Introduction

This book is an integral part of the project to publish the proceedings of the TAG Conference which was held at Southampton in 1992, and which had European archaeology as its underlying theme. The other volumes in this series focus on the world perspective of European archaeology (Ucko 1995), the archaeology of human ancestry (Steele and Shennan 1995), the role of cultural construction in the identity of Europe (Graves–Brown et al. 1995) and theory in Greek archaeology (Spencer 1995). This volume seeks to explore the application of such new theoretical traditions to a particular European region through a number of case studies ranging from the Palaeolithic through to the medieval period.