 So thank you for letting me speak here today. I will try to give a preliminary overview of my attempt to define a prehistoric landscape. By analysing the resource use within the landscape and the demarcation in and around it I would like to show the diversity of a complex landscape which forms spatial occupation but is also formed by the inhabitants. And I think this duality is at the heart of trying to understand the prehistoric landscapes through the eyes of its inhabitants. This also poses an opportunity to determine the interrelation of social dynamics and resource use but I will only touch on this briefly because I don't have so much time. So the landscape is here in western Denmark and it's a densely populated landscape around a river called Sturl. And I am going to talk about this area east of the small city Hörsteborg and I have limited my presentation today to the early Iron Age. The area has been surveyed extensively in connection with infrastructure and development projects and right now the museum in Hörsteborg is working on a larger research project focusing on settlement and land use in this area from the late New Lithic and also the beginning of the 20th century and this is just the preliminary results so I hope we'll have much more to share at a later date. But first let's take a look at the landscape in its natural form. The area is located at the edge of the Vaxilion Ice Sheet so that has created a unique range of natural resources associated with both the clay foreheads to the north you can see the landscape up there and the river valley to the south which is more flat and sandy. Some of the natural features of the landscape which must have been characteristic in the Iron Age as well are still evident today such as the river and the small streams and the stark contrast between the flat sandy plains and the hills to the north but other features are less obvious such as the small bogs containing bog iron which seem to have featured heavily in the northern part of the area. Today these small bogs are drained and they are clearly visible in historical maps of the area and other features are entirely hidden from our understanding such as which areas have been forested or maybe prehistoric sources of fresh water have been obscured by modern drainage. During the late New Lithic and the Bronze Age natural demarcations were supplemented by several hundred burial mounds forming a line parallel to the river. The mounds are linked to the main travel and transportation route which is simply known as the ancient route, Ulcersvein in Danish and this route stretches almost 90 kilometers inland from the western coast it's not a road as such, it's just a transportation route but during the early Iron Age four pit zone alignments were constructed two in myopia and two in the neighboring parish of Borbenen. The pit zone alignments consist of several hundred small shallow pits stuck in rows and stretching more than two kilometers the largest ones across the landscape. Some of them are divided into sections and some have rows of post holes along one side you can see the pits here and the rows of post holes on this side. When the pit zone alignments were first discovered they were compared to Cheveux de Fries or to Cecils Lilles but the pit zone alignments in the Myrobaria contain no evidence of spikes or other objects being placed in or between the pits so the most plausible interpretation for these particular alignments is that they are simply long rows of small empty pits and they might have been a temporary hindrance for a group in crossing them but I think it's doubtful if they are a substantial defense while the mounds are still visible in the landscape today the pits were never reducked they must have sanded over within a few years so each of the four pit zone alignments represent a very specific but unknown event also in the early Iron Age a system of fields were laid out just north of the row of mounds and together these man-mates and lateral demarcations have shaped the landscape adding a valuable aspect to understanding the sites within the area in addition to the fields, the pit zones and the mounds we have archaeological evidence in the form of eight excavated settlement sites in Myrobaria from this period six of the sites are only partially excavated with only a few houses on each site because this is primarily rescue excavations so we don't always get the full picture but the fully excavated sites are no one and the Langemargen in Luhan there is only one house and in Thies-Müllewey one or two houses and then Langemargen which has approximately 100 houses dating from between 500 and 300 BC this is the Langemargen site as you can see the light blue is the pre-Roman settlement and there are other periods here as well oh sorry the houses at Langemargen are not fenced and it's not always possible to determine if the house is a main building or a secondary building but since most of the houses have both living areas and wires each house is assumed to represent an independent farm at the moment we're not entirely sure how many houses may have been functioning at the same time so generally the 14, C14 dates fall within the range of 500 to 300 BC but it's a difficult period for carbon dating because of the house that was too so we can't really get any closer than that right now but if it's assumed that a farm has been in use for approximately one generation or 30 years then that would mean 15 farms were in use in time during that period and this is of course very simplified but it might be a general indication of the intensity of the settlement some of the farms seem to have been located in the same spot for several settlement phases and others seem to have migrated a bit more simply have a later starting date or an earlier end date so we have a settlement structure consisting of a large fairly stable settlement and several smaller settlements with shorter time spans surrounding it and