The landscape has long been seen simply as the canvas on which history is painted, but the environment is integral to the processes of history. History is written on the land. While the big geomorphological changes happen at a pace indiscernible to the human eye, changes in soils, plants and animals reflect changes in the patterns of human history. Processes of settlement remade landscapes and left behind a record on the land itself and beneath its surface.
It is sometimes hard to envision how much environments have transformed over time. ‘As solid as rock’ is a common simile, but little remains static and the rocks themselves move, break down and re-form – given long enough. The earth itself is about 5 000 million years old. Some 1 000 million years ago, the earth was cool and wet enough for life to begin. Single-cell organisms (bacteria) were the first life on earth and all carried the building blocks of life (DNA), the twenty amino acids that compose the building blocks of proteins in the cells of all living things.
