Michael Shapland

Archaeology has become good at using metaphors for the person-like properties of material culture, seeing objects as accruing life-histories and biographies. This paper seeks to further this debate by introducing an old concept – known as panpsychism – which has experienced a resurgence in modern physics. It holds that sentience is a universally distributed property of the material world, meaning that all matter must be, to some extent, conscious. This theory is applied to an existing study of the person-like characteristic of early medieval swords, as a first step in understanding that all of the objects with which we deal may have some quality of consciousness. One implication of this is the seriousness with which archaeologists can afford to take animist beliefs.

I am fortunate enough to spend my working life exploring many different buildings, from medieval manor houses to 20th century football stadia, as part of a development-led brief to record them for posterity. This provides the opportunity to access places that few members of the public (other than squatters and urban explorers) ever see. It also involves many hours picking round derelict hulks with the rain coursing down the walls. This work feeds into the undeniable research value that arises from the study of individual buildings and how they inform our understanding of past societies and social practices. Conversely, there is also the less classifiable output of our attempting to capture the ‘spirit’ of a building prior to its demolition or conversion. Whilst the former is prioritised in guidance literature and methodologies, the latter
arguably comprises the majority of what we do. What follows is an attempt to reconcile these two mindsets, with what can be termed a ‘biographical’ approach to historic building recording.

This chapter concerns an aspect of early medieval building practice which remained static in a society otherwise characterised by immense transition and transformation. I first outline an example par excellence of a modern-day building of stasis, at Onkalo, which is being built to defy even geological time, and so is likely to endure as one of the last monuments of human achievement on Earth. But this is a rational, scientific building of stasis, not a structure of measureless eternity: its existence will be perceived in scientific, linear time until its destruction by tectonic forces, or Earth's inevitable consumption by our own dying star. This present chapter instead seeks how a building of stasis may have been perceived by the Anglo-Saxons, whose ideas of continuity, changelessness, even of time itself, would have been wholly different to those of the modern Western world.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the use of open source, structure from motion methods for creating 3d pointclouds from photographs and compares these with alternative workflows in other software, and relative accuracy compared to other 3D modelling methods. It describes a series of case studies that use structure from motion to record standing buildings and create digital elevation models. Looking at other recording techniques it finds that structure from motion can produce better results than traditional techniques such as plan drawing, topographic survey and photogrammetry, and is cheaper and more accessible than new techniques such as laser scanning and LiDAR, although it is less accurate in some regards. It demonstrates that good accuracy can be achieved if careful measurements are made, and concludes that it has great potential for widespread archaeological application.

This volume had its beginnings in the ‘Woodlands, Trees, and Timber in the Anglo- Saxon World’ conference hosted at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London in November 2009, organized by the editors. The aim of the conference was to bring together a range of specialists working in a variety of fields throughout Anglo-Saxon studies and in other areas whose work engaged with woodlands, trees, or timber. A specific aim of the conference was to address the issue of what an interdisciplinary approach to the study of trees in early medieval England might reveal about how the Anglo-Saxons thought about and utilized them on various different levels. To this end, the conference featured speakers from a variety of different backgrounds, including historical geographers (John Baker, Della Hooke, Oliver Rackham), archaeologists and experts in woodworking (Martin Comey, Richard Darrah, Damian Goodburn, Carole Morris), buildings archaeologists (Mark Gardiner, Michael Shapland), historians and archaeologists of religion and landscape (John Blair, Sarah Semple, Jane Sidell), and specialists in comparative religious literature and symbolism (Michael Bintley, Clive Tolley). To a certain degree, this volume represents the proceedings of that conference, although not all speakers were ultimately able to produce papers for the volume, and three new papers have been added by Jennifer Neville, Michael Bintley, and Pirkko Koppinen to bring literary balance to the discussion elsewhere of objects, materials, and landscapes. The aim has been to produce a work representative of contemporary scholarly perspectives on trees and timber in the Anglo-Saxon world. Theinterdisciplinary emphasis of this volume is based on the belief that correspondences between written and material sources, be they objects or landscapes, are indicative of a ‘deeper level of cultural structure and practice’, as John Hines has put it—‘whether, superficially, they coincide or not’. This is to say that the study of any aspect of woodland, trees, and timber in the Anglo-Saxon world will be enriched by a heightened awareness of the complex interrelationships between practical application and religious belief, architectural utility and literary conceit, or functionality and symbolism. None of these categories is mutually exclusive, of course; human experience inevitably lies somewhere between. Modern Westerners rarely appreciate their reliance upon sustainable forestry and woodsmanship to anything like the same extent as the Anglo-Saxons did, and as many present-day societies still do. There may be some general awareness of the value of trees, but the distance at which most stand from the means and methods of production effectively severs this connection. This was not a luxury that could be afforded in the Anglo-Saxon world. The woodlands of England were not only deeply rooted in every aspect of early English material culture, as a source of heat and light, food and drink, wood and timber for the construction of tools, weapons, and materials, but also in their spiritual life, symbolic vocabulary, and sense of connection to the beliefs of those who had gone before them. To conceive of the Anglo-Saxons as being separate from their woodlands, in this sense, is unthinkable; the relationship between culture and environment was inseparable. It is this gap in our experiential understanding of this relationship which this volume aims to address.

In March 2015 English Heritage commissioned Archaeology South-East to record the Great Gatehouse at Battle Abbey, East Sussex, in order to inform its re-display to the public. This represented the first thorough investigation of this famous building, which originated in the Norman period as part of a complex of prominent structures marking the main entrance to the abbey precinct, including a gateway-chapel dedicated to St John and a possible courthouse. The original gatehouse was remodelled on a grand scale c. 1338, and the present civic courthouse constructed in the late 16th century. The gatehouse and its attendant suite of entrance structures to the abbey are interpreted here as a complex symbolic of martial power and temporal lordship which doubled as a metaphor for the entrance to heaven.

It has long been recognized that timber was the standard building material of the Anglo-Saxon world. Surveys of Anglo-Saxon buildings have been dominated by timber halls with usually little more than a brief mention made of the slender archaeological and documentary evidence that exists for stone domestic structures. The implicit assumption is that this paucity of evidence is simply a gap in our knowledge which future excavation will fill. This may indeed be the case, but until that happens it is worth discussing why it is that there is so very little evidence for masonry domestic buildings in a society so rich in stone churches. After all, the durability of stone might lead us to expect such buildings to be over-represented in the archaeological record. It is therefore first worth briefly examining the present archaeological and documentary evidence for Anglo-Saxon stone domestic buildings, divided into settlement sites, lordly buildings, and urban defences. Then an attempt will be made to explain why timber seems to have typified the secular buildings, with stone being confined to the religious buildings of Anglo-Saxon society.