Session: #491

Content:

This session takes a starting point from a growing understanding of the complexity of trade and exchange along Europe’s western Atlantic fringe in late antiquity and the early medieval period. A better understanding of ceramic exchange from the fifth to the seventh/eighth centuries AD has developed in recent years through the increased networking of researchers and better data. Coherent terminology across the Mediterranean and Atlantic zones has helped improve knowledge of the distribution and chronology of late Roman fine wares and amphorae. While there has been a longstanding recognition of imported coarse wares in western Britain and Ireland (the so called ‘E ware’ pottery type) there is now a growing body of knowledge of these same ceramic types in their area of production in western France.
While imported ceramics of early medieval date have been long studied in western Britain and Ireland they are generally seen as a phenomenon peculiar to the fifth-seventh centuries. This session seeks to place these imports against a broader, long-term background of exchange along Europe’s Atlantic littoral in the first millennium AD. How does this ‘post-Roman’/early medieval dynamic connect with systems of commodity exchange active in the Atlantic region in the first half of the first millennium and what is the evidence for this? What can development-led and research excavations and artefact analysis conducted over the past twenty years tell us about enduring networks of trade or redistribution, or patterns of consumption, in the Atlantic zone? Do the ceramics that we see in western Britain and Ireland represent demand for liquid cargoes and dining vessels, or were other items also in circulation? What were the dynamics in western France, Portugal and Atlantic regions of Spain that led to the circulation of Mediterranean and Atlantic pottery and other exotic goods in the Irish Sea area?

Session: #491

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