Theme:
1. The Material Record: Current Trends and Future Directions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Luxury - Standard - Poverty: Archaeology of Quality of Life in Medieval and Early Modern Towns
Content:
The term quality of life describes the overall well-being, i.e. how the needs of individuals and societies are satisfied. Well-being consists of economic variables like material wealth and non-economic ones like social capital, human health, physical condition, and knowledge. Economists, as well as sociologists dealing with these problems based on contemporary approaches, mostly agree that the most critical determinants of broadly understood well-being concern good nutrition, the lack of diseases, the presence of personal freedom and dignity, respect for other group members, safety from aggression, economic security, a stable and just law. Many of these concepts are relative, depending on local cultural practices, perceptions, and financial capacities, which makes them challenging to study in past societies. Nevertheless, in the case of medieval and post-medieval towns, approaching the quality of life from an archaeological perspective can bring new insight. Contrary to written records, which often register the social position and wealth of the upper part of urban society, the material remains of past activities bring us information on household possessions, quality of materials, dietary practices, and actual physical condition of individuals. To measure the quality of life based on archaeological sources, one needs to put them into the relational framework: understand what people considered as luxury, what was a standard, and what was poverty in a given time and space.
This session aims to discuss various approaches to luxury, standards and poverty as indicators of quality of life and inequalities in later medieval and post-medieval urban environments. We are particularly interested in papers relating to urban studies concerning:
- Theoretical approaches
- Dietary practices
- Population status based on bioarchaeological research
- Architectural research
- Material culture
Keywords:
Medieval, Post-Medieval, Quality of Life, Inequality, Urbanity, Materiality
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:
Jakub Sawicki (Czech Republic) 1
Co-organisers:
Jerzy Piekalski (Poland) 2
Paweł Cembrzyński (Germany) 3
Affiliations:
1. Institute of Archaeology, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague
2. Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw
3. Cluster of Excellence ROOTS, CAU Kiel
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