Medieval (Other Keyword)

1-25 (43 Records)

After the Dissolution: The Second Life of Monastic Stones (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

One of the more dramatic results of the English Reformation was the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Once these institutions were closed and sold off, they often had a secondary purpose for the new landholders, such as working farms, personal residences and colleges. In spite of this, much of the architecture of the original monastery was destroyed, with stone, brick, and metal carted off. This paper focuses on how the stone from monasteries became a resource in the immediate vicinity of the...


Asturias Across Time and Space: An Exploration of Medieval and Early Modern Spain using Stable Isotopes (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy MacKinnon. Eric J. Bartelink. Nicholas V. Passalacqua.

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data from 104 individuals from eight sites was used to reconstruct the diets of Medieval and Early Modern (AD 600-1750) individuals from Asturias, Spain. Asturias is a coastal region located in northern Spain that remained one of the last Catholic kingdoms when the Moors ruled Iberia. Asturian society was structured hierarchically and divided into clergy, nobility, and peasant classes. Each socioeconomic group buried their own according to status and wealth....


Between radicalism and tolerance: Characterising the rule of a militarised Christian theocracy in the medieval Baltic (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleksander Pluskowski.

The Teutonic Order, the last of the major military orders founded in the Holy Land in the twelfth century, developed a strong, centralised hierarchy once it redirected its efforts to crusading in the Baltic. After the initial period of crusading was over, its fortified monasteries were built with consistent regularity, and the Order adopted a top-down, corporate approach to controlling the conquered territories, under the leadership of the Grand Master. However, despite this centralisation,...


Bridging the Gap: Understanding the empty Medieval landscape of post-Roman Aquitaine (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

The end of the Roman Empire is marked archaeologically by an impressive shift in material culture. Changes in land organization and the use of more ephemeral building materials created a largely invisible and difficult to detect post-Roman landscape. Archaeologists initially assumed such landscapes were abandoned as a result of the political and economic chaos resulting from Rome’s fall. Work in northwest Europe in the past two decades, however has shown that new techniques can help locate these...


Building Charlieu: Chronology and Asset Flow over Time at Saint Fortunatus Monastery, 872-1120 C.E. (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Jackson.

The monastery of Saint Fortunatus in Charlieu, France, was built and rebuilt several times from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. In the twentieth century, the monastery was excavated by American archaeologist and art historian Elizabeth Sunderland, who relied heavily on its relationship to mega-monastery Cluny to reconstruct the smaller abbey’s chronology. However, re-examining Charlieu’s timing and phasing with attention to material and labor costs over time exposes an alternative chronology...


Castle Ballintober, County Roscommon, Ireland: The Castles in Communities Project (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Connell. Niall Brady. Kathryn Maurer. Daniel Cearley.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Gaelic Social Order through Castle Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Castles in Communities program at Ballintober Castle in County Roscommon, Ireland has been studying the construction sequence of the castle and the newly discovered deserted medieval village in the hinterlands. As we work with the community of Ballintober we are faced with a conundrum of how best to present our results as...


Castles in Communities Anthropology Settlement Survey: Preliminary data from 2015/2016 field seasons at Ballintober, Ireland (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Connell. Rachel Brody. Andrew Bair. Lena Murphy. Valerie Watson.

An overview of project design and preliminary results from two field seasons of research aimed at expanding our understanding of settlement in later medieval Ireland. The field school program run by Foothill College at Ballintober Castle in Co. Roscommon has made remarkable progress 1) identifying possible phases of Anglo-Norman and subsequent Gaelic Irish castle construction and occupation, 2) utilizing different geophysical techniques to find a Deserted Village associated with the castle,...


Childhood and Adulthood Mobility at Medieval (1240s AD) Solt-Tételhegy, Hungary Reconstructed from Stable Oxygen Isotope Analysis (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariana Gugora. Tosha Dupras. Erzsébet Fóthi.

