King Arthur is probably the most famous and certainly the most legendary medieval king. From the early ninth century through the middle ages, to the Arthurian romances of Victorian times, the tales of this legendary figure have blossomed and multiplied. And in more recent times, there has been a continuous stream of books claiming to have discovered the 'facts' about, or to unlock the secret or truth behind, the 'once and future king'. Broadly speaking, there are two Arthurs. On the one hand is the traditional 'historical' Arthur, waging a doomed struggle to save Roman civilization against the relentless Anglo-Saxon tide during the darkest years of the Dark Ages. On the other is the Arthur of myth and legend - accompanied by a host of equally legendary people, places, and stories: Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad and Gawain, Merlin, Excalibur, the Lady in the Lake, the Sword in the Stone, Camelot, the Round Table. The big problem with all this is that 'King Arthur' might well never have existed. And if he did exist, it is next to impossible to say anything at all about him. As this challenging new look at the Arthur legend makes clear, all books claiming to reveal 'the truth' behind King Arthur can safely be ignored. Not only the 'red herrings' in the abundant pseudo-historical accounts, even the 'historical' Arthur is largely a figment of the imagination: the evidence that we have - whether written or archaeological - is simply incapable of telling us anything detailed about the Britain in which he is supposed to have lived, fought, and died. The truth, as Guy Halsall reveals in this fascinating investigation, is both radically different - and also a good deal more intriguing.

This book stems from the results of an interdisciplinary European Union supported research project, WreckProtect, which investigated the decay and preservation of wooden shipwrecks under water in the Baltic Sea. It is not limited to the decay of wrecks in the Baltic alone and is aimed at all stakeholders with a vested interest in the protection of the underwater cultural heritage including marine archaeologists, conservators, engineers, and students in related fields at universities around the world. The book includes chapters on the anatomy and structure of wood and the physical and biological decay of shipwrecks under water. Well-known shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea are introduced, focusing upon their state of preservation and are compared to finds typically found in the North Sea and the Mediterranean. Microbial decay processes and their identification in both sediments and the water column are also discussed and related to other natural decay processes, as well as human impacts. Finally, a summary of available methods for the in-situ protection of wrecks is presented and a cost-benefit analysis of in-situ preservation versus conventional raising and conservation is given.

Living Opposite to the Hospital of St John: Excavations in Medieval Northampton 2014 presents the results of archaeological investigations undertaken on the site of new county council offices being built between St. John's street and Angel Street, Northampton in 2014. The location was of interest as it lay directly opposite the former medieval hospital of St. John, which influenced the development of this area of the town. Initially open ground situated outside the Late Saxon burh, the area was extensively quarried for ironstone during the earlier part of the 12th century, and by the mid-12th century, a few dispersed buildings began to appear. Domestic pits and a bread oven were located to the rear of Angel Street along with a carver's workshop, which, amongst other goods, produced high-quality antler chess pieces. This workshop is currently without known parallel. The timber workshop was refurbished once and then replaced in stone by the mid-13th century. During the late 12th and early part of the 13th centuries, brewing and baking were undertaken in the two plots adjacent to the workshop. A stone building with a cobbled floor lay towards the centre of the St. John's street frontage, and behind the building were four wells, a clay-lined tank for water drawn from the well, and several ovens, including at least two bread ovens and three malting ovens. This activity ceased at around the time that the carver's workshop was replaced in stone, and much of the frontage was cleared. Subsequently, although there was still one building standing on St. John's street in the early 15th century, the former cleared ground was gradually incorporated back into the plots, perhaps as gardens adjoining the surviving late medieval tenement. The stone tenement was extended and refurbished in the late 15th century and was occupied until c. 1600. Another building was established on Fetter Street after c. 1450 but had disappeared by c. 1550. However, this is the first archaeological indication for the existence of Fetter Street, and further demarcation occurred in this period with a rear boundary ditch being established along the back of the Angel Street plot, separating the land to the south. In the 17th-18th centuries, the area was covered by the dark loamy soils of gardens and orchards until the construction of stables and terraced buildings on the site, which would stand into the Victorian period and beyond.

