ABSTRACT
This chapter explores different types of prehistoric landscape change in relation to human agency and natural landscape change. It also explores human agency in landscape transformation, investigating themes of woodland clearance, landscape division, enclosure, movement and the impact of industrial activity. The chapter examines landscape change from the perspective of natural agency, with a particular focus on climatic change during the first millennium bc, and it is argued that natural environmental change can be understood within the framework of metaphysical agency and intentionality drawn from the iconoclasm literature. Landscapes are embedded with meaning, stemming from cultural memory constructed from histories of use, and personal memory resulting from lived experience. In terms of cultural landscape change and potential impacts from, woodland clearance and changes in landuse, division of the landscape, enclosure, movement through the landscape and later prehistoric industrial activity. In south-west England, the timing of the clearance of woodland is variable.
