Category: Theory
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What Did Rich Early Medieval Thegns Eat?
Food is a universal, but frequently invisible to the historian. What and how did people of the past eat? Do these questions vary by ‘class’, gender, age etc. In the first of these Deep-Dives into smaller topics of early medieval history, we’ve going to approach this broadly by looking at the food consumption of the…
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Experimental Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology: An Introduction
Every historian of the early medieval period should have at least a basic grasp of archaeology. One area of archaeology less frequently understood, however, is Experimental Archaeology. Seen by some as a bit of fun, Experimental Archaeology is actually a crucial aspect of developing and testing archaeological hypotheses. Broadly speaking, Experimental Archaeology marks an attempt…
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The ‘New Chronology’ – the World’s Craziest Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy Theorists are the bane of the academic. After years of research, experimentation and peer-review, some random person on the internet appears and instantly disregards your work, choosing to accept a sinister cover-up instead. I’ve written before about how these conspiracy theories can often be actively damaging and dangerous, rather than simply laughable. But today,…
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Studying ‘Disability’ in History
Understanding and Framing ‘Disability’ A consistent trend in modern academic history has been to challenge ideas that we have traditionally seen as straight-forwards and monolithic. Real life is rarely this simplistic. Variation across time and space makes clear that many cultural trends of the modern world are cultural creations, and vary substantially across history. Recently,…
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‘New’/Processual Archaeology – an introduction
Although broadly maligned by Hodder and the Post-Processualists in the 1980s, New (or Processual) archaeology is often identified as a substantial shift in both theory and methodology. Led by Binford, Renfrew and Clarke it reacted against the perceived shortcomings of Culture-Historical archaeology, embodied by Childe and (more openly politically) Kossina. Fundamentally, New Archaeology proposed a…