Theme:
5. (Extreme) Environments – Islands, Coasts, Margins, Centres
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Reshaping Medieval Desertion in Europe: Beyond the Late Medieval Crisis Paradigm
Content:
This session aims to discuss new perspectives on the abandonment of rural settlements and small towns in medieval Europe, which draw on theoretical frameworks concerning the Anthropocene, resilience, connectivity, mobility, social complexity, multiscale analysis, comparisons, human ecology, ecosystems, environmental changes, and landscapes.
In large parts of Europe, the very beginnings of medieval archaeology are associated with the investigation of deserted villages. These sites were considered ‘field laboratories’ for studying domestic social life, as well as the impact of the late medieval crisis. In the last decades, however, this issue has been overlooked in the wake of the expansion of other topics addressed by postclassical archaeologies. The phenomenon of settlement abandonment has thus remained under theorised, with frequent cataclysmic hypotheses and deterministic interpretations being advanced. Most of the existing conclusions do not reflect recent reassessments of rural communities, which increasingly emphasise their active and strategic role.
Finally, a vast number of deserted sites have been discovered due to the boom in development-led archaeology. In parallel, methodological advances, new procedures, and a wide range of geoarchaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and remote sensing data, have opened up new avenues for studying topics such as village origins, social dominance, and environmental and landscape change. Nevertheless, the abandonment processes have not returned to being the major area of study.
The ultimate goal of the session is to produce a collective book that brings together innovative and rigorous papers which revisit the question of settlement desertion in medieval Europe. For this reason, we do not request case studies, surveys, or descriptive reports. Instead, we expect holistic, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches with cutting-edge contextual or scientific analyses, which should reveal the driving forces behind abandonment, shed light on the interrelationships between various agents and systems, and thus enhance our understanding of medieval landscape dynamics.
Keywords:
Rural milieu, Settlement abandonment, Landscape dynamics, Middle Ages, Modern Age
Session associated with MERC:
yes
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo (Spain) 1,2
Co-organisers:
Lukáš Holata (Czech Republic) 3
Affiliations:
1. University of the Basque Country
2. University College London
3. Univerity of South Bohemia
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