Between 2005 and 2009, archaeologists excavated more than 100 skeletons from the medieval (1240s AD) Hungarian site of Solt-Tételhegy. Little has been published about this archaeological settlement, and although previous stable isotopic research has described the migration patterns of medieval European peoples, here we present the first such study performed on a medieval Hungarian population. Stable oxygen isotope analysis was conducted on dental enamel from 23 individuals and on bone apatite...


Christian Life in Medieval Nubia at el-Kurru, Sudan (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Abagail Breidenstein. Geoff Emberling. Abigail Bouwman. Frank Ruehli. Abigail Bigham.

The Nubian site of el-Kurru (modern Sudan) lies along the Nile River about 140 km upstream of Old Dongola, the capital of the Medieval Christian kingdom of Makuria. In 2015-2016, a cemetery adjacent to the settlement was excavated, containing 26 skeletons. Here, I will present current bioarchaeological work on these individuals. Biological profiles were developed, including sex and age ranges, health markers evaluated, and indicators of pathology and trauma identified. Those interred span all...


The Chronological and Liturgical Context of Charnel Practice in Medieval England: Manipulations of the Skeletonized Body at Rothwell Charnel Chapel, Northamptonshire (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Craig-Atkins. Jennifer Crangle. Dawn Hadley.

The rare survival of a charnel chapel and the commingled remains of more than 2,500 individuals it houses at Holy Trinity Church, Rothwell, England provides a unique opportunity to investigate the postmortem manipulation of human remains in the medieval period. The apparent paucity of charnel chapel sites in England has led to the dismissal of charnelling as a marginal practice with little liturgical significance, a pragmatic solution to the need for storage of disturbed bones. Yet the evidence...


Comparative Eurasian Statecraft: al-Andalus in the context of the Medieval West (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only James Boone.

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Attempts to describe and explain differences between Western and Asian state structures have a long history, starting with Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production and Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism.The bottom-up approach offered here argues that differences between the two forms are due largely to the way primary...


Conserving a Castle: The Connection between Archeology and Preservation in Making History Accessible (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Mills.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nestled in the hidden heartlands of Roscommon, Ireland is Ballintober Castle. Ballintober Castle and its surrounding deserted village are the site of an archeological field school, Castles in Communities. As the field school progresses into its fifth year, castle conservation becomes more important for continuing archeological work and maintaining the cultural...


Experimental Archaeology of Medieval Food as Participant Observation (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Stull.

Central to anthropology is the concept of participant observation, where a researcher engages in immersive learning through ethnographic fieldwork. This concept is also important for archaeologists as immersive learning provides an avenue for more robust interpretation and the development of better research questions. Participant observation is not directly possible in the study of medieval archaeology, but replication studies of food culture can serve as one avenue toward immersive learning in...


Fosterage and Mobility at the Early Medieval Irish Monastery on the Island of Illaunloughan: A Bioarchaeological Case Study (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Alonzi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fosterage and mobility both require creating and breaking social ties. Early medieval Irish texts suggest that mobility and fosterage, which is the practice of children leaving home to be raised and educated, were means by which monastic communities gained members and sustained a prestigious social standing. Examining these practices through biogeochemistry...


Gribshunden (1495), a Royal Medieval Danish Flagship in the Baltic Sea (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan P. Foley.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The royal Danish-Norwegian flagship Gribshunden (or Gryffen) was launched in 1485 as one of the earliest purpose-built warships in northern Europe. King Hans uniquely employed the vessel as his “floating castle”, combining hard and soft power functions into a mobile seat of government. After a decade in active service, the ship was...


Ground-penetrating Radar and Photogrammetry in Medieval France: Results from the Auvergne (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Eileen Ernenwein. Jeremy Menzer. Frederic Surmely.

The medieval period in Europe is well known from archaeological sites and historical records including England’s Domesday Book. The Auvergne of southern France, however, is a poorly studied upland region. This rugged environment of volcanic peaks contains a rich, yet mostly unknown medieval history. A research program is underway that includes archaeological survey, excavation, and geophysical survey at sites across the region. GPR survey in June 2015 focused on unexcavated portions of Les...


