Medieval to Modern Transitions and Historical Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Medieval to Modern Transitions and Historical Archaeology," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historical archaeologists working in the Atlantic world primarily focus on the 15th century and later, a period roughly characterized by the spread of European colonialism across the globe. However, the antecedents of this "historical" period lie in a medieval European social context, a period that is rarely addressed explicitly within later historical and post-medieval archaeologies. The processes by which medieval society became recognizable as "modern" followed dramatically different trajectories across the Atlantic world, from slow and incremental shifts in practice, to sudden disjunctures in social reproduction. Through the analysis of material culture, buildings, landscape practice, trade, and households over the last millennium, papers in this session draw primarily on a North Atlantic context to examine connections, transitions, and revolutions between the medieval and the modern.