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The past decade has seen many calls for the development of unified ‘world historical archaeologies’ of the past 500 years. While the field benefits from growing international exchanges and collaborations, retaining the diversity of regional traditions is a major and emerging challenge. As the field increasingly tests the temporal, geographical and interdisciplinary limits of archaeological perspectives, engaging with the diversity of modern material, these complexities remain little discussed, and the situations and contingencies of disciplinary narratives, priorities and interactions remain unproblematized. Exploring these matters, this paper considers transatlantic interactions between British and North American traditions of historical archaeology over the past two decades, journeying between two garden landscapes – in Annapolis and Bristol. After considering Mark Leone's 1984 study of the William Paca garden in Annapolis, Maryland, and its subsequent reinterpretations, the paper discusses an eighteenth-century ‘eclectic’ garden at Goldney in Bristol. The paper argues that situational and ‘symmetrical’, rather than interpretative, approaches to archaeological material would aid the development of multi-vocal and inclusive ‘world historical archaeologies’, acknowledging and celebrating the archaeological complexities that are encountered in the past and the disciplinary present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garden cultivation played an important role in early food production but the definition of a garden is often unclear and encompasses a variety of different cultivation methods. This paper explores the intensive cultivation of small plots using horticultural methods through an investigation of garden and field agriculture in the Greek island of Evvia. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that intensive cultivation practices, such as hoeing, weeding, manuring and watering, have a significant impact on soil and crop productivity and are most likely to be applied to areas located near to settlement. The implications of intensive, small-scale cultivation for settlement location, population mobility and land tenure in prehistory are then explored. For example, while an economic system dependent on cereal cultivation does not necessarily involve extensive land clearance or field systems, the investment in land inherent in intensive cultivation provides a strong incentive for remaining in the same place and repeatedly cultivating the same spot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes some of the geoarchaeological evidence for early arable agriculture in Britain and Europe, and introduces new evidence for small-scale but very intensive cultivation in the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age in Scotland. The Scottish examples demonstrate that, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, midden heaps were sometimes ploughed in situ; this means that, rather than spreading midden material onto the fields, the early farmers simply ran an ard over their compost heaps and sowed the resulting plots. The practice appears to have been common in Scotland, and may also have occurred in England. Neolithic cultivation of a Mesolithic midden is suggested, based on thin-section analysis of the middens at Northton, Harris. The fertility of the Mesolithic middens may partly explain why Neolithic farmers re-settled Mesolithic sites in the Northern and Western Isles. Keywords Midden; Neolithic; farming: agriculture; manuring; prehistory.

This article examines the evidence for gardens in the Bronze Age landscapes of northern and western Britain. It offers an alternative perspective on the small field plots and unbounded areas of cultivated land by treating them as spaces that people inhabited with plants and animals, where environmental knowledge was learnt and controlled, and where social roles and identities were defined, maintained and contested. The excavated evidence shows that the biographies of houses are closely associated with those of the adjacent field plots. It also highlights the need to consider the ‘in-between places’ around the edges of buildings, along boundaries and in unkempt corners of fields. The coexistence of both domesticated and other plants demonstrates that gardens were not spaces dedicated to economic production in the terms that we understand today; rather they were places where people engaged closely with the botanical world and so gave it cultural value. The occupations of gardens and settlements were long-lived, if not necessarily continuous, and so provided the conditions in which more intensive strategies could be adopted, developing towards a more permanent and long-lasting commitment to place and landscape. Relations between people were structured through the contribution of gardening to activities such as the preparation and consumption of food, the provision of plants for medicinal and ritual purposes and the use of plots for keeping animals and as disposal areas for household refuse. These activities were closely controlled and, because of their cultural value, gardens were defined and their link to houses expressed as a means of negotiating social roles and identities within co-resident groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]