Author: Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803274387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
This book provides an overview of the driving theories, methodologies and main topics that have been addressed to date regarding agrarian archaeology. The text is presented as an introduction for students, a critical reading guide for other scholars, and an informative instrument aimed at a wide audience.
Author: Wendy Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198895860
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Using archaeological, archaeobotanical, and written evidence, this book explores what gardens meant in northern Spain and northern Portugal in the early middle ages - a question asked here for the first time. Dealing with a vast area of the Iberian peninsula that lay beyond Muslim al-Andalus, with great geographical diversity and wide variation in climate, this books spans the sixth to tenth centuries, showing that gardens might lie beside houses or scattered among arable fields or grouped together in garden zones. Gardens are difficult to recognize archaeologically but excavation suggests that many were terraces, as it also suggests that indicators of intensive use - through fertilization or irrigation or characteristic weed species - may be more useful for identifying garden activity than looking for a distinctive shape. The strongest indications of garden produce are that fruit was always important and so were legumes; and some gardens, especially those owned by monasteries, may have grown herbs. The most striking trend across the tenth century is that peasants sold gardens to monasteries, although there are regional differences, Catalonia having a more diverse land market. Peasants sold in order to get food and monasteries bought partly to provide garden produce, including herbs, for expanding communities but partly to use and increase garden space for textile plants--flax, hemp, and dye plants--for commercial reasons, especially urban supply. Gardens were vital for the supply of clothes. By scrutinising the logistics of small- and medium-scale ownership, the relations of owners with large-scale land-holders, especially institutions, and the ins-and-outs of those economic and social interactions, this wide-ranging book adds a new dimension to the environmental history of western Europe, in addition to contributing to an understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of the period more generally.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004392084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity brings together scientific, archaeological and historical evidence on the interplay of social change and environmental phenomena at the end of Antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages, covering the period ca. 300-800 AD. It gives a new impetus to the study of the environmental history of this crucial period of transition between two major epochs in premodern history. The volume contains both systematic overviews of the previous scholarship and available data, as well as a number of interdisciplinary case studies. It covers a wide range of topics, including the histories of landscape, climate, disease and earthquakes, all intertwined with social, cultural, economic and political developments. Contributors are Daniel Abel-Schaad , Francesca Alba-Sánchez, Flavio Anselmetti, José Antonio López-Sáez, Daniel Ariztegui, Brunhilda Brushulli, Yolanda Carrión Marco, Alexandra Chavarría, Petra Dark, Carmen Fernández Ochoa, Martin Finné, Asuunta Florenzano, Ralph Fyfe,Didier Galop, Benjamin Graham, John Haldon, Kyle Harper, Richard Hodges, Adam Izdebski, Katarina Kouli, Inga Labuhn, Tamara Lewit, Anna Maria Mercuri, Alessia Masi, Lucas McMahon, Lee Mordechai, Mario Morellón, Timothy Newfield, Almudena Orejas Saco del Valle, Leonor Peña-Chocarro, Sebastián Pérez-Díaz, Eleonora Regattieri, Stephen Rippon, Neil Roberts, Laura Sadori, Abigail Sargent, Gaia Sinopoli, Paolo Squatriti, Giovanni Stranieri, Raymond van Dam, Bernd Wagner, Mark Whittow, Penelope Wilson, Jessie Woodbridge. See inside the book.
Author: Eugene Costello
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351213377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were first domesticated. Such seasonal movements have formed an important aspect of many European farming systems for several thousand years, although they have declined markedly since the nineteenth century. Ethnographers and geographers have long been involved in recording transhumant practices, and in the last two decades archaeologists have started to add a new material dimension to the subject. This volume brings together recent advances in the study of European transhumance during historical times, from Sweden to Spain, Romania to Ireland, and beyond that even Newfoundland. While the focus is on the archaeology of seasonal sites used by shepherds and cowherds, the contributions exhibit a high degree of interdisciplinarity. Documentary, cartographic, ethnographic and palaeoecological evidence all play a part in the examination of seasonal movement and settlement in medieval and post-medieval landscapes. Notwithstanding the obvious diversity across Europe in terms of livestock, distances travelled and socio-economic context, an extended introduction to the volume shows that cross-cutting themes are now emerging, including mobility, gendered herding, collective land-use, the agency of non-elite people and competition for grazing and markets. The book will appeal not only to archaeologists, but to historians, geographers, ethnographers, palaeoecologists and anyone interested in rural lifeways across Europe.
