ABSTRACT
The collection, recording, cleaning, marking and storage of every sherd of pottery, every fragment of bone, every nail, every scrap of painted plaster is tedious, and time-and labour-consuming. But only by the study of large quantities of everyday evidence can we approach an understanding of the site and its occupants as a whole and not simply the more immediately attractive aspects, such as those which lie on the fringes of art or architectural history. An understanding of English medieval life cannot be gained wholly from the study of church architecture, painted missals and objets d’art-it is necessary to dig complete villages, including the barns and pigsties, and collect the whole mass of unaesthetic evidence if we are going to penetrate deeper than the aristocratic crust of medieval society. If this is true of medieval times, where we have considerable documentation to add to the rest of the evidence, how much more true it is of earlier, less literate societies.
