Time and the Fifth Century
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 30/04/2019

The over-arching concern of early archaeologists and antiquarians was chronology: the correct temporal sequential ordering of the physical remains of the distant and not-so-distant past. For those archaeologists objects and monuments became proxies for periods that divided up humanity’s linear past. Today we continue to reap the benefits of this scholarship and refine the detail. The fifth century AD/CE is often presented as a fissure that separates the world of Classical Antiquity from the early Medieval period. Between AD 400/410 (the end of the Roman system) and c. AD 470 (the widespread adoption of Salin’s Style I in lowland Britain) there is almost nothing. Some see this as a consequence of the catastrophe that was the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, others perceive this gap as an empirical problem: one to be solved by the application of better methods, or the recovery of more data. In this paper (and session), we argue - following the approaches of Collingwood, Lucas, Witmore and others - that just as important are our views of periods, time and how ordinal and interval chronologies are reconciled with the residues of the past. 

James Gerrard (Newcastle University) and Elliot Chaplin (Newcastle University)