Post-medieval Period Research Articles

Refining Chronological Resolution in Iron Age Scotland: Excavations at Dorman's Island Crannog, Dumfries and Galloway

Excavations were carried out at the crannog known as Dorman's Island, Whitefield Loch in Wigtownshire, SW Scotland as part of the Scottish Wetland Archaeology Programme. Although limited in extent, the excavation has uncovered dating evidence for multiple phases of construction and use of the crannog, including secondary activity in the post-medieval period, with finds including a range of coarse stone tools as well as fragments of glass bracelet and shard from a Roman drinking vessel. Perhaps most significantly, in situ oak timbers have yielded the first prehistoric dendrochronological dates in Scotland, indicating a phase of construction in the earlier second century BC. This initial evidence correlates with evidence from the Irish dendrochronological record that suggests construction on lochs may have occurred in irregular 'pulses' of activity – one of which was in the second century BC. The significance and potential of these results in the context of the northern British Iron Age are discussed.

Idiocy and Madness in Princely European Families

Idiocy and Madness in Princely European Families

A Scythian Burial-Mound with a Sarcophagus Bearing Painted Decoration

Abstract In 1976 an expedition of the Archaeology Institute of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic investigated Scythian Burial-mound No. 9 in a group of burial-mounds near the village of Mar’evka in the Zaporozhie District of the Zaporozhie Region. The mound had been erected from blocks of turf in the manner traditional for the Scythians. Later on a Polovtsian shrine was evidently erected on top of the mound but in the post-Medieval period this would appear to have been destroyed (the base and the lower part of a statue have survived intact). The mound was erected over a grave in the form of a catacomb with two entrances and a burial of a bridled horse in a separate pit. The grave was looted in antiquity. Among the remains of grave goods typical for Scythian burials of various levels rare items were also discovered, including fragments of a sword with one cutting edge, a gold ring with a coin used for its bezel (a Pantikapaion stater). The most remarkable find of all was a board from the lid of a sarcophagus bearing painted decoration. The decoration, applied in three tiers, consisted of battle scenes depicting three pairs of fighting warriors. The attire, weaponry and poses of the warriors make it possible to assume that the decoration illustrates one of the motifs from the mythology of Ancient Greece – Amazonomachy. The dimensions and arrangement of the burial-chamber and the diverse grave goods indicate that a number of individuals had been buried in it – an individual of high rank accompanied by his servants. Details of the funerary rite (the overall lay-out of the grave and its details, features of the horse burial) and also the range of artefacts enable us to date the burial-mound to the very end of the 4th or beginning of the 3rd century BC.

Lockerbie Academy

Trial trenching carried out by CFA Archaeology Ltd in 2006 to the north of Lockerbie Academy (NGR: NY 13398273) identified four areas of archaeological significance covering a timescale from early Neolithic to post-medieval periods. The earliest site identified was the remains of a Neolithic timber hall, which was situated on top of the flat plateau towards the northwest end of the site (Area A). Pottery recovered from the Neolithic structure was of the Carinated Bowl ceramic tradition. At the summit of the rounded knoll in the centre of the area (Area D) a Bronze Age phase consisting of a cremation and inhumation cemetery enclosed by a possible ring-cairn was identified. The Bronze Age cemetery included a Collared Urn and a copper alloy dagger of Butterwick type. At the base of the rounded knoll, the remains of an Early Historic timber hall were identified (Area C). This Anglian timber hall reoccupied the site of a post-built structure, which was interpreted as a timber hall, possibly belonging to an earlier British tradition. Radiocarbon dates taken from the primary fill of two of the post-holes of the earlier structure gave dates which are broadly contemporary with the dates obtained for the Anglian hall, suggesting that the post-built structure immediately preceded it. A corn-drying kiln was identified cut into the same knoll as the Bronze Age cemetery (Area D) and has been dated to the late medieval or early post-medieval period. A segmented ditched enclosure was located towards the north-east end of the site (Area B), but the poor survival of this feature combined with a lack of finds and palaeobotanical evidence means that it remains undated and poorly understood.

