scholarly journals Grave Goods in Early Medieval Europe: regional variability and decline

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Early Medieval ◽  
Regional Variability ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The North ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Grave Good ◽  
Gis Methods ◽  
Individual Choices ◽  
Grave Goods

This article analyses the use of grave goods in burials across early medieval Europe and how that use changed over the course of the 6th to 8th centuries CE with the widespread transition to unfurnished burial. It uses data gathered from published cemetery excavation reports from England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The grave good use in these cemeteries was analysed using GIS methods to visualise regional differences, as well as statistical methods to analyse how grave good use evolved over time in those regions. This analysis revealed clear regional distinctions in grave good use, with England and Alamannia appearing similar, with relatively high levels of grave good use. Meanwhile, parts of Frankia and of Burgundy had considerably lower levels of grave good use. Distributions of individual artefact types tended to match those of overall numbers, but there were a few key exceptions, such as vessels, which followed a quite different pattern, being found in high numbers along the Frankish coast, but in much lower numbers elsewhere. Despite these overall trends, there was still considerable intra-regional and intra-cemetery variation that suggests communities and individuals had the ability to make highly individual choices about the way to bury their dead, along with the ability to subvert local norms. It also revealed that while there was a general decline in the use of grave goods across this period, and everywhere eventually reached the point of almost completely unfurnished burial, this decline occurred at different rates. In particular, there was a zone around the North Sea, including Kent, western Frankia, and the Low Countries, where there was little change in grave good use until it was suddenly abandoned in the early 8th century. Different types of objects declined at different rates across different regions, with few clear trends, suggesting that only personal accessories held a common significance across Europe; the meanings of all other object types were negotiated on a local basis.

Maritime and River Traders, Landing Places, and Emporia Ports in the Merovingian Period in and Around the Low Countries

2020 ◽  
pp. 763-796
Author(s):  
Dries Tys
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
New Institutional Economics ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Sea

The origin, rise, and dynamics of coastal trade and landing places in the North Sea area between the sixth and eighth centuries must be understood in relation to how coastal regions and seascapes acted as arenas of contact, dialogue, and transition. Although the free coastal societies of the early medieval period were involved in regional to interregional or long-distance trade networks, their economic agency must be understood from a bottom-up perspective. That is, their reproduction strategies must be studied in their own right, independent from any teleological construction about the development of trade, markets, or towns for that matter. This means that the early medieval coastal networks of exchange were much more complex and diverse than advocated by the simple emporium network model, which connected the major archaeological sites along the North Sea coast. Instead, coastal and riverine dwellers often possessed some form of free status and large degrees of autonomy, in part due to the specific environmental conditions of the landscapes in which they dwelled. The wide estuarine region of the Low Countries, between coastal Flanders in the south and Friesland in the north, a region with vast hinterlands and a central position in northwestern Europe, makes these developments particularly clear. This chapter thus pushes back against longstanding assumptions in scholarly research, which include overemphasis of the influence of large landowners over peasant economies, and on the prioritization of easily retrievable luxuries over less visible indicators of bulk trade (such as wood, wool, and more), gift exchange, and market trade. The approach used here demonstrates that well-known emporia or larger ports of trade were embedded in the economic activities and networks of their respective hinterlands. Early medieval coastal societies and their dynamics are thus better understood from the perspective of integrated governance and economy (“new institutional economics”) in a regional setting.

Walter Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2018, xxiii, 636 pp., 4 maps.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 381-382
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The North ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Nomadic People ◽  
Military Structure

Even though this is not a new publication, Pohl’s study on the Avars deserves particular attention, now in its first English translation. While not identified on the cover page, Pohl’s book was superbly translated into English by Will Sayers, who is briefly mentioned in the preface. Pohl had published his book originally in German in 1988, and it appeared in its third edition in 2015. Only in the last few decades has our awareness and understanding of the Avars grown and changed, particularly because intensive archaeological evidence has vastly changed our concept of that Steppe people who lived in the Carpathian Basin long before the Magyars settled there. Consequently, Pohl has made great efforts to reflect on the new insights and rewrote the respective sections of this book. In short, although here we hold in our hands ‘only’ the English translation of the third edition, The Avars represents, after all, a new approach and a thorough update of the current research on that people that had significant influence on the Byzantines, the Germanic peoples to the west and southwest, and to the north and east. They were the first to introduce into Europe the stirrup, but they left practically no written sources. They were Nomadic people, and yet not simply barbarians, as later chroniclers liked to call them. Hence, Pohl’s study on this early medieval people sheds important light on the political and military structure of early medieval Europe in an area where the Byzantine sphere of interest ended and where the Carolingians endeavored to place their stakes.

scholarly journals The Dead and their Possessions: The Declining Agency of the Cadaver in Early Medieval Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 406-427
Author(s):  
Emma Claire Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Grave Good ◽  
The Dead

Between the sixth and eighth centuries ad, the practice of furnished burial was widely abandoned in favour of a much more standardized, unfurnished rite. This article examines that transition by considering the personhood and agency of the corpse, the different ways bonds of possession can form between people and objects, and what happens to those bonds at death. By analysing changing grave good use across western Europe, combined with an in-depth analysis of the Alamannic cemetery of Pleidelsheim, and historical evidence for perceptions of the corpse, the author argues that the change in grave good use marks a fundamental change in the perception of corpses.

scholarly journals Evidence from survey data for regional variability in cod dynamics in the North Sea and West of Scotland

2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Holmes ◽  
Peter J. Wright ◽  
Robert J. Fryer
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Gadus Morhua ◽  
Temporal Trends ◽  
Trawl Survey ◽  
Regional Variability ◽  
The North ◽  
Spawning Areas ◽  
General Decline ◽  
The North Sea

Abstract Holmes, S. J., Wright, P. J., and Fryer, R. J. 2008. Evidence from survey data for regional variability in cod dynamics in the North Sea and West of Scotland. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 65: 206–215. Although cod (Gadus morhua) in the North Sea and ICES Division VIa are assessed as single units, recent research suggests that the stocks consist of reproductively isolated subpopulations within a metapopulation. We investigate whether temporal trends in stock indicators are asynchronous across subpopulations, which would support the metapopulation hypothesis. First quarter trawl survey data for the years 1983–2005 were aggregated into putative areas of high spawner fidelity (three in VIa, seven in the North Sea) to obtain indices of spawning–stock biomass (SSB) and recruitment (numbers-at-age 1). Asynchrony was investigated by fitting a smoother to the data for each of the ten spawning areas and testing whether the smoothers were parallel. Trends in SSB differed between spawning areas in both VIa and the North Sea. In VIa, SSB collapsed in the most southwesterly area, but remained more constant elsewhere. In the North Sea, there was a general decline in SSB, but areas thought to contain resident inshore populations showed more rapid declines than those in adjacent offshore areas. Recruitment results offered less support for a metapopulation, although recruitment in the southern North Sea declined rapidly before any trend was seen for the North Sea as a whole.

Contesting the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Town Government ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This book exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England—Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York—in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail—whether ideologically or in practice—when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.

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