ABSTRACT
Archaeology has the capacity not only to calibrate but also to amplify the established documentary and iconographic record of human experience. The recently published conferences of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (The Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture 1400-1600 [1997]; The Archaeology of Reformation [2003]; The Archaeology of Industrialisation [2004]; and Cities in the World [2006]1) have all revealed the capacity of archaeology and the study of artefacts to illuminate the ‘parallel lives’ of ordinary people who experienced the effects of the merchant capitalism, industrialised modes of production, urban sprawl, environmental damage, colonial expansion, religious sectarianism and the social inequality that are all defining characteristics of the early modern world. The period of transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern epoch (1400 to 1600) covers only part of that story but is a critical phase and one that establishes the physical, material and mental aĴributes of what we now regard as modernity and the foundation for the world we live in today. The spread of a new secular artistic culture beyond the confines of religious devotion in the form of the Mediterranean Renaissance idiom, the invention of the printing press for mass communication and the emergence of Protestantism and a more secularised everyday environment (with leisure time becoming an increasingly important category of culture for the many, not just the few) are just some of the key material features of this ‘age of transition’ that everyday objects can negotiate.
