Scientific Dates for England's Field Systems

The ‘Scientific Dates for Field Systems in England’ project was completed during 2015-16 in a partnership between Historic England, the University of Sheffield and ArcHeritage, a commercial archaeological consultancy. The project’s aims were to: (a) produce a collated list of relevant scientific dates for field systems in England; (b) provide a constructive critique of fieldscape chronologies based on collated scientific dates; (c) recommend methodological enhancements and future research that arise from the project’s results. The project assessed the current understanding of the chronology of field systems of all periods in England. The focus of the work was on reviewing known dates for the activity of enclosure for agricultural purposes and aimed to review existing dates for fields of all periods drawn from published and unpublished sources. The project recorded 393 scientific dates from 120 excavated sites (‘site’ refers to the archaeologically investigated area, however large or small) using information from unpublished and published sources.