The Past from the Ploughzone: Understanding the Meaning of Ploughzone Scatters of Pottery and Metalwork and their Application to Landscape History in East Suffolk, c. AD 250-1350

Cox, Tom (2025) The Past from the Ploughzone: Understanding the Meaning of Ploughzone Scatters of Pottery and Metalwork and their Application to Landscape History in East Suffolk, c. AD 250-1350. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Artefacts recovered from the plough soil were once widely used by landscape historians and archaeologists to understand settlement and landscape change from prehistory to the present day. More recently, however, the use of this evidence has been eclipsed by more fashionable archaeological techniques such as geophysics. This thesis reasserts the validity of fieldwalking and metal detecting as archaeological survey techniques, particularly when employed together as part of a ‘blended methodology’.

A new methodology for understanding scatters of pottery and metalwork recovered from the plough soil is developed, systematically incorporating fieldwalking and metal detecting assemblages together into a single study for the first time. Through previously unpublished case study, it is demonstrated that fieldwalking and metal detecting offer differing, but complementary, insight into historic activities and processes that can be used to understand historic settlement and agriculture.

This methodology is used to explore the development of settlement, agriculture and society in 37 parishes in East Suffolk from the later Roman period to the end of the High Middle Ages (c. AD 250-1350). Using high quality, previously unpublished fieldwalking data from the ‘Survey in the Deben Valley’ and metalwork scatters from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, patterns of continuity and change in the landscape and settlement pattern of the study area are interrogated and new insight into the development of the countryside is offered. Recurrent subregional variations in manuring strategies are identified, arguably the result of long-term, environmentally structured patterns of landscape exploitation and livestock husbandry, while the importance of the natural environment in structuring settlement location and form, as well as in influencing social differencing is highlighted. The importance of these patterns for understanding the development of the landscape of East Anglia, and indeed England more widely, is laid out in the final chapters.

This thesis thus develops a novel framework for understanding fieldwalking and metal detecting datasets and shines new light on the interpretation of past landscapes from the ploughzone.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	19 May 2026 07:55
Last Modified:	19 May 2026 07:55
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103079
DOI:

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