Discoveries from archaeology: Fealing with the past in the present INTRODUCTION

This introduction places the contents of the special issue "Discoveries from Archaeology" in the context of philosophical approaches to questions of knowledge. As a method for generating new knowledge, archaeology has a special contribution to make to Shakespeare studies, most particularly in helping us to understand just what the commercial theatres of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London looked like. As well as interpreting from the surviving foundations of these buildings their size and shape, archaeological examination of small artefacts apparently dropped at the theatres can help historians of material culture to illuminate the working practices of early moderns, inside and outside the theatre.