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The multidisciplinary research described here shows how archaeologists can help reconstruct past seismic episodes and understand the subsequent relief operation, rehabilitation, and reconstruction processes. In October 1522, a major earthquake and landslide struck the then capital of the Azores, Vila Franca do Campo, 1500 km from the European mainland. Damage was extensive, destroying key monuments, affecting most of the inhabited area, and leaving few survivors among the early colonists. The results from twenty-six archaeological trenches, geological and geoarchaeological investigations, and documentary analysis are reviewed here. Distinctive archaeological deposits are identified and explained, using the high density of artefacts and the erosional contact between the landslide and the pre-1522 palaeosol to reconstruct the episode in detail.

The importation of Chinese porcelain and celadon into Europe has long been thought to have first begun around the thirteenth century AD. A unique group of Chinese ceramic sherds from archaeological contexts in Spain dated to between the ninth and eleventh centuries, however, now represents the earliest Chinese wares identified in Europe. Such an unexpectedly early presence on high-status sites in Western Europe probably reflects changing patterns of commerce in the Indian Ocean and the giving of prestigious gifts at the very highest levels of social and political power across the Islamic Mediterranean world.

This is the introductory chapter of the book 'Waiting for the end of the world? New perspectives on natural disasters in medieval Europe' which provides an overview over the theoretical approach of the volume and its contents.

With few exceptions in which dating is implied by indirect association with adjacent settlements or incorporation of diagnostic artefacts in upcast sediment, individual qanats have proven very difficult to date. This absence of a chronological framework hampers both our understanding of technology transfer, as well as the study of local settlement and landscape evolution and the temporal correlation of land use with climatic and palaeoenvironmental data. However, surface shaft mounds potentially contain a sequence of upcast deposits collected periodically from the tunnel, starting with initial construction and persisting until the last maintenance episode, less any material lost by surface erosion. The sedimentary nature of the upcast lends itself to the application of luminescence dating to determine the burial age, in particular, using the techniques based on optically stimulated luminescence. We examine the results produced by two recent dating studies where luminescence techniques were applied to two qanat systems with the aim of building a chronostratigraphy for the deposits within their upcast mounds. These studies show that the extent to which a complete record of the deposition since initial construction survives may differ between qanat systems, and even shaft mounds within the same system. Providing there is a close coupling of luminescence and sedimentological analysis in the testing of qanat mounds, these formative studies suggest that there are good prospects for introducing a valuable tool in the study of various types of hydraulic feature where upcast has been preserved and guidance regarding further fieldwork is provided.

Catalogue of major disasters occurred in medieval Europe. It describes twenty natural disasters including, among the others, the volcanic eruptions of AD 536 and 540 363, the 1117 earthquake in northern Italy, the 1222 Cyprus earthquake, the 1248 Mont Granier landslide, the 1348 Carinthia and Friuli earthquake, the 1356 Basel earthquake, the 1382 Straits of Dover earthquake, Excavating the 1522 earthquake and landslide on the island of São Miguel, Azores, The 1531 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami. These entries were written by Paolo Forlin.

This paper explores the impact of changing religious political rule on subsistence within a single city through time using stable isotope analysis of human and animal bone collagen. The diet and economy of the medieval city of Valencia (Spain) are examined over a 1000-year period during successive periods of Visigothic, Muslim and Christian rule. Bulk stable isotope analysis of carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) was carried out on 67 humans and 47 animals sampled from several archaeological sites dating between the fifth and fifteenth centuries AD. Terrestrial C3 resources dominated the diet in all periods. However, an increase in consumption of C4 plants (e.g. millet, sorghum) and/or marine resources is detected among individuals dating to the Islamic period. Differences in the isotopic values of humans and animals between the three periods indicate a significant dietary diversity during the Islamic phases (eleventh to thirteenth century), compared with the earlier Visigothic phase (fifth–seventh century) and the later Christian phase (fourteenth and fifteenth century). Observed diachronic changes in isotopic results provide evidence for a shift in diet and subsistence, particularly during the Muslim and later Christian periods. This is linked with change in population and economic focus. Dietary diversity among Muslim individuals is hypothesised to indicate the polyculture that was reflected in varied Islamic agricultural practices and the presence of potential migrants from elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) techniques, supported by geomorphological analysis, have been applied to date the construction of shaft and gallery irrigation systems, more commonly referred to as qanats, falaj and foggara. The approach developed was tested on four hydraulic systems located in semi-arid landscape settings, three in Murcia, Spain, and the fourth in the Sus Tekna region, Morocco. Excavation of the characteristic sediment mounds that surround each ventilation shaft enabled a detailed examination of strata containing upcast deposits and their assignment to the main stages in the construction and use of the hydraulic feature. OSL techniques with single grain resolution applied to samples taken from the key strata provided age estimates for their deposition on the mound and, from these, dating of the construction and use of the system. Of the four irrigation systems analysed, the OSL dates indicated that the youngest had been constructed in the 19th century AD and the oldest, located in Murcia, was dated to the Roman period. The latter is of archaeological significance because the introduction of this particular form of hydraulic technology to Spain is widely identified as an Islamic innovation of the early 8th century AD.

