In Craftsmen and Jewelers in the Middle and Lower Danube Region (6th to 7th Centuries) Daniela Tănase uses archaeological evidence to examine blacksmithing and goldsmithing and shows how the practice was subject to multiple influences.

This volume examines interdisciplinary boundaries and includes texts focusing on material culture, philological analysis, and historical research. What they all have in common are zones that lie in between, treated not as mere barriers but also as places of exchange in the early Middle Ages. Focusing on borderlands, Continuation or Change uncovers the changing political and military organisations at the time and the significance of the functioning of former borderland areas. The chapters answer how the fiscal and military apparatus were organised, identify the turning points in the division of dynastic power, and assign meaning to the assimilation of certain symbolic and ideological elements of the imperial tradition. Finally, the authors offer answers to what exactly a "statehood without a state" was in regard to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas that were also perceived through the prism of the idea of a world system, network theory, or the concept of so-called negotiating borderlands. Continuation or Change is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in medieval warfare, Eastern European history, medieval border regions, and cross-cultural interaction.

In The Long Sixth Century in Eastern Europe, Florin Curta offers a social and economic history of East Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe during the 6th and 7th centuries.

Winner of the 2016 George Bariţiu Prize In The Mortuary Archaeology of the Medieval Banat (10th – 14th centuries) Silviu Oţa highlights the interactions between different ethnic groups as reflected in burial customs and funerary practices. The book will deal with the Banat as a whole (as opposed to the Romanian, Serbian or Hungarian parts of the region) since the modern political borders are not identical with the cultural boundaries in the Middle Ages. On a more general level, the goal of this book is to analyse the social dynamics in the region. The author rejects the idea that any of the "archaeological cultures" identified in the Banat (e.g. the Bjelo Brdo culture) may be associated with any single ethnic group. Winner of the 2016 George Bariţiu Prize from the Romanian Academy for outstanding contribution to the development of Romanian culture and science in the area of history and archaeology. The prize, named after the towering figure of George Bariţiu (1812-1893) in nineteenth-century Romanian political and cultural life and former president of the Academy, is awarded for originality of the work, its contribution to its field, and its impact at the national level of the field development.

This collection of studies is the result of a six-year interdisciplinary research project undertaken by an international team, and constitutes a completely new approach to environmental, cultural and settlement changes around the mid-first millennium AD in Central Europe.

In The Pechenegs: Nomads in the Political and Cultural Landscape of Medieval Europe, Aleksander Paroń offers a reflection on the history of the Pechenegs, a nomadic people which came to control the Black Sea steppe by the end of the ninth century. Nomadic peoples have often been presented in European historiography as aggressors and destroyers whose appearance led to only chaotic decline and economic stagnation. Making use of historical and archaeological sources along with abundant comparative material, Aleksander Paroń offers here a multifaceted and cogent image of the nomads’ relations with neighboring political and cultural communities in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

In Khazaria in the Ninth and the Tenth Centuries Boris Zhivkov offers a new view on Khazaria by scrutinizing the different visions offered by recent scholarship. The paucity of written sources has made it necessary to turn to additional information about the steppe states in this period, and to analyze exceptional cases not directly related to the Khazars. In re-examining the Khazars, he thus uses not only the known documentary sources and archaeological finds but also what we know from history of religions (comparative mythology), history of art, structural anthropology and folklore studies. In this way the book draws together a synthesis of conclusions, information and theory.