Vernacular Parallels: Brochs and Blackhouses

The buildings of the Western Isles of Scotland have been subject to archaeological study for the last 150 years, with a singular focus on buildings of the middle and later Iron Ages, but with occasional discussions about folk traditions and later post-medieval building techniques. Many writers have tended to adopt a negative view of the buildings of the post-medieval period, underestimating their complexity, their interest to the prehistorian and their utility as an indirect but important architectural analogy. This paper presents a model where aspects of use, materials and design in brochs are explored from a perspective informed by the study of blackhouses built in the same region. Without proposing a simplistic link between the two, evidence suggests that the respective builders may have responded to the challenging environment with similar solutions and, furthermore, that we can look at the wealth of information for post-medieval building techniques to help illuminate the buildings of prehistory.

Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World (review)

Reviewed by: Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World Simon Ditchfield Jacalyn Duffin. Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xvii + 285 pp. $29.95 (978-0-19-533650-4). Jacalyn Duffin is a historian and hematologist by training whose initial interest in this topic was sparked by her discovery that she had unwittingly acted as a peritus (expert) in the canonization trial of the first Canadian-born saint, Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais d’Youville (1701–77). Duffin’s focus is fourfold: to study how the concept of the miraculous has changed over her chosen period, to discover what it takes for a miracle to be approved by the Roman Catholic Church, to show the potential these records have for other historians, and, finally, to consider the relationship of medicine and religion. It must be said straightaway that the author largely succeeds in her ambitious project to offer the first overview of her topic for the postmedieval period. In her first chapter, she offers a brief history of canonization and sketches the role miracles played within it. Here Duffin is to be congratulated for insisting on the similarities between saint- and heretic-making. However, she might have made more of this, since the personnel involved were often one and the same, as in the case of Spanish canonist Francisco Peña, who was extensively involved with several of the trials immediately after the resumption of canonization in 1588 after a gap of sixty-five years, as well as being a leading member of the Roman Inquisition. Italian scholar Miguel Gotor (I beati del papa, 2002) has made a crucial contribution by showing how extensive was the role played by the Inquisition, which contested the authority claimed by the body specifically charged, since 1588, with making saints: the Sacred Congregation of Rites. For Duffin, the heroes of her story are the experts who managed to marry medical science with faith. None perhaps deserves the accolade more than Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659), sometime papal physician, on whose indispensable collection of case studies, collected together in ever-expanding editions of his Quaestiones medico-legales (1621ff) she draws, together with that magnificent guide to pre–Vatican II saint-making, Pope Benedict XIV’s De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (1734–38), to inform her impressive archival haul: testimonies of witnesses to no fewer than 1,409 miracles culled from the trials of all those beatified or canonized between 1588 and 1999 in the Vatican archives and library (though files that postdate 1939 are still closed to scholars, and Duffin was forced to rely on secondary sources). In chapter 2, Duffin turns to the supplicants and, with the assistance of a number of statistical tables that pepper her text to instructive effect, she skillfully balances (often moving) descriptions of individual cases with general trends. The latter include the intensity of appeals by anxious parents for their child’s cure, which flies in the face of the argument made by some historians that somehow affection for offspring on the part of premoderns was attenuated by high levels of infant mortality. In chapter 3, Duffin considers the miracles themselves and shows that physical healing was the single most important form of miracle in the seventeenth century and, if anything, increased in importance in the twentieth century (up from 87 percent to 96 percent). One of the most fascinating insights was that miracles changed as understanding of [End Page 289] disease changed, with a shift of focus from symptoms to specific organs: “Until the eighteenth century, anatomical localization was unimportant for diagnosis” (p. 85). In chapter 4, Duffin turns to the doctors, whose presence is well chronicled from the beginning. As early as the 1601 investigation into the case of the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), seventeen of the sixty-five cases contained physician testimony. Chapter 5, “The Cure as Drama,” is a fitting capstone to this well-crafted and illuminating study, which marries statistical sophistication with a sensitivity to individual cases. In her conclusion, Duffin remarks on how the structure of the healing narratives over the four centuries of her study...

Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East

What the Anglo-Saxons “knew” about Asia and its inhabitants was drawn from Biblical exegesis, saints' lives, and other texts derived from Latin sources. Numerous Old English and Anglo-Latin texts of varied genre and contents give evidence of an intense interest in the East that serves both to define Anglo-Saxon origins and to depict outsiders of varying types that are made to perform as “Other” to members of the Anglo-Saxon community. Ælfric follows Augustine and Isidore in his division of the world into three regions whose people are descended from the biblical Ham, Shem, and Cham; the division is depicted in Anglo-Saxon world maps and referenced in poetry such as the Old English Genesis. The Beowulf-manuscript contains several texts about “the East” including the prose Wonders of the East, Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and Life of Saint Christopher, as well as the poems Judith and Beowulf. The outlandish creatures described and illustrated in each of these texts figure as outsiders to Anglo-Saxon culture and function to structure masculinity and social cohesion. Images of monstrosity are interwoven with figurations of femininity to bring the ideation of the “other” closer to home. Old English texts that refer to “the East” have more to do with Anglo-Saxon preoccupations with locating themselves geographically and temporally in Christian Europe than with historical realities. “The East” becomes at once monstrous, marvellous, and mysterious, a place of the imagination in quasi-historical accounts ranging from the Letter of Alexander to Beowulf, each of which depicts a realm whose wild characters and characteristics opposed the wished-for stability of roles and functions “at home” among the English. With all of these figurations existing together in a single manuscript, it becomes possible to argue that Asia as a whole functions in the same position to medieval Christian Europe in a comprehensive fashion, anticipating the “orientalism” of the post-medieval period.

Post-medieval sheep ( Ovis aries) metapodia from southern Britain

The ‘improvement’ of sheep ( Ovis aries) in southern Britain during the post-medieval period is examined using measurements taken on the metacarpals and metatarsals from the late 18th to 19th centuries AD site of Tumbling Fields, Tiverton, Devon. This data set is a rare and important metric archive from which is derived information on the conformation (size and shape) of sheep. Comparisons are presented from other medieval and post-medieval sites, which demonstrate that Tumbling Fields is comparable to other sites of a similar period. The comparisons presented also reveal temporal variation with bones from later sites being taller and more robust on average than those from earlier sites. In addition, the abnormalities of sheep ( O. aries) metapodia are examined. In particular, two different conditions are discussed: small, oval cavities in the proximal articulation of the metacarpals, and a ridge of bone on the proximal anterior shaft of the metatarsals. Comparisons are presented from other medieval and post-medieval sites, and potential aetiologies are discussed.

Romanesque art and thought in the twelfth century: essays in honor of Walter Cahn

First classified as an early phase of the Gothic, Romanesque art of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries presents a variety of challenges. Difficulties as to when the Romanesque began or ended (even within individual countries), the disparities in local idioms of the style, and its intrinsic links to nationalism in a variety of countries in the post-medieval period have sometimes hindered scholarly research on a European scale.It is a period and style that is best studied with no classificatory platform, as the many essays in this volume indicate. Some of the most eminent scholars in the field gathered in Princeton in 2006 to celebrate Walter Cahn, one of the doyens of the period, and this volume presents their research for the first time. Looking at the concepts of style and historiography, these essays set out to stimulate new scholarship in the Romanesque and to show us how we have tended to neglect it in recent studies. Issues of reception, innovation, nationalism, iconography, technology, dating, and geographic coverage are all examined and make this volume a necessary addition for all scholars of medieval art.