Seismic catalogues of past earthquakes have compiled a substantial amount of\ud information about historical seismicity for Europe and the Mediterranean. Using two of the\ud most recent European seismic databases (AHEAD and EMEC), this paper employs GIS\ud spatial analysis (kernel density estimation) to explore the representativeness and reliability\ud of data captured for late medieval earthquakes. We identify those regions where the\ud occurrence of earthquakes is significantly higher or lower than expected values and\ud investigate possible reasons for these discrepancies. The nature of the seismic events\ud themselves, the methodology employed during catalogue compilation and the availability\ud of medieval written records are all briefly explored.

After the Battle Dunbar between English and Scottish forces in 1650, captured Scottish soldiers were imprisoned in Durham and many hundreds died there within a few weeks. The partial skeletal remains of 28 of these men were discovered in 2013. Building on previous osteological work, here we report wide-ranging scientific studies of the remains to address the following questions: Did they have comparable diet, health and disease throughout their lives? Did they have common histories of movement (or lack of movement) during their childhoods? Can we create a collective biography of these men? Strontium and oxygen isotope analysis of tooth enamel investigated childhood movement. Carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of incrementally sampled dentine addressed childhood diet and nutrition. Metaproteomic analysis of dental calculus investigated oral microbiomes and food residues; this was complemented by microscopic analysis of debris in calculus from ingested materials. Selected individuals were examined for dental microwear. The extent of hydroxylation of proline in collagen was examined as a potential biomarker for scurvy. An osteobiography for each man was created using the full range of data generated about him, and these were synthesised using an approach based on the historical method for a collective biography or prosopography. The childhood residences of the men were primarily within the Midland Valley of Scotland, though some spent parts of their childhood outside the British Isles. This is concordant with the known recruitment areas of the Scottish army in 1650. Their diets included oats, brassicas and milk but little seafood, as expected for lowland rather than highland diets of the period. Childhood periods of starvation or illness were almost ubiquitous, but not simultaneous, suggesting regionally variable food shortages in the 1620s and 1630s. It is likely there was widespread low-level scurvy, ameliorating in later years of life, which suggests historically unrecorded shortages of fruit and vegetables in the early 1640s. Almost all men were exposed to burnt plant matter, probably as inhaled soot, and this may relate to the high proportion of them with of sinusitis. Interpersonal violence causing skeletal trauma was rare. Based on commonalities in their osteobiographies, we argue that these men were drawn from the same stratum of society. This study is perhaps the most extensive to date of individuals from 17thcentury Scotland. Combined with a precise historical context it allows the lives of these men to be investigated and compared to the historical record with unprecedented precision. It illustrates the power of archaeological science methods to confirm, challenge and complement historical evidence.

This chapter considers the development of medieval archaeology in Britain since the formation of the Society for Medieval Archaeology. Anglo-Saxon archaeology had been ‘very largely a museum study’ until that point, centred on objects and the cemeteries from which they came, but now fieldwork came into its own at Thetford, Yeavering and elsewhere, while the pre-war excavations at Sutton Hoo did much to stimulate public interest through its spectacular grave goods. One organization which has had direct but untrumpeted impact on the development of medieval archaeology in Britain is the Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings Directorate, in its various incarnations. It is unhelpful that medieval archaeologists have acquired a reputation for resistance to the latest theoretical developments. Since 1957 there has been a huge overall expansion in the number of students and universities, matched both by increases in academic staff in archaeology departments and the overall number of other institutions who teach archaeology.

On the afternoon of Tuesday 16 April 1957 at Burlington House, Piccadilly, Donald Harden, newly appointed Director of the London Museum, first outlined proposals for what he called a ‘society for Dark Age and Medieval Studies’. With a perversity which only academics can muster, another member of Council then objected to the procedures by which Council was selected, finding them to be plain manipulative. The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies had been formed in 1911, and the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia of 1908 had become the Prehistoric Society in 1935, so this was the third of the period societies to be established. At the April 1957 meeting Harden explained that there was opposition to using the term ‘Dark Ages’ and put forward The Society for Medieval Archaeology and the Society for Historic Archaeology.

Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) techniques have been applied to investigate the potential for dating the deposition of upcast mounds associated with qanat ventilation shafts at the site of a medieval qanat located in Aragón, Spain. Coarse quartz grains, extracted from sediment samples taken from excavated sections of several mounds, possessed sufficiently strong OSL to enable an evaluation of equivalent dose by applying the single aliquot regenerative procedure to small aliquots, each containing an individual bright grain. The OSL dates for both palaeosol and overlying upcast indicate that a chronostratigraphic record has been preserved within the mounds investigated, and micromorphological analysis of thin sections of sediment blocks taken from the mounds is shown to provide an essential means of verifying the characteristics of the strata, in particular, the critical interface of upcast and the ancient ground surface. The earliest OSL dates for basal deposits taken from two separate sections of the same mound are in agreement, placing the mound construction during the first half of the 13th century A.D. However, in two other mounds the OSL dates for the deposition of upcast are internally consistent with the stratigraphy but significantly later, dating to the 16th and 17th centuries A.D. We interpret the differences between the dates for the upcast deposition to be the result of partial erosion of the upper shaft and later repair of the mounds, and this finding underlines the importance of both examining multiple mounds in the same qanat system and the internal structure of each sampled mound. This exploratory work demonstrates the potential for wider application of OSL for dating this important type of subterranean irrigation feature in the study of both the archaeology of human settlement and palaeoenvironmental change in arid regions.

This chapter considers the application of archaeological theory to later medieval archaeology, with a selective review of the different approaches offered over the past fifty years by archaeologists of the Later Middle Ages set into a wider historiographical framework. In this chapter key processual, structuralist, and post-processual studies are all debated with particular emphasis on phenomenology and the experiential, the archaeology of identity, biography, and the life-course. New forms of interpretation are judged to be neither consistent or coherent but, nevertheless, they offer exciting insights which cross disciplinary boundaries and challenge orthodoxies.

This chapter explores medieval contact and trade between Britain and the Iberian Peninsula. For the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain, archaeological evidence includes coins, burials, badges, scallop shells, and souvenirs of bone, ivory, and jet as well as artistic influences on heraldry and artistic representation. The important heavy goods being transported were wool, cloth, metals, and bulk foodstuffs for which there is an emerging archaeology of production in Spain and Portugal. There was also minor trade in leather and salt as well as in foodstuffs like honey and wine, figs, and candied fruit. Pottery and tile exports from Spain are today the most telling indication of commercial contact and personal exchange but English embroideries and alabaster devotional panels are among the items of exchange which travelled south and have survived. Overall, Anglo-Iberian contact in the Middle Ages has left an oddly skewed signature in the archaeological record.

This overview traces early engagements with the medieval past in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the impact of the Landscape Movement in gardens, Romanticism in poetry and fiction, the Picturesque in painting, and particularly the Gothic Revival in architecture. It discusses the seeds of later medieval archaeology in the twentieth century, framed by war and new ideals of a common national heritage, and picks out the influential people, projects, and institutions that have shaped the subject.

Drawing on the contributions to the Handbook as a whole, this final chapter begins by summarizing the current infrastructural issues surrounding the study of later medieval archaeology. These include unresolved questions around access to unpublished reports generated by developer archaeology, the numerous barriers to synthesis and collaboration across disciplines, and the surge in applications of new techniques. Also mentioned in this context are the challenge of integrating the results of public archaeology projects and the impact of new theoretical perspectives, many of which are applied to good effect in this volume. The second part of the article focuses on four ‘grand challenges’ which hold promise for the future. These are defined as social complexity, resilience, behaviour and identity, humans, and the environment.

The Middle Ages are all around us in Britain. The Tower of London and the castles of Scotland and Wales are mainstays of cultural tourism and an inspiring cross-section of later medieval finds can now be seen on display in museums across England, Scotland, and Wales. Medieval institutions from Parliament and monarchy to universities are familiar to us and we come into contact with the later Middle Ages every day when we drive through a village or town, look up at the castle on the hill, visit a local church, or wonder about the earthworks in the fields we see from the window of a train.This Handbook provides an overview of the archaeology of the later Middle Ages in Britain between ad 1066 and 1550. Sixty entries, divided into ten thematic sections, cover topics ranging from later medieval objects, human remains, archaeological science, standing buildings, and sites such as castles and monasteries, to the well-preserved relict landscapes which still survive. This is a rich and exciting period of the past and most of what we have learnt about the material culture of our medieval past has been discovered in the past two generations. This volume provides comprehensive coverage of the latest research and describes the major projects and concepts that are changing our understanding of our medieval heritage.

This chapter describes the nine excavations around Shapwick House mansion undertaken between 1993 and 1997. The sequence of building and demolition phases close to Shapwick House is known principally from map evidence, most of it 18th century. The main house is depicted in various ways with ornamental ponds and a banqueting house to the north; to the south lies a dovecote, the Glastonbury Great Barn and village houses in plots divided by lanes. A pair of rectangular ponds had already been dug by 1750 to the north of Shapwick House. They are thought to be late 17th century in origin and contemporary with the banqueting house, though this could not be confirmed archaeologically. There is some evidence for prehistoric activity around Shapwick House mansion. Relatively high densities of worked flint were recovered from small excavations to the south and there is a small but significant group of late Bronze Age to middle Iron Age pottery from excavations further north.

