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Given the nature of medieval artifacts and resulting research requirements, a precise temporal classification is essential. It is especially important for the purposes of medieval archaeology in interpreting archaeological finds/finding situations and identifying them with a historical events or figures, for example, to identify skeletal remains of a known historical figure or to establish a chronological sequence of various cultural and architectural changes within an area. Due to the fact that the uncertainties of radiocarbon (14C) analyses have been decreasing in recent years, the applicability of 14C dating for such purposes is now growing. In this work, we aim to demonstrate the current possibilities of the use of AMS 14C analyses on specific cases and confront the results with other available data. 14C data from skeletal remains of members of the oldest Czech ruling dynasty of the Přemyslids (about 880–1306 AD) were obtained in recent years. Archaeological research conducted in the three oldest churches in the Prague Castle discovered skeletal remains of three members of the second, two members of the fourth and two members of the fifth generation. This case study of the application of 14C data has three parts: i) identification of excavated individuals; ii) demonstration of the application using current AMS-based analysis of 14C on medieval osteological material and tests of our preparation method; iii) contributing to discussion and consulting with other problematical 14C age alteration influenced by diet, age of bone collagen or seasonal variation of 14C activity. The obtained results and the issues arising from them clearly highlight the necessity of a multidisciplinary cooperation in this type of study.

Using the example of pottery imported into the Channel ports of southern England, an approach to examining the role of pottery in the emergence and mediation of coastal communities is proposed. Building upon recent scholarship it is argued that it is no longer tenable to see pottery as a carrier of identity or as part of a ‘cultural package’, with meaning instead emerging with identity as people interact with pottery within and outside of port environments. The study proposes that imported pottery found meaning in different ways depending upon the context of acquisition and use and, as such, it mediated different forms of community and identity. The paper ends with a consideration of the wider implications of this approach for ongoing studies of material culture, trade and urban identities in medieval Europe.

Any reader expecting yet another contribution on the urbanization of Scandinavia will be misguided reading Axel Christophersen's contribution on ‘performing towns’. As the author makes very clear, he focuses onurbanityin the sense ofurban social practicerather than onurbanizationitself. The latter concept is straightforwardly dismissed as belonging to processual archaeology, and was trying to understand the town as abeingstructure and neglecting the dynamic role of its individual inhabitants as a ‘crucial historical driving force’ (p. 110). Christophersen also omits the classic discussion – actually besides Christianization one of the two most prominent topics in early medieval archaeology – on the designation and character of the earliest towns in the north, where early towns are merely defined as population centres ‘larger than a village and smaller than a city’ (p. 112). Instead, with the adoption ofpractice theory, Christophersen picks one heuristic approach from modern social theory (mentalism (subjectivistic/objectivistic), intersubjectivism, textualism and practice theory itself) for the analysis of social phenomena as routinized body/knowledge/things complexes (Reckwitz 2002, 257–58).

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries AD, the Lower Vistula valley represented a permeable and shifting frontier between Pomerelia (eastern Pomerania), which had been incorporated into the Polish Christian state by the end of the tenth century, and the territories of western Prussian tribes, who had resisted attempts at Christianization. Pomeranian colonization eventually began to falter in the latter decades of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, most likely as a result of Prussian incursions, which saw the abandonment of sites across the borderland. Subsequently, the Teutonic Order and its allies led a protracted holy war against the Prussian tribes, which resulted in the conquest of the region and its incorporation into a theocratic state by the end of the thirteenth century. This was accompanied by a second wave of colonization, which resulted in the settlement pattern that is still visible in the landscape of north-central Poland today. However, not all colonies were destroyed or abandoned in between the two phases of colonization. The recently excavated site of Biała Góra, situated on the western side of the Forest of Sztum overlooking the River Nogat, represents a unique example of a transitional settlement that included both Pomeranian and Teutonic Order phases. The aim of this paper is to situate the site within its broader landscape context which can be characterized as a militarized frontier, where, from the later twelfth century and throughout much of the thirteenth century, political and economic expansion was combined with the ideology of Christian holy war and missionary activity. This paper considers how the colonists provisioned and sustained themselves in comparison to other sites within the region, and how Biała Góra may be tentatively linked to a documented but otherwise lost outpost in this volatile borderland.

