Discovery by Design: The identification of secular élite settlements in western Britain A.D. 400-700

This book presents the theory of historical archaeology in practice, seeing how new perspectives may be able to solve the problem of archaeologists' inability to recognise secular settlement sites in Celtic Britain. In four parts, the first chapter presents an outline of recent theory and historical archaeology. Subsequent chapters define `high status' sites and secularity in the archaeology of western Britain, AD 400-700, and present an application and test of the models outlined in the first chapter using excavated evidence from western Britain, and an evaluation of hill-fort and castle sites.