The North Eurasian inland heaths are open landscapes, dominated by evergreen sclerophyllus plants, most typically Calluna vulgaris L. (Hull). These thrive in the Atlantic humid climate on sandy acidic soils. To the passing eye, they can seem a pristine and unchanging kind of nature, untouched by human intervention. But appearances are deceptive. Heathlands are deeply anthropogenic landscapes, the product of millennia of human interaction by self-organised groups, each with their own large-scale grazing and fire regimes and associated livelihoods, ethics and forms of governance. Moreover, Calluna heaths are disequilibrial states of plant composition. They are in constant drift, which means that in the absence of disturbances and pressures they will be overgrown by shrubland and forest and eventually disappear. Checks like these can come from climate or soil conditions, other plants and organisms, or human and non-human animals.

These heathlands raise questions about how humans in the past were able to manage that drift and turn it into an advantage; how this enormous hybrid and multiply interbound assemblage became domesticated and crucially dependent on humans – and how, in return, it shaped and constrained human livelihoods.

Heather once thrived on the vast, exposed, unleached landscapes following the Weichselian Glaciation. The cold climate, soil conditions and browsing mammals and megafauna kept the landscape open without substantial human intervention. Only when the climate became warmer and megafauna were extinct did trees slowly begin to recolonise. Eventually, climax forest exterminated the heath assemblage, and over the next many millennia, heather had a very different existence, only appearing now and then in small patches in the underwood. When Neolithic agropastoral communities started to fell and burn the forest, heather returned once again on a massive scale on sandy and rocky soils. But something was fundamentally different from the heather growing on the barren tundra: heathland was now deeply dependent on humans to stay put. Whenever humans moved away, it regrew into other plant assemblages. Heathland could now only thrive and expand if drift was mitigated under persistent human commitment.

Some of the earliest heathland provocations were carried out by non-sedentary agro-pastoral Neolithic societies, who preferred the sandy soils for burying their dead in round barrows. Though they did not settle on the heath in permanent domestic camps, they likely did discover its potential for winter grazing and ensured its rejuvenation through frequent managed fires. This is reflected in pollen diagrams as correlated rising values for both Calluna taxa and microscopic charcoal. Consistent controlled burning and grazing was a powerful temporal and vegetational discipline on the otherwise mosaic herbaceous landscape. Evenly aged plants with regular return rates gave Calluna a significant advantage over its competitors.

Across the following centuries, human uses of the heathlands diversified massively. Turfs became a vital element in the Early Bronze Age boom in round barrow construction, with hundreds of thousands of hectares stripped of topsoil. We can see an intimate connection between humans and heaths where pieces of turf were brought into domestic sites or even into houses for thatching, byre-bedding or fuel. In the later Middle Ages and Early Modern times, three-course rotation systems depended on large-scale repurposing of soils from grass and heath pastures to cropfields. Some of these practices ensured repeated interruption of the heath drift; others devastated the heathland assemblage or modified the rejuvenation pattern over a much longer cycle. When the topsoil is removed, for example, it takes up to a hundred years to regenerate.

Hence, in a deep time perspective, humans increasingly regulated life and death for Calluna and shaped the character of the heathlands. The humans–heathland assemblage became increasingly mutually dependent in a cycle of rejuvenation and exhaustion. Intrinsically unstable in themselves, anthropogenic heathlands sometimes survived or reappeared across several millennia.

The associated research is currently free-to-access in Antiquity: Anthropogenic Heathlands: Disturbance ecologies and the social organisation of past super-resilient landscapes.