Scale
A crucial consideration for any approach to landscape is that of scale. People in the past operated at a series of scales from the very local to long distance sets of connections, so that often most evidence is generated by life in the local area, structuring the nature of evidence. The balance between local, regional and long-distance action varies between periods, with longer distance connections most obvious in the Roman period, when Britain was connected to the empire. We start with a general consideration of questions of scale, before moving to consider the Roman period more specifically. We focus on the nature of villas as microcosms of the landscapes in which they sit, looking at where building materials come from, using good information from Isle of Wight villas as a case study. We play with the ideas that villas sit in landscapes, but also represent those landscapes in a condensed form.