Settlement Change Across Medieval Europe: Old Paradigms and New Vistas

The idea that the past was an era with long periods of little or no change is almost certainly false. Change has always affected human society. Some of the catalysts for change were exogenous and lay in natural transformations, such as climate change or plant and animal diseases. Others came from endogamous processes, such as demographic change and the resulting alterations in demographic pressure. They might be produced by economic changes in the agrarian economy such as crop- or stock-breeding or better agricultural husbandry systems with the resultant greater harvests. Equally, they might be from technological developments in industry and manufacturing affecting traditional forms of production. We should also note changes in ideology within society and even between principal groups, such as secular and ecclesiastical bodies. We need to consider the impact of politics and warfare.

These innovations, transmissions and transformations had profound spatial, economic and social impacts on the environments, landscapes and habitats evident at micro-, meso- and macro-levels. Changes, alterations and modifications may affect how land was worked, how it was organized, and the nature of buildings and rural complexes (homesteads, work buildings, villages, monasteries, towns and landscapes).

The authors of the 36 papers focus in particular on transmissions and transformations in a longue durée perspective, such as from early medieval times (c. 500AD) to the High Middle Ages (c. 1000/1200 AD), and from medieval to post-medieval and early modern times (1700). The case studies include the shrinking and disappearance of settlements; changes in rule and authority; developments in the agrarian economy; the shift from handwork to manufacturing; demographic change.

Contents

Preface
Niall Brady, Claudia Theune

Introduction
Niall Brady, Claudia Theune

Mountain communities in the Catalan Pyrenees: 25 years of archaeological research
Walter Alegría-Tejedor, Marta Sancho-Planas, Maria Soler-Sala

Endogenous and exogenous characteristics of settlement development of an early medieval settlement at Sursee (Canton of Lucerne, Switzerland)
Christian auf der Maur

Not so dark centuries: changes and continuities in the Catalan landscape (6th-12th centuries)
Jordi Bolòs

Rural settlement in later medieval Ireland through the lens of deserted settlements
Niall Brady

Rural settlement and economy in Campania (South Italy) between Late Antiquity and Middle Ages
Nicola Busino

Deciphering transformations of rural settlement and land-use patterns in central Adriatic Italy between the 6th and the 12th centuries AD
Francesca Carboni, Frank Vermeulen

Change and continuity in rural early medieval Hispania. Comparative multidisciplinary approach to the countrysides of Egitania (Idanha-A-Velha, Portugal) and Emerita (Mérida, Spain)
Tomás Cordero Ruiz

Beyond the Borders: transformations, acculturation and adaptation between Latium and Campania during the Lombard Period (6th - 8th c.)
Cristina Corsi

Silent witness: the deserted medieval borough of Newtown Jerpoint, Co Kilkenny, Ireland
Ian Doyle, Tadhg O'Keeffe

Kopaniec in the Izera Mountains. An example of unusual transformation of a village after the Thirty Years' War period in Silesia
Paweł Duma, Jerzy Piekalski, Anna Łuczak

Counting heads. Post-Roman population decline in the Rhine-Meuse delta (the Netherlands) and the need for more evidence-based reconstructions
Bert Groenewoudt, Rowin J. van Lanen

Land-organisational changes in rural Denmark from AD 200-1200
Jesper Hansen

Settlement abandonment in Dartmoor (England): Retreat of margins reassessed and difficult market accessibility as important factors of settlement vulnerability
Lukas Holata

The mid-6th century crises and their impacts on human activity and settlements in south-eastern Norway
Frode Iversen, Steinar Solheim

The transformation of rural settlements in Slavonia in the period from the 12th to the 15th centuries
Andrej Janeš, Ivana Hirschler Marić

Socioeconomic Mobility and property transmission among peasants: the Cheb region (Czech Republic) in the Late Middle Ages
Tomáš Klír

Mendicant friaries and the changing landscapes of late medieval Ireland: The foundations of the Augustinian friars in Co. Mayo and Sligo
Anne-Julie Lafaye

Late medieval transformation of rural landscape - model of melioratio terrae on the examples of the land of Nysa-Otmuchów and the Kaczawskie Foothills, Silesia, Poland
Maria Legut-Pintal

New evidence for the transformative impact of depopulation on currently inhabited medieval rural settlements from archaeological test-pit excavation in England
Carenza Lewis

One land, Two peasantries: Moriscos and old Christians in the Upper Genal Valley, Málaga (16th-18th C.)
Esteban López-García, Ignacio Díaz, Félix Retamero

Transformation and continuity in the Wexford countryside
Breda Lynch

Rural landscapes of north-eastern Rus' in transition: From the large unfortified settlements of the Viking Age to medieval villages
Nikolaj Makarov

The Anglo-Scottish western march: A landscape in transition
Caron Newman

Change in rural settlement in Eastern Central Europe from the early to the later Middle Ages
Elisabeth Nowotny

Assembling in times of transitions - the case of cooking-pit sites
Marie Ødegaard

Post-roman land-use transformations: analysing the early medieval countryside in Castelo de Vide (Portugal)
Sara Prata

The Hungarian conquest and the contemporary settlement structures. Research into 9th - 10th century archaeological finds from the Pest Plain
Tibor Ákos Rácz

Transformations of settlements for agricultural production between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Italy
Marcello Rotili

Settlements, communication and authority. Transforming spatial structure in the Danube-Tisza Interfluve Region in the 15-17th century
Edit Sárosi

Late medieval deserted settlements in Southern Germany as a consequence of long-term landscape transformations
Rainer Schreg

Crisis or transition? Risk and resilience during the late medieval agrarian crisis
Eva Svensson

No smoke without fire. Burning and changing settlements in 10th-century central-northern Portugal
Catarina Tente

Climate change and economic development in the Alps during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
Claudia Theune

Breaking old ties. Settlement relocation in North-Brabant (NL) at the dawn of the Late Middle Ages
Johan Verspay

The impact of the Christian conquest on the agrarian areas in the low Ebro valley. The case of Xerta (Spain)
Antoni Virgili, Helena Kirchner

Medieval settlement dynamics in peatland reclamations in the Western, Central and Northern Netherlands
Jan van Doesburg

Niall Brady is the founding director of the Archaeological Diving Company, Ireland's premier maritime archaeological consultancy, and between 2002 and 2010 he was project director of the Discovery Programme's Medieval Rural Settlement Project. Main research fields: landscape archaeology, medieval settlement, agrarian economy and technology, maritime archaeology, industrial archaeology.

Claudia Theune is Professor for Historical Archaeology at the University of Vienna with a special/great/deep interest in contemporary archaeology. Her main research fields are: Early Medieval funeral and social archaeology, Medieval archaeology of marginal landscapes, urban archaeology, as well as, Archaeology of the contemporary past (research projects in the former concentration camps of Sachsenhausen (Brandenburg, Germany), Mauthausen (Upper Austria, Austria) and its sub camps (Loibl-North, Carinthia, Austria; Gunskirchen, Upper Austria, Austria), massgrave Rechnitz (Burgenland, Austria), Five Islands, Trinidad and Tobago)