Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T03:16:57.655Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Middens, memory and the effect of waste. Beyond symbolic meaning in archaeological deposits. An early medieval case study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2014

Ben Jervis
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Building upon the debate published in volume 19 of Archaeological dialogues, this contribution explores how, rather than seeing deposits as meaningful, we can move to explore the processes through which things and spaces become waste as well as the broader social effects of these processes in relation to elements of identity and sense of place. An extended case study of depositional practice in the early medieval settlement of Hamwic (Southampton, UK) is presented, to demonstrate how depositional practice caused waste, people and spaces to develop particular meaning in the emergence of an urban settlement, and served as a medium for the negotiation of continuity and change in the lives of the settlement and its inhabitants.

Keywords

structured depositionbiographyAnglo-Saxonspecial depositsrubbishtechnologies of remembrance
Type
Articles
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , December 2014 , pp. 175 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrews, P., 1997, Excavations at Hamwic, Vol. 2, Six Dials, London (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 109).Google Scholar
Berggren, Å., 2012: The interpretation of deposits in pits. Is it time for the pendulum to swing back? Archaeological dialogues 19 (2), 116–20.Google Scholar
Birkbeck, V., and Smith, R., 2005: The origins of mid-Saxon Southampton. Excavations at the Friends Provident St. Mary's Stadium 1998–2000, Salisbury.Google Scholar
Bourdillon, J., 1980: Town life and animal husbandry in the Southampton area, as suggested by the excavated nones, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club Archaeological Society 36, 181–91.Google Scholar
Bourdillon, J., n.d., Problems of animal husbandry, unpublished typescript in Southampton City Museum.Google Scholar
Brück, J., 1999: Houses, lifecycles and deposition on Middle Bronze Age settlements in southern England, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 65, 145–66.Google Scholar
Brudenell, M., and Cooper, A., 2008: Post-middenism. Depositional histories on Later Bronze Age settlements at Broom, Bedfordshire, Oxford journal of archaeology 27 (1), 15–36.Google Scholar
Chapman, J., 2000: Fragmentation in archaeology. People, places and broken objects in the prehistory of southern Europe, London.Google Scholar
Chapman, J., 2012: Structured deposition meets deliberate object fragmentation, Archaeological dialogues 19 (2), 133–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cottrell, P., 1980: SARC Sites IV and V, in Holdsworth, P. (ed.), Excavations at Melbourne Street, Southampton, 1971–76, London (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 33), 25–31.Google Scholar
Edensor, T., 2005: Waste matter. The debris of industrial ruins and the disordering of the material world, Journal of material culture 10 (3), 311–22.Google Scholar
Fontijn, D., 2012: Meaningful but beyond words? Interpreting material culture patterning, Archaeological dialogues 19 (2), 124–27.Google Scholar
Garrow, D., 2012a: Odd deposits and average practice. A critical history of the concept of structured deposition, Archaeological dialogues 19 (2), 85–115.Google Scholar
Garrow, D., 2012b: Reply to responses, Archaeological dialogues 19 (2), 133–44.Google Scholar
Gibson, J., 1979, The ecological approach to visual perception, Boston.Google Scholar
Gosden, C., 2005: What do objects want? Journal of archaeological method and theory 12 (3), 193–211.Google Scholar
Gosden, C., and Marshall, Y., 1999: The cultural biography of objects, World archaeology 31 (2)169–78.Google Scholar
Gregson, N., and Rose, G., 2000: Taking Butler elsewhere. Performativities, spatialities and subjectivities, Environment and planning D. Society and space 18, 433–52.Google Scholar
Hall, M., 2011: The cult of saints in medieval Perth. Everyday ritual and the materiality of belief, Journal of material culture 16 (1), 80–104.Google Scholar
Hall, R., 2000: The decline of the wic? In Slater, T. (ed.), Towns in decline AD100–1600, Aldershot, 120–36.Google Scholar
Hall-Torrance, M., and Weaver, S., 2003: The excavation of a Saxon settlement at Riverdene, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1995: Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club Archaeological Society 58, 63–105.Google Scholar
Hamerow, H., 2006: ‘Special deposits’ in Anglo-Saxon settlements, Medieval archaeology 50, 1–30.Google Scholar
Hansen, S., 2012: Deposition in the Bronze Age, Archaeological dialogues 19 (2), 127–29.Google Scholar
Herva, V.P., 2009: Living (with) things. Relational ontology and material culture in early modern northern Finland, Cambridge archaeological journal 19 (3), 388–97.Google Scholar
Hill, D., and Cowie, R. (eds), 2001: Wics. The early medieval trading centres of northern Europe. Sheffield.Google Scholar
Hill, J.D., 1995: Ritual and rubbish in the Iron Age of Wessex. A study on the formation of a specific archaeological record, Oxford (BAR British Series 242).Google Scholar
Hodder, I., 2012: Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things, Oxford.Google Scholar
Hodges, R., 1981: The Hamwih pottery. The local and imported wares from 30 years’ excavations at middle Saxon Southampton and their European context, London (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 37).Google Scholar
