- People and Nature in the Celtic World -
Along the Mediterranean coast of France and Italy the earlier deciduous forest
was being replaced by evergreen trees and shrubs and by the expansion of the
characteristic Mediterranean scrubby mac chi a and garrigue vegetation. Human
activity is generally believed to be the main factor in these changes (Behre 1988),
although climatic changes may also have played a part (Huntley 1990).
In the environs of Manching, Bavaria, oak woodland had been cleared well before
the Iron Age and had given way to an open landscape with scattered pine and juniper
trees, with denser woods remaining only in the damper parts of the Danube valley
(Kuster 1991). Construction of Manching's 7km long defences C.200 Be required
vast numbers of mature oak trees, which pollen analysis shows must have been
transported from beyond the immediate vicinity of the site. By this period some
woodland was being managed: there is evidence for the conversion of beech forest
in Westphalia into coppice before the birth of Christ (Pott 1986). Another form of
management, which can be seen as a response to declining woodland for pasture and
leaf foliage, is the appearance of mown meadows in central Europe in the Early
Iron Age, a practice which increased considerably during the Roman period (Behre
1988 ).
On the Atlantic fringes of the area, the Landes, Brittany, Normandy and the sandy
soils in Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as sandy and coastal areas of the British
Isles, areas of heathland developed. This can be seen as a specific type of cultural
landscape created and maintained by particular regimes of grazing and burning.
Heathland expanded in Brittany during the Iron Age (Marguerie 1990). In Germany
and the Netherlands barrows were constructed of podsolized heath turves (Behre
1988) and heathland continued to increase in the Roman period and later during the
tenth century AD.
The intensity of iron age agriculture in some areas led to erosion. Sandy soils of
the Netherlands experienced wind erosion which buried iron age fields (van Gijn and
Waterbolk 1984). Major erosion of loessic soils on the chalk of Champagne, France,
occurred during the period when La Tene cemeteries were in use (Beal et al. 1980).
Wetlands in Mainland Europe and Britain
In this period of increasing human impact on nature, those inhabiting coastal
areas remained subject to natural changes in the extent of marine influence. At the
beginning of the Iron Age, settlement on the Assendelver Polder in the Netherlands
was restricted to slightly higher areas of peat or river levees (Brandt et al. 1987). Clay
areas subject to marine influence were exploited seasonally until c.250 Be when
reduced marine influence enabled settlement. By the first quarter of the first century
AD ditched fields were laid out, peat was drained and converted to grass pasture. The
ditches manifest greater control over the natural and social environment, and human
activity created a more homogeneous agricultural landscape, masking some of the
wetland's natural diversity, but only within temporal limits set, by variability in
the extent of marine influence. Eventually water-tables rose, peat growth resumed
and settlement on the polder was abandoned in the second and third centuries AD.
On the Somerset Levels, England, the first millennium Be saw renewed construc-
tion of wooden trackways, sometimes prompted by particular episodes of flooding