Into the Wild: Rewilding and the Historic Environment

This network brings together an interdisciplinary collaborative partnership of researchers and practitioners from archaeology, cultural geography, nature conservation, land management, and policy. Its outputs will provide a much-needed evidence base on re-wilding within the historic environment. Re-wilding describes an array of global conservation approaches that aim to increase the sustainability of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscapes and undoubtedly offers huge ecological potential. At the same time, re-wilding changes a landscape’s historic character, which is often tightly interwoven with human histories – and can destroy archaeological evidence, so therefore presents potential threats. Our current understanding of these potential threats is very limited; this network responds to the need for dialogue and guidance for re-wilding projects around the historic environment.