The Landscape Materialized in Late Medieval Houses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Social and political ideologies are entangled in the management and control of the ecological landscape. When relations between social institutions shift, it impacts how people interact with their local environment. In this paper, I explore how these relationships are visible within the fabric of a building. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English people were subject to religious conflict, political change, and a shifting economic system. Earlier institutions that governed and controlled access to natural resources had weakened toward the end of the medieval period. An emerging group of wealthy peasants, merchants, and small landowners prospered in and around many of England’s market towns. They built, and rebuilt, their houses, benefiting from increased access to building materials from the local landscape. This paper explores a few of the houses built in the market town of Bury St. Edmunds. Embodied in the fabric of each building are entanglements of labor, environmental resources, and power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32632