Using Zooarchaeology to Explore the Origins of Medieval Urbanism: Evidence from Badia Pozzeveri near Lucca, Antwerp, and Ipswich

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The origin of urbanism is one of the most significant transitions in human history. Archaeologists and historians have been interested in the origins and development of early medieval urbanism since the days of V. Gordon Childe and Henri Pirenne in the early twentieth century. While most of the early studies of medieval towns were based on historical sources, archaeological research carried out in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have provided new data on the process of urbanization in medieval Europe. In this paper, we use zooarchaeological data from Badia Pozzeveri near Lucca in Italy (ca. 900–1300 CE), Antwerp in Belgium (eighth through eleventh centuries CE), and Ipswich in the United Kingdom (seventh through twelfth centuries CE) to address two related questions: (1) how did early urban populations obtain food and other animal products from the surrounding countryside, and (2) to what extent were people living in the countryside participating in urban markets?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Animal Bones to Human Behavior   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32056