Materiality and Mutable Landscapes: Rethinking Seasonality and Marginality in Rural Ireland

Drawing on examples from Achill Island, County Mayo and from the north Antrim uplands, notions of marginality, isolation, and cultural stagnation associated with upland landscapes are explored in light of contradictory material and documentary data, raising questions about the materiality of marginality and challenging static, nationalist presentations of rural Irish life in the post-medieval period. Discussion of the Irish evidence is contextualized with reference to the twentieth-century construction of marginality in southern Appalachia.

Prehistoric and Historic Landscape Change in Aragón, Spain

The Moncayo Archaeological Survey (MAS) was initiated in 2000 to investigate population, economic and environmental change in a study area northwest of Zaragoza in the northeast of Spain. This is an interdisciplinary project which combines landscape archaeology with earth-science methodologies and approaches. Research undertaken during the first four field seasons has concentrated on reconstructing and explaining landscape change, while at the same time cataloguing existing archaeological records and prospecting for previously unknown sites. Two episodes of significant landscape change dating to the Neolithic/Bronze Age and post-medieval period have been identified from the geomorphological record. These are interpreted here as the result of human land-use change: in the prehistoric period from clearance of woodland during the Neolithic and the subsequent expansion of agriculture in the Bronze Age, and in the 19th century from the removal of upland woodland following changes in land ownership and management. Notably, evidence for erosion and deposition was not found for either the Roman or medieval periods when archaeological and historical evidence indicate that local population was at its highest and agriculture at its most intense, nor from the height of the Little Ice Age when climate is thought to have been at its most extreme. Therefore, direct relationships between the intensity of agriculture or climate change and landscape modification are rejected here in favour of a more complex interaction of multiple human and climatic variables. These can only be understood by a combination of high-resolution archaeological survey, geoarchaeological study and chronometric dating.

Medieval Clay-walled Houses: A Case Study from Norfolk

Attention is drawn to a hitherto neglected medieval tradition of clay-walled construction in East Anglia. Using data from archaeological excavations the author demonstrates that clay-walled houses were an important element of the housing stock in town and country alike. He concludes by examining the factors which led to the disappearance of these buildings during the post-medieval period and identifies some research priorities for the future study of these buildings.

Population sequences in a high altitude alpine environment: Archaeological sites and historical and environmental time

Since 1998, a group of archaeologists have been studying the long-term history of human settlement and activity in the mid to high altitude (1800m and above) in theParc National des Ecrins (southern French Alps). This research has identified a number of different phases of settlement since the end of the last Ice Age (10,000 years ago). Whilst we accept that it is impossible to present the variation in actual number of people present in these marginal milieus, we can present an overview of waxing and waning of human activity in our study area. Our research demonstrates that poeple moved into these high altitude zones as soon as the glaciers retreated. The first phase of extensive and relatively intensive activity dates to the Bronze Age (c. 2000 BC). During the Iron Age and Roman period there appears to have been a relative reduction in the level of activity. However, from the early medieval period onwards there is incontrovertible evidence for a substantial increase in activity. This culminates with the emergence of a “busy” landscape during the post-medieval period when mining and pastoral activities were at their peak.

English Woodlands and the Supply of Fuel for Industry

The perception of post-medieval English woodlands as a dwindling resource, felled to fuel industries whose consumption of charcoal and wood was unsustainable, was widely held in the middle of the 20th century. However, research into woodland and industrial management has shown that for many estates coppicing practices made woods a renewable resource, and that the development of industrial uses of mineral fuel was not only to combat increasing wood prices but also due to the inherent attractions of innovative coal-using processes. It has become clear that at the end of the Middle Ages coppicing was not universal, and that the skills of managing sustainable woodlands developed over the 16th and 17th centuries. Archive and archaeological evidence shows that after a peak in the use of wood-derived fuels at the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, woodland management shifted towards the production of timber, with cutting-cycles longer than those practised for the fuel trades. This paper considers aspects of the archaeology of woodland management: how far woodland products and their industrial destinations can be identified; the physical indicators of former managed woodlands; patterns of change over the post-medieval period, and concludes with a brief consideration of the socio-economic context of the woodland economy.