In recent years, scientific methods of bio- and geoarchaeology have become increasingly important for archaeological research. Political changes since the 1990s have reshaped the archaeological community. At the same time environmental topics have gained importance in modern society, but the debate lacks an historical understanding. Regarding medieval rural archaeology, we need to ask how this influences our archaeological research on medieval settlements, and how ecological approaches fit into the self-concept of medieval archaeology as a primarily historical discipline. Based mainly on a background in German medieval archaeology, this article calls attention to more complex ecological research questions. Medieval village formation and the late medieval crisis are taken as examples to sketch some hypotheses and research questions. The perspective of a village ecosystem helps bring together economic aspects, human ecology and environmental history. There are several implications for archaeological theory as well as for archaeological practice. Traditional approaches from landscape archaeology are insufficient to understand the changes within village ecosystems. We need to consider social aspects and subjective recognition of the environment by past humans as a crucial part of human–nature interaction. Use of the perspective of village ecosystems as a theoretical background offers a way to examine individual historical case studies with close attention to human agency. Thinking in terms of human ecology and environmental history raises awareness of some interrelations that are crucial to understanding past societies and cultural change.

The Gothic Revival moved forward in step with advances in medieval archaeology and history, the one feeding off the other and back again. As this process unfolded, historical understanding enabled the association of forms with ideas. For example, some Victorian architects favoured the Decorated style because a connection could be drawn between it and the power of the English state in its early maturity. Reasoning by analogy, this style could thus be seen as the model for a modern Gothic architecture appropriate to a new, dynamic age. However, the meaning of forms was rarely fixed. That this was the case is illustrated by the restoration at exactly the same time, the early 1840s, of two medieval churches, both typological copies of the same building, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Though similar in their round plans, the intentions of those promoting each project were very different. The first, the Temple Church in London, was an essentially secular project; by contrast, the Round Church in Cambridge was restored for theological reasons. In different ways, these two projects also reflected contemporary ideas about Palestine and its archaeology.

Since the early Middle Ages, relics of Catholic saints played an important role in popular religion in Europe. The shrines containing the human remains of the saints, however, are rarely studied, typically only when restoration becomes necessary. Formerly, such study was mostly restricted to the art-historical aspects of the artifacts, sometimes including the counting and rough identification of the bones. In this study, for the first time, and for a number of case studies, a more systematic approach was taken, including detailed physico-anthropological observations,13C and15N stable isotope measurements, and14C analysis of the bones.The importance of this project lies not only in a critical evaluation of the authenticity of the relics. Fruitful insights could also be gained about the origin, history, and treatment of these parts of our religious heritage. Finally, it has been proven that shrines are an important source of early medieval human skeletal material, which is only rarely found in archaeological contexts in Belgium.

This article develops recent interpretations of mortuary practices as contexts for producing social memory and personhood to argue that early medieval cairns and mounds served to commemorate concepts of gender and genealogy. Commemorative strategies are identified in the composite character, shape and location of cairns and in their relationship with other commemorative monuments, namely Class I symbol-stones. The argument is developed through a consideration of the excavations of early medieval cists and cairns at Lundin Links in Fife.