that's not really a part of the usual settlement pattern for this time and place but it may indicate a transition from the late Bronze Age settlement structure of dispersed single or double farmsteads to the hamlet of village-like settlements of the middle and late pre-Roman Iron Age the oldest phases of the Celtic fields are thought to be dating to the same time as the settlement at Langemargen they are a symptom of the same change and access to resources from a dispersed settlement with fields connected to each farm and to a nucleated settlement with a larger coherent arable area consisting of smaller plots or fields surrounded by urban banks there are only limited traces of iron smelting at Langemargen and the surrounding sites but at a contemporary site nearby we have evidence of extensive smelting and ironworking dating back to the beginning of the pre-Roman Iron Age this site, Mobja, is situated a little further north in the clay hills and the smelting site is located at the edge of a peat bog containing bog ore so ironworking might not have been present in large quantity at the Langemargen site and the surrounding area but presumably it was quite easy to obtain iron tools from the neighboring settlement just three or four kilometers away so ironmike represent a resource access was limited but not by the occurrence of bog iron as a raw material but maybe more by the relatively new set of skills needed to work with bog iron-owned tools as mentioned, the demarcations had an aspect of understanding to the settlement structure but what about the demarcations themselves who built them? most of the mounds were built during the Bronze Age rows of mounds are coming throughout the area and they seem to be an integrated part of the Bronze Age cosmology at this point the settlement pattern consisted of single farmsteads thus the construction of this particular row of mounds spanning 90 kilometers must have been the result of common understanding of the right way to place a mound in the landscape but the pit zones were dark during the early Iron Age when the settlement and land-use patterns were transforming the pit zones in the Maiwa Barrier are all located near the Old Bronze Age transportation road two are running parallel to the Old Road this one and this one and one crosses it and the last small blue line is not... we're not able to determine the direction it takes of the three pit zones with determinable directions they are all associated with the river-crossings the westernmost pit zone at Svismullivaj is running across the ancient road its southern end is located just north of the river-crossing at Stormbrook and this pit zone has two smaller openings allowing pedestrian traffic through but preventing for example wagons, riders or herds of cattle from crossing you can see one of the openings over there it's only just approximately one year across the pit zone at Rysum Östergård further east is running parallel to the ancient road with the western end located just east of the river-crossing at Stur-Albeckbrug down there and then the north-eastern end of the pit zone at Lille-Torstrup sits at the edge of the crossing at Gambeck the crossings are marked by several sunken roads in river banks sunken roads in this area date back to the Bronze Age so it's not at all implausible that the crossings have been used when the pits were dug so the pit zones seem to point towards the river crossings they were dug at a time when the settlement structure was changing from dispersed single farms to a larger more coherent settlement thus redefining the landscape as seen by its inhabitants a changing use of the landscape called the old conventions of axes in the landscapes and routes through the area into question so as we've established sorry as we've established the pit zones are connected to the river crossings so the questions become were they meant to confirm the old travel routes marked by the row of mounds or were they an effort to renegotiate or transform them to be a part of the resource assemblage the new spatial organization of the landscape if we look at it through the lens of simple transportation the old route the old road loosely marked by the row of mounds winding through a dispersed settlement was not easy to control when settlement became more centralized the new spatial organization necessitated a more tightly regulated route ensuring that traffic went through the appropriate channels bringing it close by the settlement and thereby ensuring access to the resources brought by the flow of people be it access to traded goods, news or the ability to control who passed through the area but looking at the problem from a material and social anthropological viewpoint controlling the flow of people might not be just about securing access to resources it might also be about social coherence and consolidating the new way of organizing space however in my experience things are rarely so clean most of the time archaeological phenomenon are both practical and social in nature digging the long rows of pits must have been a considerable effort for a small farming community like the one at Langemargen it must have been quite a social event even if the purpose was practical in nature which brings us back to the duality where the landscapes both form and is formed by the inhabitants the landscape shaped the way people moved through it the easiest places to cross rivers and stream became focal points at the same time the trade and communication routes formed the way the inhabitants used the resources available to them be it iron trade cattle herding or other activities so by repeating these activities through time the people formed the landscape confirming the routes and focal points by wearing sunken roads into the hills to the point where the old crossings are still used today which is after the pits and that's all I had to say today if you want to read a bit more some inspiration here thank you very much