ABSTRACT
Movements in archaeology, particularly in the 1980s, attempted to set medieval archaeology free of the apparent ‘tyranny of the historical record’. Medieval archaeology has indeed been fairly criticized for its failure to theorize, but the flip side of the coin can be equally worrying in its lack of rigour. The failure of medieval archaeologists in Britain to engage with theoretical approaches at the same pace and intensity as prehistorians is also partly due, ultimately, to the Roman occupation of Britain. Power and authority in the early medieval landscape are normally considered in terms of monumental constructions, burial mounds, imposing residences, sculpture, and so on, but a key mode of the exhibition of secular power within the early medieval landscape was the erection of gallows. Landscape archaeology tends to deal with ‘fixed’ entities, settlements, farms, boundaries, fields, and so on, without considering the concomi.
