Search results for ""Author Mark McKerracher""

Medieval Settlement Research is the journal of the Medieval Settlement Research Group (MSRG), a long-established, widely recognised and open multi-disciplinary research group that facilitates collaboration between archaeologists, geographers, historians and other interested parties. The Group is dedicated to developing understanding of rural settlements and their associated landscapes between the 5th and 16th centuries AD. To achieve these aims, the MSRG organises Spring and Winter Seminars each year, offers research and travel grants, awards the annual John Hurst Memorial Prize for the best postgraduate paper, and publishes an annual journal, Medieval Settlement Research. The journal is an internationally recognised publication containing research papers, scholarly articles, fieldwork reports, news and reviews. Although the MSRG’s interests are concentrated primarily on British and Irish medieval landscapes between the 5th and 16th centuries AD, it actively encourages wider chronological and pan-European perspectives. Medieval Settlement Research therefore welcomes papers relating to Britain, Ireland and the rest of Europe that help us to improve our understanding of medieval settlements and landscapes from the level of individual sites to the international scale.

Read more less

There is a growing recognition within Anglo-Saxon archaeology that farming practices underwent momentous transformations in the Mid Saxon period, between the seventh and ninth centuries AD: transformations which underpinned the growth of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and, arguably, set the trajectory for English agricultural development for centuries to come. Meanwhile, in the field of archaeobotany, a growing set of quantitative methods has been developed to facilitate the systematic investigation of agricultural change through the study of charred plant remains. This study applies a standardised set of repeatable quantitative analyses to the charred remains of Anglo-Saxon crops and weeds, to shed light on crucial developments in crop husbandry between the seventh and ninth centuries. The analyses demonstrate the significance of the Anglo-Saxon archaeobotanical record in elucidating how greater crop surpluses were attained through ecologically-sensitive diversification and specialisation strategies in this period. At the same time, assumptions, variables and key parameters are presented fully and explicitly to facilitate repetition of the work, thus also enabling the book to be used as a source of comparative data and a methodological handbook for similar research in other periods and places. It constitutes a specialist, data-driven companion volume to the author’s more general narrative account published as ‘Farming Transformed in Anglo-Saxon England’ (Windgather, 2018).

Read more less

Medieval Settlement Research is the journal of the Medieval Settlement Research Group (MSRG), a long-established, widely recognised and open multi-disciplinary research group that facilitates collaboration between archaeologists, geographers, historians and other interested parties. The Group is dedicated to developing understanding of rural settlements and their associated landscapes between the 5th and 16th centuries AD. To achieve these aims, the MSRG organises Spring and Winter Seminars each year, offers research and travel grants, awards the annual John Hurst Memorial Prize for the best postgraduate paper, and publishes an annual journal, Medieval Settlement Research. The journal is an internationally recognised publication containing research papers, scholarly articles, fieldwork reports, news and reviews. Although the MSRG’s interests are concentrated primarily on British and Irish medieval landscapes between the 5th and 16th centuries AD, it actively encourages wider chronological and pan-European perspectives. Medieval Settlement Research therefore welcomes papers relating to Britain, Ireland and the rest of Europe that help us to improve our understanding of medieval settlements and landscapes from the level of individual sites to the international scale.

Read more less

Drying kilns, corn-dryers and malting ovens are increasingly familiar features in post-Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval archaeology. Their forms, functions and distributions offer critical insights into agricultural, technological, economic and dietary history across the British Isles. Despite the significance and growing corpus of these structures, exceptionally few works of synthesis have been published. Yet such a foundational study was produced by Robert Rickett as early as 1975: an undergraduate dissertation which, for the first time, assembled a gazetteer of drying kilns from across the British Isles, critically examined this archaeological evidence in the light of documentary research, and established a typology and uniform terminology for drying kiln studies. This pioneering and oft-cited dissertation is here published for the first time, providing a foundation for the future study of drying kilns in Britain, Ireland and beyond. A new introduction and notes by Mark McKerracher set the original work within the context of drying kiln research since 1975.

Read more less