Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Towns

My interest in early medieval towns arose from my work on pottery distribution. I wanted to know whether the proliferation of towns in the 10th and 11th centuries was connected with changes in in the pottery industries of the time which I was finding in my research work.

My interests have broadened somewhat since then but I am still fundamentally interested in what people did in those early towns - were they predominantly local markets, long-distance trading centres, places of refuge, instruments of oppression or a mixture of all of these things? I am less interested in who controlled them, who built them and other aspects of control. My means of studying my research questions are to look at the source and quality of artefacts found in them and to compare these with artefact assemblages from non-urban centres.

GIS and Urban Archaeology

My interest in the use of Geographic Information Systems in urban archaeology really arises out of my main research interests in towns. I started off simply wanting a computer-based system which would allow me to view distribution plots of artefact types within a town viewed against a background of the supposed land-use and social topography of the settlement. A chance meeting with Dominic Powlesland, of the Heslerton Parish Project, made me realise that this was actually possible on a relatively small budget and using a PC rather than expensive work-stations. I started to use his G-sys software and have seen it develop from a DOS-based program through to one fully integrated into Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.

From my research-based interest in GIS in urban archaeology I have now moved on to the use of GIS as a means of cultural resource management (ie. protecting the archaeological deposits in a town whilst still allowing development to continue). The nice thing about GIS is that you don't have to choose between an academic or practical use of your data. You can view the same data in different ways. For example, for my purposes I might want to look at Viking Age artefacts against a background map showing the town in that period but to make the data relevant to CRM we simply swap the background map to one showing areas at threat of development or one showing areas protected by legislation.

Artefact Taphonomy

My third main area of interest is linked to the first two, I'm afraid. One of the main conclusions that you reach when studying the distribution of artefacts in urban stratigraphy is that the stratigraphy is very complex, much more than on rural excavations. Urban archaeological deposits are mainly formed by the movement of earth around or between sites. Sometimes this took place on a truly massive scale, as with the reclamation of the Thames waterfront in the City of London, in other cases it was simply a case of rubbish disposal on an urban tenement. In both extremes, however, the artefacts you find in a deposit cannot be assumed to have been in use at the same time or in the same location. You have to undertake a considerable amount of study to disentangle the different means by which these finds came to be in their final resting place.

My interest in this problem was started mainly because I wanted to remove the "noise" from the "signal", so to speak. However, over the years I have started to realise that one person's "noise" is another person's "signal" and that the study of artefact taphonomy actually has a lot to contribute to urban archaeology in general.