Domestic material culture and post-medieval archaeology in Greece: a case-study from the Cyclades Islands

The Kyklades or Cycladic Islands have always been popular amongst archaeologists working on the Aegean Bronze Age and the 'glorious' Classical Greek past. In contrast, not much light has been shed upon aspects of post-Roman life on the islands. Research into the post-medieval period has been a subject mainly for historians and folklorists. This paper attempts to explore aspects of the lifestyle of the peoples who inhabited this island group throughout the more recent, yet most neglected centuries of Greek history, using archaeological, textual and other sources and methods. My aim is to reconstruct everyday rural life in Greece, by focusing on the domestic sphere and addressing questions concerning society and the domestic material culture of a littoral area that has remained traditional until very recently.This paper examines some first results of the CY.RE.P. (Cyclades Research Project) and introduces examples concerning the domestic material culture of the late medieval and post-medieval periods (early 13th–late 19th centuries) in the Aegean Islands of the Cyclades, with particular reference to housing, furniture and internal fittings, costumes and embroideries.

Designed Landscapes: The Regional Dimension

Designed landscapes are usually studied at a national level, and local and regional variations largely ignored. But the ways in which different styles of design were adapted to local circumstances can tell us much about the principal aesthetic and social concerns of designers and landowners. Moreover, some aspects of local and regional variation may have a cultural and ideological dimension, and examining them may tell us much about the character of English provincial society in the post-medieval period. We thus need to think locally, as well as nationally, when studying designed landscapes: and we need to analyse them in terms of soil types and farming regions, rather than simply by administrative units such as counties. Such an approach is particularly well-suited to the skills of the landscape historian.

Characterising the late prehistoric, ‘Romano-British’ and medieval landscape, and dating the emergence of a regionally distinct agricultural system in South West Britain

Palaeoenvironmental evidence for the character of lowland cultural landscapes during the last 2500 years in Britain is poorly understood, owing to a combination of an over-reliance on data from upland sequences, and because lowland mires are typically located in positions marginal to areas of settlement and agriculture. This paper presents an attempt to derive environmental evidence for this time period from a lowland context in order to characterise the key periods of change and continuity in the lowlands. The study focuses on mid-Devon, in South West Britain, and uses small pollen sites which are embedded within the historic landscape. The South West is a particularly poor region for lowland environmental data, and has until now been reliant on upland sequences. The results show that continuity, rather than abrupt change, has characterised the landscape from the later Iron Age to the early medieval period (around cal AD 800). There is no palynologically distinct Roman period in the data, contrary to evidence from the high uplands of Exmoor that suggests a decline of the agricultural system during the immediate post-Roman period. Around cal AD 800 there is a change in the agricultural system from predominantly pastoral activities to one that led to relatively high proportions of cereal pollen appearing in the sequences, which is interpreted here as marking the onset of convertible husbandry, a regionally distinct agricultural system which is recorded from AD 1350, but whose origins are not documented. This agricultural system remained in place until the post-medieval period, when the predominant agricultural regime returned to pastoralism around AD 1750. The data clearly show discrepancies between the high uplands and the lowlands, demonstrating the potential hazards of extrapolating upland sequences to lowlands environments.

Archaeology and settlement in the Third Cataract region during the Medieval and Post-Medieval periods

