Showing papers on "Medieval archaeology published in 1993"

Decolonizing the English past: readings in medieval archaeology and history

Abstract: Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists are accustomed to categorizing the inhabitants of the rural farming households of medieval England as peasants without questioning the disciplinary implications of imposing such a category on historical subjects. Foundational categories, such as the worker, the peasant, the woman, become so familiar that they appear natural and divert us from studying the historical and power-charged processes involved in their constructions, past and present. The century-old debate over views of medieval English peasants as bound statically by custom, on the one hand, or as dynamically diverse or mobile, on the other, perhaps expresses embedded disciplinary tensions in the historic division of labor between anthropology (including archaeology) and history. From their disciplinary formation in the early modern period, anthropology and history together have constructed and guarded an imaginary but nevertheless potent boundary between the historical and the primitive, a boundary that divided the European colonizer from the non-European colonized and that within Europe divided the historical past from the traditional past. Who gets an anthropology and who gets a history therefore becomes a question of historic and power-charged disciplinary practices. As a foundational category, “peasant” straddles both disciplines and both divisions of the past, historical and traditional.In this essay, I wish to examine the powerful yet unacknowledged ways in which these disciplinary practices inform medieval peasant studies. I shall focus especially on the study of the material culture of the medieval English peasantry. Both history and archaeology claim the medieval English peasant to justify disciplinary narratives.

The Relationship between History and Archaeology: Elements of the Present Debate

Abstract: A EUROPEAN perspective to the current debate on the nature of archaeology and its relationship with history is given. Whilst some of the concepts are complex, it is important that medieval archaeology recognizes its importance as a field of research likely to yield valuable insights into the nature of archaeological data, the ways in which inferences about the past can be drawn, and the similarities and differences between archaeology, anthropology and history.

The Study of Medieval Archaeology: European Symposium for Teachers of Medieval Archaeology Lund 11-15 June 1990

Abstract: A collection of 25 articles on medieval archaeology an also presentations of the teaching of medieval archaeology in Europe.