I’ve just finished Historic Landscape Archaeology: Approaches, Methods and Beneficiaries, available via FutureLearn.

Why I Took this Course

Although my main interest is in the sciences, I have previously taken a couple of fascinating online archaeology courses. This one looked like archaeology from a different angle: rather than dating pottery shards and digging up Pompeii, we looked at how humans have shaped the landscape by farming, mining, and moving water around over centuries and millennia.

The Course

Created by the University of Padova, the course focuses mainly on Mediterranean settlements, but other places, particularly in Britain and Europe, are mentioned. The instructor, Alexandra Chavarria, is a professor of medieval archaeology at the University of Padova.

Photographs, maps both old and new, and diagrams are used extensively throughout the course to illustrate different land uses. We learned how to recognise different land uses over time. The same area could have been a farming community with crops, then livestock, then later mining or manufacturing, even the trench warfare of the first World War. Each of these uses causes its own unique marks on the landscape. Water storage and distribution have also been responsible for changes to landscapes during human settlement. Also, some settlements have been abandoned either temporarily or permanently. We learned techniques to accurately date different features at a site, or at least to make an educated guess of their ages!

Time Commitment

I spent less than the recommended four hours per week for the four weeks of the course, although I didn’t read through many of the supplementary links provided, such as UNESCO’s list of Cultural Landscapes. As well as these engrossing and helpful links, learners have also added useful website resources in the discussion steps below many course pages.

Several steps include exercises where learners identify features and land uses, with the answers just a click away via pdf. A couple of practice quizzes helped us check our understanding of the material, but the final test and certificate are only available to those who paid. Current FutureLearn rules mean that new material is released weekly to non-paying learners, who lose course access at the end of the fourth week.

Conclusion

This course made me realize that we have been responsible for even more modifications to the landscape than I thought. While some will necessarily become lost, it’s vital to preserve various sites for future generations to study.  Find more archaeology courses here.