Medieval North Research Articles

Osteometric characteristics of the Medieval population of Northern Sudan (based on materials from the Deraheib monument)

Introduction. Paleoanthropological studies of Medieval North African materials are extremely few. Despite the large number of international expeditions working in the region, very few results of craniometric and osteometric data are presented. This is partly due to the loss of practical measurement skills in European anthropological schools in the second half of the 20th century, partly due to the difficulties of studying the graves of the Islamic period. Several seasons of work of the Nubian Archaeological and Anthropological Expedition of the Research Institute and the Museum of Anthropology of Lomonosov Moscow State University on the Southern Necropolis of the medieval site Derakheyb (Republic of Sudan) were devoted to the study of this population. The purpose of the publication is characteristics of the medieval population buried in the Southern Necropolis of the Derakheyb site due to osteological features and introducing the new data. Materials and methods. The material is the bones of the postcranial skeleton of adult individuals (14 men and 9 women). The technique corresponds to the classical program in the modification of V.P. Alekseev (a total of 74 signs and 16 pointers). The reconstruction of the body length was carried out, the total body dimensions were described, and the proportion indicators were calculated. For intra-group analysis, the principal component method was used, which was carried out using individual data using the R language. Results and discussion. The male population is characterized by average total body size and shoulder width, while the female series is relatively narrow-shouldered. In the male series, the distal parts of the arms and legs are elongated relative to the proximal ones, and the lower limbs are elongated relative to the upper ones. The women's series featured a more graceful physique. The distal part of the leg is elongated relative to the proximal one, as in the male group; there is also some shortening of the upper limbs relative to the lower ones. Body length varies between 166 cm for men and 156 cm for women. Conclusion. According to osteometry data, the medieval population of the city of Derakheyb can be characterized as heterogeneous, the individuals that stand out mainly correspond to those that stood out according to craniological data. The male part of the population is medium-massive, and the female part is graceful. The entire sample is characterized by shortened lower limbs relative to the arms, as well as elongated distal parts of the arms and legs relative to the proximal ones, which reflects one of the features of the tropical adaptive type.

Dragon Ships to the Dawnland: Eugène Beauvois and the Vinland Viking Expeditions in the Nineteenth-Century Settler Imagination

Abstract Between the mid-1700s and the Great War, people in Europe and North America were gripped by a frenzy of enthusiasm for all things Viking. Eminent scholars and ordinary readers discovered an insatiable curiosity for medieval Scandinavia, imagined land of dragon-prowed ships and saga heroes. Among these enthusiasts was the prolific French historian Pierre-Eugène Beauvois (1835–1912). Beauvois was fascinated by the Norse voyages to continental North America, known in Old Norse as “Vinland.” By arguing for extensive pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas, Beauvois stole the glory enjoyed by Spain and Italy as the first “discoverers” of the “New World,” shifting it to Norse populations that Beauvois linked to France. Such a vindication of early voyages by ethnic “cousins” of the French presented France as genetically destined to colonize foreign lands, thus legitimating their conquest of Africa. Yet Beauvois’s arguments extended beyond simply positing a meaningful Norse presence in medieval North America. He maintained that Indigenous culture was really just a watered-down residue of transplanted European culture. By asserting that central components of Indigenous cultures such as language and religion derived from medieval European models, Beauvois usurped Native positionalities and affirmed the rightness of the settler colonial project.

Ancient and Medieval North Pole Stars


 
 
 In this article, the identification in different civilizations and eras of some cir-umpolar stars as the north pole star are reviewed, the main principles behind and crucial considerations in the past for forming the criteria for north pole star identification are scrutinized, and some profound differences in ancient and medieval views of it are discussed. The point of departure is the identification of the north polar star in Euclid’s Phaenomena as the star HR 4646, and its identification in the Pahlavi Bundahišn and al-Ṣūfī’s Ṣuwar al-kawākib as HR 4893. Because of the inevitable transitory nature of the north pole star, the location of al-Ṣūfī’s north pole star in the manuscript tradition of his magnum opus during the centuries after him is also investigated in detail. A supplementary discussion is included on the confusion between two different entities—the pole of the celestial sphere and the pivot of an indigenous Arabic asterism envisioned as a millstone—in philological, lexical, and literary Islamic works, which chiefly stems from the vague terminology employed.
 
