ABSTRACT
Although anatomically modern humans had established themselves in the British Isles at the latitude of 53N several millennia before the maximum stage of the last glaciation (Bocquet-Appel and Demars 2000; Jacobi and Pettitt 2000), the onset of extreme glacial conditions around 20,000 years ago led to the abandonment of this part of northwest Europe. By the time recolonization got under way, following on from deglaciation, there had been a hiatus of at least 7,000 years during which knowledge of these northern landscapes is likely to have lapsed. Although claims have been made for the extreme longevity of landscape traditions in the context of origin myths (Echo-Hawk 2000), from the practical perspective of the people involved the deglaciated landscapes of the British Isles were terra incognita in the most literal sense of the term, while even half-remembered and distorted myths were of no use in northern Britain and Ireland, which entered the realm of human settlement for the first time during the early postglacial. Knowledge had to be acquired anew, and the lateglacial and early postglacial settlement of the British Isles offers a classic case of the ‘landscape learning process’ in the context of remote antiquity.
