HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

The distinction between the fields of history and archaeology is widely recognized to be a result of the scholarly boundaries that place historians and archaeologists in separate academic departments. The hindrance of intellectual exchange between the disciplines has resulted in the development of misunderstandings about philosophical underpinnings, standards of practice, and current inquiry. Moreover, this division between history and archaeology naturalizes modern distinctions between the pasts of literate and nonliterate people. Indeed, a thorough assessment of the relationship between history and archaeology requires an appraisal of the nature of historical and archaeological inquiry, as scholars in each field exhibit fundamental misconceptions about the other discipline.

literacy in early medieval europe

Traditionally, the division between "prehistoric" and "historic" archaeology, with its evolutionary implications, has been based on the presence of writing. In modern studies of the early medieval period, however, this distinction often is obscured, because literate groups, such as the members of the Latinized Christian church, may provide the names and histories by which we know either contemporaneous nonliterate peoples or groups whose symbolic expression remains undeciphered by modern scholars. The archaeology of these peoples has been termed by some scholars "protohistory." The distinction between peoples who produced written records and those who did not underlies the privileged position ascribed to literacy as defining an evolving "civilization" and nonliteracy as representative of an ahistorical "barbarism."

In a society with limited literacy, such as early medieval Europe, writers generally were drawn from and read by only a small, usually elite, segment of society. Literacy was restricted geographically to religious and urban centers. It is important to acknowledge that documentation is in itself an agent of cultural transformation, as records play a role in the material discourse of power. During the early medieval period, an apparent association with the supernatural afforded an otherworldly authority to the documents created in religious scriptoria.

Documents often were created to maintain and further the economic and administrative interests of certain constituencies. For example, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), written in the first third of the eighth century by the Northumbrian cleric the Venerable Bede, and the sixth-century History of the Franks (Historia Francorum), by the bishop Gregory of Tours, consciously or unconsciously legitimized the nation-building endeavors of their respective kings, Edwin and Clovis, within the emerging English and Frankish states. These histories presented a spurious political unity that implied, for the benefit of their readers, that these nascent states manifested a cultural homogeneity. Archaeologists seeking a corresponding agreement in material culture patterning must be aware that the documents that direct their interpretations can be misleading. Attempts to relate the tribal groupings recorded in early medieval historical records perpetuate mythic notions of ethnic identity that sometimes find their realization in modern European nationalities. Despite early medieval references to cultural groupings, such as Burgundians, Goths, and Saxons, no evidence exists that these peoples shared a common biological descent. Indeed, ethnicity appears to have been a situational construct that was important within relationships of power and politics. The elite and their interests were most likely to have been the subjects, benefactors, and consumers of the written works in which ethnic labels were recorded.

Because of the centrality of the documentary records in the ongoing activities of church and state, it is impossible to consider any aspect of the early medieval period without acknowledging the power of the written word in our current appreciation of these institutions. Without such awareness, the social, economic, and political organization of the past becomes evidence of evolutionary developments extending from the early medieval period to the modern day. This deterministic presentation of "progress" legitimizes the authority of those powers whose past is recorded and affords modern interests an opportunity to incorporate the legitimacy of a mythic past in the pursuit of their own objectives. The historiography of the early medieval period cannot be separated from Europe's own self-conception, as current political concerns have unconsciously guided interpretations of the past. For example, beginning in the nineteenth century, archaeology presented Europe as the cultural product of conquest and colonization, mirroring the European imperialist experience in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. By the 1960s, this association with militaristic expansionism was superseded by complex processual models. Today, in an environment of individualism and nation building, interpretations emphasizing human agency and cultural identity are evoked.

the nature of historical and archaeological evidence

In comparison with texts of later historical periods, those dating to early medieval times (c. a.d. 400–1000) are neither as common nor as specific and typically lack any substantive presentations of individuals. Textual sources during this period include heroic literature, annals, histories and chronicles, saint's lives, charters, wills, pedigrees and genealogies, and laws. Discontinuous in their creation and episodic in their narrative of time and space, documents traditionally have been considered permanent records intended for present and future audiences. In contrast, archaeological information, characterized as cumulative and continuously created, informs on relations and situations in the past. Categories of archaeological data include the excavated remains of settlements, burials, and earthworks, field surveys, and supporting data from specialist analyses (e.g., metallurgical, petrographic, chronometric, and zooarchaeological studies).

Underscoring the importance of the written link between the documentary and archaeological records are inscribed objects. These textual artifacts, such as coins carrying the name and place of the authority under whom they were minted and personal items inscribed with the name of the individual who made, commissioned, or owned the object, occasionally are encountered in contexts associated with nonliterate peoples. It cannot be assumed that the content of the inscription necessarily was understood by those using these objects. The symbolic authority of the written word, however, must have been generally appreciated, as meaningless characters sometimes appear on objects, such as precious metal bracteates, fabricated by nonliterate people. Moreover, the prestige vested in the written word is emphasized by the fact that the members of the elite would have been most likely to have had the resources and relationships necessary to acquire and distribute these valuable goods.