 

Hitting the Vein: Bloodletting Fleams from Medieval Oslo

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEDIEVAL HEALING can expand beyond the confines of textual sources. This is exemplified by the discovery of bloodletting fleams from medieval Oslo, iron tools used in the medical practice of phlebotomy. Based on the archaeological context of these finds, phlebotomy was not undertaken solely in monastic institutions or the elite secular settings of manors and castles in the medieval North, but also in urban residential areas. The material properties of the fleams furthermore provide an insight into the process of venipuncture as well as the embodied experience of bloodletting for both practitioners and patients. The paper positions itself within the theoretical framework of archaeologies of corporeality in order to reflect on the correlation between the practice of bloodletting and cultural conceptions of the body as humoral. The archaeological evidence for bloodletting in urban contexts indicates a widespread conception of the medieval body and its fluid boundaries with the natural environment.

A Material Culture of Medieval Disability: Contextualising Norwegian Votive Offerings

In this paper, the potential for material culture studies within the history of disability is explored through a study of preserved anatomical votives from medieval Norway left in connection with miraculous healing practices. The Norwegian votives, which include wooden body parts of hands, arms, finger, feet and legs as well as mobility aids, are here related to the lived experience of the physically impaired. Anatomical votives have been interpreted as meaningful depictions of how an individual conceptualised the body part in question, which they sought healing for. Through a posthumanist approach, anatomical votives can, however, not only be seen as solely representational of a body part but as material extensions of the body. Preserved mobility aids, here identified as hand-trestles and a knee-brace, provide insight into the availability of aids for individuals with lower limb impairments in the medieval North. The study of the material culture of disability can elucidate cultural notions of disability in relation to physical impairment. While written miracle accounts have been identified as important sources for the study of medieval disability, their associated material culture is here presented as important data for the embodied experience of the physically impaired in medieval Norway.

Book review: Suraj Bhan Bhardwaj, State and Peasant Society in Medieval North India: Essays on Changing Contours of Mewat, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Century

Suraj Bhan Bhardwaj, State and Peasant Society in Medieval North India: Essays on Changing Contours of Mewat, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Century (Delhi: Primus Books, 2019), 220 pp., ₹995, ISBN: 9789386552235 (Hardback).

19th Century Moroccan Sufism and the 2011 Syrian Revolution: The Legacy of Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Mas'ūd al-Fāsī

Abstract: In the context of the 2011 Syrian Revolution, numerous Syrian Sufi scholars emerged in opposition to the government of Bashar al-Assad. Among the most prominent of these was Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ya'qūbī (b. 1963). In his vocal opposition to the Syrian government, Shaykh al-Ya'qūbī framed the ongoing conflict in eschatological terms, and in doing so drew upon a long tradition of North African Shādhilī Sufi terminology and vocabularies of spiritual and political vicegerency ( khilāfa ). Specifically, this article argues that Shaykh al-Ya'qūbī drew heavily upon the works of the nineteenth-century Moroccan Sufi Shaykh Muḥammad al-Fāsī (d. 1870), whose thoughts on vicegerency and eschatology informed and animated al-Ya'qūbī's response to the conflict in Syria. To demonstrate al-Fāsī's pivotal role in the formation of the Syrian Revolution's spiritual politics, this article draws upon both intellectual history and original ethnographic fieldwork. It begins with a discussion of migration and mobility, detailing the significance of mobile diasporas in incubating Shādhilī Sufi traditions outside the Maghrib, and offers a corrective to current scholarship on the Shādhilī tradition in the Arab East. From there, it uses eschatology as an entry point into Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ya'qūbī's spiritual politics and those of Muḥammad al-Fāsī, upon which it relies. This article then proceeds to a deeper intellectual history of Shaykh al-Fāsī, specifically his mobilization of extant medieval North African spiritual vocabularies and his development of new ones. The article concludes by connecting these premodern North African spiritual trends to the Syrian Revolution by examining Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ya'qūbī's use of Moroccan Sufi vocabularies in his own engagement with the Syrian Revolution.

Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily

Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily

Timber imports to Norse Greenland: lifeline or luxury?

The native trees of Greenland are unsuitable for larger construction projects or shipbuilding. Instead, the Norse colonists (AD 985–1450) relied on driftwood and imported timber. The provenance and extent of these imports, however, remain understudied. Here, the author uses microscopic anatomical analyses to determine the taxa and provenance of wood from five Norse Greenlandic sites. The results show that while the needs of most households were met by local woodlands and driftwood, elite farms had access to timber imports from Northern Europe and North America. By demonstrating the range of timber sources used by the Greenland Norse, the results illustrate connectivity across the medieval North Atlantic world.