Hill Street, Upper Well Street and Far Gosford Street comprise three suburban streets which stood directly outside the city gates of Coventry for much of the medieval period. As a result of the 2003-2007 excavations an extensive body of archaeological, environmental and documentary evidence has been brought together to allow comparison in terms of land planning, construction methodologies, character and relative fluctuations in the long-term economy of two of the city's medieval and post-medieval suburbs. As well as evidence for street frontage occupation, the sites contain substantial portions of the city's defences, never before looked at in such detail. The new data is of great value in comparing the results with those previously gained from a variety of smaller sites in Coventry and comparable sites elsewhere in the country. The work has, in some detail, married up excavated data and documentary sources for the working of the defences over a period of 250 years. In addition the immediate suburban environment has come under scrutiny and an unprecedented level of botanical data has come to light in a programme of sampling for both seeds and pollens as a guide to the changing character of the suburbs. At Hill Street, excavation uncovered two medieval and post-medieval frontage properties 50m wide and their rear yards adjacent to the city ditch. While upstanding structural remains were scant, analysis of contemporary pits has highlighted mainly domestic but also some industrial aspects of the properties and given an insight into the diet, economy and changing face of suburban Hill Street from the 13th to 19th centuries. Excavation also uncovered some 55m of the city ditch adjacent to Bond Street, into which four large sections were cut, three close to Hill Street and one at the junction with Upper Well Street. The excavations highlight the huge investment made in digging and maintaining the ditch as a defensive line for the first half of the 15th century before it was gradually misused for fly-tipping and eventually lost beneath a welter of dumping by the later 17th century. It was probably indefensible long before the Civil War. A varied and rich environmental profile of the site has been constructed, which paints a picture of a suburban, semi-rural habitat which was increasingly spoiled in the 16th and 17th centuries by unrestricted dumping of refuse and cess. A wide variety of finds was recovered, indicative of both domestic and industrial occupation and use. This range was dominated by a large group of well-preserved late medieval leather shoes. The Far Gosford Street excavations revealed evidence for some 800 years of human activity. The earliest remains comprised a solid timber post, possibly related to a bridge over the River Sherbourne, for which tree-ring dating established a felling date of 1162-1212. A frontage was first occupied in the early 14th century when buildings were laid out along the street. A hoard of silver pennies found buried beneath the floor of one of the buildings probably represents the savings of one of the street's earliest residents. These structures were replaced in the first half of the 15th century, probably at the same time as the city wall was built a short distance to the west. A second medieval frontage lasted until 1643 when it was again dismantled during the Civil War. Entrenchments dating to this period were also excavated. In the 18th century a third frontage was built, replaced in the 19th century and finally demolished to make way for Singer Motors car showroom after they acquired the site in 1926.

This book presents an overview of the results of the research project DESPAMED funded by the Spanish Minister of Economy and Competitiveness. The aim of the book is to discuss the theoretical challenges posed by the study of social inequality and social complexity in early medieval peasant communities in North-western Iberia. Traditional approaches have defined these communities as poor, simple and even nomadic, in the framework of a self-sufficient economy that prioritised animal husbandry over agriculture. This picture has radically changed over the last couple of decades as a result of important research on the archaeology of peasantry and the critical analysis of ninthand tenth-century documentary evidence that show the complexity of these rural societies. These new records are discussed in the light of a new research agenda centred on the analysis of the emergence of villages, the formation of local elites, the creation of socio-political networks and the role of identities in the legitimation of local inequalities. The nine chapters of this book explore the potential and the limits of the archaeological record to tackle social inequality in rural communities. Those considerations have a wider theoretical and methodological potential and are applicable to other regions and chronologies. The different chapters explore local societies through different methodologies and approaches such as food, settlement patterns, social exclusion, consumption patterns and social practices. In addition, the book introduces some of the most relevant topics studied currently by Iberian Medieval archaeologists, which are not always accessible to an international audience.

Just six miles from the center of Belfast, County Down, on the plateau of Ballynahatty above the River Lagan, is one of Ireland’s great Neolithic henge monuments: the 200 m wide Giant’s Ring. For over a thousand years, this area was the focus of intense funerary ritual seemingly designed to send the dead to their ancestors and secure the land for the living. Scattered through the fields to the north and west of the Ring are flat cemeteries, standing stones, tombs, cists, and ring barrows – ancient monuments that were leveled by the plough when the land was enclosed in the 18th and 19th centuries. A great 90 m long timber enclosure with an elaborate entrance and inner ‘temple’ was first observed through crop marks in aerial photos. Excavation of the site between 1990–1999 revealed a complex structure composed of over 400 postholes, many over 2 m deep. This was a building in the grand style, elegantly designed to control space, views, and access to an inner sanctum containing a platform for exposure of the dead. By 2550 BC, the timber ‘temple’ had been swept away in a massive conflagration and the remains dismantled. Ballynahatty was one of the last great public ceremonial enterprises known to have been constructed by the Neolithic farmers in Northern Ireland, an enterprise proclaiming their enigmatic religion, ancestral rights and territorial aspirations. This report reconstructs the remarkable building complex and explains the sophistication and organization of its construction and use. The report sets the site and excavation in the wider development of the Ballynahatty landscape and its study to the present day.

