Medieval Castles? June Thesis Update

Warning: The following is a wall of text:

Completing a Masters dissertation here at the University of Sheffield (and likely, likewise, across England) is proving to be an interesting process. The Department of Archaeology at Sheffield runs various different one-year Masters programs ranging from Aegean archaeology to human osteology and funerary archaeology. Starting on June 1, all of us Masters students were formally able to start working on our dissertation (read: ‘theses’ in the U.S.) and prepare them for a mid-September deadline. Ideally, the goal is to carry out original archaeological research and present your results and complete report in something like ca. 50 pages of text, not counting tables and figures, etc.

As I work through my first graduate school thesis over the summer, I thought I’d attempt to share monthly updates on what I’m doing and what I’m finding. In addition, it will give me experience in putting down my thoughts on my work for a (somewhat) public readership.

So, I’m in the MSc program for environmental archaeology and palaeoeconomy. The term “environmental archaeology” has lots of guises and has to come mean different things, all of varying virtue, in its relatively short life-span as an archaeological sub-discipline. Essentially, the term is today widely taken to mean the practice of studying biological or geological evidence from archaeological sites to learn more about the conditions of the surrounding environment, how people have exploited their environment throughout time, what people ate, how they chose to make a living, etc. Various proponents of differing views on the sub-discipline will argue that you might use “environmental archaeology” to do such things as re-construct an ancient landscape, etc, but I think the term is largely a convenient misnomer. The whole thing is a product of the “New Archaeology” of the ‘60s and ‘70s that sought to make archaeology a more scientific and thus more rigorous discipline than it had been in the past, given our evolution from the more colonial antiquarians. And despite a lot of ‘political’ theoretical rifts between various factions within archaeology, I’m probably still a processualist at heart.

I’m generally more concerned with the ‘palaeoeconomy’ side of things. The study of prehistoric economies isn’t quite the same thing that a Wall Street economist would recognize as being very familiar, because it’s more akin to investigating people’s choices for animal husbandry, selecting foodstuffs, working out social ways to deal with supply, etc. Currently, I’m particularly interested in studying feasting – using evidence from animal remains to discuss the social and cultural strategies used to gain power, negotiate social roles, and shape self- and communal-identity though food. It’s an interesting little corner of academic zooarchaeology (a simple definition: the archaeological study of animal remains) that I enjoy. Recently, to complete my coursework for my zooarchaeology method and theory course, I had to deal with a dataset of animal bones from a large, unique Neolithic site in Greece that seemed to buck the Greek trend in settlement types and whose community bonded through a impressively large feast.

But, to get to my dissertation work: Sadly, while Masters theses in the States have to be original research (and thus actually add to the literature on a certain topic), that’s not so much the case in England. When I told my course-mates that I was looking for a topic that I could produce original work from as a strong thesis but would also be something that A) could be re-worked to be published as an article in a scholarly archaeology journal and B) would focus more on methodology of that subject as to be more relevant to my career returning home, my British colleagues smirked and seemed to think that would be a tall order.

Which, it turns out, is true here. However, with the help of my adviser, I found the Doncaster Museum’s archaeologist had some suggestions for material to work on. Doncaster is a nearby town that today is one of the poorest, most AIDS-ridden corners of England. But, it used to be a bustling Roman fort and town and continued to be an important center in this area until the Industrial Revolution, when nearby Sheffield began to predominate thanks to all the rivers. I’ve spent a good deal of time now taking the train back and forth to Doncaster to help their archaeologist look for zooarchaeological material for me to work on, and have ended up with a working topic from our results. Currently, I plan to look at the high-status consumption of food from Medieval/Norman period sites. Namely, two local castles and a local manor house that had a moat installed around it. This is a subject my adviser is well-known for working on here in England, and a fair bit of this sort of work has been done in the ‘South,’ but the majority of archaeological work on castles by region all stops just south of us here in South Yorkshire.

Another development was my realization that only one of the three sites (mildly-famous Conisbrough Castle, mentioned in Ivanhoe) has been written up at all. All three were excavated in the 1970s, by English Heritage or its contemporary iteration, and the animal bones, at least, have been in storage ever since. This is, sadly, a huge problem in archaeology back home in the States as well. But, it always provides work for graduate students. So, I have now copied all of the paperwork I could find on the sites in the museum and have spent a few weeks just staring at thirty-five year old hand-written field notes trying to figure out exactly where each bag of bones actually came from. Because archaeology, of course, is based on the notion that archaeologists can use the context you find artifacts in to suggest a pattern of use or deposition in the soil. Pottery sherds and other artifacts can be dated because you know this design was only made during these years, or because you know that this style of pottery was made before that type but after the other type. Animal bones, however, generally look like animal bones. I could tell you these look older than those because they’re poorly preserved, but that’s relative. So, without an understanding of where these bones were found, they’re fairly useless.

Fortunately, I know have a decent idea about the material from Conisbrough Castle and the nearby Tickhill Castle. However, the material from Cowick Manor seems to just have been trenched out with a back-hoe and picked out of the backfill, with the records only telling me they came from this side or that side of the moat. So, that’s worrisome. Especially since the majority of my elements are from there.

In addition to continuing to work through that, I’ve also hooked up a database I’ll be able to use to record my identifications based off of a similar database structure used in the zooachaeological work at a village nearby to Stonehenge. I’ve also been reading up on my Medieval archaeology and castle household archaeology, since it was never really a huge focus of mine. And this week, I’ve started the process of washing all of the bones. That’s something that should have really happened thirty-five years ago, but before I can do much else I need to clean them. But, luckily, after just two days I’m about half-way through.

As much as I’ve been trying to avoid all this work with trips to London and Durham and the Peak District, that’s been my academic life this month. I apologize if it was fairly boring (if you’re still reading this far)!