The non-urban revolution: reflections on the idea of the town in early medieval Britain
01 October 2018, 4:00 pm
Event Information
Open to
- All
Location
-
Room 612, UCL Institute of Archaeology
The first seminar in the UCL Institute of Archaeology Research Seminar series for Term I, 2018/19 will be given by Andrew Reynolds on 1 October.
Andrew's seminar is entitled 'The non-urban revolution: reflections on the idea of the town in early medieval Britain' and all are welcome to attend.
Abstract
Medieval archaeology is
a relative newcomer to the study of the past and one of its early achievements
in the 1960s was its claim to have revealed a hitherto unsuspected level of
urban culture in England before the Norman Conquest.
Prior to to this, historians had argued back and forth about the very existence of towns before the 11th century. Recent archaeological work, however, has shown just how rare urban places were in early England, prompting enquiry into exactly how society was structured and organised. This presentation reviews the topic in the light of new research into early medieval socio-political organisation that reveals a complex society that did not rely on centralisation as its principal mode of operation, but instead upon a multiplicity of places of varying function dispersed throughout the landscape. A case is made that site hierarchies as traditionally applied in archaeology require revision in the case of post-Roman societies in the Northern World.
UCL Institute of Archaeology Research Seminars Programme | Term I, 2018/19
Mondays, 4pm, Room 612 (some titles are still provisional)
- 1 October: Andrew Reynolds (World Archaeology) - The non-urban revolution: reflections on the idea of the town in early medieval Britain
- 8 October:
Andrew Bevan (Archaeological Sciences) - Food storage and
its cultural consequences across pre-industrial Europe
- 15 October: Gersande Eschenbrenner-Diemer (World Archaeology) - The TRACER Project: two years after. Results and Perspectives
- 22
October: Sefryn
Penrose (Heritage Studies) - My Margaret Thatcher Museum: from the
archaeology of the postindustrial to the archaeology of the neoliberal
-
[5 November: Reading Week - no seminar]
- 12 November: Miljana
Radivojevic (Archaeological Sciences) - The Making
of the Silk Roads: Bronze Age Metallurgy in the Eurasian Steppe
- 19 November: Jonathan Gardner (Heritage Studies) - What is to become of the Crystal Palace? Excavating the afterlives of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its building
- 26 November:
Michael Charlton (Archaeological Sciences) - Ironmaking
practice at Meroe, Sudan
- 3 December: Hana Morel (Heritage Studies) - Global challenges, governance and heritage
- 10 December: Dean Sully (Heritage Studies) - Punk Conservation: resolving the no future approach to conserving the past