1. IntroductionRéalisés dans le cadre d’un mémoire de master soutenu à l’université Lyon 2, les présents travaux ont concerné un village d’Ardèche septentrionale, Boulieu-lès-Annonay, durant l’époque ...médiévale et le xvie siècle. Ils ont été motivés par l’existence de vestiges de cette période, particulièrement bien conservés dans la topographie urbaine actuelle. L’enceinte villageoise est en effet préservée en grande partie en plan, mais aussi en élévation. Se distinguent également plusieurs...
The paper explains the distribution, based on sources and historiographical works, of settlements on the Vérvár and Otok estate in the Vukovo County in Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom in the Late Middle ...Ages. The central part of the paper is the analysis of medieval documents with lists of settlements from 1437, 1446 and 1476. A brief overview of the ownership of the estate was made and the issue of the Selna estate becoming property of the Otok estate was presented. According to the lists of settlements and the years stated in them, geographical maps of the estate were made.
•First zooarchaeological evidence of cat fur exploitation in medieval Portugal.•Domestic cats remains bear cutmarks related to skinning, and possibly to meat consumption.•Sexual differentiation in ...domestic cats is difficult but may be attempted trough osteometric variation.•Cats were disposed of among domestic waste and not through careful burial.
The presence of domestic cats (Felis catus) in medieval urban settlements was frequent, as attested by cat remains identified among various faunal assemblages from that period. However, cat remains are rarely the focus of zooarchaeological analysis, and little is known about the interaction between these felines and humans at that time.
Archaeological excavations in Almada, Portugal, revealed the presence of storage pits filled with domestic waste from the Late Middle Ages. Among these, a unique collection of cat bones, representing 13 individuals, was found inside two storage pits filled during the 12th-13th century. We present the results obtained in the analysis of this cat assemblage, which stands out by the presence of several skeletons with cutmarks associated with skinning, possibly providing the first archaeological evidence of cat fur exploitation in medieval Portugal.
This study reviews all available sources and publications about the territory known in the 11th–14th century under the name of the Karvuna land (Karvunskata zemya), Karvona chora, Karvuna archontate ...and the town of Karvuna. The analysis contradicts the claim that Tsar Ivan Alexander’s charter form 1230 given to the merchants from the city of Dubrovnik includes all territories within the Bulgarian kingdom. The thesis that these territories have always been named after their administrative centers has also been rejected. This is supported by the Privilegium given by Emperor Alexios III Angelos to Venice in 1198. It is widely accepted, based on the territories listed in the Dubrovnic Charter – Tarnovo and entire Zagora, and Preslav, and the the Karvuna chora, that the centers of these two territories were the new and the old capital cities of Tarnovo and Veliki Preslav, and not a town named Karvuna. According to the written sources, other ports and fortresses did not exist to the north of the present-day city of Varna and the Danube estuary until the late 13th and the early 14th century. The data allows to reject the suggestion of the existence of a district center named Karvuna in the 10th–13th century. It has also been established that the theses that a town named Karvuna has given the name of the territory in the 11th century is based on sources dating back as late as the 14th–18th century. The archaeological evidence for the two towns claiming the title of administrative center of the Karvuna – Kavarna and Balchik has also been reviewed. The conclusion is that this evidence does not support the possibility of the existence of a fortress and an administrative center with this name. There is no reason to believe that either town was the center of the Karvuna archontate. The studies reveal that the fortress and port named Karvuna developed as late as late 13th century and existed in the 14th century when a port with this name appeared on the portolan charts and sea maps. The analysis of the written sources dated back to the 14th century reveals that the information they provide is not about the town of Karvuna but about a territory – the Karvuna chora and the Karvuna archontate. One of the sources provides information about a fortress but its name is Karnava-Kavarna and not Karvuna. The evidence form written and archeological sources examined in this study does not support the longstanding thesis that this 14th century fortress gave the name of the area – Karvuna/Karvuna chora/Karvuna land – in the 11th century. The origin of the name of the Karvuna land/chora area is a subject of further research, but it seems possible that this is the name given by the Bulgarians to the Slavic toponim Hundred hills (Stohalmie). Since there is no information about the location of the fortress/town of Karvuna in the 11th–13th century, it seems more logical that the name of the harbour or the fortress of Karvuna marked on a number of maps and portolan charts after the 14th century was taken from the name of the district. Finally, this study argues that Karvuna is not the “first capital” of the Karvuna archontate/principality. There is no evidence of the existence of a castle or residence in any of the fortresses claiming this name; similarly, there is no evidence of an intense urban life in the 14th century. Such evidence exists only for the Kaliakra fortress, which functioned as the center of the principality from its establishment in the 1320s until its possible relocation to Varna after 1385.
This paper presents a novel method to access lived religion and magical practices of a Medieval congregation via sermons combined with material culture. Previously, scholars have dismissed sermons as ...having low ‘truth value’ due to the copying inherent in the genre. In this paper, I first examine how one Danish sermon was adapted from a German model to fit a local context. This adaptation reveals specific local practices that the preacher thought were relevant to his congregation. Secondly, I demonstrate how several practices described in the sermons are mirrored in surviving non-normative material evidence such as amulets and incantations in manuscripts. This interdisciplinary combination of sermon studies, magic studies, archaeology, and medieval studies yields an as-yet-untapped source group. The paper concludes that 1) sermons can indeed be used as sources for magical practices and lived religion, and 2) they can be used as sources for practices that did not leave material evidence. Finally, discussions of the importance of material evidence in sermon studies and how magical practices were both locally anchored and part of an international network are broached.
•Seeds and fruits from urban sites show similarities in terms of taxonomic composition among the samples studied.•Medieval towns channeled the flow of agricultural production of certain crops, such ...as cereals and fruits.•Agricultural surpluses are a response to social networks linking the economic interests of the towns and the countryside.•The control of distribution of household production was used by the wealthy class to enhance their social status.
Towns were dynamic economic and political centers during the Middle Ages, giving rise to the emergence of new social classes. As a result of their functions, a new relationship began to be forged with the rural world, which supplied towns with foodstuffs that satisfied new social demands. Archaeobotanical analysis (carpology) allows us to understand the flow of cash crops by tracing seeds and fruits produced in the countryside that were consumed in and redistributed from the towns. The study of four waterlogged contexts from medieval archaeological sites in the Kingdom of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, Padrón, and Pontevedra) has provided a set of species that played a crucial role in the economy of the urban dwellers and that possibly were related to differential access or food preferences. Evidence for fruits (grapes, chestnuts, figs, apples, and cherries, among others), garden crops (melon), and cereals (foxtail millet, rye, naked wheat, and oat) has been documented. Broomcorn millet is particularly abundant, demonstrating that it was important for subsistence. Some of the species found (medlar, turnip/grelo) are novel in the archaeobotanical literature of the medieval period in the Iberian Peninsula.
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