Northern Emporium

Northern Emporium
Author: Søren M. Sindbæk
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2022-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8793423764

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 piece together the history of the emporium and its social fabric. The research employs novel, high-definition methods to explore the networks of the site, integrating an extensive use of geoarchaeology and 3D stratigraphic recording with intensive environmental sampling and artefact recovery, resulting in more than 100,000 artefact finds. The results transform our understanding of key points of the early history of the North Sea region. Through the remains of dwellings and workshops – the traces left by traders, sailors, weavers, tailors, comb makers, and skilled producers of glass beads and metal ornaments – we follow the creation of Viking Age social networks, along with some of the most iconic artistic products of this world and the daily lives of some of its notable inhabitants.

Franks and Northmen

Franks and Northmen
Author: Daniel Melleno
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2024-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040030742

Franks and Northmen explores the full spectrum of Franco-Scandinavian interaction, examining not just violence but also less well-known relationships centered on acts of diplomacy, commerce, and mission and demonstrating the transformative nature of cross-cultural encounter during the Viking Age. In the year 777, the Frankish sources mention the Northmen, better known to most as the Vikings, for the first time. By the tenth century these Northmen, once a mysterious people on the borders of the Carolingian Empire, would be a familiar presence in the Frankish world. As raiders and pillagers, the Vikings would fill the pages of Frankish authors, leaving a legacy that continues to fascinate even to the twenty-first century. But a closer look at sources, both textual and material, reveals that the relationships between Franks and Northmen were far more complex and multifaceted than a rigid focus on Viking violence might suggest. Merchants carried goods across the North Sea, missionaries encouraged new ways of understanding the world, and Franks and Northmen formed relationships and bonds even amidst conflict and violence. This study is a useful resource for both students and specialists of central and northern Europe in the early medieval period.

Urban Life in the Distant Past

Urban Life in the Distant Past
Author: Michael Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1009249037

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.

Economic Circularity in the Roman and Early Medieval Worlds

Economic Circularity in the Roman and Early Medieval Worlds
Author: Jonathan Wood
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789259975

Economic circularity is the ability of a society to reduce waste by recycling, reusing, and repairing raw materials and finished products. This concept has gained momentum in academia, in part due to contemporary environmental concerns. Although the blurry conceptual boundaries of this term are open to a wide array of interpretations, the scholarly community generally perceives circular economy as a convenient umbrella definition that encompasses a vast array of regenerative and preservative processes. Despite the recent surge of interest, economic circularity has not been fully addressed as a macrophenomenon by historical and archaeological studies. The limitations of data and the relatively new formulation of targeted research questions mean that several processes and agents involved in ancient circular economies are still invisible to the eye of modern scholarship. Examples include forms of curation, maintenance, and repair, which must have had an influence on the economic systems of premodern societies but are rarely accounted for. Moreover, the people behind these processes, such as collectors and scavengers, are rarely investigated and poorly understood. Even better-studied mechanisms, like reuse and recycling, are not explored to their full potential within the broader picture of ancient urban economies. This volume stems from a conference held at Moesgaard Museum supported by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Centre for Urban Networks Evolutions (UrbNet) at Aarhus University. To enhance our understanding of circular economic processes, the contributions in this volume aim to expand the framework of the discussion by exploring circular economy over the longue durée and by integrating an interdisciplinary perspective. Furthermore, the volume wants to give prominence to classes of material, processes, agents, and methodologies generally overlooked or ignored in modern scholarship.

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns
Author: Rebecca Boyd
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000984397

Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland. This coincides with the arrival of the Vikings and the appearance of the post-and-wattle Type 1 house. These houses reflect this crucial transition to urban living with its attendant changes for individuals, households, and society. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns uses household archaeology as a lens to explore the materiality, variability, and day-to-day experiences of living in these houses. It moves from the intimate scale of individual households to the larger scale of Ireland’s earliest urban communities. For the first time, this book considers how these houses were more than just buildings: they were homes, important places where people lived, worked, and died. These new towns were busy places with a multitude of people, ideas, and things. This book uses the mass of archaeological data to undertake comparative analyses of houses and properties, artefact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to interrogate some 500 Viking-Age urban houses. This analysis is structured in three parts: an investigation of the houses, the households, and the town. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging in these new environments and allow themselves to develop a new, urban identity. This book is suited to advanced students and specialists of the Viking Age in Ireland, but archaeologists and historians of the early medieval and Viking worlds will find much of interest here. It will also appeal to readers with interests in the archaeology of house and home, households, identities, and urban studies.

Money, Coinage and Colonialism

Money, Coinage and Colonialism
Author: Nanouschka Myrberg Burström
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2024-10-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040133169

This book explores coinage and related object types as an important form of material culture that is crucial to interrogating interactions between coloniser and colonised. Money, Coinage and Colonialism is a much overdue treatment of coinage and money in debates around ancient and recent colonial practices. It argues that coinage offers unique opportunities to study interactions and effects of the meeting between colonisers and colonised, as well as the economic, political and ideological interactions between colonial communities and the state of origin. It is argued that the study of coins and other means of exchange may reveal less apparent and under-communicated processes, values and discourses in the study of colonial environments and projects, with commonalities informing a larger "global history" approach. A broad picture is built from numerous case studies, spanning from Classical Greek colonies to European colonial enterprises of the Modern period, exploring colonial histories, settings, ideology and resistance. Particular attention is paid to the role of coins in identity construction; to ambiguity, hybridity and creolisation of monetary objects in colonial contexts; and to specific uses of coins that tell of violence, oppression and resistance as well as of networks, acculturation and globalisation. Composed of chronologically broad and diverse case studies from colonial contexts, this book is for researchers in colonial and post-colonial archaeology as well as archaeological and cultural-historical numismatics.