This study applies New Materialist theory to examine early medieval urban emergence at Ipswich (Gipeswic), challenging traditional models that privilege elite agency and linear development. Through detailed analysis of 7th–9th century thoroughfares, including Franciscan Way, Market Lane, St Stephen’s Lane, and Fore Street, the research reveals urbanism as a complex process of ‘distributed agency’ involving diverse human actors – from craftspeople and neighbours to enslaved neighbours and officials – and nonhuman actants. The author develops ‘material negotiation analysis’ as a methodological framework, demonstrating how roads emerged through interactions between rivers, flood channels, trackways, gravel surfaces, and human activities rather than top-down planning. Key findings include the synchronous metalling of roads across late 9th-century Ipswich, differential maintenance patterns encoding social relations, and the active role of materials in creating urban identity. The study demonstrates why New Materialism’s focus on material agency proves especially valuable for archaeological contexts where documentary evidence is limited. This approach reframes early medieval towns as dynamic assemblages continuously negotiated through material practices, offering archaeologists a robust alternative to foundational narratives of urban origins and advancing New Materialist applications in medieval urban archaeology.

Maritime cultural heritage is often perceived as distant or inaccessible: hidden beneath the surface or lost beyond the horizon. Yet in everyday language and imagery, maritime metaphors are frequently used to articulate life experiences, abstract thoughts, and emotions. This article explores the well-being affordances of metaphorised maritime cultural heritage, focusing on the emotional and symbolic meanings of maritime metaphors, heritage as an affective practice, and the use of maritime heritage objects as prompts in self-reflective writing. The research was conducted through a bibliotherapeutic workshop for a group of volunteers. The workshop combined autobiographical writing with sensorial engagement with authentic maritime cultural heritage objects. Findings indicate that maritime-related metaphors and historically significant objects elicit a wide range of strong emotional responses and personal autobiographical reflections. This study offers new insights into the affective and therapeutic dimensions of maritime cultural heritage. It highlights how heritage-linked emotions are shaped through complex, individual processes, in which cultural heritage operates in dynamic interaction with the observer’s lived experience.

Recent years have seen increased archaeological interest in the study of mutuality, cooperation, consensus and interdependence. In Scandinavian Iron Age archaeology, relevant works tend to treat voluntary cooperation as something different from and opposed to power. This paper suggests the alternative of the term ‘power with’, drawn from political theory, as a name for the power of joint action. The term is applied to an analysis of mound construction and communal feasting and assembly at Hundorp, present-day Norway. Hundorp is often presented as a centre of power and dynastic rule. I argue instead that there is much material from Hundorp that speaks of large-scale joint action and cooperation and less that speaks of hierarchisation and differentiation. This does not mean the place was not a centre of power, but indicates that power at Hundorp may have been jointly owned, representing communal ‘power with’ rather than exclusive ‘power over’. I do not dispute the existence of ‘power over’ in Iron Age Scandinavia but here I propose that the mounds of Hundorp expressed a different kind of collective agency.

Despite being a central element in traditional agricultural practices, shielings have rarely been subject to large-scale archaeological investigations in Norway. Combining results from development-led surveys and small-scale research projects, this study demonstrates how such an extensive archaeological material – despite inadequate contextual information and chronometric hygiene – may contribute to a refined chronology for transhumance and shielings in the county of Møre and Romsdal, and beyond. Radiocarbon dates from these investigations may relate to specific archaeological features or events or to more complex archaeological contexts. Albeit mixed and incorporated into palimpsest deposits, charcoal sampled for radiocarbon dating could still be treated as a remnant of significant past events. Varying means of statistical modelling may thus enhance our understanding of this chronometric material, revealing both continuity and change at various scales. Hence, I propose a development of transhumant practices across four phases, spanning from the Pre-Roman Iron Age to modern times. According to a definition that emphasises settlement, however, there is still no evidence of shielings until the Late Iron Age and Early Middle Ages.