|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
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.
Medieval Settlement Research is the journal of the Medieval
Settlement Research Group (MSRG), a long-established, widely
recognised and open multi-disciplinary research group that
facilitates collaboration between archaeologists, geographers,
historians and other interested parties. The Group is dedicated to
developing understanding of rural settlements and their associated
landscapes between the 5th and 16th centuries AD. To achieve these
aims, the MSRG organises Spring and Winter Seminars each year,
offers research and travel grants, awards the annual John Hurst
Memorial Prize for the best postgraduate paper, and publishes an
annual journal, Medieval Settlement Research. The journal is an
internationally recognised publication containing research papers,
scholarly articles, fieldwork reports, news and reviews. Although
the MSRG's interests are concentrated primarily on British and
Irish medieval landscapes between the 5th and 16th centuries AD, it
actively encourages wider chronological and pan-European
perspectives. Medieval Settlement Research therefore welcomes
papers relating to Britain, Ireland and the rest of Europe that
help us to improve our understanding of medieval settlements and
landscapes from the level of individual sites to the international
scale.
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.
There is a growing recognition within Anglo-Saxon archaeology that
farming practices underwent momentous transformations in the Mid
Saxon period, between the seventh and ninth centuries AD:
transformations which underpinned the growth of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms and, arguably, set the trajectory for English agricultural
development for centuries to come. Meanwhile, in the field of
archaeobotany, a growing set of quantitative methods has been
developed to facilitate the systematic investigation of
agricultural change through the study of charred plant remains.
This study applies a standardised set of repeatable quantitative
analyses to the charred remains of Anglo-Saxon crops and weeds, to
shed light on crucial developments in crop husbandry between the
seventh and ninth centuries. The analyses demonstrate the
significance of the Anglo-Saxon archaeobotanical record in
elucidating how greater crop surpluses were attained through
ecologically-sensitive diversification and specialisation
strategies in this period. At the same time, assumptions, variables
and key parameters are presented fully and explicitly to facilitate
repetition of the work, thus also enabling the book to be used as a
source of comparative data and a methodological handbook for
similar research in other periods and places. It constitutes a
specialist, data-driven companion volume to the author’s more
general narrative account published as ‘Farming Transformed in
Anglo-Saxon England’ (Windgather, 2018).
|
|