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The past decade has seen many calls for the development of unified ‘world historical archaeologies’ of the past 500 years. While the field benefits from growing international exchanges and collaborations, retaining the diversity of regional traditions is a major and emerging challenge. As the field increasingly tests the temporal, geographical and interdisciplinary limits of archaeological perspectives, engaging with the diversity of modern material, these complexities remain little discussed, and the situations and contingencies of disciplinary narratives, priorities and interactions remain unproblematized. Exploring these matters, this paper considers transatlantic interactions between British and North American traditions of historical archaeology over the past two decades, journeying between two garden landscapes – in Annapolis and Bristol. After considering Mark Leone's 1984 study of the William Paca garden in Annapolis, Maryland, and its subsequent reinterpretations, the paper discusses an eighteenth-century ‘eclectic’ garden at Goldney in Bristol. The paper argues that situational and ‘symmetrical’, rather than interpretative, approaches to archaeological material would aid the development of multi-vocal and inclusive ‘world historical archaeologies’, acknowledging and celebrating the archaeological complexities that are encountered in the past and the disciplinary present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the celebration of the feasts of Saint Clement and Saint Katherine in Bristol, England from 1400 through 1600. For the region, the pairing of the church celebrations seems focused especially on the structural tensions that characterized the late medieval community. Processions expressed in visible form the organization of the municipal government, and reinforced the relationship of the civic authorities to the burghal community. The feast of Saint Katherine together with its companion feast of Saint Clement confirmed the principle of unity which the late medieval borough community proclaimed.

The article focuses on humanist research at the University of Bristol Institute of Education. Research in education has, in fact, been unduly influenced by the success which has attended research in the pure sciences to use narrowly scientific methods. But the methods that are suitable to the investigation of material things are not necessarily suitable to investigate the world of thought, purpose and value. At Bristol researchers have broken boldly away from contemporary style of research and embarked on five projects which are frankly humanist in character. They have undertaken one that is consciously and narrowly scientific in type, and rightly so, because it is a research on a material aid to education. This is a technical research on the use of television in the classroom. The British Broadcasting Corp. has carried out its own research in Middlesex, but this has a limited validity because it occupied only a few hours and invoked little help from teachers. The Bristol experiment, carried out in Gloucestereshire rural schools, lasted many months and depended on the collaboration of many teachers as well as the British Broadcasting Corp.