ABSTRACT
The concept of urban decline is a difficult one because it is doubly relative. There is little real consensus among historians or archaeologists either about what constitutes a town, or about what constitutes decline, and so while most of us think (or like to imagine) that we know what we mean when talking about urban decline, those perceptions remain awkward to translate into hard and fast definitions. For a mixture of practical and methodological reasons, I will endeavour in this chapter to circumvent these difficulties by confining my discussion within certain limits which it seems best to define at the outset.
