History is just archaeology by other means, but writing things down, instead of committing them to memory, did not herald a whole new pattern of existence, it’s clearly bad news if you are a druid or a bard, but if you
plough the fields and scatter - it is of passing interest, and if you own the lands being ploughed, its time to sack the bard and hire a scribe.
The stories we learnt at school about kings, queens, bishops, and knights are surprisingly relevant to the archaeology of the built environment, because great chunks of it were built at their behest; they were at the focal point of the history of medieval Scotland, which as we saw in the last article, was an economic and ecological disaster zone, subject to systemic violence between Highlands and Lowlands.
For several millennium agriculture had supported an elite, an aristocracy, who for most of our history owned the land, an ownership that extended a varying degree to the people who lived on and worked their land. While prehistory gives us a canvass onto which we can project a world where this might not be so, as soon as myth, then history, emerges, it’s men with swords that are calling the shots. Swords are not entirely symbolic in this context, they appear in the Bronze Age,
[left [1]],and unlike arrows or spears, they are unambiguously weapons, and raised the technological bar for warfare; interpersonal violence was becoming the preserve of specialists.
Often, when we think about the past, we do so in our imaginations, using the pictures and impressions we have picked from our shared visual culture, we mix the real things we find into a fantasy world. Envisioning the environment in terms of its familiar topography and plants does not present much of a problem, domestic animals are bits hazier, but most of the things that made up the fabric of life just don’t survive here in our damp climate. However, even trees in the picture may not be clear, the focus of archaeology is on tools, seldom extending to a consideration of the materials and products that gave them utility and value. How to discuss, visualise and define things that no longer exists except in the imagination is one central issues of presenting archaeology. 
