The Don Valley in Prehistory: Upland and Lowland Developments and Interactions

This thesis fills a lacuna in the sequence of regional archaeologies in Britain. No work of synthesis exists for the Mesolithic to Bronze Age of the study area, consisting of South Yorkshire and much of the north midlands.
Is it possible to detect regional senses of identity using archaeological methodologies? The nature of regional identity is well attested in the recent past. Rooted in familiar landscapes, environments and locales, identity at the regional scale is related to and expressed through the undertaking of particular or routine tasks with familiar people.
In this thesis a relational approach accounts for the complex and sophisticated interaction between people and materiality. The sources for this include the databases of HERs, museums and national datasets. They also include both publications and unpublished reports. Most importantly, the largely untapped resource of museum collections have been a crucially important source of information. This has resulted in a database for the thesis consisting of 12,234 individual records. All classes of artefacts and structures have been considered in historical sequence, together with and in relation to the landscapes and environments within which they were deposited.
In the Mesolithic, different home ranges overlapped on the southwest side of the study area on the Gritstone uplands. The home ranges were probably centred in the Peak District and to the northeast of the study area respectively. Groups predominantly journeyed along river valleys. In the Neolithic, tasks related to pastoral lifeways became concentrated on the higher and drier areas flanking the middle reaches of the major rivers and the Humberhead Levels. The Magnesian Limestone Plateaux acted as the centre of gravity of communities, expressed through the material remains of their activities, and the structures they built. This continued in the Bronze Age, but the Gritsone uplands to the west became settled once more. People expressing affinities both to the southwest and northeast occupied locales that were connected in both directions by river valleys. The Magnesian Limestone plateaux, however, remained a strong focus for communities established between low lying wetlands.