And this *isn’t*…

Ages ago I got given a copy of a book edited by Martin Hall and Stephen Silliman, called Historical Archaeology. I have of course a very great many things I haven’t read, but this one recently got to jump the queue because of my plundering one of its papers for my Material Culture class and figuring I should see what was in the rest.¹ You can probably guess that my reaction to the following piece of the introduction was less than friendly:

At the same time, many who study the periods for which documents exist, particularly those outside of the Americas, do not in fact refer to themselves as ‘historical archaeologists.’ Instead, they label their work by general period, such as Roman or Post-medieval, or by regional focus, such as Egyptology or Classical Greek Studies.

Hullo, did we miss something there? Are there really lots of documents from Classical Greece? Are there really lots of documents from the Roman period, indeed? Oh, really, you think there are? And from exactly when are the earliest manuscripts of those texts, do you happen to recall? Oh yes: they’re usually medieval. That bit you missed out. In fact they’re usually early medieval, and very often Carolingian. That Cicero for example! Quintessential man of Roman letters, right? Yes, they thought so in the ninth and tenth centuries too which is why you have any of his works. Argh. And yet it’s not just these people. I used to have a partner in Brighton, so I particularly noticed when Sussex University there ceased provision of medieval history and archaeology. Now their history course started with early modern, but their archaeology one retained an ancient component and a historical one that started, likewise, in the the early modern. The Middle Ages just dropped out of the middle. (Mind you, this appears to have been unsustainable because, unless I am just being stupid, they have now ceased offering archaeology of any kind.) I don’t know how many other places have these attitudes but I find it very strange and, obviously, inimical to my employment prospects.

Now this here was just a list of examples, I know, but it’s a bit ridiculous to be claiming that Roman archaeology could count as historical archaeology and then miss out the medieval. I wasn’t entirely surprised that they go on to say: “we do need an organising concept to frame and introduce the chapters that comprise this volume. Here, a useful framework is that of an archaeology of the modern world”.² In fact, the paper I originally used from this volume deals with the Picts, as part of a comparison, and it’s hard to get less textual evidence for a medieval culture than exists from Pictland, so I don’t really know what they thought they were doing with this introduction. They try and break down the work they’re presenting into themes, Scale, Agency, Materiality, Meaning, Identity, and Representation, which should be useful, but they’re all incoherent and run into one another, at least as presented here; for example, almost all of the relevant paragraphs involve questions of scale, in as much as they see a common theme as being the linking of the microcosmic to the global. So why not just say that once? And so on.

It’s not just that this wasn’t thought out and that they slight my period that bothers me. Slighting my period is costing them. If you prowled a list of medieval archaeological seminars from some suitably involved department you’d see loads of centre-and-periphery stuff, at least partly driven by the effect that these anthropological and sociological concepts have had on history of the period; I’m told that agency is now out of fashion though I continue to find it a very useful concept for my work; materiality is a weak spot for many medievalists, but obviously really not for medieval archæologists—how can this be a special characteristic of any branch of archæology?—and meaning is something that this introduction fails to locate at all, but we working on the Middle Ages have to defend that they mean something quite often. Lastly identity (because the question of how we represent the medieval world in the present I feel were best left to those like the team at In The Medieval Middle who specialise in it): how much work on medieval identity is there? To read this you’d think this was a new way to take archæology rather than something that two decades’ work on ethnogenesis could inform.³ The places where the texts can’t guide you through the material remains but both sides have to struggle to work it out are where these theories have been melded, tested, bent, broken and reformed for some time now. It’s worth paying attention to us, guys.

(Oh, and while I’m snarking about bad historicity in historical archæology: really, diggers at Bective Abbey, the Cistercians’ were not the first economically viable monasteries. Look up the Statutes of Adalhard of Corbie sometime to see how much food a Benedictine house that was well-landed and determined could produce. Enough to feed its community, their labourers and twenty to fifty pilgrims daily, up to 420 mouths a day, people.⁴ Even in Ireland monks did not subsist on food handouts from the nobility. You have taken the Cistercian bait hook, line and sinker, sorry.)

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1. Patricia Galloway, “Material Culture and Text: Exploring the Spaces Between and Within” in Martin Hall & Stephen W. Silliman (edd.), Historical Archaeology, Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology 9 (Oxford 2006), pp. 42-64.

2. Martin Hall & Stephen W. Silliman, “Introduction: Archaeology of the Modern World”, ibid. pp. 1-19, quotes here from pp. 1 & 2.

