Archaeology and Text challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship between history and archaeology by re-evaluating the role of artefacts and documents in the reconstruction of the historical past. Previous attempts to create a rapprochement between the disciplines have been undermined by a failure to see artefacts and documents as anything more than simple sources of information about the past. The central argument of this concise and original book is that both must be seen in terms of their efficacy in the past, in particular as technologies of power and resistance....

In this important volume of collected essays John Moreland demonstrates the ways in which a theoretically informed archaeology significantly enhances our understanding of the early Middle Ages, and indeed of the past more generally. Beginning from the premise that theory must be worked through in data (since abstract theorising conjures up only a historical pictures of the past), he applies a consistent and contemporary body of theory, broadly characterised as 'post-processual', in a series of case-studies. The essays are enhanced by extensive notes and commentary, updating theoretical...