Earthwork

An artwork which involves the manipulation of the natural environment and/or the use of natural materials, such as earth, stones, or wood, largely a phenomenon of the late 1960s and 1970s. Although some were exhibited in galleries, most earthworks were vast and usually constructed on remote, deserted sites and hence only known through photographs and plans. Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer (1944– ), two leading exponents, engaged in physically overpowering works, for example, Heizer's Complex One, Central Eastern Nevada (1972, unfinished), an elongated, pyramidal hill of rammed earth supported by steel and concrete.

The Earthworks or Land art movement drew its inspiration from Conceptual art, seeking to expand the concept of art, and of sculpture in particular, and to redefine attitudes both to technology and to the natural environment.

earthwork

In archaeology, any artificial bank or mound of earth with or without a ditch. Examples include barrows or burial mounds, henge monuments (circular banks with ditches), earthen circles, cursus banks, dykes, hill forts, ancient settlement sites, primitive cultivation systems, trackways, castle mounds or mottes, and medieval homestead moats.

The causewayed enclosures of Wessex (early Neolithic or New Stone Age) may have needed 100,000 hours of labour; that is, an estimated 250 people working together for six weeks. Estimates for Silbury Hill (late Neolithic) suggest 18 million hours of work. How this was organized is pure supposition.