Critical theory has led scholars to understand that the past is a cultural construction and that historians and archaeologists, as well as their source materials, are constrained by biases. The historical records were not created to address the questions that modern scholars pose. Intentional and unintentional biases arise between the situations in which documents were originally created and have been subsequently interpreted. At a fundamental level are errors of translation, as the lack of equivalency in one language can lead to misrepresentation in another. Moreover, the written records often were drafted many years after the events that they describe or, in the case of oral traditions, after the original work was composed. As a consequence, these written works may reflect the political geography and relationships of the time of transcription rather than the period of creation. Not all records from a particular time and place have been preserved, so the picture presented from a reading of the available documents can never be considered complete or even representative. Indeed, early medieval authors were selective in their choice of subjects, often omitting entire categories of people, such as the young, the impoverished, or the disabled, from meaningful mention. The resulting historical narrative often lacks any structure beyond that of chronology, as the events described occur at irregular intervals and are of unknown relative significance.

Without mediation between these two sources of information, our understanding of the archaeological or textual evidence is constrained. For example, the Beowulf poem, written down in the eighth century or later, has been used by archaeologists to identify and interpret objects, such as the helmet and standard found in the elite seventh-century ship burial at Sutton Hoo (Suffolk, England). Although the poem and the burial generally are thought to be separated chronologically by at least one century, scholars often treat them as contemporaneous. Moreover, similarities between the literary and archaeological material have been employed to derive the date of the heroic Beowulf poem and to guide its translation toward language and concepts framed by the finds at Sutton Hoo. By viewing the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and the Sutton Hoo burial as mirrors of each other, we limit our understanding of each in its own right.

relationships between history and archaeology

Archaeology has been famously belittled as the "handmaiden to history" and "an expensive way of telling us what we already know." Indeed, some archaeologists have viewed archaeology during historic periods as most useful as a laboratory in which theories, particularly those developed by prehistorians, can be tested. At the same time, early medieval archaeologists ignore the epistemological implication of this cultural connection across centuries: Is it appropriate—and, if so, under what conditions—to assume a cultural connection from historically documented times into the prehistoric past? Often, little rigor is exercised in assessing the appropriateness of the analogy drawn. This procedure, called by North American archaeologists the "direct historical approach," effectively decontextualizes the past, thereby subjecting it to anachronistic interpretation and obscuring its specific social meaning.

The discipline of history or archaeology is seen by some practitioners in the other field as a fertile source of comparative material to illustrate or interpret research concerns within their own discipline. In the most intellectually arid conception of the relationship between written and artifactual evidence, historians simply have grafted archaeological facts onto a historical framework, and archaeologists have substantiated their findings by drawing facts from the documentary record. Throughout study of the early medieval period, archaeology has been used to illuminate areas of research largely ignored by the written texts, such as technology and economy.

The intellectual conversation between the two disciplines has been characterized as a monologue, as some historians consider archaeology to be irrelevant or overly theoretical. Scholars in both fields complain that in making use of the historian's toolkit, archaeologists demonstrate a limited understanding of the nature of historical inquiry and are unable to keep pace with philosophical and theoretical changes in the historical discipline. Anthropologically related historical approaches that mirror work done by post-processual archaeologists in other parts of the world, such as historical analyses that focus on the cultural construction of language and on the ways in which culture creates, fosters, and challenges inequalities, are largely ignored by those working in the early medieval period.

Using history to frame archaeological questions risks the production of tautologies, or circular arguments. For example, burials found in an area and at a time known from documents to have been inhabited by a certain tribal group generally are deemed to represent the population group. In early medieval England, this unreflective ethnic ascription of cemeteries as Anglo-Saxon has raised critical questions about how Celtic and Germanic ethnic identity was conceived, if at all, by those living in the fourth to seventh centuries and what the cemetery evidence indicates about the fate of the indigenous British population during this time.

past approaches, future directions

During the twentieth century the relationship between archaeology and history reflected wider developments in each field. During the first half of the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxon archaeologists, such as J. N. L. Myres and E. T. Leeds, fashioned an early medieval archaeology that privileged the historical record. Archaeological finds were organized within chronological and typological schema, which were related, in turn, to events, such as battles, and accounts of great men detailed in historical documents.

Into the 1970s and 1980s, archaeological data were viewed as more objective and reliable than historical sources, because it was argued that archaeology produced deposits that were unconsciously created and lacked intentionally communicated messages. Artifacts were seen as the tools by which humans maintain stability within the natural and social environment. Following the positivistic philosophy prevailing in the "New Archaeology" movement at that time, archaeology was positioned as a natural science against which subjective historical facts could be tested.

