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.

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.