This book explores the experiences of rural communities who lived between the seventh and ninth centuries in central and eastern England. Combining archaeology with documentary, place-name and topographic evidences, it shows the way in which the settlements in which people lived provide a unique insight into social, economic and political conditions in 'Middle Saxon' England. The material derived from excavations within currently-occupied rural settlements represents a particularly informative dataset, and when combined with other evidence illustrates that the seventh to ninth centuries was a period of fundamental social change that impacted rural communities in significant and lasting ways. The transformation of settlement character was part of a more widespread process of landscape investment during the 'Middle Saxon' period, as rapidly stratifying social institutions began to manifest power and influence through new means. Such an analysis represents a significant departure from the prevailing scholarly outlook of the early medieval landscape, which continues to posit that the countryside of England remained largely unchanged until the development of historic villages from the ninth century onward. In this regard, the evidence presented by this book from currently-occupied rural settlements provides substantial backing to the idea that many historic villages emerged as part of a two-stage process which began during the 'Middle Saxon' period. Whilst it was only following subsequent change that recognisable later village plans began to take shape, key developments between the seventh and ninth centuries helped articulate the form and identity of rural centres, features that in many instances persisted throughout the medieval period and into the present day.

The majority of literature about the Viking period, based on artefacts or written sources, covers battles, kings, chiefs and mercenaries, long distance travel and colonisation, trade, and settlement. Less is said about the life of those that stayed at home, or those that immigrated into Scandinavia, whether voluntarily or by force. This book uses results from the examination of a substantial corpus of Swedish osteological material to discuss aspects of demography and health in the Viking period face=Calibri>- those which would have been visible and recognisable in the faces or physical appearances of the individuals concerned. It explores the effects of migration, from the spread of new diseases such as leprosy to patterns of movement and integration of immigrants into society. The skeletal material also allows the study of levels of violence, attitudes towards disablement, and the care provided by Viking communities. An overview of the worldwide phenomenon of modified teeth also gives insight into the practice of deliberate physical embellishment and body modification. The interdisciplinary approach to questions regarding ordinary life presented here will broaden the knowledge about society during the Viking Age. The synthesis of the Swedish unburnt human skeletal remains dated to the Viking age will be a valuable resource for future research, and provides an in-depth view on Viking age society.

The Watlington Hoard was discovered in southern Oxfordshire in 2015 by a metal-detectorist, and acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2017. A nationally-important find of coinage and metalwork, and the first major Viking-Age hoard from the county, it dates from the late 870s, a fundamental and tumultuous period in Britain's history. The contents of the hoard include a highly significant collection of over 200 silver pennies, mostly of Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, and Ceolwulf II, king of Mercia, transforming our understanding of the coinage in this period, and 23 silver and gold pieces of contemporary metalwork much of which was derived from Scandinavia. Presenting the complete publication of the objects and coins in the Watlington Hoard - including an important re-assessment of the coinage of the late 870s - the authors discuss its wider implications for our understanding of hoarding in late 9th-century southern Britain, interactions between the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, and the movements of the Viking Great Army after the Battle of Edington in 878. The book also relates another side to the hoard's story, beginning with its discovery and excavation, charting its path through the conservation work and acquisition by the Ashmolean Museum to the public outreach projects which ran alongside the scholarly research into the hoard.

To obtain sacred relics, medieval monks plundered tombs, avaricious merchants raided churches, and relic-mongers scoured the Roman catacombs. In a revised edition of "Furta Sacra," Patrick Geary considers the social and cultural context for these acts, asking how the relics were perceived and why the thefts met with the approval of medieval Christians.

This volume is dedicated to the remarkable flourishing of art and architecture in Bohemia, and Prague in particular, as it became the political centre of Charles IV's Holy Roman Empire. A focus is on cultural exchange, and the links which can be traced through the artwork across Europe. Topics and buildings under discussion include Prague Cathedral, St Bartholomew's in Kyje, Karlstein Castle, St Stephen's Vienna, aristocratic patronage, chasuble iconography and the Zderad column in Brno.

