Hilary Paterson

Research project

Supervisor: Dr Tania Dickinson

Thesis Title: Power and Possession: The Importance of Dress and Personal Adornment to the Construction of Complex Societies in Early Medieval Northern Britain and Ireland

I am a final year PhD student in the Department of Archaeology where my research interests include the application of modern sociological and anthropological approaches to past societies.

In particular, my research aims to assess the capacity for items of personal adornment in early medieval northern Britain and Ireland, functioning within the sphere of dress as a whole, to have contributed to the development of social hierarchical relations, and thus to the construction and maintenance of complex societies in these areas  between 400 and 1000 AD. This is demonstrated by the adoption of  multidisciplinary and biographical approaches to the subject of dress and appearance, incorporating aspects of history and history of art, as well as combining post-processual theoretical approaches with aspects of dress theory derived from social anthropology.

The approach employed in my thesis has been designed  to overcome the literal fragmentation of the archaeological record of this area of study, where most extant examples derive from uncontextualised stray finds, so as to contextualise and 'reassemble' otherwise disparate dress assemblages. It also allows the roles played by human and material agents in the construction, maintenance and manipulation of identity through dress to be identified and investigated.