Recent British research on prehistoric territorial boundaries

The British Isles are very rich, compared to the rest of Europe, in prehistoric boundary earthworks. There are difficulties in deducing prehistoric territories from them, mainly because of the incompleteness of other evidence of settlement patterns. Fortunately, in the past two decades there have been major advances in territorial studies, in particular, of the pattern defined by the reaves (long walls) on Dartmoor in Southwest England and in the Anglo-Saxon pattern in Southern England defined by boundaries in legal documents (charters). These studies enable some general principles of early land divisions to be deduced, particularly the relations of boundaries to the natural features of the terrain. These principles can be applied to the study of other early boundary earthworks, and, in some cases, reasonable deductions on the nature of the prehistoric estates can be made. The paper concludes with a discussion of major problems, namely, the dating of earthworks, the continuity of boundaries between prehistoric and historic eras, the functions of boundary markers, their chronological development, and their social implications.