By the late 1980s the subfields outlined above were growing in confidence, coherence, and critical mass. However, virtually no new researchers and practitioners or researchers had joined British historical archaeology: the generation of archaeologists that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s (trained in the new undergraduate degrees in archaeology) overwhelmingly turned instead to prehistoric or world archaeology. From the outside, British historical archaeology appeared to be an intellectually isolated and stagnant field in which a dry consensus had developed around purely descriptive modes of research. In this context, from around 1990 a number of factors combined to bring ‘fragmentation and critique’.
Fragmentation
Fragmentation resulted in part from the new commercial archaeological environment that developed after the changes to the Department of Environment’s Planning Policy Guidance (PPG 16) in 1990. During the 1990s, competitive tendering and the emergence of a new kind of commercial archaeological contractor radically changed the positions of museum-based city archaeological units in which post-medieval material culture studies and urban excavation had developed during the 1970s and 1980s. In the new commercial environment, a new generation of larger, national-based archaeological units emerged. This made the previous development of integrated overviews of urban post-medieval archaeology produced by museum-based archaeologists much more difficult, especially outside London.
Meanwhile as the decade progressed, the conventional internal disciplinary boundaries of British historical archaeology were increasingly questioned from within. This was most visible in the conference activities of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, driven in particular through the work of professional and museum-based archaeologists, laid many of the foundations for this process. Through the efforts of David Gaimster, Geoff Egan, and David Cranstone, the society held joint conferences with the Society for Medieval Archaeology in London in 1996 on the theme of The Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture 1400-1600, with the US-based Society for Historical Archaeology in London and Williamsburg, Virginia in 1997 on the theme of Old and New Worlds, and a joint conference with the Association for Industrial Archaeology at Bristol University in 1999 on the theme of Archaeology and Industrialization. These meetings served to problematize conventional boundaries that had developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and focused the attention of historical archaeologists upon significant processes that fell across conventional chronological divisions, such as the archaeology of the ‘reformation’, the reuse of monastic lands and buildings after the ‘dissolution’ (1536-1540), or the social history of industrialization. From 1995 the conventional neglect of the twentieth-century British archaeology was challenged by the 7-year Council for British Archaeology’s Defence of Britain Project through which around 600 volunteers recorded almost 20 000 twentieth-century military sites across Britain.
Critique
Meanwhile ‘critique’ developed from researchers based in higher education institutions, particularly archaeologists who studied as doctoral students at the University of Cambridge during the late 1980s and early 1990s such as Matthew Johnson, Sarah Tarlow, John Carman, Gavin Lucas, and Victor Buchli. The extension of the principles of ‘ethnoarchaeology’ into an examination of very recent and contemporary British material culture - mortuary practices in Victorian England and modern Cambridge, modernism and suburbia, pet food factories or beer can designs - had been an important point of departure for the postpro-cessual turn of 1980s Cambridge (see Postprocessual Archaeology). Such work used modern or contemporary material rhetorically - to make broader theoretical arguments about material culture rather than to contribute to the historical study of recent periods. Indeed, from the early 1990s Chris Tilley, Daniel Miller, and others rejected archaeological approaches, seeking instead to develop anthropological ‘material culture studies’ as a separate field. At the same time, however, others began to use interpretive approaches to critique the descriptive consensus of British historical archaeology.
An early statement was Kate Clark’s diagnosis of ‘Trouble at t’Mill’ for 1980s industrial archaeology, published in Antiquity in 1987. But it was not until the second half of the 1990s that a genuine watershed in British historical archaeology came about with Matthew Johnson’s An Archaeology of Capitalism (1996), Sarah Tarlow’s Bereavement and Commemoration (1999), and Sarah Tarlow and Susie West’s edited collection The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain (1999). These volumes questioned interdisciplinary boundaries, and sought to develop a ‘social archaeology’ of early modern material: variously applying the sociological perspectives of Bourdieu and Giddens, literary theory and Foucault, structuralist analyses of social space, and anthropological theories of consumption in conventional post-medieval contexts. The literary bent of such studies sometimes weakened their engagement with materiality, critiquing previous uses of archaeology to illustrate processes defined by social and economic history but replacing such studies with similar illustrations of social theory. Nevertheless, the importance of these studies lay in their emphasis of interpretive as well as purely descriptive approaches, and their inspiration of a new generation of archaeologists to start work on British historical archaeology.
World History
