Hilary Paterson (University of York, UK)

This paper is designed to confront the fact that the social function of dress and display in early medieval northern Britain has been largely understudied. Comparative archaeological analyses on the evidence of Anglo-Saxon funerary remains have shown this to be primarily due to a lack of burial evidence and otherwise cohesive collections in these areas, and have thus exposed the failure of current academic practice to deal with issues of human agency in relation to fragmentary assemblages. As such, this paper will take a multidisciplinary approach to the subject of dress and appearance that will combine aspects of the study of History; History of Art; Sociology; Social Anthropology; and Archaeology, so as to demonstrate a theoretical and methodological framework by which items of dress and personal adornment might be understood as having played an active role in the construction and maintenance of complex societies in past cultures.

The approach discussed in this paper has been devised as a means by which to overcome the literal fragmentation of the evidence of dress and appearance from northern Britain and of the period 400-1000 AD, the majority of which comes not from datable settlements or funerary deposits, but from scattered and largely un-contextualised stray finds. And it is believed that by the adoption of such contextual and interdisciplinary methods of interpretation, it might be possible to ‘reassemble’ these disparate assemblages, and thus to give a voice to a period otherwise little understood.