In the years leading up to the First World War the academic understanding of the earthen mounds we know as mottes underwent a series of dramatic changes. Exploration of the paradigms behind these viewpoints tells us much about the way in which knowledge comes into being and is used. In particular, archaeologists have created their own foundation myths, complete with hero and demon figures, which serve to emphasize a progressive account of research. The reality is often somewhat more reactionary. In this paper I argue that archaeological histories have impeded understanding of the discipline as the complexities of research remain hidden. As viewpoints become entrenched, creative thought is stifled because the subject is believed to be understood. In castle studies, one a-priori paradigm is that the English motte-and-bailey castle was introduced by the Normans, an idea commonly attributed to Ella Armitage. This paper explores the context behind the adoption of this idea through a case study focusing on changes in understanding. Acrimonious dismissal of alternative points of view has maintained the dominance of this paradigm. I conclude that critical historiographies such as this best serve the development of future understanding of the discipline.

The author reviews the development of Islamic archaeology in Spain, Portugal and Morocco through its publications and fieldwork, identifying research themes such as ceramic studies, fortified settlement and landscape archaeology, irrigation and urban archaeology. Features excavated in Spain or Portugal can best be understood through ethno-archaeological studies of the Moroccan landscape and its living traditions.

One of the most important techniques to be applied in medieval archaeology is access analysis, in which the spaces inside a structure are categorised by their relative ease of access and interpreted in terms of privilege and privacy. The author demonstrates the method, taking buildings from Salisbury town and Cathedral Close as a case study.

Medieval archaeology in Ireland has been described twice in the last 30 years as ‘in its infancy’, by Delaney (1977: 46) andby Barry (1987: 1). Neither was strictly correct. Ireland played a full part in the general English interest in medieval castles and churches around 1900, with Champneys, Orpen and Westropp in particular listing and describing them and relating to their historical and European context. In Ulster the medieval period had occupied a central place in archaeological research and excavation, rcmarkable within Europe and unique within the British Isles, from 1950 (Tope 1966).

Explicitly regional projects have been a comparatively recent phenomenon in Mediterranean archaeology. Classical archaeology is by far the strongest discipline in the university, museum and antiquities services career structures within the Mediterranean countries. It has always been dominated by the ‘Great Tradition’ of classical art and architecture: even today, a university course on ‘ancient topography’ in many departments of classical archaeology will usually deal predominantly with the layout of the major imperial cities and the details of their monumental architecture. The strength of the tradition is scarcely surprising in the face of the overwhelming wealth of the standing remains of the Greek and Roman cities in every Mediterranean country. There has been very little integration with prehistory: early prehistory is still frequently taught within a geology degree, and later prehistory is still invariably dominated by the culture-history approach. Prehistory in many traditional textbooks in the north Mediterranean countries remains a succession of invasions and migrations, first of Palaeolithic peoples from North Africa and the Levant, then of neolithic farmers, then metal-using élites from the East Mediterranean, followed in an increasingly rapid succession by Urnfielders, Dorians and Celts from the North, to say nothing of Sea Peoples (from who knows where?!). For the post-Roman period, church archaeology has a long history, but medieval archaeology in the sense of dirt archaeology is a comparatively recent discipline: until the 1960s in Italy, for example, ‘medieval archaeology’ meant the study of the medieval buildings of the historic cities, a topic outside the responsibility of the State Archaeological Service (the Superintendency of Antiquities) and within that of the parallel ‘Superintendencies’ for monuments, libraries, archives and art galleries.

Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists are accustomed to categorizing the inhabitants of the rural farming households of medieval England as peasants without questioning the disciplinary implications of imposing such a category on historical subjects. Foundational categories, such astheworker,thepeasant,thewoman, become so familiar that they appear natural and divert us from studying the historical and power-charged processes involved in their constructions, past and present. The century-old debate over views of medieval English peasants as bound statically by custom, on the one hand, or as dynamically diverse or mobile, on the other, perhaps expresses embedded disciplinary tensions in the historic division of labor between anthropology (including archaeology) and history. From their disciplinary formation in the early modern period, anthropology and history together have constructed and guarded an imaginary but nevertheless potent boundary between the historical and the primitive, a boundary that divided the European colonizer from the non-European colonized and that within Europe divided the historical past from the traditional past. Who gets an anthropology and who gets a history therefore becomes a question of historic and power-charged disciplinary practices. As a foundational category, “peasant” straddles both disciplines and both divisions of the past, historical and traditional.In this essay, I wish to examine the powerful yet unacknowledged ways in which these disciplinary practices inform medieval peasant studies. I shall focus especially on the study of the material culture of the medieval English peasantry. Both history and archaeology claim the medieval English peasant to justify disciplinary narratives.

