ABSTRACT
While we reject empathetic responses, the experience of engaging with the past as archaeologists is intimately bound up with the impact that sites and artefacts make through their resonances of past activities and past minds. A past populated with individuals becomes ‘alive’, and this (indirect) contact is one of the rewards and motivations of research. Arguably, it is this sense of contact with the past that has been lacking in British post-medieval archaeology. Post-medieval archaeology in Britain is conventionally held to start after 1500 or 1550, and in practice ceases by 1750 to judge by the lack of published work going beyond that date. Post-medieval archaeology does not have a flourishing image as a research area, and can be unfavourably contrasted with intellectual explorations in prehistoric archaeology. Years of data collection have not been illuminated by questions centred on people. Modern archaeology has evolved through a vigorous period of reassessments of the purpose and methods of the discipline since the 1960s, and is now aligned with other human behaviour disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. The reasons for post-medieval archaeology’s lack of involvement with the general disciplinary evolution of archaeology are not clear, but there is some evidence that one specific definition of the practice of archaeology has acquired a longer life within the community of post-medieval researchers than elsewhere. The fundamental questions that define the existence of our discipline deserve consideration in this community. Why, and how, do we do archaeology?
