The logics of enclosure: deep-time trajectories in the spread of land tenure boundaries in late prehistoric northern Europe

Invasive schemes involving the erection of land tenure boundaries are currently spreading quickly across vast areas throughout the globe, turning former unfenced forests and grasslands into closed-off parcels. These processes pose intriguing questions about the deep history of colonizing assemblages consisting of particular tenure practices, temporalities, and technologies, as well as their potential long-term repercussions. This article expands the temporal horizon applied to human-nonhuman configurations, endeavouring to focus beyond the ethnographic present or the event on trajectories as a particular spatial and temporal logic of fencing and the virtuality that ensues. It explores the earliest large-scale spread of land tenure boundaries across northern Europe, a process which occurred between the seventeenth and fifth centuries BCE, several millennia after Neolithization. Significant ebbs and flows in this process demonstrate how fencing exerts pressure on the future, a conspiring of forces and potentialities regarding what may or may not turn into long-term paths towards ever-increasing or enduring boundaries. By applying a 2,000-year timespan to the study of material ontologies, this article explores new interfaces between archaeology and new materialism which reveal the presence of formative yet dynamic processes and quasi-paths.