Holdsworth, P. (ed.), 1980: Excavations at Melbourne Street, Southampton, 1971–76, London (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 33).Google Scholar
Holtorf, C., 2002: Notes on the life history of a potsherd, Journal of material culture 7 (1), 49–71.Google Scholar
Ingold, T., 1993: The temporality of landscape, World archaeology 25 (2), 152–74.Google Scholar
Jervis, B., 2011: A patchwork of people, pots and places. Material engagements and the construction of ‘the social’ in Hamwic (Anglo-Saxon Southampton), UK, Journal of social archaeology 11 (3), 239–65.Google Scholar
Jervis, B., 2012: Making-do or making the World? Tempering choices in early–mid Anglo-Saxon pottery manufacture, in Jervis, B. and Kyle, A., A. (eds), Make-do and mend. Archaeologies of compromise, re-use and repair, Oxford (British Archaeological Reports International Series 2408), 67–80.Google Scholar
Johnstone, D., 1998: A Roman and Anglo-Saxon site at Northbrook, Micheldever, Hampshire, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club Archaeological Society 53, 79–108.Google Scholar
Jones, A., 2002: Archaeological theory and scientific practice, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Jones, A., 2003: Technologies of remembrance. Memory, materiality and identity in Early Bronze Age Scotland, in Williams, H. (ed.), Archaeologies of remembrance. Death and memory in past societies, New York, 65–87.Google Scholar
Jones, A., 2007: Memory and material culture, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Kelly, F., 1988: A guide to early Irish law, Dublin.Google Scholar
Knappett, C., 2005: Thinking through material culture, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Knappett, C., 2011: An archaeology of interaction. Network perspectives on material culture and society, Oxford.Google Scholar
Kopytoff, I., 1986: The cultural biography of things. Commodization as process, in Appadurai, A. (ed.), The social life of things, Cambridge, 64–91.Google Scholar
Latour, B., 2005: Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network-theory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Malcolm, G., Bowsher, D. and Cowie, R., 2003. Middle Saxon London. Excavations at the Royal Opera House 1989–99, London (MoLAS Monograph 15).Google Scholar
Millet, M., and James, S., 1983: Excavations at Cowdery's Down, Basingstoke, Hampshire,1978–81, Archaeological journal 140, 151–279.Google Scholar
Mol, A., and Law, J., 2006: The actor-enacted. Cumbrian sheep in 2001, in Knappett, C. and Malafouris, L. (eds), Material agency. Towards a non-anthropocentric approach, New York, 57–78.Google Scholar
Morris, J., 2011: Investigating animal burials. Ritual, mundane and beyond, Oxford (BAR British Series 535).Google Scholar
Morris, J., and Jervis, B., 2011: What's so special? A reinterpretation of Anglo-Saxon ‘special deposits’, Medieval archaeology 55, 66–81.Google Scholar
Morton, A., 1992: Excavations at Hamwic, Vol. 1, Excavations 1946–83, excluding Six Dials and Melbourne Street, London (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 84).Google Scholar
Mytum, H., 2010: Ways of writing in post-medieval and historical archaeology. Introducing biography, Post-medieval archaeology 44 (2), 237–54.Google Scholar
Needham, S., and Spence, T., 1997: Refuse and the formation of middens, Antiquity 71, 77–30.Google Scholar
Olsen, B., 2010: In defence of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects, Plymouth.Google Scholar
Orton, C., Tyers, P. and Vince, A., 1993: Pottery in archaeology, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Pollard, J. 1999, ‘These places have their moments’. Thoughts on settlement practices in the British Neolithic, in Brück, J. and Goodman, M. (eds), Making places in the prehistoric world. Themes in settlement archaeology, London, 76–93.Google Scholar
Pollard, J., 2001: The aesthetics of depositional practice, World archaeology 33(2), 315–33.Google Scholar
Pollard, J., 2013: From Ahu to Avebury. Monumentality, the social and relational ontologies, in Alberti, B., Jones, A.M. and Pollard, J. (eds), Archaeology after interpretation. Returning materials to archaeological theory, Walnut Creek, 177–96.Google Scholar
Reno, J., 2009: Your trash is someone's treasure. The politics of value at a Michigan landfill, Journal of material culture 14 (1), 29–46.Google Scholar
Reynolds, A., 2003: Boundaries and settlements in later sixth to eleventh-century England, in Griffiths, D., Reynolds, A. and Semple, S. (eds), Boundaries in early medieval Britain, Oxford (Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 12), 98–136.Google Scholar
Schiffer, M., 1987: Formation processes of the archaeological record, Albuquerque.Google Scholar
Sørensen, M.L., 1996: Pottery evidence for formation process in the Late Bronze Age deposits, in Needham, S. and Spence, T. (eds), Refuse and disposal at Area 16 East, Runnymede, London, 61–73.Google Scholar
Stoodley, N., 2012: New light on the southern end of Hamwic. Excavations at the Deanery by Southampton City Council Archaeological Unit and Wessex Archaeology, Hampshire studies 67 (2), 240–42.Google Scholar
Thomas, J., 2012: Some deposits are more structured than others, Archaeological dialogues 19 (2), 124–27.Google Scholar
Thrift, N., 2008: Non-representational theory. Space, politics, affect, London.Google Scholar
Timby, J., 1988: The middle Saxon pottery, in Andrews, P. (ed.), The coins and pottery from Hamwic, Southampton, 73–122.Google Scholar
Tipper, J., 2004: The grubenhaus in Anglo-Saxon England, Yedingham.Google Scholar
Van Es, W., and Verwers, S., 1980: Excavations at Dorestad 1. The Harbour. Hoogstraat 1, Amersfoot.Google Scholar