An Open Access edition is available on the LUP and OAPEN websites. Across Europe, the early medieval period saw the advent of new ways of cereal farming which fed the growth of towns, markets and populations, but also fuelled wealth disparities and the rise of lordship. These developments have sometimes been referred to as marking an ‘agricultural revolution’, yet the nature and timing of these critical changes remain subject to intense debate, despite more than a century of research. The papers in this volume demonstrate how the combined application of cutting-edge scientific analyses, along with new theoretical models and challenges to conventional understandings, can reveal trajectories of agricultural development which, while complementary overall, do not indicate a single period of change involving the extension of arable, the introduction of the mouldboard plough, and regular crop rotation. Rather, these phenomena become evident at different times and in different places across England throughout the period, and rarely in an unambiguously ‘progressive’ fashion. Presenting innovative bioarchaeological research from the ground-breaking Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project, along with fresh insights into ploughing technology, brewing, the nature of agricultural revolutions, and farming practices in Roman Britain and Carolingian Europe, this volume is a critical new contribution to environmental archaeology and medieval studies in England and beyond. Contributors: Amy Bogaard; Hannah Caroe; Neil Faulkner; Emily Forster; Helena Hamerow; Matilda Holmes; Claus Kropp; Lisa Lodwick; Mark McKerracher; Nicolas Schroeder; Elizabeth Stroud; Tom Williamson.

How did the life course, with all its biological, social and cultural aspects, influence the lives, writings, and art of the inhabitants of early medieval England? This volume explores how phases of human life such as childhood, puberty, and old age were identified, characterized, and related in contemporary sources, as well as how nonhuman life courses were constructed. The multi-disciplinary contributions range from analyses of age vocabulary to studies of medicine, name-giving practices, theology, Old English poetry, and material culture. Combined, these cultural-historical perspectives reveal how the concept and experience of the life course shaped attitudes in early medieval England. Contributors are Jo Appleby, Debby Banham, Darren Barber, Caroline R. Batten, James Chetwood, Katherine Cross, Amy Faulkner, Jacqueline Fay, Elaine Flowers, Daria Izdebska, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Thijs Porck, and Harriet Soper.

Until recently, historians tended to stress the perceived technological and ecological shortcomings of medieval agriculture. The ten essays assembled in this volume offer a contrary view. Based upon close documentary analysis of the demesne farms managed for and by lords, they show that, by 1300, in the most commercialized parts of England, production decisions were based upon relative factor costs and commodity prices. Moreover, when and where economic conditions were ripe and environmental and institutional circumstances favourable, medieval cultivators successfully secured high and ecologically sustainable levels of land productivity. They achieved this by integrating crop and livestock production into the sort of manure-intensive systems of mixed-husbandry which later underpinned the more celebrated output growth of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If medieval agriculture failed to fulfill the production potential provided by wider adoption of such systems, this is more appropriately explained by the want of the kind of market incentives that might have justified investment, innovation, and specialization on the scale that characterized the so-called 'agricultural revolution', than either the lack of appropriate agricultural technology or the innate 'backwardness' of medieval cultivators.

Archaeology in the past century has seen a major shift from theoretical frameworks that treat the remains of past societies as static snapshots of particular moments in time to interpretations that prioritize change and variability. Though established analytical concepts, such as typology, remain key parts of the archaeologist’s investigative toolkit, data-gathering strategies and interpretative frameworks have become infused progressively with the concept that archaeology is living, in the sense of both the objects of study and the discipline as a whole. The significance for the field is that researchers across the world are integrating ideas informed by relational epistemologies and mutually constructive ontologies into their work from the initial stage of project design all the way down to post-excavation interpretation. This volume showcases examples of such work, highlighting the utility of these ideas to exploring material both old and new. The illuminating research and novel explanations presented contribute to resolving long-standing problems in regional archaeologies across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Oceania. In this way, this volume reinvigorates approaches taken towards older material but also acts as a springboard for future innovative discussions of theory in archaeology and related disciplines.

This is the first of three planned volumes which deal with the techniques and technology of agriculture in Europe in the period from 600 A.D. down to the 17th century. The focus of this first volume is Scandinavia, the British Isles, Northern Germany, the Low Countries and Northern France. The volume discusses methodological approaches and their limitations, the development of medieval agriculture in terms of the transmission of technological ideas, improvements in productivity, regional variations, social responses to agricultural technology, and those common trends that unite the Northwest European region.The volume integrates material derived from the great advances made in medieval archaeology and the historical study of landscapes during the past 30 years and has a supranational character. It will be of interest to all those working on the social, economic and political history of Northwest Europe in the medieval and early modern periods as well as to those undertaking research in the specific field of the history of technology.Technology and Change in HistoryThis new series of scholarly surveys is intended to offer an updating of the discussion of questions regarding the nature of technology and technological change first broached in the nine-volume survey by R. Forbes: Studies in Ancient Technology. The series will however take in not only the original scope of Forbes' work, namely the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, but will extend beyond this to cover the medieval and early modern periods.7The volumes in the series will be in English, of 300-800 pp., divided into 10-15 topical chapters and aim to present to scholars, graduate students and to non-specialist scholars the current state of knowledge in the various fields in the history of technology. They collect, assimilate and present facts, opinion, sources, and literature in the accessible way that Forbes did, but will also identify issues that have not been plainly addressed and will in doing so indicate where the field might profitably be going.Including notes and numerous illustrations, the volumes address questions of a primarily historical nature, such as: 1. what technological options were open to peoples at different times and different places? 2. what options did they choose and why? 3. what impact did this have on their contemporaries and successors (and on their technological choices)?Questions and problems more proper to political, social and economic history will also be touched upon, but the starting point and focus of this new series is the history of technology.Volumes planned in the series include:R.J. Curtis: Food Technology in Antiquity (1999)M.-C. Deprez-Masson and N.J. Mayhew (eds.): Metal Technology: 600-1800 A.D. (2001)P. Squatriti (ed.): Medieval Hydrotechnology (2001)O. Wikander (ed.): Ancient Water Technology (1998)G.R.H. Wright: Ancient Building Technology (1999)J. Langdon and G. Astill (eds.): Agrarian Technology in the Middle Ages: Northwest Europe (1996)

Originally published in 1981, The Origins of Open Field Agriculture looks at the problems connected with open field agriculture – the origins of strip cultivation, the three-field system, the adaptation of ‘Celtic’ fields, and the development of ploughing techniques. The book looks at the challenges to traditional ideas on the origins of settlement and their associated economy, and casts new light on understandings of village development. The book suggests that conventional views of the nucleated village, in the midst of open field strips as a product of the Anglo-Saxon migration, is no longer tenable. The book brings together the work of distinguished archaeologists, historians, and historical geographers and opens up a new perspective on the early development of medieval agriculture.