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.

"This collection of studies is the result of a six-year interdisciplinary research project undertaken by an international team of archaeologists, historians, numismatists and paleobotanists. It constitutes a completely new approach to environmental, cultural and settlement changes during the Migration Period in Central Europe. Part One discusses written sources, theories regarding migration, and environmental change in the first millennium AD. In Part Two, archaeological sources relating to Central Europe in the Migration Period are analysed, while Part Three is devoted to new discoveries between the Oder and the Vistula, including traces of Germanic settlement in northern Poland in the early seventh century. In Part Four, evidence for cultural and settlement changes in neighbouring areas is characterized in a comparative light."--

This book offers a collection of essays on Byzantine Italy which provides a fresh synthesis of current research as well as new insights on various aspects of its local societies from the 6th to the 11th century.

This book analyses the society, economy, settlement, and culture of the territory of present-day Estonia in the period of ca AD 450-1050. This period is known in the Estonian archaeological chronology as the Migration Period, the Pre-Viking Age, and the Viking Age. This was an era of rapid change, by the end of which traditional Estonian peasant culture as it is known until the 19th century had developed. Whereas in Western Europe written sources from the second half of the first millennium AD herald the arrival of the Middle Ages, there is an almost complete absence of written information about the prevailing conditions and events that took place in the area of present-day Estonia. There are only remains of the farms and fortresses of that time beneath the earth, as well as cemeteries, overgrown field baulks and clearance cairns, and the large amount of excavated ancient objects or fragments thereof. Many aspects of prehistoric life cannot be researched because the source material is not extant and there is no hope of finding it. Moreover, many phenomena of human life do not generate archaeological source material. Thus our overall understanding of the Estonian Middle Iron Age and the Viking Age is inevitably fragmentary and superficial.

The Goths-a rumored people first known by history around the river Vistula in present Poland-was the people that more than other contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. It was however also the Goths who preserved the Roman culture against other Germanic tribes. Earlier it has been generally assumed the Goths originated in Scandinavia but during the 20th c. many scholars have grown skeptical. The author has, using both Classical and Nordic sources and supplementary sciences, made probable there is an intimate connection between the Goths and the Nordic countries. Consequently it is quite possible that at least part of the Goths have a Nordic origin. The book rests on the basic hypothesis that the Goths are not a people but a number of tribes and peoples united through a common religious/cultic origin. The old dispute concerning the relationship between Svear and Gautar also gets quite a new meaning. The book is interdisciplinary and embraces history, religion, arts, linguistics and archaeology. In 1999 Ingemar Nordgren received his Ph.D. at Odense University, Denmark The book builds to a considerable extent on his dissertation but has been updated and partly rewritten with brand new material.

This book examines the ways Poland dealt with the territories and peoples it gained from Germany after the Second World War.

Gibbon offers an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written sources, though he was not the only historian to tackle the subject. Most of his ideas are directly taken from what few relevant records were available: those of the Roman moralists of the 4th and 5th centuries.