNA studies, which show an unexpectedly strong element surviving from earliest, pre-farming times. But the full, wonderful story of who we are will come only from a blend of archaeology, history and genetics. It is the complete archaeological question.

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba117/feat1.shtml