Field Pattern   The ancient approach to farming land across Europe was to fragment it. Fragmentation meant that village elders would distribute small plots of land to individuals and those plots would be separated from each other. One farmer might be responsible for scores of different plots. The crops grown would be determined by the village's rotation system. An 'open field system' existed where small plots were farmed and eventually even owned by different individuals but where there was no fence between each plot. Areas dominated by the ancient Slav moldboard plough would have long, ribbon-like plots as a result of the plough being heavy and difficult to turn. Areas dominated by the smaller ploughs of Roman and Mediterranean Europe had smaller, squarer plots. Across Europe fragmentation has slowly been replaced over the centuries by enclosure and the joining of plots to make larger fields. Agriculture has slowly moved to make itself more efficient in this way. The British experience was that of parliamentary enclosure, originating in the 1200s and coming to a head in the 1700s and resulting in Britain's characteristic enclosed field pattern. In Eastern Europe communism introduced collectivisation that caused centuries-old fragmented agricultural patterns to wiped away in only a small number of years.  The evidence for three field pattern types includes: a. Traditional fragmented open field systems. no boundary fences etc. evidence of different crops being grown next to each other in small plots strips or small squares lack of evidence of collectivisation in the past b. Collective farms / abandoned collective farms / ex-collective farms now being run as large scale private enterprises etc. very large, often square fields evidence of large scale mechanised farming evidence of collective farm buildings modern operation tracks / roads c. Ex-collective farm land being farmed in a post-communist fragmentary fashion. evidence of past collective activity (see 2) small strip or square plots being farmed by individuals reliance on low levels of mechanisation and human resource