Inter Duo Maria: Rethinking Early Medieval Settlement in the Forth-Clyde Zone through an Environmental Lens

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The twin estuaries of the Firths of Forth and Clyde in southern Scotland boast a wealth of evidence for studying early medieval settlement. The modern population density around Glasgow and Edinburgh has resulted in a relatively large amount of data from rescue excavations and surveys compared to other parts of northern Britain. However, the societal shifts and settlement changes which marked the transition from the Roman-dominated Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages remain poorly understood and are often placed in simple ethnic frameworks and conquest narratives. New excavations hold great promise for understanding settlement change and the development of new communities, especially in relation to local landscapes and the environment. My paper draws together several examples of such settlements, both older and recently excavated, to think about how they used their local ecological landscapes to build new communities and lifeways in the early medieval period. In turn, it then explores what these settled landscapes mean for our understanding of early medieval southern Scotland, and queries whether older models of conquest-driven cultural shifts are sustainable moving forward.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37842.0