Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 Archaeology and the Life Course
- 2 Experiencing Age: the Medieval Body
- 3 Clothing the Body: Age, Sexuality and Transitional Rites
- 4 The Medieval Household: the Material Culture of Everyday Life
- 5 The Medieval Church and Cemetery: The Quick and the Dead
- 6 Medieval Lives: People and Things
- Appendix 1 The Medieval Ages of Man: natural, humoral, temporal and material associations of age
- Appendix 2 Excavated Medieval Cemeteries Discussed in the Text
- Appendix 3 Indicative Age Profiles Based on Excavated Medieval Cemeteries
- Appendix 4 Children's Clothing and Dress Accessories from Burial Contexts in Britain: infants to 15-year olds
- Appendix 5 Sexual Signs: medieval dress accessories incorporating sexual imagery
- Appendix 6 Dress Accessories Associated with May Festivities
- Appendix 7 Love Gifts: dress accessories associated with courting and betrothal
- Appendix 8 Apotropaic Materials: dress accessories, domestic and devotional objects
- Appendix 9 Charms: devotional inscriptions on excavated objects and dress accessories
- Appendix 10 Devotional Inscriptions on Medieval Finds from the Portable Antiquities Scheme
- Appendix 11 Priests' Burials from Medieval English Parish Churches and Hospitals
- Appendix 12 Grave Goods associated with Aged Skeletons from Medieval English Parish Churches and Hospitals
- Appendix 13 The Classification of Grave Goods from Medieval Burials
- Appendix 14 Infant Burials from Domestic Contexts in Medieval England
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Archaeology and the Life Course
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 Archaeology and the Life Course
- 2 Experiencing Age: the Medieval Body
- 3 Clothing the Body: Age, Sexuality and Transitional Rites
- 4 The Medieval Household: the Material Culture of Everyday Life
- 5 The Medieval Church and Cemetery: The Quick and the Dead
- 6 Medieval Lives: People and Things
- Appendix 1 The Medieval Ages of Man: natural, humoral, temporal and material associations of age
- Appendix 2 Excavated Medieval Cemeteries Discussed in the Text
- Appendix 3 Indicative Age Profiles Based on Excavated Medieval Cemeteries
- Appendix 4 Children's Clothing and Dress Accessories from Burial Contexts in Britain: infants to 15-year olds
- Appendix 5 Sexual Signs: medieval dress accessories incorporating sexual imagery
- Appendix 6 Dress Accessories Associated with May Festivities
- Appendix 7 Love Gifts: dress accessories associated with courting and betrothal
- Appendix 8 Apotropaic Materials: dress accessories, domestic and devotional objects
- Appendix 9 Charms: devotional inscriptions on excavated objects and dress accessories
- Appendix 10 Devotional Inscriptions on Medieval Finds from the Portable Antiquities Scheme
- Appendix 11 Priests' Burials from Medieval English Parish Churches and Hospitals
- Appendix 12 Grave Goods associated with Aged Skeletons from Medieval English Parish Churches and Hospitals
- Appendix 13 The Classification of Grave Goods from Medieval Burials
- Appendix 14 Infant Burials from Domestic Contexts in Medieval England
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The life course: archaeology on a human scale
This study aims to develop a new scale of archaeological analysis: the measure of the human life is adopted to explore the experience of living in the Middle Ages. While the theme of age will form a major part of this enquiry, the concept of the life course integrates ageing with embodiment, ritual, memory and material culture. Age has been examined previously as an aspect of social identity within historical disciplines: for example, the medieval and Tudor lifecycles have been evaluated in terms of the distinctive roles and representations of male and female as they progressed through life stages from infancy to old age (Youngs 2006; Cressy 1997), and through age statuses from apprenticeship to widowhood (e.g. Hanawalt 1993; Barron and Sutton 1994). What is innovative in the sociological model of the life course is its interrogation of the human life as a continuum: this ‘longitudinal’ approach reviews the long stretch of a human lifetime and places it within the context of age cohorts, generations, and social domains, including family, work and institutional structures. Rather than studying successive episodes or stages of the lifecycle in isolation, it stresses the inter-linkages between phases of life and provides a framework for examining the distinctive life experiences of particular groups of individuals at respective stages in their lives (Mayer 2009; Heinz et al. 2009).
The archaeology of the medieval life course provides an important new dimension to historical studies of ageing and the lifecycle, revealing connections between human lives and the material world, and between measures of human and cosmological time.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval LifeArchaeology and the Life Course, pp. 1 - 31Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012