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The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World
The Merovingian world has become more visible in Anglophone historical studies in the past two decades as attention to the social and economic networks of empires and modes of communication has begun to change older frameworks that viewed these centuries in terms of decline and characterized them as the "Dark Ages". The Merovingian epoch witnessed, something which we understand from the perspective of hindsight, a "tilt" to the middle ages. The forty-six essays included in this volume thus highlight the vitality and importance of the Merovingian kingdoms in the fifth through eighth centuries. Rather than suggest that this was a chaotic and obscure interlude between the "Fall of the Roman Emp...
Urban Life in the Distant Past
In this book, Michael Smith offers a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of ancient settlements and cities. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. Smith here introduces a coherent approach to urbanism that is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. His new insight is 'energized crowding,' a concept that captures the consequences of social interactions within the built environment resulting from increases in population size and density within settlements. Smith explores the implications of features such as empires, states, markets, households, and neighborhoods for urban life and society through case studies from around the world. Direct influences on urban life – as mediated by energized crowding-are organized into institutional (top-down forces) and generative (bottom-up processes). Smith's volume analyzes their similarities and differences with contemporary cities, and highlights the relevance of ancient cities for understanding urbanism and its challenges today.
Ancient Scandinavia
Scandinavia, a land mass comprising the modern countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, was the last part of Europe to be inhabited by humans. Not until the end of the last Ice Age when the melting of huge ice sheets left behind a fresh, barren land surface, about 13,000 BC, did the first humans arrive and settle in the region. The archaeological record of these prehistoric cultures, much of it remarkably preserved in Scandinavia's bogs, lakes, and fjords, has given us a detailed portrait of the evolution of human society at the edge of the inhabitable world. In this book, distinguished archaeologist T. Douglas Price provides a history of Scandinavia from the arrival of the first humans to ...
Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic
Preface -- Introduction -- Note on Old Norse characters -- Part I. Textiles and their interpretation -- 1. Sheep, wool, and fleece processing: where it all began -- 2. Potential insights on archaeological textiles: the nature of preservation and the conservator's eye -- 3. King Harald's grey cloak: Vararfeldir and the trade in shaggy pile weave cloaks between Iceland and Norway in the late Viking and early Middle Ages -- 4. Re-clothing the inhabitants of tenth-century Dublin based on archaeological evidence -- 5. The sensory archaeology of early Medieval fabrics from the North Atlantic -- 6. The function of written textiles in the Íslendingasögur -- 7. The Medieval mantles of Hibernia: functional markers of ethnic identity -- Part II. Understanding through replicating -- 8. Making the best of it: planning decisions for reproduction fabrics -- 9. The value of intangible knowledge: how living history can aid experimental archaeology in exploring the past; Iron Age Scandinavian tablet weaving and Nalbinding -- 10. Collaborative working practices: creating and theorising Sprang -- 11. From wool to mitten: when history comes to life in your hands -- Glossary -- Index.
Urban Network Evolutions
For millenia, urban networks have shaped the development of human societies. Today, new archaeological approaches are unveiling the evolution of these networks in unprecedented detail. Urban Networks Evolutions reviews the new approaches to urban evolution as archaeology endeavours to characterise both the scale and pace of historical events and processes. Issuing from the work of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence, the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), the book compares the archaeology of urbanism from medieval Northern Europe to the Ancient Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean World. The 40 contributors demonstrate how new techniques for refining archaeological dates, contexts, and the provenance ascribed to material culture, afford a new high-definition approach to the study of global and interregional dynamics. This opens up for far-reaching questions as to how and to what extent urban networks catalysed societal and environmental expansions and crises in the past.
The World in the Viking Age
The Viking Age was ignited by the art of building seaworthy sailing ships and the skills to sail them on the open sea. The growth in seafaring, trade, piracy, and exploration that began to gather momentum during the 8th century CE was not limited to Europe's northern seas, however. Ships, laden with cargo and with seafarers who met foreign cultures, created unexpected connections between people from the Arctic Circle to the oceans south of the equator. Travel accounts have handed down glimpses of these voyages to the present day. However, it is archaeological discoveries in particular which uncover the story of Viking-Age seafaring and voyages of exploration. The World in the Viking Age reveals a global history concerning ships, people and objects on the move. It is a story that challenges entrenched ideas about the past and present, and the skills and opportunities of previous generations.
Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns
Crafting Communities explores the interface between craft, communication networks, and urbanization in Viking-age Northern Europe. Viking-period towns were the hubs of cross-cultural communication of their age, and innovations in specialized crafts provide archaeologists with some of the best evidence for studying this communication. The integrated results presented in these papers have been made possible through the sustained collaboration of a group of experts with complementary insights into individual crafts. Results emerge from recent scholarly advances in the study of artifacts and production: first, the application of new analytical techniques in artifact studies (e.g. metallographic,...
Northern Emporium
This is the second and final volume presenting the results of the Northern Emporium research project and the high-definition excavations carried out within this programme in 2017-18 in Ribe. The 22 chapters survey the remarkable range of finds retrieved from this hub of the North Sea world in the eighth and ninth centuries AD: artefacts made from pottery, stone, shell, glass, metals, amber, leather, wood, textile, bone and antler. They offer detailed insights that highlight discoveries such as the assemblages from glass bead or comb-making workshops, and rare finds such as wooden furnishings and musical instruments. The focus of the book is on assembling Ribe’s early urban network. By analysing finds and their context, we develop a picture of social roles and interactions between residents and visitors in the emporium. And we follow the connections they created with other worlds as we trace the flows of glass vessels, pottery and wine barrels from Western Europe; iron, stone and animal products from North and Central Scandinavia and beads and coins that travelled from the Middle East and the Indian Ocean into northern Europe’s new maritime frontier.
Northern Emporium
In the early Middle Ages, a network of maritime trading towns – emporia – emerged along the northern coasts of Europe. These early urban sites are among archaeology’s most notable contributions to our knowledge of the period between the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire and the growth of a maritime-oriented world in the Viking Age. Ribe, on the western coast of Denmark, is one of these sites. In 2017-18 the Northern Emporium research project conducted seminal research excavations, which provided new foundations for the study of this nodal point between Western Europe, Scandinavia, and the world beyond. This first volume presents the results of these excavations and analyses to...
Pastfinders
It is widely agreed that the birth of modern archaeology happened in Denmark in the 19th century. A particular set of intellectual and material circumstances came together in a small northern European country to forge the making of a new academic field of enquiry. The history of this event has been widely constructed from the vantage points of certain schools and subjects. This anthology aims to demonstrate that the early Danish pioneers saw little distinction between the study of classical antiquity, the middle ages, prehistory, ethnography and human evolution, nor between humanities and natural sciences. The contributions show how Danish scholars remained key actors and delivered pioneering achievements in the archaeology of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In many cases, a full appreciation of their work has been blinded by the disciplinary boundaries of post-war academia. Rediscovering the intimate links between what was later to become separate subjects within the work of individual scholars, this book recasts the history of archaeology in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a joint quest for a global understanding of human history.