3. There’s been so much of that that it’s hard to know where to start but a review of sorts can be found in Andrew Gillett, “Ethnogenesis: A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe” in History Compass Vol. 4 (Oxford 2006) [ironically, from the same publishing house], pp. 241-260.

4. Partial transl. in Paul Dutton (transl.), Carolingian Civilization: a reader, Reading in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures 1, 2nd edn. (Peterborough ON 2004), pp. 223-229, citing Léon Levillain (ed.), “Les statuts d’Adalhard” in Le Moyen Âge, 2^e série Vol. 4 (Bruxelles 1900), pp. 354-359. It’s in the first edition of Dutton too but I don’t own that to check pp.

More theory: genealogical narrative and the feudal transformation

There is a paper by Randolph Starn in that van Engen volume I mentioned starting so long ago, called “Who’s Afraid of the Renaissance?”.¹ Its main purpose is to argue that medievalists and Renaissance scholars cannot afford, for all that they do subtly different things with their material, to exclude each other from their orbits. This may well be true but as someone whose period comes nowhere near the Quattrocento I’m not worrying too much just now. He does however say some interesting things about periodization.

He observes as an initial point that if you imagine there was a Renaissance at all, you are implicitly accepting three periods; the Renaissance itself, the golden period which it revives, and the interval in between in which that period was in eclipse. We usually call these the Renaissance, Antiquity and the Middle Ages respectively of course but they are all required by the concepts embodied in the first alone, and some have rejected them. Again, all fine. But because one of the things that occupies Renaissance and late medieval scholarship, he argues, is setting the boundary between each other, a boundary that he argues is unhelpful, it is very focused on a grand narrative transition between epochs. And he argues that this is unhelpful because it neglects things that don’t fit the story, and this is also all very fair and true and needs not to be forgot.

So his alternative is to suggest, rather than a narrative approach, a genealogical one. He suggests that rather than telling one story we follow lines down, or up, through history, looking for connections as a genealogist looks for ancestry or descent, expecting some branches to stop, other new ones to `marry’ in, thus allowing things to enter and leave the family without prejudice to their importance or the family’s. I quite like this conceptually, even though I don’t usually have to worry about grand narratives (except the ruddy feudal transformation) because of focusing on nature’s narrative duration, the lifespan, rather more than many. He is certainly right that this allows for a more nuanced and personalised reading of history than a truly big story like `the end of the Middle Ages’, and various analogies with modern family tree software that lets you zoom in and out on particular generations or groups could also be worked in.² The trouble comes when you stop trying to work vertically.

A real family tree or genealogy has siblings on it. It also has collateral lines, running in parallel but not directly linked. This model has no power to distinguish between the two. Let’s take the good old Transformation, since I can discourse on it easily. As you’ll see from the diagram thumbnailed below, I have views on how things derive in the feudal transformation. I’d also like to keep them so please, if you should find it useful, use it with my name attached and copyright recognised, without other change. But back to the thread.

Somehow, for example, we descend down this notional tree from, for example, a system where the court is the dominant field of political interaction to one where castle lordships are as high as it gets. We also descend from, let’s pick something fairly neutral, an armed yeomanry to a subject and disarmed peasantry who are `protected’ by armoured horsemen. So is the court the `sibling’ of the armed peasantry? Is the castle the `sibling’ of the knights? That latter sounds as if it makes sense, the former less so, though it’s kind of been argued. So which of those two from the upper generation is the parent of the latter two? Do they in fact give rise to either? Even together? Or are they in fact separate `families’? Why are they on the same tree then? And yet they clearly are related, even if only by time, whereas our scheme demands more consequence than that.

So I think it’s a nice idea, but when I try and put something I want to explain into it, it doesn’t help, and probably forces me to make false associations or ignore important ones. Therefore I suspect that it’s not much use for explaining things that actually happened. We may have to keep telling stories instead.

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1. Randolph Starn, “Who’s Afraid of the Renaissance?” in John van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame 1994), pp. 129-147.

2. I should speak a word here for Spansoft‘s Kith & Kin, which has been helping me keep families sorted and Catalan noblewomen called Adelaide distinct since 1999. Not that modern, therefore, although current versions look very different from what I started with (a shareware version that you can still find on the internet in places), but really quite robust and useful. Doesn’t deal gracefully with cousins who marry, though; if anyone knows anything that does, I’m open to suggestions also.