Timber as a Marine Resource: Exploitation of Arctic Driftwood in the North Atlantic

Abstract The North Atlantic islands of the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland have always been relatively poor in terms of native timber resources, due to their cold climate and exposed topography. Nevertheless, timber was vital to the material culture of the Norse settlers of these islands, and driftwood often met this need. As in subarctic Norway, where trees are also scarce, driftwood use and ownership were prescribed in medieval law codes. Historical documentary evidence shows that wealthy landowners bought driftwood rights as valuable assets, and ethnohistorical sources reveal a wide range of local and regional customs related to driftwood exploitation. However, driftwood was an unstable resource, and its delivery depended on a range of unpredictable factors related to climate and ocean currents. There is also ongoing debate regarding the relative importance of imported timber, which is for example often referenced in the Icelandic sagas. The use of driftwood is difficult to demonstrate through macroscopic, microscopic, or (geo-)chemical analysis. Similarities in the microscopic anatomy of boreal wood taxa preclude definitive provenancing through taxonomic analysis, and material traces of immersion in seawater are often either impermanent or ambiguous, especially in archaeological wood remains. This paper presents a comprehensive review of current historical and archaeological research on the exploitation of driftwood timber in the Medieval North Atlantic and explores potential future directions in this field. Furthermore, it asserts that this line of research should be pursued with some urgency, as anthropogenic climate change threatens both driftwood delivery and the preservation of archaeological wood remains.

Women in Early Medieval North India.

Women in Early Medieval North India.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Проблемы концептуализации традиционной общественной организации Кабарды (XVI–XVIII вв.)

This paper analyzes the ways of reconstruction and conceptualization of the traditional organiza-tion of society and power of Kabarda in the 16th–18th centuries. This work studies features of the presentation in the generalizing works of the stage-typological characteristics of the traditional society of Kabardians in the complex of socio-spatial, socio-economic and potestary-political conditions of development. Demographic, territorial and economic factors of social and political development are emphasized as key problems, being the focus of the research attention. The in-consistency of the characteristics of the social system of medieval North Caucasian societies in historiography, presented in a summary picture of the history of “mountain feudalism”, is noted. There is a tendency to reduce the analysis of the social organization of Kabardians to the problems of “features” and “level” of development of “Kabardian feudalism”. Potestary-political identifica-tion of Kabarda in the 16th–18th centuries in the sense of organizational and governance forms of institutionalization of power is emphasized as a problem that is difficult to solve. Also, attention is drawn to the development of fruitful traditions of domestic and foreign historiography associat-ed with the study of ancient forms of statehood and institutional alternatives and analogues to the state. Successful interpretations of the social organization of traditional Kabardian society and forms of institutionalization of power are associated with modern political anthropological con-cepts, within which an assessment is made of the level of development of the considered tradi-tional and archaic communities in studying complexity of the ideological, economic, social, de-mographic, and territorial components.

Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire: Ideals and Expectations during the Reign of Louis the Pious (813–828). By Rutger Kramer. The Early Medieval North Atlantic. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 277 pp. $144.00 hardback.

Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire: Ideals and Expectations during the Reign of Louis the Pious (813–828). By Rutger Kramer. The Early Medieval North Atlantic. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 277 pp. $144.00 hardback. - Volume 91 Issue 3

The Early Icelandic Moral Economy According to the Major Poems of Egill Skallagrímsson

The Early Icelandic Moral Economy According to the Major Poems of Egill Skallagrímsson

Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, by Elizabeth A. Cecil

Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, by Elizabeth A. Cecil

Rutger Kramer, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire. Ideals and Expectations during the Reign of Louis the Pious (813–828). (The Early Medieval North Atlantic.) Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020

Article Rutger Kramer, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire. Ideals and Expectations during the Reign of Louis the Pious (813–828). (The Early Medieval North Atlantic.) Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 was published on February 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 314, issue 1).

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

Outlawry, Liminality, and Sanctity in the Literature of the Early Medieval North Atlantic

Outlawry, Liminality, and Sanctity in the Literature of the Early Medieval North Atlantic

The Muqaddam Represented in the pre-Mongol Persian Documents from Ghur

This paper addresses the Muqaddam, or the village headman, the relevant fiscal department, and the process of tax collection as represented in pre-Mongol Persian documents found recently in the Ghur region in present day Afghanistan. It argues that “Muqaddam” was the title used for a village notable associated with the fiscal department called the Diwān al-Ikhtiyārī. The Muqaddam collected the ʿushr, or the state's shares of harvests as prescribed under Islamic law. The tax is collected only in the presence of the Muʿtamid, who is the Diwān's trusted agent. Tax collection followed the Diwān's issuance of an edict termed ḥukm-i tafṣīl, which detailed the instructions given to the Muqaddam. The analysis in this article highlights the Ghurid aspect of the Muqaddam's role, which was previously unknown. This is due in part to the scarcity of primary sources about his roles; in part because the Muqaddam mentioned in the medieval north Indian Persian literature overshadowed discussion on the Muqaddam. By analysing the Ghurid documents, this paper thus argues “Muqaddam” was a term specifically used in the Ghur region in a particular agricultural context.