Lowland Chalk Grassland
Posted: Thu Aug 22, 2024 5:28 pm
I found my oldest bit of pottery at archaeology up on the South Downs three weeks ago, a chunky piece of Middle Bronze Age bowl. That's the Amex Stadium a little to the right of it.
You can't help but get a bit reflective when you find something like that. To me it's as if the intervening 3,400 (ish) years vanish down to an instant, one person hacked off because they've broken a bowl and another very happy to find some of it.
It also got me thinking about the lowland chalk grassland habitat the Neolithic ancestors of the pot's owner had helped create and the many subsequent generations of farmers and their livestock have helped maintain, right up to the sterling present day efforts of people like Neil Hulme (and others on this site I'm sure) who put in hard scrub-bashing graft for the benefit of the many flora and fauna species who make this habitat their home and the people who enjoy seeing them.
Apologies then if this is a really daft question, but sticking just with butterflies were our current lowland chalk grassland specialists exactly that at the dawn of the major Neolithic woodland clearances / onset of livestock farming i.e. with colonies already established in pre-existing strips of chalk grassland along the coast and possibly other naturally occurring tree-free areas, who just followed their larval food plants into the rapidly expanding man-made landscape ? Or was there nowhere naturally scrub-free/short-turfed enough to support a Silver-spotted Skipper colony (for example) and we can say with some certainty that this species decided to take advantage of this newly cleared/grazed/maintained expansive man-made vista by making significant changes to its (presumably) erstwhile woodland edge existence ?
You can't help but get a bit reflective when you find something like that. To me it's as if the intervening 3,400 (ish) years vanish down to an instant, one person hacked off because they've broken a bowl and another very happy to find some of it.
It also got me thinking about the lowland chalk grassland habitat the Neolithic ancestors of the pot's owner had helped create and the many subsequent generations of farmers and their livestock have helped maintain, right up to the sterling present day efforts of people like Neil Hulme (and others on this site I'm sure) who put in hard scrub-bashing graft for the benefit of the many flora and fauna species who make this habitat their home and the people who enjoy seeing them.
Apologies then if this is a really daft question, but sticking just with butterflies were our current lowland chalk grassland specialists exactly that at the dawn of the major Neolithic woodland clearances / onset of livestock farming i.e. with colonies already established in pre-existing strips of chalk grassland along the coast and possibly other naturally occurring tree-free areas, who just followed their larval food plants into the rapidly expanding man-made landscape ? Or was there nowhere naturally scrub-free/short-turfed enough to support a Silver-spotted Skipper colony (for example) and we can say with some certainty that this species decided to take advantage of this newly cleared/grazed/maintained expansive man-made vista by making significant changes to its (presumably) erstwhile woodland edge existence ?