Imagined Forests: Woodlands and Wood Resources in Medieval Icelandic Literary, Documentary and Archaeological Sources (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Elise Mooney.

This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval literary sources describe the Icelandic landscape when the first settlers arrived as ‘forested from the mountains to the shores’. It had previously been thought that the island was rapidly deforested after settlement, but recent research gives a much more nuanced picture of woodland history. It...


Investigations at Amisfield: A Late Medieval Scottish Tower House (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Connolly. Julie M. Schablitsky. Robert S. Neyland. Guy L. Tasa. Vivien J. Singer. Chelsea Rose. Michael P Roller. Bob Ward. John S. Craig. Jaime Dexter.

The "Debatable Lands" of the Scottish-English border region remained a frontier in a virtual state of war for centuries. Conflicts with England (the Border Wars) were punctuated with feuds among powerful Scottish families for dominance. Landholding families built small fortified towers for security in this hostile environment. Amisfield Tower, one of the best preserved small towers in Scotland, served the Charteris family from at least AD 1400 to 1630. Excavations adjacent to the tower sampled a...


Just Beyond the ‘Land of Women’: Examining Gender in Early and Late Medieval Ireland (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Shaffer Foster.

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1996, historian Lisa Bitel published "Land of Women: Sex and Gender in Early Ireland," a critical study of medieval gender, which remains influential over 20 years later. While more recent historical and literary research is available, there have been relatively few archaeological investigations of gender...


Life and Death in Medieval San Giuliano (Lazio Province, Italy) (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Zori.

This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The medieval period in northern Lazio saw significant restructuring of social and economic relationships through *incastellamento, the process by which people chose or were forced to move onto fortified hilltops. Here, I present results from four seasons of mapping,...


Medieval fishweirs in Britain and Ireland: exploring practice, power, and identity amongst fishing communities (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Aidan O'Sullivan.

Medieval wooden and stone fishweirs are amongst the most spectacularly preserved evidence for fishing practices amongst riverine and estuarine communities in Britain and Ireland. Recent archaeological surveys and excavations have traced their types of construction, forms, uses and biographies across time, and increasingly sophisticated means of dating them has enabled us to identify patterns in their repair over relatively short periods of time (i.e. years and decades). This paper will use...


Medieval Transylvanian Church Burial Patterns and Demographics (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Zejdlik. Jonathan Bethard. Nyárádi Zsolt. Andre Gonciar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Papdomb archaeological site is located immediately outside the village of Văleni (Hungarian: Patakfalva), Romania in the historic region of Transylvania. Papdomb comprises the ruins of a medieval Székely church and its associated cemetery. Human interment within the walls of the church started in the second half of the 12th century and extended to the...


The Missing Medieval in the North Atlantic (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bolender. Elizabeth Sweet.

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the North Atlantic has overwhelmingly focused on the long-term political and environmental impacts of the Viking Age colonization of these remote, marginal islands. In places like Iceland, these impacts were profound and resulted in the radical transformation of the previously...


Modeling Early Medieval Agricultural Practices through Archaeobotany (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Whitlock.

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval landscape archaeologists have described the Middle Saxon (650-850 AD) and Late Saxon (850-1100 AD) periods in England as times of increased agricultural production and economic expansion, but archaeobotanical analyses are not often integrated with these studies. Archaeobotanists have developed several methods...


A Mosque and a Castle: The Discovery of the Salemi Mosque (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Kirk. Michael J. Kolb.

In the summer of 2007 an elaborate, colonnaded gypsum-plaster floor was discovered outside of the Salemi Castle in western Sicily. Believed to date sometime between the 10th and 12th centuries, this feature was constructed during a period when the island of Sicily was repeatedly invaded and conquered by a series of expanding political entities. As such, interpretation of this feature has proved to be somewhat difficult. However, its orientation in an eastward direction may suggest that this...