In the 1980s, however, archaeologists began to complain that historical interests framed the agenda, modes of analysis, and language of archaeological inquiry. As a consequence, it was argued, archaeological research should be guided by its own theoretical premises and executed independently of the historical sources. Rather than chronicling past events of traditional narrative history, with its focus on the elite, the "new medieval archaeology" sought to explicate the social processes affecting the daily lives of the wider population.

The "new medieval archaeology" was itself criticized, however, for conceptualizing change as an adaptive response to external systemic stimuli, thereby denying individual agency and ignoring the discursive relationship between human actions and the structures that they produce. Instead, it was argued that artifacts must be assessed in context, both as the products of actions and as the active agents by which social relations are identified, subverted, and transformed. Particularly in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, this reassessment of the relationship between history and archaeology revitalized medieval studies. Inspired by anthropologically oriented historians, such as those engaged in the French Annales school, which examined the long-term structures of social and economic history, and by the theoretical agendas of anthropologically trained North American archaeologists, new research cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries and sources to investigate thematic concerns, such as gender, power relations, and cultural identity.

The work of historical archaeologists in the United States was invoked further to demonstrate that the distinction between artifacts and texts is cultural rather than natural. Some archaeologists emphasized that in the same way that historians approach documents, artifacts can be "read," because both sources are components of material culture formed by the imposition of human action on nature. This position considers texts and artifacts equally as the products of thoughtful human action that contain social meaning and are the means by which social relations are articulated and negotiated. Rather than playing a passive role, as labels or markers, artifacts and documents were utilized in the past as expressive media. Written texts, therefore, are fundamentally artifacts and, as such, are not privileged over other forms of material culture in the interpretation of the past. As a consequence, only through examining the specific social contexts of artifacts and documents can we understand their social meaning.

The analytical framework must be derived from a social theory independent of historical or archaeological methodologies. It has been suggested that social reproduction—the renewal and transformation of the social system and its cognitive structure—or the structuring dynamic of power provide organizing principles by which texts and artifacts can be methodologically joined. For example, through reading the changing proportions of different Pictish symbols carved on monumental stones between the sixth and tenth centuries, it is possible to identify a discourse of power. According to this interpretation, changes in the ideological content of these symbols articulate the expansion of dynastic elites in early medieval Scotland and the religious authorities put to their service.

This approach holds more broadly that the processes that produce the archaeological and historical records are often the same, even if their creators or circumstances of origin differ. Thus, the ideological anxieties articulated by the paganism of the seventh-century Sutton Hoo burials also are expressed, at a later time and in a different medium, by the political tension pervading the Beowulf poem, thereby uniting these works through a common metaphor or mindset. Indeed, following the writings of postmodern philosophers, the fact that a document shapes reality, thereby transforming it into a monument, is echoed by archaeologists who consider monuments, such as burial mounds, to be documents not only in a metaphorical sense but also as statements of ancestral authority and land tenure.

Rather than ignoring the documentary record or considering it to be all of a piece with the archaeological record, other archaeologists have argued that archaeology and history provide different sets of data that can be related dialectically to expose contradictions. This view holds that because different processes produce them, written and material pieces of evidence are fundamentally independent. In this approach, the interests of the dominant groups, as portrayed in the texts, can be used to investigate the ideological promotion of power and control and the resistance, through the distribution of material culture, among the textually disenfranchised. For example, this type of analysis exposes the contradictions between contrasting religious, political, and social interests vying for supremacy during the sixth and seventh centuries in the emerging East Anglian kingdom. Along with the documented attempts by Frankish and Italian churchmen to bring Christianity to England came a political and ideological alignment with these Continental kingdoms. Despite Continental Christianizing efforts, however, the burials at the East Anglian cemetery at Sutton Hoo exhibit a defiant paganism in their preference for cremation, grave furnishings, and ship burial. The dialectic between the missionary activities of the Christian church, as described in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and the pagan burial practices has been interpreted as the East Anglian kingdom's resistance to an ideological conquest by Continental powers.

In conclusion, there is no agreement as to whether archaeological and historical inquiries have different source materials, methodologies, or goals. While some archaeologists have sought to validate and integrate the interests of the fields of history and archaeology by identifying commonalties, others consider the disciplines to be complementary, and still others argue that archaeology must be released from its historical shackles. Rather than evidence of an inadequate theoretical and epistemological foundation, the lack of a universalizing system within which history and archaeology can be unified has been considered essential for the development of a contextual and pluralistic approach to the early medieval past.

See alsoThe Nature of Archaeological Data (vol. 1, part3); Sutton Hoo (vol. 2, part 7).

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Genevieve Fisher