In bringing together these papers, Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Europe demonstrates the need for active participation of different disciplines in formulating questions about and interpretations of material culture in the Middle Ages. It celebrates the coming of age of historical archaeology, of which medieval archaeology is a subdiscipline. The papers collected are striking for their diversity of approaches and subject matter. They reflect the spirit of an open area excavation where specialists from many disciplines with diverging methodologies meet and work side by side. No paper is specifically devoted to an excavation report, although the majority of contributors made use of data from such reports. The collection is intended primarily as a sampler, but a thematic unity emerges around the potential of archaeological approaches to contribute to a political ecology of the medieval period. The volume is an indispensable offering for archaeologists and historians of the Middle Ages seeking an appraisal of the state of the young discipline of medieval archaeology.
