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This thesis aims to provide an intimate study of the concept and practice of community archaeology in the United Kingdom today. The research is founded upon evidence drawn from a programme of ethnographic research conducted at the venues of three diverse community archaeology projects. A significant contention is that understanding of community archaeology can best be informed through study and analysis of the narratives produced by project participants and those who have connections to the localities around which particular projects are sited. Methodologies of participant observation and qualitative interviewing have been selected. It is argued that whilst community archaeology is a relatively new term, if viewed in terms of social relations rather than practices, it can be seen as having a greater historical depth. Drawing on research from the fields of social anthropology and political science, it is argued that the role of 'community' within community archaeology is especially significant. Issues of 'community' are seen to be heavily influential in determining the types of practice adopted by individual projects. Projects can be seen to be put to use within social and political agendas, which seek to regenerate or construct communities. Study of participant narratives reveal that the interests, meanings and values surrounding community archaeology vary amongst different actors and that those of community participants, politicians and archaeologists do not always coincide. It is demonstrated that projects are put to use by participants in the construction of individual and group identities, and the negotiation of power relations. There appears to be strong disjunction between social policy, which seeks to encourage community action and heritage policy which seeks to conserve, protect and restrict.

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Since the mid-nineteenth century, the presence of large numbers of Viking place-names and pieces of sculpture, in the North West of England, has been interpreted in terms of a large-scale tenth- and eleventh-century Scandinavian settlement. This thesis re-considers, both in theoretical and actual terms, the philological and archaeological evidence underpinning this model of settlement, placed against a re-evaluation of the Viking-Age landscape, using the Hundred of Amounderness as a case study. Current attempts to model the Viking-Age North West are not fully convincing. Reconstruction of the landscape has focused upon the region's wetlands, using what are relatively late maps, the modern geological evidence and information provided by the small number of medieval field-names. Recent phytological evidence pUblished by the North West Wetland Survey reveals little evidence of rapid or sustained clearance in the tenth and eleventh centuries, so also casts doubt on the existence of a significant Viking-Age ingress into the region's previously unadopted hinterland. The quantity of Scandinavian archaeology is also comparatively thin in the North West and much of the philological evidence has an uncertain chronology. This picture is insufficiently convincing to evidence a large-scale Viking settlement. Using a new philological model of the Viking North West, and an alternative and more fluid vision of ethnic identity, it seems more likely that the level of archaeological and linguistic change evidenced within the region was the result of a relatively small but elite status Scandinavian settlement; these were communities originating from Ireland, Scandinavia, the Scottish Isles, the Isle of Man and/or Yorkshire. With a relatively small population in the North West, the indigenous English communities may have been particularly vulnerable to cultural change, a change that may also have been driven by increasing contact with the Norse settlements in Ireland and beyond.

The Roman conquest of Britain presages extensive changes in local material culture. This elaboration of material meant that people in Roman Britain were continually engaged in making choices and selections in material use for tasks of survival that faced them in their daily lives. Material culture is thus first and foremost something used to achieve an end, yet archaeology, normally being constrained to look at material culture in symbolic and thus semiotic terms, rarely looks at this most human and basic aspect of material culture, the way it was lived. There is thus a rupture between what archaeologists look at and the way material 'existed in the past. This study seeks to provide an alternative archaeological perspective on material culture by an investigation into slip use-wear and use-alteration on sarnian wares in Roman Britain. When a slipware ceramic is used, repeated abrasive .activity can cause the slip II to erode and the fabric underneath to become visible. To assess this process samian from a number of sites across Roman Britain was examined I and these physical i deletions were reduced to numerical information. Patterns were observed in the resulting data, and, rather being deteIlI),ined by macro-level factors such as supply, it is argued these patterns are predicated on social factors including status, activity, and culture.

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