Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400-900 [Paperback]

The excavation of settlements has in recent years transformed our understanding of north-west Europe in the early Middle Ages. We can for the first time begin to answer fundamental questions such as: what did houses look like and how were they furnished? how did villages and individual farmsteads develop? how and when did agrarian production become intensified and how did this affect village communities? what role did craft production and trade play in the rural economy? In a period for which written sources are scarce, archaeology is of central importance in understanding the 'small worlds' of early medieval communities. Helena Hamerow's extensively illustrated and accessible study offers the first overview and synthesis of the large and rapidly growing body of evidence for early medieval settlements in north-west Europe, as well as a consideration of the implications of this evidence for Anglo-Saxon England.1. Archaeological Approaches and Frameworks2. Houses and Households: The Archaeology of Buildings3. Settlement Structure and Social Space4. Land and Power: Settlements in their Territorial Context5. The Forces of Production: Crop and Animal Husbandry6. Rural Centres, Trade, and ProductionBibliographyIndex This short, clearly written book, the first of a series on medieval society, is...useful to archaeologists and historians alike. --Journal of Interdisciplinary History

The first overview of the evidence for settlements in North-West Europe