Search results for ""Author James H. Barrett""

Quoygrew - a settlement of farmers and fishers on the island of Westray in Orkney - was continuously occupied from the tenth century until 1937. Focusing on the archaeology of its first 700 years, this volume explores how 'small worlds' both reflected and impacted the fundamental pan-European watersheds of the Middle Ages: the growth of population, economic production and trade from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries and the subsequent economic and demographic retrenchment of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. Concurrently, it addresses the nature of island societies, with distinctive identities shaped by the interplay of isolation and interconnectedness.

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This book is a study of communities that drew their identity and livelihood from their relationships with water during a pivotal time in the creation of the social, economic and political landscapes of northern Europe. It focuses on the Baltic, North and Irish Seas in the Viking Age (ad 1050–1200), with a few later examples (such as the Scottish Lordship of the Isles) included to help illuminate less well-documented earlier centuries. Individual chapters introduce maritime worlds ranging from the Isle of Man to Gotland — while also touching on the relationships between estate centres, towns, landing places and the sea in the more terrestrially oriented societies that surrounded northern Europe’s main spheres of maritime interaction. It is predominately an archaeological project, but draws no arbitrary lines between the fields of historical archaeology, history and literature. The volume explores the complex relationships between long-range interconnections and distinctive regional identities that are characteristic of maritime societies, seeking to understand communities that were brought into being by their relationships with the sea and who set waves in motion that altered distant shores.

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