This contribution intends to present, very briefly, one of the facets of medieval archaeology in Bohemia, a land which to this day bears the marks of having belonged to ‘the other Europe’. I will focus on a short phase of Bohemian history and within it, I will take out just a small portion that is accessible via the archaeological evidence. In spite of all the material limitations, I want to show that in this theme Bohemian archaeology documents one of the components of the gradual emergence of Europe, a continent so varied and yet so internally coherent.

The archaeology of rural settlements is a comparatively new branch of history. Its genealogy is easy to trace. Spurred on by the growth of economic and social history in the inter-war years, Dutch archaeologists, like A.E. van Giffin, and younger Danish archaeologists, such as Gunther Hatt and Axel Steensburg, undertook large open-area excavations of North Sea Migration period settlements. Van Giffin's excavation of the terp at Ezinge during the ‘thirties is a typical example. Using open-area excavation, a controlled form of the clearance excavation being employed on the large classical sites in Mussolini's Italy, it became feasible to examine the Migration-period architecture (as an architectural historian might) and the evolution of the settlement (as a classical topographer might do it). Neither would have been possible if a site such as Ezinge had been trenched. As far as we can tell today, van Giffin et al. did not intend to rewrite history, so much as to use archaeology to confirm prevailing ethnically-oriented theses about Migration period peoples. In some ways this was also the case when W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford began to undertake small excavations of deserted medieval villages in England in 1947. Both hoped that small excavation trenches might help them to date the desertion of some of these settlements. In practice, of course, what they discovered in the course of nineteen excavations merely proved to be confusing (cf. Hurst, 1971: 83). Hoskins turned to other matters, but Beresford pursued the possibilities of archaeology at Wharram Percy, a fine example of a so-called deserted medieval village.

For his contribution to landscape history, Maurice Beresford may be compared to William Hoskins. His first book, The Lost Villages of England (1954), explored a subject which he initially chanced upon when surveying ridge and furrow in a Midland parish and found that there was a gap in the pattern somewhere near its centre. That gap, a deserted village, led him rapidly into a huge field of enquiry, embracing historical demography, social history and agrarian history, as well the history of the landscape. Many others have been drawn into this field, which was pioneered simultaneously by Hoskins, largely through the enthusiasm of Beresford's writing. It was Beresford, together with John Hurst, who initiated the long-running excavations of a deserted village at Wharram Percy, where fundamental techniques in medieval archaeology were developed and many innovative ideas emerged, on changing settlement morphology, for example, on types of peasant houses and, latterly, on peasant diet and disease. The influential group now called the Medieval Settlement Research Group was at first associated with the excavations at Wharram.