An Open Access edition is available on the LUP and OAPEN websites. Across Europe, the early medieval period saw the advent of new ways of cereal farming which fed the growth of towns, markets and populations, but also fuelled wealth disparities and the rise of lordship. These developments have sometimes been referred to as marking an 'agricultural revolution', yet the nature and timing of these critical changes remain subject to intense debate, despite more than a century of research. The papers in this volume demonstrate how the combined application of cutting-edge scientific analyses, along with new theoretical models and challenges to conventional understandings, can reveal trajectories of agricultural development which, while complementary overall, do not indicate a single period of change involving the extension of arable, the introduction of the mouldboard plough, and regular crop rotation. Rather, these phenomena become evident at different times and in different places across England throughout the period, and rarely in an unambiguously 'progressive' fashion. Presenting innovative bioarchaeological research from the ground-breaking Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project, along with fresh insights into ploughing technology, brewing, the nature of agricultural revolutions, and farming practices in Roman Britain and Carolingian Europe, this volume is a critical new contribution to environmental archaeology and medieval studies in England and beyond. Contributors: Amy Bogaard; Hannah Caroe; Neil Faulkner; Emily Forster; Helena Hamerow; Matilda Holmes; Claus Kropp; Lisa Lodwick; Mark McKerracher; Nicolas Schroeder; Elizabeth Stroud; Tom Williamson.

More than fifteen sites of either confirmed or conjectured urban status existed between the 6th and 19th centuries in the particular region of northeastern Mesopotamia, bounded by the rivers Great Zab, Little Zab and Tigris. This present study concentrates on the investigation of this urban network. The archaeological substance of the deserted sites is mostly very well preserved in the relief of the arid steppe environment and can be excellently identified in satellite images of several types. The archaeological investigation of these settlements, augmented by a revised historical topography, offers a unique opportunity for the holistic study of the diversity, temporal dynamics and mutual relationships within the urban network that developed in the hinterland of Baghdad and Samarra, the two largest super-centres of the Old World. This collective monograph puts together archaeological and historical data available for the individual sites, including analyses of pottery obtained by surface survey. The materially rich final report of the three-year project is supplemented by an interpretative chapter that focuses on detailed topographical comparisons of the sites, their landscape contexts, and the dynamics of the urban system within the framework of studies on Near-Eastern Islamic-period cities.

This book is based on several years of author's fieldwork in the valleys of the Black Mountains in South East Wales. Hodges had personal knowledge of the area having worked there in his professional capacity as a drystone waller. The aim of the fieldwork was to locate all the sites of derelict stone buildings within the designated upland study area of approximately 140 square kilometres. Initial research indicated that the area had not been previously surveyed to any great extent and the presence of derelict stone buildings that existed in the valleys was not a characteristic of the surrounding lower terrain. Using a combination of documentary evidence and fieldwork, a total of 549 potential sites were identified comprising houses, barns, other ancillary buildings and sheepfolds; 499 separate structures were located on the ground. Following a specially devised protocol at each site, information regarding masonry, modes of construction and extant features was recorded in both tabular and photographic forms.

From the end of the thirteenth century to the first decades of the sixteenth century, Guyart des Moulins's Bible historiale was the predominant French translation of the Bible. Enhancing his translation with techniques borrowed from scholastic study, vernacular preaching, and secular fiction, Guyart produced one of the most popular, most widely copied French-language texts of the later Middle Ages. Making the Bible French investigates how Guyart's first-person authorial voice narrates translation choices in terms of anticipated reader reactions and frames the biblical text as an object of dialogue with his readers. It examines the translator's narrative strategies to aid readers' visualization of biblical stories, to encourage their identification with its characters, and to practice patient, self-reflexive reading. Finally, it traces how the Bible historiale manuscript tradition adapts and individualizes the Bible for each new intended reader, defying modern print-based and text-centred ideas about the Bible, canonicity, and translation.

Drying kilns, corn-dryers and malting ovens are increasingly familiar features in post-Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval archaeology. Their forms, functions and distributions offer critical insights into agricultural, technological, economic and dietary history across the British Isles. Despite the significance and growing corpus of these structures, exceptionally few works of synthesis have been published. Yet such a foundational study was produced by Robert Rickett as early as 1975: an undergraduate dissertation which, for the first time, assembled a gazetteer of drying kilns from across the British Isles, critically examined this archaeological evidence in the light of documentary research, and established a typology and uniform terminology for drying kiln studies. This pioneering and oft-cited dissertation is here published for the first time, providing a foundation for the future study of drying kilns in Britain, Ireland and beyond. A new introduction and notes by Mark McKerracher set the original work within the context of drying kiln research since 1975.

