The Biography of a Place: Faccombe Netherton, Hampshire, c. 900–1200

Summary

A place is not a static thing. The creative and destructive process that a place goes through leaves innumerable marks on it: buildings are created, destroyed, rebuilt. Boundaries are fixed, changed, moved. Landscapes are altered, left to fallow, recreated. A place is a palimpsest, and it is our job to look between the layers and the scraping and the reuse to try to see the meanings of these places.

There are many ways we attempt to do this: excavation, of course, and documentary research, and as often as not in the medieval period a healthy combination of the two. Our goal is to ultimately decide what these places meant to the people in them, and how this might reflect the wider society. But this is a difficult task to achieve. As William Whyte has recently pointed out, trying to ask what a place did runs into a large number of methodological problems: phenomenology is valuable in asking the right questions but as a theory and a methodology can be deeply problematic to the point of being a simple exercise in the present as opposed to a research method of the past. Reliance on a processual system that records and ‘reads’ a site reduces objects to texts instead of taking account of their materiality.

Of late, biography has come to be a powerful tool used in archaeology and material culture studies. The study of object biographies, that is to say, the study of the life-cycle of things, has had a great impact on discussing not just materiality but the object in the everyday, its trajectory and uses and users. This is a method that goes far beyond measurements and recording and into the object as a part of the fabric of society. The scales of time in archaeological biography can be great or small: the life-cycle of an object may be decades, but the biography of a landscape can be millennia. But the primary importance of the use of biography at a site comes with its opportunity to explore agency. As Henri Lefebvre describes, a place is not a thing itself but ‘a set of relations between things’; in site biographies, we try to view the interlocking and intertwined relationships between people, buildings, and objects.