Medievalists, and medieval archaeologists in particular, have over the last 20 years supported a series of highly successful and well-attended Europe-wide congresses, inaugurated at York in 1992, and staged at Bruges in 1997, Basel in 2002 and Paris in 2007. The next conference was due in 2012, but at this point its future was reviewed in the light of a number of factors, among them the burden on the host, the existence of several other annual conferences, the cost of ours, and the difficulty in finding time to attend them all. A greater imperative, however, was a change in emphasis within the discipline of medieval archaeology itself. Whether in the academic or commercial sector, practitioners were finding themselves increasingly drawn to regard prehistorians and biologists as their colleagues of choice. An understanding of rural medieval life depends not only on a close reading of the environment but on the previous use of landscape and materials. Medieval archaeologists were increasingly involved in large-scale multi-period commercial projects and those major landscape research projects that are refreshing the life-blood of European universities. The development of archaeological theory has been most vigorous among archaeology’s prehistorians; but medievalists too have much to offer the theoretical debate from the fresh application of the environmental and social sciences and a greatly enlarged agenda. Accordingly, with the agreement of colleagues and through the good offices of the EAA President it was arranged that the Medieval Europe Congress would from its 2012 meeting be merged into the EAA Conference as ‘MERC’, so providing Europe’s medieval archaeologists with an opportunity to explore their interests with those of the wider archaeological community. There is no danger that practitioners will abandon the friendship of historians and art historians and cease to value their advice and insights: these loyalties will be maintained and strengthened at annual multi-disciplinary meetings, for example at Leeds and Kalamazoo. The new facility was launched at EAA Helsinki with an excursion, a party, and a number of special medieval sessions, but the key event was the hearing of position papers by invited speakers. These were intended to take stock of various research areas and set programmes for the future, and it is very good to see two of them welcomed into the pages of the EJA. Both are by long-standing leaders in their fields: Christer Westerdahl has advanced the study of the medieval peoples who depend on the sea and developed a concept of ‘maritime space’ applicable to all periods. Here he offers a glimpse of the wide range of archaeological evidence that provides access to the maritime mind. The study of the environment has risen ever higher within the medieval agenda. The leading researcher Rainer Schreg shows how the Middle Ages allows the development of sophisticated models of ecological change that should prove of the greatest value to students of all prehistoric and historic periods. European Journal of Archaeology 17 (1) 2014, 82

Urban archaeology, long familiar in Germany and Scandinavia, has come relatively late to Britain, but is rapidly making up for lost time. Evidence is being discovered or re-interpreted for all periods from Roman to Georgian, and the discoveries are especially exciting for the crucial, and usually undocumented, periods when towns were first founded. Publication is not, however, keeping pace with discovery. A few excavations are quickly encapsulated in definitive reports, and others are made available in annual interim reports (e.g. Winchester and York in the Antiquaries Journal, and Oxford in Oxoniensia). For many others, however, scholars have to rely at best on the brief annual surveys in Britannia, Medieval Archaeology and Post-Medieval Archaeology. The Editor believes, as I do, that the importance of recent work justifies a regular review which will attempt to summarize the most significant discoveries for the benefit of urban historians. This first review covers excavations especially of the early 1970s, with a few of slightly earlier date, especially those at Winchester. The terminal date is the time of writing (July 1974), but not all reports drawn on can be equally up-to-date, and there will inevitably be some chronological overlap with the next report.

EARLY medieval archaeology can be said to have its origins with the investigation of burial: with Otto III's opening of Charlemagne's tomb in 1000; with medieval and early modern reports of the discoveries of the graves of kings or warriors; and, most notably, with the discovery at Tournai in 1653 of the grave of an early Frankish king, Childeric. And, until very recently, the study of burials dominated the subject. This is only natural. Graves are easily recognisable when discovered accidentally; often they were intended to be, and have remained, a very visible part of the landscape. Surviving royal burials are, of course, very rare. But there are over one hundred thousand excavated graves of lesser personages from the period betweenc. 450 andc. 1000: an astonishing mass of data which forms a significant proportion of the total available evidence for the early Middle Ages and which needs to be assessed and taken into count by any early medievalist interested in the totality of the period. And it can be argued that cemeteries offer rather more opportunity than the written sources to understand the world of those below the status of kings and bishops, and to do so without the ecclesiastical bias that the written sources have. We nevertheless have to remember that graves are not the unconscious waste products of society, like most of the data studied by an archaeologist: rubbish pits, building remains and so on. Bodies were deliberately and carefully placed in the ground, along with whatever accompanied them. Those responsible for the burial made a whole series of choices about the manner in which they carried out this action. A burial, like a written text, is a product of conscious mental activity, and subject to many of the problems of interpretation and analysis with which historians are familiar.

