ABSTRACT
Two recent conferences – the ‘Familiar Past’ session at the Theoretical Archaeology conference (December 1996) and the ‘Age of Transition 1400–1600’ conference held by the Societies of Medieval and Post-medieval Archaeology (November 1996) – have highlighted the need for a reappraisal of the relationship between medieval and historical archaeology in Britain. Until recently we have tended to follow a historical periodization of the past into medieval and post-medieval and ‘industrial’ archaeology. This has rein-forced perceptions of archaeology’s role as the ‘handmaiden of history’, merely illustrating existing historical narratives with artefactual evidence (c.f. Rahtz 1981; Austin 1992). Historical and medieval archaeologists have therefore spent a disproportionate amount of time and energy discussing our methodological and theoretical boundaries; a debate which has polarized around the relationship between documentary ‘historical’ sources and artefactual material culture. One of the most exciting developments in this volume is that historical archaeologists appear to have moved beyond such a circular debate, crossing the medieval/post-medieval divide and choosing to engage in a critical way with artefactual and documentary sources. To ignore historical sources is to misunderstand the multiple ways in which medieval and early modern people represented themselves through texts and artefacts. Rather, both documents and artefacts (including buildings and space) should be seen as ‘the surviving fragments of those recursive media through which the practices of social discourse were constructed’ (Barrett 1988: 9). These developments in historical archaeology have allowed us rather to begin to develop a critique of how historical periodization tends to mask the way in which our apparently ‘familiar’ and modern past was actually structured through the appropriation and consumption of medieval material culture. This issue will be explicitly addressed through the contextual case study of three fourteenth- and fifteenth-century religious fraternity halls in York. In many ways it is a response to the challenges laid down by Johnson’s (1996) search to develop an archaeology of capitalism through the study of the transformation of the meanings and use of rural medieval material culture. Although there has been considerable historical work concerning the role of towns in the commercialization and transformation of medieval feudal society (c.f. Hilton 1992; Britnell 1993; Miller and Hatcher 1995; Rigby 1995), urban buildings archaeologists have seemed reluctant to engage in this debate.
