ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s the most vibrant areas of research to emerge were urban archaeology and church archaeology, stimulated by the contemporary climate of rescue and threats to the growing numbers of redundant medieval churches. Landscape and burial archaeology also feature prominently in the recent development of medieval archaeology in southern Europe, as does ‘the archaeology of architecture’. The formation of the Society for Medieval Archaeology in 1957 involved substantial negotiation and cooperation between competing disciplines, and there was appropriate attention given to the visibility of the ‘Celtic west’. With maturity, medieval archaeology has learned to work in concert with history, providing complementary and alternative approaches, or asking different questions more suited to material data. Medieval archaeology faces the same political and funding challenges that beset other areas of the wider discipline, such as the imperative to maximize the research value of developer-funded archaeology, and the real threat to archaeological employment in the face of global economic recession.
