Apophatic Archaeology: The Materiality, Phenomenology, and Textuality of Caves in Early Medieval Britain

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although most discussions surrounding humans and caves in Britain begin in prehistory and end with the Roman period, archaeologists have uncovered evidence for early medieval activity across the island. Still, early medieval historians face a methodological problem in which—compared to the preceding eras—the quantity of archaeological evidence for cave presence declines substantially, just as the textual record increases and begins to flourish with underground references. At once, this paper seeks to address this evidentiary quandary from a jointly archaeological and historical perspective. First, I draw upon established frameworks such as the archaeology of atmosphere, phenomenology, and the archaeology of darkness to argue for an “apophatic archaeology” that acknowledges absences in the underground material record as meaningful. Deploying this experimental framework with reference to British cave sites, I propose that the “imagined” underground, as uncovered in early medieval texts, must be read with and against the “real” underground, evidenced by both archaeological discoveries and present-day phenomenological encounters with caves. Above all else, this paper aims to bridge the disciplines of archaeology, literature, and history in order to further scholarly exploration of underground encounters in the early medieval British milieu.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37887.0