Search results for ""author søren m. sindbaek""

For millenia, urban networks have shaped the development of human societies. Today, new archaeological approaches are unveiling the evolution of these networks in unprecedented detail.Urban Networks Evolutions reviews the new approaches to urban evolution as archaeology endeavours to characterise both the scale and pace of historical events and processes. Issuing from the work of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence, the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), the book compares the archaeology of urbanism from medieval Northern Europe to the Ancient Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean World.The 40 contributors demonstrate how new techniques for refining archaeological dates, contexts, and the provenance ascribed to material culture, afford a new high-definition approach to the study of global and interregional dynamics. This opens up for far-reaching questions as to how and to what extent urban networks catalysed societal and environmental expansions and crises in the past.

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The Viking Congresses bring together scholars of archaeology, philology, history, toponymy, numismatics and a number of other disciplines to discuss the Viking Age from a variety of viewpoints. This volume contains 44 peer-reviewed papers selected from those presented at the 18th Viking Congress held in Denmark in August 2017. The contributors take up the interdisciplinary challenge, and the papers cover a wide range of subjects, rooted in the past, but also connecting to the present.

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Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns explores the interface between craft, communication networks, and urbanisation in Viking-Age northern Europe. Viking-period towns were the hubs of cross-cultural communication of their age, and innovations in specialised crafts provide archaeologists with some of the best evidence for studying this communication. The integrated results presented in these papers have been made possible through the sustained collaboration of a group of experts with complementary insights into individual crafts. Results emerge from recent scholarly advances in the study of artefacts and production: first, the application of new analytical techniques (e.g. metallographic, isotopic, and biomolecular techniques) and second, the shift in interpretative focus from a concern with object function to considerations of processes of production, and of the social agency of technology. Furthermore, the introduction of social network theory and actor-network theory has redirected attention toward the process of communication, and highlighted the significance of material culture in the learning and transmission of cultural knowledge, including technology.The volume brings together leading UK and Scandinavian archaeological specialists to explore crafted products and workshop-assemblages from Viking towns, in order to clarify how such long-range communication worked in pre-modern northern Europe. Contributors assess the implications for our understanding of early towns and the long-term societal change catalysed by them, including the initial steps towards commercial economies. Results are analysed in relation to social network theory, social and economic history, and models of communication, setting an agenda for further research. The volume provides a landmark statement on our knowledge of Viking-Age craft and communication.

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