This book is the result of more than a dozen years of research in the field of the hitherto unstudied medieval settlement pattern of the Syrian coastal region in the 12th and 13th centuries. The conclusions presented in this work were reached with the combined use of several source types including medieval documents, travellers' accounts, former research, map evidence, toponymy, archive and satellite photographs, oral sources and extensive archaeological field surveys accompanied by documentation between the years 2000 and 2015. After enumerating the historical events that influenced the settlement pattern of the coast, its centres, including the towns and castles (with special regard to the smaller fortifications of the countryside that seem to have been a Frankish introduction to the area) are analysed. Following the detailed examination of the written sources and the architectural material preserved at these lesser sites, a closer look at the villages and their environment aims to draw a general picture on the density of settlements and their basic characteristics. The book also discusses communication lines and provides an assessment of the medieval population that inhabited the region in the 12th and 13th centuries. The text is accompanied by a collection of maps, plan drawings, tables and illustrations on a selected number of sites visited during the field surveys.

This publication honours Birgitta Hardh on her 70th birthday. Birgitta Hardh is one of the leading experts on European Viking Age, engaged in diverse research projects, and also a vital collaborator in various networks specializing in the period. Through time, Birgitta has extended her research to comprise other periods of the Iron Age. A feature common to all Birgitta Hardh's research is that she has been able, through analysis of a body of finds, to broaden the perspective, not least geographically through her profound knowledge of phenomena in Northern Europe and indeed all of Europe. Therefore, this book has been given the title Small Things - Wide Horizons. A total of fourty titles have been submitted to the volume. The presentations include a number of perspectives mainly of Iron Age. Themes as silver economy, coins, trinkets, burials, crafts, farms and fields, centrality and transformations give a view of the variation of contributions nationally and internationally.

The latest British Archaeological Association transactions report on the conference volumes at Beverley in 1983. Papers provide the latest thoughts on topics at Beverley Minster and in the surrounding area. Contributions include: Pre-Conquest Sculpture (J Lang); pre-13th century Beverley (R Morris & E Cambridge); 12th century sculpture from Bridlington (M Thurlby); Bridlington Augustinian church and cloister in the 12th century (J A Franklin); stained glass of Beverley Minster (D O'Connor); East Riding sepulchal monuments (B & M Gittos); St Peter's Church, Howden (N Coldstream); the Percy tomb workshop (N Dawton); architectural development of Patrington Church (J Maddison); Beverley in conflict: Archbishop Neville and the Minster Clergy, 1381-8 (R B Dobson); monumental brasses in the 14th and 15th centuries (S Badham); the misericords in Beveley Minster (C Grossinger).

In (Re)using Ruins, Douglas Underwood presents a new account of the use and reuse of Roman urban public monuments in a crucial period of transition, A.D. 300-600. Commonly seen as a period of uniform decline for public building, especially in the western half of the Mediterranean, (Re)using Ruins shows a vibrant, yet variable, history for these structures. Douglas Underwood establishes a broad catalogue of archaeological evidence (supplemented with epigraphic and literary testimony) for the construction, maintenance, abandonment and reuses of baths, aqueducts, theatres, amphitheatres and circuses in Italy, southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, demonstrating that the driving force behind the changes to public buildings was largely a combined shift in urban ideologies and euergetistic practices in Late Antique cities.

Scholars each have their own rationale as to the 'site' of this momentous battle. Their thirst for recognition has created diverse arguments, some flooding the media, others proposing to the point of acrimony that they have this 'site'. The 'conundrum' is whether any identification of the 'site' is correct for all, apart from the circumspect, have taken assorted place-names similar to Brunanburh as their starting point. The author chose to disregard the place-name approach and look at the topographic references in the manuscript. The first references were maritime then latterly landscape leading to field-names which have a more stable base than the constantly changing place-names. He found inconsistences in various positions held by some scholars to that of historical record about Brunanburh. One major stumbling block was the phrase "on dingesmere" which has created controversy, some scholars totally dismissing it but the 'sea of noise' appears to have some scientific foundation. Obviously it had some special significance to the Anglo-Saxon's and their Christian allies and may well have been a kenning. Importantly, 'who were these allies?' The challenge for the author was to unearth the correct locale of these historic events. As an archaeologist he decided to interpret the topographic phrases in the manuscript evidence as material culture. The results were surprising.

