Landscapes and Identities

Author(s):  
Chris Gosden ◽  
Anwen Cooper ◽  
Miranda Creswell ◽  
Victoria Donnelly ◽  
Tyler Franconi ◽  
...  

This chapter pulls together the themes of the volume as a whole, looking back at the nature of the evidence, providing a synthesis of landscape use and considering again issues of identities. We review the nature of our evidence, as well as the possibilities and difficulties posed by working with large amounts of information. We review the broader differences found across England, either side of a line roughly from Torquay to Whitby, where south and east of that line more settlements and artefacts occurred than north and west. These differences indicate long-term contrasts in ways of life in both areas. We end by considering the complex question of identities, taking seriously issues of scale. An English identity was produced through a political project in the early medieval period and would not have existed in this form earlier.

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Pears ◽  
A.G. Brown ◽  
J. Carroll ◽  
P. Toms ◽  
J. Wood ◽  
...  

Environmental information from place-names has largely been overlooked by geoarchaeologists and fluvial geomorphologists in analyses of the depositional histories of rivers and floodplains. Here, new flood chronologies for the rivers Teme, Severn, and Wye are presented, modelled from stable river sections excavated at Broadwas, Buildwas, and Rotherwas. These are connected by the Old English term *wæsse, interpreted as ‘land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly’. The results reveal that, in all three places, flooding during the early medieval period occurred more frequently between AD 350–700 than between AD 700–1100, but that over time each river's flooding regime became more complex including high magnitude single events. In the sampled locations, the fluvial dynamics of localized flood events had much in common, and almost certainly differed in nature from other sections of their rivers, refining our understanding of the precise nature of flooding which their names sought to communicate. This study shows how the toponymic record can be helpful in the long-term reconstruction of historic river activity and for our understanding of past human perceptions of riverine environments.


Author(s):  
Chris Gosden ◽  
Tyler Franconi ◽  
Letty ten Harkel

This chapter introduces the project, the history of work on the English landscape for all periods from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period, earlier attempts at long-term histories and our intellectual approach.


Author(s):  
Giovanna Bianchi

In 1994, an article appeared in the Italian journal Archeologia Medievale, written by Chris Wickham and Riccardo Francovich, entitled ‘Uno scavo archeologico ed il problema dello sviluppo della signoria territoriale: Rocca San Silvestro e i rapporti di produzione minerari’. It marked a breakthrough in the study of the exploitation of mineral resources (especially silver) in relation to forms of power, and the associated economic structure, and control of production between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the basis of the data available to archeological research at the time, the article ended with a series of open questions, especially relating to the early medieval period. The new campaign of field research, focused on the mining landscape of the Colline Metallifere in southern Tuscany, has made it possible to gather more information. While the data that has now been gathered are not yet sufficient to give definite and complete answers to those questions, they nevertheless allow us to now formulate some hypotheses which may serve as the foundations for broader considerations as regards the relationship between the exploitation of a fundamental resource for the economy of the time, and the main players and agents in that system of exploitation, within a landscape that was undergoing transformation in the period between the early medieval period and the middle centuries of the Middle Ages.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-187
Author(s):  
Massimo Iovane

Abstract This review essay analyses a very interesting collection of essays providing a fresh examination of international law schools operating in Italy from the early medieval period to current times. The Essay will show that the book adopts a completely new presentation of this subject, offering thus an unbiased assessment of the doctrinal debate developed in between the two World Wars.


Author(s):  
Yu-yu Cheng

In classical Chinese tradition, writing a commentary is a basic way of interpreting texts and teaching classics. A commentator not only speculates on an author’s intent but also cites from various oral or written accounts to annotate a text. Commentary thus becomes a core text for converging knowledge and conserving culture, and sometimes it is many times longer than the original text. This chapter focuses on a series of commentaries on literary texts in the early medieval period and shows that, instead of being secondary to the original text, a commentary constitutes a new text on a par with the urtext in many ways.


Author(s):  
David R. Knechtges

In China from ancient times the anthology has occupied an important place in literary culture. During the early medieval period the purely literary anthology comes into its own. The emergence of a large number of anthologies in this period is related to changing conceptions of writing as well as attempts to define genres and to establish an independent category for belles lettres. Only a few of the anthologies from this period have survived, the most famous being the Wen xuan, compiled around 526. Another extant single-genre anthology is the Yutai xinyong. The Wen xuan eventually became the Chinese anthology par excellence, and for several centuries was the primary source from which scholars and writers obtained their literary education; it was also important in Japan and Korea.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kesavan Veluthat

This article brings out certain aspects of the ways in which the temple and the state were related in the early medieval period. Arriving in South India almost simultaneously, both derived support from each other. While the state patronised the temple, the latter lent considerable legitimacy to the former. The temple gradually started appropriating the role of the state in numerous ways, assuming administrative, judicial and fiscal functions. In many cases it was now in a position even to challenge the local political authorities.


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