If I Wanted To Get There, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: Movement, Place And Space In Post-medieval Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Archaeology usually studies the static and solid. We think in terms of landscapes, sites, artefacts and buildings. This paper will focus on the first and last of these, landscapes and buildings, but in terms of movement through the landscape and to and from buildings. The daily journeys and activities performed in late eighteenth and nineteenth century towns and villages provide significant grist to our interpretations of the physical structures and locations of buildings.

By locating places within people’s activities we can understand better what people did where and why, and also what they might have experienced. To do this, we need tools and I will present some suggestions as to appropriate tools for analyzing these daily journeys and considering how we can apply them to different environments. The paper will develop several case studies from my research on late-eighteenth and nineteenth century soup kitchens in England.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow