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The relationship between handmilling, undertaken in domestic contexts, and mechanized mills in medieval Kent is used to challenge linear approaches to economic progress in the Middle Ages. Inspired by posthuman perspectives which emphasize messiness, non-linearity and multiplicity, medieval economic development is re-imagined as a patchwork of intensive material processes. In so doing, an approach is developed which works towards dissolving problematic binaries between gendered labour, domestic and economic spheres and the Middle Ages and modernity.

Using examples from medieval Europe and Africa, an approach to understanding urban open spaces is proposed. We argue that new digital and high-resolution methodologies, combined with interpretive frameworks which stress the affective capacities of the material world, call for a reappraisal of open spaces as places of disruption, creativity, and emergent urbanity. We advance an intensive approach to create a methodological basis on which to reimagine emptiness as a stimulus for interaction, applying Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth/striated space. Key themes are the role of open spaces in the negotiation of power, their capacity to facilitate encounters, and their role as a resource from which distinctive forms of urbanity might emerge. The paper advocates for greater attention to be paid to open spaces in the study of medieval urbanism.

A new theoretical approach to medieval rural settlement, built on the concept of intensity, is proposed. It is argued that analysing settlements as intensive spaces creates new opportunities to explore the emergence of difference in medieval lived experience. The approach is intended to overcome the challenges posed by approaches to medieval architecture framed by binary divisions (e.g. inside/outside). Drawing on posthuman thought, it is argued that such divisions constrain the understanding of how and why difference emerged in the past. The paper advances this approach through its application to the study of house construction and domestic economy in the medieval village of Hangleton, England. It is proposed that difference emerges as everyday practices are performed in constantly changing material environments, generating situationally grounded but varied experiences of rurality. Rather than being subject to macro-scale economic processes, this approach allows us to understand historical change as a patchwork of localised interactions which overflowed the bounds of communities or regions.

Food is often one of the most distinctive expressions of social, religious, cultural or ethnic groups. However, the archaeological identification of specific religious dietary practices, including the Jewish tradition of keeping kosher, associated with ritual food practices and taboos, is very rare. This is arguably one of the oldest known diets across the world and, for an observant Jew, maintaining dietary laws (known as Kashruth) is a fundamental part of everyday life. Recent excavations in the early medieval Oxford Jewish quarter yielded a remarkable assemblage of animal bones, marked by a complete absence of pig specimens and a dominance of kosher (permitted) birds, domestic fowl and goose. To our knowledge, this is the first identification of a Jewish dietary signature in British zooarchaeology, which contrasted markedly with the previous Saxon phase where pig bones were present in quantity and bird bones were barely seen. Lipid residue analysis of pottery from St Aldates showed that vessels from the possible Jewish houses were solely used to process ruminant carcass products, with an avoidance of pig product processing, correlating well with the faunal data. In contrast, lipid analysis of pottery from comparative assemblages from the previous Saxon phase at the site and a contemporaneous site in the city, The Queen’s College, shows that the majority of these vessels appear to have been used to process mixtures of both ruminant and non-ruminant (pig) products. Here, the combination of organic residue analysis, site excavation and animal and fish bone evidence was consistent with the presence of Jewish houses in eleventh- and twelfth-century St Aldates, Oxford, hitherto only suspected through documentary information. This is the first identification of specific religious dietary practices using lipid residue analysis, verifying that, at least 800 years ago, medieval Jewish Oxford communities practised dietary laws known as Kashruth.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235005.].

Archaeology has yet to capitalise on the opportunities offered by bioarchaeological approaches to examine the impact of the 11th-century AD Norman Conquest of England. This study utilises an integrated multiproxy analytical approach to identify and explain changes and continuities in diet and foodways between the 10th and 13th centuries in the city of Oxford, UK. The integration of organic residue analysis of ceramics, carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotope analysis of human and animal bones, incremental analysis of δ13C and δ15N from human tooth dentine and palaeopathological analysis of human skeletal remains has revealed a broad pattern of increasing intensification and marketisation across various areas of economic practice, with a much lesser and more short-term impact of the Conquest on everyday lifestyles than is suggested by documentary sources. Nonetheless, isotope data indicate short-term periods of instability, particularly food insecurity, did impact individuals. Evidence of preferences for certain foodstuffs and cooking techniques documented among the elite classes were also observed among lower-status townspeople, suggesting that Anglo-Norman fashions could be adopted across the social spectrum. This study demonstrates the potential for future archaeological research to generate more nuanced understanding of the cultural impact of the Norman Conquest of England, while showcasing a method which can be used to elucidate the undocumented, everyday implications of other large-scale political events on non-elites.

Resilience is a key theme in contemporary urban studies, with researchers seeking to understand what it is that makes some urban communities better equipped to cope with trauma than others. However, this scholarship rarely draws on historical examples to understand how resilience might emerge over the long term. This chapter introduces key concepts relating to resilience and the ways in which communities are able to anticipate trauma and applies these ideas to understanding the resilience of the community of medieval Southampton. Southampton faced a number of traumatic events in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, not least the Black Death and a French raid in 1338. Evidence from archaeological excavations in the city is drawn upon to consider the different ways that members of Southampton’s community were able to protect their interests, build resilience and anticipate trauma, and the implications of their actions for urban development. The chapter demonstrates how the idea of resilience can be used to provide deeper insights into the political structure of medieval towns, and also assesses how archaeological evidence might be used to further develop and test concepts which are more typically used in understanding the modern city.

Using the example of pottery imported into the Channel ports of southern England, an approach to examining the role of pottery in the emergence and mediation of coastal communities is proposed. Building upon recent scholarship it is argued that it is no longer tenable to see pottery as a carrier of identity or as part of a ‘cultural package’, with meaning instead emerging with identity as people interact with pottery within and outside of port environments. The study proposes that imported pottery found meaning in different ways depending upon the context of acquisition and use and, as such, it mediated different forms of community and identity. The paper ends with a consideration of the wider implications of this approach for ongoing studies of material culture, trade and urban identities in medieval Europe.

Over the last 30 years we have become increasingly aware of the commercializing nature of the medieval English economy. However, these insights have had little impact on narratives of consumption, which persist in seeing it as a characteristic of modernity. Here it is argued that we must move away from seeing an early modern consumer revolution and instead think about consumption in medieval society, particularly to examine the implications of commercialization for identity and selfhood. A framework is developed, building upon David G. Shaw’s use of the ‘social self’ and the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to explore how the increasing variability of a wider range of objects impacted upon the negotiation of selfhood in the 13th-15th centuries

I would like to thank the three respondents for their comments and, in reflecting upon them, take the opportunity to think about their implications for medieval material culture studies, particular...

The medieval English escheator was a royal official who seized the goods and chattels of felons, fugitives and outlaws for the crown’s benefit. This article uses escheators' inquests and accounts to ask: what information exists about the location of forfeited possessions at the point of their appraisal by the escheator, and what is revealed about the use of space in the houses and outbuildings of lower status people? We also ask more general questions about contemporary understanding of the relationship between domestic objects and space. We find that there was limited interest in describing possessions according to their position within buildings. Nonetheless, one may use the order of items as they are recorded in the escheators’ lists of forfeited goods to explore the issues raised in the article. The records reveal an emphasis on the difference between 'household utensils' and other movables, especially crops and livestock.

It is proposed that assemblage theory offers the possibility of exploring archaeological evidence in innovative ways, in order to write alternative narratives of urban development. By combining historical and archaeological scholarship with work in contemporary urban geography, it is proposed that the concept of urban decline in the later Middle Ages is problematic and a more fruitful alternative approach would be to focus on the transformation of urban assemblages. These ideas are explored by drawing upon archaeological evidence from Southampton, UK.

Archaeological evidence is used to examine how urban life changed in the later medieval towns of Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire in southern England, in light of ongoing debates about the existence of a fifteenth-century urban ‘decline’. The article proposes that rather than seeking evidence of decline, we should consider how and why experiences of urban life vary. The role of towns in commercial and political networks is highlighted as a key cause of variability in late medieval urban experience.

It is proposed that our understanding of medieval town foundation is limited by a failure to appreciate that ‘town’ is a relational category. It is argued that urban character emerges from social relations, with some sets of social relationship revealing urbanity and others not, as places develop along distinctive, but related, trajectories. This argument is developed through the application of assemblage theory to the development of towns in thirteenth-century southern England. The outcome is a proposal that, by focusing on the social relations through which towns are revealed as a distinctive category of place, we can better comprehend why and how towns mattered in medieval society and develop a greater understanding of the relationship of urbanization to other social processes such as commercialization and associated changes in the countryside.

Multiple strands of evidence are combined to determine the impact of the Norman Con-quest on food culture. Diet is reconstructed from the analysis of zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical and ceramic evidence, as well as through an analysis of the 12th-century text Urbanus magnus. This text is then examined alongside the study of artefacts to reconstruct practices surrounding cooking and dining. The chapter concludes that the Norman Conquest did not have a clear and consistent impact on food culture. Whilst some changes, particularly to elite cuisine, can be related to Norman influences, others, such as an increase in fish consumption, are in fact indicative of longer-term trends. It is considered that the continuities and changes observed caused different experiences of the Conquest to be mediated through food, for some allowing new forms of elite, Norman, identity to emerge, whilst for others the consumption of familiar foods provided stability in a changing world.

Building upon the debate published in volume 19 ofArchaeological dialogues, this contribution explores how, rather than seeing deposits as meaningful, we can move to explore the processes through which things and spaces become waste as well as the broader social effects of these processes in relation to elements of identity and sense of place. An extended case study of depositional practice in the early medieval settlement of Hamwic (Southampton, UK) is presented, to demonstrate how depositional practice caused waste, people and spaces to develop particular meaning in the emergence of an urban settlement, and served as a medium for the negotiation of continuity and change in the lives of the settlement and its inhabitants.

Jette Linaa’s analysis of urbanity and consumption in medieval and post-medieval Aarhus is a bold attempt to utilise a large body of archaeological evidence in a theoretically informed way to shed ...

Studies of Anglo-Norman material culture, and pottery in particular, have struggled to see how processes of change are reflected in the material record. In this paper I propose a new approach to the analysis of this material. By reconstructing how people interacted with objects, we can see how the agency to create Anglo-Norman England was distributed through interactions between people and their surroundings. Furthermore, rather than being reflected in such interactions, continuity and change flowed through engagements with objects, generating unique meanings and experiences. This approach therefore challenges the existing ontology that underlies our understanding of the period and its political developments and ethnic identities.

Soil micromorphology, a method that analyzes undisturbed soils and sediments in thin section using petrographic microscopes, has proven a useful tool for the study of archaeological sites. In particular, this geoarchaeological method is suitable for tackling a number of questions that are recurrent in research on early medieval towns and are often difficult to study with other methods. The starting point of the research that prompted this paper was to evaluate how micromorphology can enhance our understanding of issues such as the origins, functions and organisation of towns, and daily life and living conditions within them. This contribution explores a selection of themes to which micromorphology has effectively contributed in the research of towns of the 8th to 10th century AD, illustrated with examples from Kaupang (Norway) and Antwerp (Belgium).

Absorbed lipid residues from 24 seventh- to ninth-century coarseware potsherds from the major Anglo-Saxon trading centre of Hamwic (Southampton, UK) were analysed by gas chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC–MS) in order to reconstruct the dietary habits of its population. The results show that the vessels were used for preparing ruminant fats and leafy vegetables. In addition, evidence was found for a minor contribution of aquatic foods. Beeswax was found once and most probably relates to a sealing function or to honey. Remarkable features were: (i) the isomeric mixture of octadecenoic acid (C18:1 Δ7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16) and 8- to 16-hydroxyoctadecanoic acid, and (ii) the co-occurrence of C17:1, C19:1 and isoprenoid fatty acids. These features were proposed as biomarkers for ruminant and aquatic food sources, respectively. Furthermore, the carbonyl position distribution in mid-chain ketones was used to identify mixtures of animal- and plant-derived ketones. The paper highlights the difficulty in interpreting complex lipid signatures that show a mixture of various foods, as observed in the majority of the samples. This was linked to the preparation of stews or the recycling of vessels. The results are considered alongside ceramic usewear data and existing data relating to environmental remains recovered from the Hamwic excavations.

A study was undertaken to assess the potential of the integrated analysis of metalwork excavated from medieval (late 13th–16th-century) rural settlements in the midlands of England and inventories (dating from c 1370–c 1440) drawn from the royal escheators’ records for the same region. The study aimed to explore the value and meaning of objects to the non-elite members of rural communities and focussed on three classes of artefact: metal vessels, tools and dress accessories. The analysis investigates medieval value systems by exploring evidence for aspiration, recycling and differences between town and country.

This study investigates how engagements with objects are active in the construction of a ‘social assemblage’, drawing on influences from work on ‘symmetrical archaeology’ and Actor-Network Theory. This interpretive perspective is explored through a case study, investigating the pottery consumed in Anglo-Saxon Southampton, demonstrating how engagements through exchange, use and deposition were active in creating a patchwork of connections which came together to create a distinct social assemblage. In particular, the article considers the multitude of ways that pottery and people were categorized through material engagements and the interpretive and methodological challenges that this presents to archaeology as a whole.

BUILDING ON HAMEROW'S previous study in Medieval Archaeology 50, the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon 'special deposits', primarily of animal bone and pottery, from England are discussed. By examining their composition and the variable nature of depositional practices, we question why these deposits are considered 'special'. Such deposits are often interpreted within a ritual or functional dichotomy and we propose that the adoption of a biographical approach to individual remains can help elucidate the many and varied human actions and means behind their creation.