At the edge of the waterscape: Interaction at the boundaries between drainage basins in early prehistoric Britain and Ireland

Abstract

• River catchments and drainage basins are being increasingly used as units of ecological and socio-political organisation. There is also ample evidence in the archaeological record that knowledge of drainage basins was important in the past. This paper will explore a wide array of archaeological evidence that the watershed boundaries of drainage basins were places of sustained interaction and interest for human groups in the past. While the topographic boundaries of drainage basins are often hills and mountains, the vagaries of geo-morphology and the interaction between topography and hydrography mean that sometimes the watershed boundary is in relatively low-lying areas where the topographic separation of river systems is unclear– paradoxically these can be the most important areas for human interaction. These are often referred to in English as passes or gaps and can be both the boundary between separate drainage basins and the most convenient access point at the lowest altitude for communication and movement between regions and human communities. Bogs, marshes, springs and lakes, features of the waterscapes at the extremities of drainage basins were often the sites of artefact/votive deposition in the Bronze Age in Britain and Ireland, but this landscape enculturation can also be explored through other forms of evidence – middens, burnt mounds, burial monuments, rock art, and traced back to Neolithic stone tool production. This perception of space and place, developed over huge amounts of time, challenges both our understanding of ancient geography and the systems of knowledge that contributed to these concepts in the past