ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of people in transforming the environment. Human activity may increase susceptibility of animals or plants to disease. Disease outbreaks triggered by particular patterns of weather. Grazing animals perpetuate clearings created in other ways. Thus an extensive area of cultural landscape in later pre history is the result of human agency interplay with a broad spectrum of other factors, natural as well as cultural. Some sites on chalkland, moorland and heathland point to closed woodland in the first half of the Holocene. Others hint at the possible persistence of some more open areas. The argument presents the antecedent environmental patchiness is not in essence environmentally deterministic because the factors responsible for that patchiness will very often be a product of an intimate combination of human agency and natural factors. Some monuments placed to make reference to earlier landscape structures and activities. Others may intend to defy and oppose existing monuments and landscape structures.
