The life course: archaeology on a human scale

This study aims to develop a new scale of archaeological analysis: the measure of the human life is adopted to explore the experience of living in the Middle Ages. While the theme of age will form a major part of this enquiry, the concept of the life course integrates ageing with embodiment, ritual, memory and material culture. Age has been examined previously as an aspect of social identity within historical disciplines: for example, the medieval and Tudor lifecycles have been evaluated in terms of the distinctive roles and representations of male and female as they progressed through life stages from infancy to old age (Youngs 2006; Cressy 1997), and through age statuses from apprenticeship to widowhood (e.g. Hanawalt 1993; Barron and Sutton 1994). What is innovative in the sociological model of the life course is its interrogation of the human life as a continuum: this ‘longitudinal’ approach reviews the long stretch of a human lifetime and places it within the context of age cohorts, generations, and social domains, including family, work and institutional structures. Rather than studying successive episodes or stages of the lifecycle in isolation, it stresses the inter-linkages between phases of life and provides a framework for examining the distinctive life experiences of particular groups of individuals at respective stages in their lives (Mayer 2009; Heinz et al. 2009).

The archaeology of the medieval life course provides an important new dimension to historical studies of ageing and the lifecycle, revealing connections between human lives and the material world, and between measures of human and cosmological time.