Sunday 17 April 2011

Landscapes of Governance UCL Early Medieval Assembly Sites

 Thynghowe Anglo-Saxon and Viking Assembly Site Sherwood Forest

A three-year interdisciplinary research project bringing archaeology, place-names and written sources together in a national study of early medieval assembly sites.

Early medieval western Europe developed in the shadow of the classical Roman world. While substantial traces of the organizational capacity of the Roman Empire can still be seen in Britain, for example the Roman road network and Hadrians Wall, evidence for power and authority in the centuries following the Roman occupation is much more subtle. Arbitration, negotiation and dispute settlement were fundamental to the formation of kingdoms and ultimately the nation state of England, but the places where such activities occurred have never been comprehensively studied as archaeological sites, their names investigated only once in the last 80 years by the Scandinavian scholar O. S. Anderson.

Landscapes of Governance is a three-year interdisciplinary venture bringing archaeology, place-names and written sources together for the first time in a comprehensive national research project.


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