The Research Papers we present in this issue move from seventeenth-century Ireland to Roman Yorkshire, but both authors are distinguished by their ability to work with multiple forms of evidence in their research.
Greg Fewer (of the Waterford Institute of Technology) argues that archaeologists must be prepared to use documentary evidence in a critical fashion, alongside excavation. In 'Women and Material Possessions: Seventeenth-century Testamentary Evidence from Counties Waterford and Kilkenny, Ireland', he uses wills to discuss the role of women in 17th-century Ireland and the way in which we might be able, as archaeologists, to write more gendered archaeologies through an appropriate knowledge of the material culture with which we deal.
Following on from Adrian Chadwick's paper in assemblage issue two, on writing a social archaeology of South Yorkshire, we bring you the latest regional research in Graham Robbins' (Sheffield) paper on 'Crop Landscapes and Domestic Space' in later prehistoric and Roman South Yorkshire. He argues that we must embed our interpretations in an intimate knowledge of the routines of everyday life, in the past. Moving between aerial archaeology, geophysical survey, excavation, environmental and material analysis, he brings a critical landscape approach to the phenomenon of 'Romanisation', exploring continuity and change through the daily lives of communities in South Yorkshire.
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