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Familiar Caves and Unfamiliar Landscapes: Approaching Cave Use During the First Millennia in Britain

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Between Worlds

Abstract

Recent research has highlighted the importance of contextualising caves in order to understand the broader significance of cave use, including what may have motivated cave selection and how these sites are situated within archaeological frameworks. Despite this, caves are frequently isolated in studies of first millennia BC and AD landscapes across Britain. Material has often been interpreted on a site-specific basis or as an adjunct of wider research focusing on specific chronological or regional narratives. This chapter will explore the broader significance of cave use in the British Late Iron Age and early Roman Iron Age (c. 200 BC–AD 200) by focusing on the landscape context of caves in southern Cravendale, North Yorkshire. By doing so, it will be possible to discuss what may have motivated site selection and how caves may have been connected to social attitudes towards landscape, including the projection of identity and the formation of cosmology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florida Department of State, Bureau of Archaeological Research, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Sam Wilford

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  1. Sam Wilford
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Lindsey Büster

  2. Centre de Recherches en Archéologie et Patrimoine, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Bruxelles, Belgium

    Eugène Warmenbol

  3. Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Dimitrij Mlekuž

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Wilford, S. (2019). Familiar Caves and Unfamiliar Landscapes: Approaching Cave Use During the First Millennia in Britain. In: Büster, L., Warmenbol, E., Mlekuž, D. (eds) Between Worlds. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99022-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99022-4_5

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