To the south of Shapwick Park mansion, lie over five hectares of pasture and meadow dotted with mature parkland trees. From early on in the life of the Project, the team were using late-18th-century maps to suggest a chronology for the embankment of the medieval and later village. Aerial photographs taken in the dry spring of 1990 had confirmed the lines of earlier streets and awareness of the archaeological potential of the area was heightened after excavation by Somerset County Council in response to a planning application on the proposed site of the Shapwick School Sports Hall. A very similar example was found close by during work on the Polden pipeline, together with five other cores, an earlier to middle Neolithic borer, the only example of such a prehistoric piercing tool from Shapwick excavations, two flakes and a core rejuvenation flake.

The study of archaeseismology (or ‘earthquake archaeology’) focuses mainly on the analysis of earthquakes at an archaeological scale, either in order to reconstruct the parameters of past seismic events (ie. their intensity, chronology, magnitude, epicentre, etc) or else to measure their impact on archaeological sites (Galadini et al., 2006; Ambraseys, 2006; Rodriguez-Pascua et al., 2011). This approach has its critics because archaeological methodologies such as excavation, field survey and remote sensing, or standard archaeological approaches to context recording, material culture and the integration of other sources of information such as history or ethnography are often laid aside (Jusseret, 2014). In short, archaeoseismology reflects far better the interests of palaeoseimologists than archaeologists (Caputo and Helly, 2008; Silva et al., 2011; Sintubin, 2011) and can be perceived as an ancillary discipline relegated to the gathering of historical seismic catalogues (Caputo and Helly, 2008; Guidoboni and Ebel, 2009). Among the topics less well studied are those tactics elaborated by past societies to cope with the damage caused by earthquakes and to increase their preparedness for future seismic events. In this paper we apply resilience theory (Holling and Gunderson, 2002; Redman and Kinzig, 2003; Redman, 2005) which emphasises the chaine operatoire (‘chain of actions’) put in place by medieval communities and we use a modern risk assessment workflow to assess the range of the strategies adopted (Smith and Petley, 2009). In particular, the importance of a multi-disciplinary perspective is underlined, one which integrates diverse sources of information ranging from archaeological to geological, historical, architectural, iconographical and ethnographical data. A unifying approach which combines evidence from the humanities and natural sciences in a common framework is fundamental in order to evaluate fully the diversity of responses adopted. Illustrative case studies are drawn from well-documented events for which fresh evidence has been gathered for the Armedea project (Archaeology of medieval earthquakes in Europe, 1000–1550 AD; Forlin et al., 2015).

This study assesses the structural vulnerability of part of a later medieval earthen building at Ambel (near Zaragoza, Spain), once a preceptory or monastic house belonging to the Military Orders. An inspection of its morphology and materials coupled with the results of an extensive campaign of static monitoring reveals marked structural inhomogeneities, the product of more than a thousand years of construction, failure and repair from the 10th century to the present day. Building materials are inappropriately juxtaposed, there are discontinuities between construction phases and fundamental concerns remain over the long-term stability of the structure. The current condition of the structure is mainly influenced by structural discontinuities introduced at the time of construction, the unintended consequences of repair and modification and the material decay that has affected the base of the rammed earth walls. The overall findings of the static monitoring show that there is no related damage, variations in crack widths are related to the building seasonal cycle. While static analysis is an essential prerequisite before a suitable maintenance program can be fully defined, this study argues that no evaluation of the structural behaviour of any historic building can afford to ignore its archaeological ‘biography’ of modification and repair.

Effective heritage management is reliant on an understanding of the range of current and potential future threats facing archaeological sites. Despite this, the processes leading to the loss of in situ archaeological remains are still poorly understood, including the rates, timing and drivers of surface erosion. This issue is particularly significant for abandoned historical metal mines in upland landscapes, where erosion rates are typically higher due to a combination of the unstable character of the archaeological deposits and the increased effectiveness of surface erosion processes. This study utilises repeat terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) to monitor the changing condition of two adjacent lead mines in the North Pennines, UK, over an 18 month period. The high spatial and temporal resolution of the TLS data, in conjunction with land cover characteristics derived from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) survey, allows the detailed quantification of the causes and impacts of surface change. The results demonstrate that stream bank erosion is the process responsible for the most widespread and archaeologically significant damage, although localised gullying of mine waste heaps resulted in the largest volumetric loss of material (> 160 m3). Temporal variation in the erosion of upland archaeological sites is highly episodic, being dominated (> 70%) by high magnitude but low frequency storm events. These results provide invaluable information regarding the causes and impacts of erosion of upland archaeological remains, as well as establishing a proven methodology which can now be applied to archaeological sites in other landscape contexts.