It has long been assumed that England lay outside the Western European tradition of castle-building until after the Norman Conquest of 1066. It is now becoming apparent that Anglo-Saxon lords had been constructing free-standing towers at their residences all across England over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Initially these towers were exclusively of timber, and quite modest in their scale, although only a handful are known from archaeological excavation. There followed the so-called 'tower-nave' churches, towers with only a tiny chapel located inside, which appear to have had a dual function as buildings of elite worship and symbols of secular power and authority. For the first time, this book gathers together the evidence for these remarkable buildings, many of which still stand incorporated into the fabric of Norman and later parish churches and castles. It traces their origin in monasteries, where kings and bishops drew upon Continental European practice to construct centrally-planned, tower-like chapels for private worship and burial, and to mark gates and important entrances, particularly within the context of the tenth-century Monastic Reform. Adopted by the secular aristocracy to adorn their own manorial sites, it argues that many of the known examples would have provided strategic advantage as watchtowers over roads, rivers and beacon-systems, and have acted as focal points for the mustering of troops. The tower-nave form persisted into early Norman England, where it may have influenced a variety of high-status building types, such as episcopal chapels and monastic belltowers, and even the keeps and gatehouses of the earliest stone castles. The aim of this book is to finally establish the tower-nave as an important Anglo-Saxon building type, and to explore the social, architectural, and landscape contexts in which they operated.

Excavations were carried out at the moated sites of Barrow Old Hall and Twiss Green, in Warrington, North West England, in the 1980s. Sub-manorial estates were established at these two sites by the fourteenth century, located near the boundaries of their multi-moated townships. Townships with multiple moats were a feature of parts of North West England and may have been the result of medieval assarting and the expansion of agriculture on to fringe or marginal areas, on the boundaries of earlier manors. It also owed much to the unusual tenurial arrangements of the region, whereby lords granted small estates out of their holdings, often to family members, to construct moated homesteads. This report presents the results of the excavations at these two small moated sites, including evidence for possible aisled halls at both sites, as well as a significant assemblage of medieval and early post-medieval pottery. There is also a full account of the finding of the remains of a timber bridge at Twiss Green and its full reconstruction; an illustration of which was previously published in the Shire Archaeology series book on Moated Sites in 1985. The publication of these excavations contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the role and development of moated sites in this part of North West England and completes the outstanding analysis of moated sites excavated in the Warrington area.

The Cumans, a people that inhabited the steppe zone in the medieval period and actively shaped the fate of the region from the Black Sea to the Carpathian Basin, have been primarily known to history as nomadic, mounted warriors. Some of them arrived in the Hungarian Kingdom in the midthirteenth century as a group of refugees fleeing the invading Mongol army and asked for asylum. In the course of three centuries they settled down in the kingdom, converted to Christianity, and were integrated into medieval Hungarian society. This study collects all available information, historical, ethnographic and archaeological alike, on the animal husbandry aspect of the complex development of the Cuman population in medieval Hungary. Although this medieval minority has been in the focus of scholarly interest in the past decades, no attempt has been made so far to study their herds using interdisciplinary methods. The research of faunal assemblages through archaeozoological methods has the potential to reveal direct, and by other means, unavailable information on animal keeping practices, although this source of evidence often escapes scholarly attention in Central and Eastern Europe. This book combines a primary scientific dataset with historical information and interprets them within the framework of settlement history in order to investigate the manifold integration process of a medieval community.

This richly illustrated book presents the fascinating results from a major project to examine the heritage of Finzel's Reach, the site of the former Courage and Bristol Breweries near the centre of one of England's greatest port cities. Archaeological, geoarchaeological and historic building investigations have revealed a fascinating story of change and urban evolution at the site. Naturally a tidal marsh, the area played an important role in the late Saxon defensive system protecting the settlement of Brycg Stowe. From the twelfth century large-scale land reclamation provided the conditions for speculative urban street and tenement development, promoted and administered under the ownership of the Knights Templar, and from the fourteenth century by new owners, the Knights Hospitaller. These medieval urban landlords oversaw the growth of an established and densely populated area full of life, trade and production on one of the town's principal roads, Temple Street, and crossroads, Temple Cross. Later medieval and early post-medieval decline gave way to new enterprises in the age of Empire, leading to the site's long-standing association with sugar production and brewing. The accompanying DVD contains documentation that formed the basis of the heritage strategy and guided its implementation, along with a complete set of full specialist reports on the artefacts and ecofacts recovered, and reports on the historic building recording of the brewery structures as they survived before modern redevelopment. A photo gallery and short film illustrate the work of the archaeologists who undertook the excavations.