Author: Neil Christie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351923471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Only in recent years has archaeology begun to examine in a coherent manner the transformation of the landscape from classical through to medieval times. In Landscapes of Change, leading scholars in the archaeology of the late antique and early medieval periods address the key results and directions of Roman rural fieldwork. In so doing, they highlight problems of analysis and interpretation whilst also identifying the variety of transformations that rural Europe experienced during and following the decline of Roman hegemony. Whilst documents and standing buildings predominate in the urban context to provide a coherent and tangible guide to the evolving urban form and its society since Roman times, the countryside in many ages remains rather shadowy - a context for the cultivation, gathering and movement of food and other resources, inhabited by farmers, villagers and miners. Whilst the Roman period is adequately served through occasional extant remains and through the survey and excavation of villas and farmsteads, as well as the writings of agronomists, the medieval one is generally well marked by the presence of still extant villages across Europe, often dependent on castles and manors which symbolise the so-called 'feudal' centuries. But the intervening period, the fourth to tenth centuries, is that with the least documentation and with the fewest survivals. What happened to the settlement units that made up the Roman rural world? When and why do new settlement forms emerge? Landscapes of Change is essential reading for anyone wanting an up-to-date summary of the results of archaeological and historical investigations into the changing countryside of the late Roman, late antique and early medieval world, between the fourth and tenth centuries AD. It questions numerous aspects of change and continuity, assessing the levels of impact of military and economic decay, the spread and influence of Christianity, and the role of Germanic, Slav and Arab settlements in disrupting and redefining the ancient rural landscapes.
Author: Alexandre Chevalier
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1782970339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 525
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Book Description
This first monograph in the EARTH series, The dynamics of non-industrial agriculture: 8,000 years of resilience and innovation, approaches the great variety of agricultural practices in human terms. It focuses on the relationship between plants and people, the complexity of agricultural processes and their organisation within particular communities and societies. Collaborative European research among archaeologists, archaeobotanists, ethnographers, historians and agronomists using a broad analytical scale of investigation seeks to establish new common ground for integrating different approaches. By means of interdisciplinary examples, this book showcases the relationship between people and plants across wide ranging and diverse spatial and temporal milieus, including crop diversity, the use of wild foodstuffs, social context, status and choices of food plants.
Author: Alfred Thomas Grove
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300100556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
This large volume draws on evidence from fieldwork, historical records, archaeology, pollen analysis and recent research in discussing the ecology of Mediterranean Europe from the past to the present day. Grove and Rackham provide clear explanations and discussions of different ecosystems, of ruined landscapes, climate fluctuations and vegetation change, the impact of fire, terracing, agriculture and man's changing subsistence strategies, of coastal erosion and deforestation. A highly readable book, packed full of information, which also assesses the pessimistic view that many people hold over the future of the landscape and environment.
Author: Mark Humphries
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004422617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 118
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Book Description
The last half century has seen an explosion in the study of late antiquity, which has characterised the period between the third and seventh centuries not as one of catastrophic collapse and ‘decline and fall’, but rather as one of dynamic and positive transformation. Yet research on cities in this period has provoked challenges to this positive picture of late antiquity. This study surveys the nature of this debate, examining problems associated with the sources historians use to examine late antique urbanism, and the discourses and methodological approaches they have constructed from them. It aims to set out the difficulties and opportunities presented by the study of cities in late antiquity in terms of transformations of politics, the economy, and religion, and to show that this period witnessed very real upheaval and dislocation alongside continuity and innovation in cities around the Mediterranean.
Author: Andrew Reynolds
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191567655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs is the first detailed consideration of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon society dealt with social outcasts. Beginning with the period following Roman rule and ending in the century following the Norman Conquest, it surveys a period of fundamental social change, which included the conversion to Christianity, the emergence of the late Saxon state, and the development of the landscape of the Domesday Book. While an impressive body of written evidence for the period survives in the form of charters and law-codes, archaeology is uniquely placed to investigate the earliest period of post-Roman society - the fifth to seventh centuries - for which documents are lacking. For later centuries, archaeological evidence can provide us with an independent assessment of the realities of capital punishment and the status of outcasts. Andrew Reynolds argues that outcast burials show a clear pattern of development in this period. In the pre-Christian centuries, 'deviant' burial remains are found only in community cemeteries, but the growth of kingship and the consolidation of territories during the seventh century witnessed the emergence of capital punishment and places of execution in the English landscape. Locally determined rites, such as crossroads burial, now existed alongside more formal execution cemeteries. Gallows were located on major boundaries, often next to highways, always in highly visible places. The findings of this pioneering national study thus have important consequences on our understanding of Anglo-Saxon society. Overall, Reynolds concludes, organized judicial behaviour was a feature of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, rather than just the two centuries prior to the Norman Conquest.
Author: Ton Otto
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
ISBN: 8779349358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 557
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Book Description
This book straddles the disciplines of archaeology and social anthropology. Its 25 contributions (divided into 6 sections with separate introductions) successively scrutinise the concept of war in philosophy, social theory and the history of anthropological and archaeological research; discuss warfare in pre-state and state societies; and assess its relationship to rituals, social identification and material culture.