Medieval archaeology in the sense of a field study involving controlled excavation is in its infancy in Italy. Scarcely a dozen excavations have been carried out with the recovery of information about the middle ages as their primary objective and little attention has been paid to the material remains of everyday life. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the past the only medieval pottery to receive lasting attention has been the tin-glazed ware which was valued as the forerunner of renaissance maiolica. Nevertheless, in recent years programmes of surface collecting and selective excavation have been initiated in two areas with the specific purpose of studying the middle ages. The two areas are Lazio and Apulia. In Apulia the Society of Antiquaries sponsored a survey of the Tavoliere, or Foggia Plain, reports on which are in active preparation.

The study of deserted medieval settlements has led archaeologists to turn interested eyes on the site of the borough of Torksey. The description of it by William Leland, the Tudor antiquary, together with its known history, seemed to promise that here, as nowhere else in the east Midlands at any rate, it would be possible to study by excavation the character of an urban settlement in the early middle ages. Hence the decision of the Adult Education Department of Nottingham University to start in 1960 a programme of annual excavations as the focal activity of summer schools on medieval archaeology.

The past two decades have witnessed an almost complete revision of ideas about the character of Anglo-Saxon settlements. The advances have come in the main from a series of archaeological excavations in which techniques commonly used in prehistoric archaeology have been applied to sites of the period in the light of results from contemporary settlements on the continent. The excavations have in effect produced entire new categories of evidence about the domestic accommodation, service buildings and general planning of settlements of all levels of Anglo-Saxon society, in most of England and in all parts of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1950 almost no domestic buildings were known other than the sunken huts found first by Leeds at Sutton Courtenay and subsequently by others in various parts of the country. Leeds‘s conclusions, accepted albeit with reluctance by scholars, were that ‘the bulk of the people, we can now be assured, were content with something that hardly deserves a better title than hovel, only varying in its greater or lesser simplicity’. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Radford, moreover, in a seminal paper in the first volume ofMedieval Archaeologydemonstrated that they stood in some considerable contrast to the settlements and to the standards of domestic accommodation enjoyed by the ancestors and contemporaries of the Anglo-Saxons on the continent.

Every schoolboy knows the name of Clarendon in connexion with the Constitutions of Clarendon 1164; but as regards the importance, historically as well as archaeologically, of Clarendon Palace, as regards its gradual growth to great splendour and magnificence in Plantagenet days, and as regards its subsequent vicissitudes—on all these points I think it may be said without exaggeration that the world at large knows next to nothing; nor have such inquiries as have sporadically taken place into the history and archaeology of Clarendon Palace ever penetrated very deeply into the subject. Having through a variety of circumstances come to give a good deal of thought to these questions, I have developed the conviction that Clarendon Palace offers a field of study which is of prime importance, and indeed, from certain points of view, of unique importance for the medieval archaeology not only of England but of the whole of Europe. I venture to hope that the present paper, though necessarily in the nature of a preliminary summary, may afford grounds for conceding that this is not too large a claim to make.

Since the last war three new branches of archaeology have grown up in Great Britain. Two of these are now established and accepted divisions of the subject, with national societies devoted to their study and reputable journals for the more important work in their fields. The third has failed to establish itself and for many archaeologists remains no more than a curious oddity. Why has 'industrial archaeology' not received the scholarly recognition accorded medieval and post-medieval archaeology? Why has Industrial Archaeology not joined Medieval Archaeology and Post-Medieval Archaeology as an important outlet for archaeological research ? That these are questions in need of answer has now been recognized by at least some of those engaged in 'industrial archaeology' and it seems generally agreed that the subject is at a turning point, a 'teenage' stage, from which it can either advance or regress (e.g. Buchanan, 1970; Symonds, 1972; Harris, 1970; Hudson, 1971-73). In what direction it should advance is a problem that has yet to be solved.