This paper concentrates on the archaeology the Third Cataract Region of the Nile Valley, essentially the rocky course of the river between Tombos in the south and Kajbar in the north. The Medieval Period in Nubia can be defined as AD 500–1300, during which time the official religion was Christianity, whilst the Post-Medieval Period is AD 1300–1600, when both Christianity and Islam were present as popular religions, and there was no longer a central government in the region. The history, culture, and archaeology of both periods is presented, including material discovered during the Mahas Survey Project. For the Post-Medieval Period, the archaeology and settlement patterns are related to a model of Nubian society known from ethno-historic sources, indicating the elements which allowed that society to maintain cohesion in times of anarchy, viz. the Nubians and the ‘other’; togetherness; the organisation of settlement; and kinship. The use of these principles is tested against the archaeology of the region, in terms of several types of remains. These comprise cemeteries, for evidence of religions affiliations, including Islamisation; fortified houses (Diffis); and the ordinary houses and villages. In conclusion, the historical settlement pattern as reconstructed archaeologically is related to the Nubian classification of the landscape, and the way in which knowledge of this classification can aid in the interpretation of the archaeology is discussed.

Mid- to late-Holocene vegetation history of Greater Exmoor, UK: estimating the spatial extent of human-induced vegetation change

This paper presents the results from three pollen profiles from a group of small spring mire sites on the southern edge of Exmoor in south west England. The size and topography of these sites allow detailed local landscape histories around each site to be reconstructed which broadly cover the mid- to late-Holocene. Comparison of the individual local landscape histories demonstrates the scale of spatial variation in vegetation around the upland edge, and facilitates understanding of human-landscape interactions from the early Neolithic onward. In the early Neolithic significant short-term woodland disturbance is recorded around the upland fringe, including clearance of oak-hazel-elm woodland, suggesting that the shift from Mesolithic to Neolithic is not marked by a gradual environmental transition. Following this, there is clear evidence of Neolithic management of upland heath using fire, presumably for the management of upland grazing. Woodland clearances are recorded throughout the later Prehistoric period; however, the use of multiple profiling suggests that woodland clearance is spatially discrete, even within an area of 4 km2. Pastoral land use is dominant around the uplands until around 900–1,000 a.d., and there is no discernible Roman or post-Roman period impact in the vegetation, suggesting cultural stability from the late Iron Age to the early Medieval period. By 1,100 a.d., there is a shift to mixed arable-pastoral farming which appears to continue well into the post-Medieval period.

Palaeoecology of a medieval fishpond system (Vajgar, Czech Republic)

A palaeoecological investigation of a sediment core obtained from an artificial lake — the fishpond Vajgar (40 ha) near the town of Jindřichův Hradec, southern Bohemia, has been carried out in connection with extensive multidisciplinary research preceding the removal of its sediment. Samples from selected standard profile were subjected to chemical, pollen, and palaeoalgological analyses in order to study the chronology of vegetation development, anthropogenic impact on the landscape, and the development of an artificial fishpond ecosystem. The palaeoecological record under study comprises the period of extensive change from pre-cultural, silver fir-dominated forest vegetation into managed, agricultural landscape dominated by cereal fields and pastures. After Medieval colonization, the proportion between wooded and open landscape changed, and the composition of original forests shifted to pine. Pollen spectra from the High Middle Ages are characterized by high percentages of anthropogenic indicators and closely resemble the results from urban deposits (cesspits, wells, communication horizons, etc.). This period can be subdivided into a first phase correlated with the High and Late Middle Ages and a second phase correlated with the post Medieval period and partly maybe also with the agricultural collectivization of the 20th century. The earlier phase has a rather uniform character with a significant presence of grazing indicators and cereal weeds. After the collectivization of the 1950s and later, a substantial change in agricultural practices can be detected: the large-scale use of herbicides affecting the composition of agricultural ruderal species (e.g. decline of cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), rye (Secale), etc.). The development of the aquatic system of the fishpond Vajgar was studied by means of chemical and palaeoalgological analyses. On the basis of observed changes in the composition of subfossil algal communities, the fishpond history can be split into four distinct phases. It is assumed that the progression over individual phases was caused by changes in water chemistry that can be interpreted as shifts in water quality caused by the urbanization of the surrounding areas as well as by changes in agricultural practices. The results of the investigation of some chemical elements (especially heavy metals) show stratigraphic patterns that can be related to historical events. These results show that the mixing and bioturbation of the sediment was not so significant as might be expected.