ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that a more productive medieval archaeology can arise only from a critical evaluation of the relationship between archaeology and history. Archaeology has thus defined itself in relation to its material, and from this has grown the set of methods and procedures deemed appropriate to its recovery and interpretation. Thus archaeology provides a record of discourse, and negotiation which has been submitted to inscription by the process of physical deposition and which can be 'read' by the archaeologist. If archaeology has gained any interpretative weight over the past decade, this can be attributed to a growing willingness to take seriously the insights into human organization which have been achieved in the social sciences in general. The archaeology is unequivocal: for all the microrhythms of existence some event or chain of events occurs, transcending them all and altering completely and irreversibly the location of the peasant habitus; quite simply, the farms are abandoned, together with the fields around them.
