8th August 2010, 11:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 8th August 2010, 11:07 PM by trainedchimp.)
I could tell you if I could work out exactly what it was myself...
But.
1) the definitions that archaeologists put on things and categories to put them into to 'describe' them are actually pretty high-level interpretations, and tell us a lot more about the archaeologists than anything they're actually trying to study - please don't start me on Roman military archaeology or that depressing trend in prehistory to talk about 'structured deposits' (agreeing with Dinosaur again. Something must be wrong...). Either way, you spend decades building up a typology, most of it arguing about the finer details of what 'is' or 'isn't' a castle, a henge or a barrow, rather than actually trying to understand the flipipng things.
2) The definitions that contemporaries used, where we can reconstruct them are, in my experience (medieval and post med mostly, but Roman, Early med and modern to a lesser degree) pretty changeable and arbitrary, even where things are built to very formulaic patterns and standardised plans. They change over time, over space and between audiences - even when the words signify the same physical thing, the meaning can be totally different (for castles, usually depending on which side of the wall you happened to be at any one point) - Roscommon would be interesting here with a high medieval castle (replaced by a C16th prodigy house thing) close to the site of a supposed earlier clan centre that is supposedly occupied while the castle was in one of several periods of disuse.
So the whole interpretive scheme is either arbitrary or but on some very shifting sands, neither of which are intellectually sustainable. So far, so unconstructively post-processual. However tracing how these constructs have been used against the use-history of structures and their cultural context(s) will actually tell you far more about what it all means (i.e. what a castle actually was/is) than trying to define something that is pretty well undefinable because it contains such innate variety. I think.
But.
1) the definitions that archaeologists put on things and categories to put them into to 'describe' them are actually pretty high-level interpretations, and tell us a lot more about the archaeologists than anything they're actually trying to study - please don't start me on Roman military archaeology or that depressing trend in prehistory to talk about 'structured deposits' (agreeing with Dinosaur again. Something must be wrong...). Either way, you spend decades building up a typology, most of it arguing about the finer details of what 'is' or 'isn't' a castle, a henge or a barrow, rather than actually trying to understand the flipipng things.
2) The definitions that contemporaries used, where we can reconstruct them are, in my experience (medieval and post med mostly, but Roman, Early med and modern to a lesser degree) pretty changeable and arbitrary, even where things are built to very formulaic patterns and standardised plans. They change over time, over space and between audiences - even when the words signify the same physical thing, the meaning can be totally different (for castles, usually depending on which side of the wall you happened to be at any one point) - Roscommon would be interesting here with a high medieval castle (replaced by a C16th prodigy house thing) close to the site of a supposed earlier clan centre that is supposedly occupied while the castle was in one of several periods of disuse.
So the whole interpretive scheme is either arbitrary or but on some very shifting sands, neither of which are intellectually sustainable. So far, so unconstructively post-processual. However tracing how these constructs have been used against the use-history of structures and their cultural context(s) will actually tell you far more about what it all means (i.e. what a castle actually was/is) than trying to define something that is pretty well undefinable because it contains such innate variety. I think.