Embracing New Perspectives

This chapter considers the application of archaeological theory to later medieval archaeology, with a selective review of the different approaches offered over the past fifty years by archaeologists of the Later Middle Ages set into a wider historiographical framework. In this chapter key processual, structuralist, and post-processual studies are all debated with particular emphasis on phenomenology and the experiential, the archaeology of identity, biography, and the life-course. New forms of interpretation are judged to be neither consistent or coherent but, nevertheless, they offer exciting insights which cross disciplinary boundaries and challenge orthodoxies.