A (Needle) Case in Point: Transformations in the Carpathian Basin During the Early Middle Ages (Late Avar Period, 8th–9th century ad)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Gergely Szenthe ◽  
Erwin Gáll

In the late Avar period (eighth to ninth century ad), vast quantities of utilitarian artefacts were produced in series in the Carpathian Basin, a phenomenon not seen since the end of the Roman period. The distribution of these articles reflects not only the region's settlement pattern, but also how these artefacts were disseminated. The communication network in the Carpathian Basin underwent a significant transformation between the early and late Avar period: its major nodes, equated with population centres but not necessarily with elite centres, contributed to moulding a social and cultural milieu that included specialized craftsmen. An early single hub in southern Transdanubia was replaced by multiple centres by the late Avar period. Around ad 700, a bipolar settlement pattern emerges in the southern part of the Carpathian Basin. It seems that the Great Hungarian Plain began to play an equal, if not dominant, role in the communication network of the Carpathian Basin at this time.

Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 286-288
Author(s):  
Therese Martin

The year 2018 saw the publication of two important monographs, each with groundbreaking scholarship on complementary aspects of monasticism; together they offer a clear path forward for Medieval Studies as a whole. While Fiona Griffiths’s Nuns’ Priests’ Tales and Steven Vanderputten’s Dark Age Nunneries approach the essentially interrelated natures of men’s and women’s medieval monasticism from different perspectives, it is by reading them in concert that one becomes aware of the paradigm shift they signal. In a welcome change from a traditional consideration of so-called “double” monasteries as neither fish nor fowl, Griffiths and Vanderputten offer a feast of evidence for the multiple levels of interactions between the genders—including priests and nuns, students and teachers, patrons, family members, and rulers, as well as the conventionally understood mixed religious communities of monks and nuns—at majority female monasteries in Western Christendom from the early through central Middle Ages. Vanderputten starts at the beginning of the ninth century and carries his investigation forward to the mid-eleventh, at which point Griffiths launches her study, moving the matter on from the late eleventh century into the early thirteenth.


Author(s):  
Daniele Miano

This book focuses on the Latin goddess Fortuna, one of the better known deities in ancient Italy. The earliest forms of her worship can be traced back to archaic Latium, and she was still a widely recognized allegorical figure during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The main reason for her longevity is that she was a conceptual deity, and had strong associations with chance and good fortune. When they were interacting with the goddess, communities, individuals, and gender and age groups were inevitably also interacting with the concept. These relations were not neutral: they allowed people to renegotiate the concept, enriching it with new meanings and challenging established ones. The geographical and chronological scope of this book is Italy from the archaic age to the late Republic. In this period Italy was a fragmented, multicultural and multilinguistic environment, characterized by a wide circulation of people, customs, and ideas, in which Rome played an increasingly dominant role. All available sources on Fortuna have been used: literary, epigraphic, and archaeological. The study of the goddess based on conceptual analysis will serve to construct a radically new picture of the historical development of this deity in the context of the cultural interactions taking place in ancient Italy. The book also aims at experimenting with a new approach to polytheism, based on the connection between gods and goddesses and concepts.


Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (13) ◽  
pp. 3895
Author(s):  
Marica Baldoni ◽  
Alessandra Nardi ◽  
Flavio De Angelis ◽  
Olga Rickards ◽  
Cristina Martínez-Labarga

The present research investigates the relationship between dietary habits and mortality patterns in the Roman Imperial and Medieval periods. The reconstructions of population dynamics and subsistence strategies provide a fascinating source of information for understanding our history. This is particularly true given that the changes in social, economic, political, and religious aspects related to the transition from the Roman period to the Middle Ages have been widely discussed. We analyzed the isotopic and mortality patterns of 616 individuals from 18 archeological sites (the Medieval Latium sites of Colonna, Santa Severa, Allumiere, Cencelle, and 14 Medieval and Imperial funerary contexts from Rome) to compile a survivorship analysis. A semi-parametric approach was applied, suggesting variations in mortality patterns between sexes in the Roman period. Nitrogen isotopic signatures influenced mortality in both periods, showing a quadratic and a linear effect for Roman Imperial and Medieval populations, respectively. No influence of carbon isotopic signatures has been detected for Roman Imperial populations. Conversely, increased mortality risk for rising carbon isotopic values was observed in Medieval samples.


The Holocene ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 095968362110332
Author(s):  
Valentí Rull ◽  
Núria Cañellas-Boltà ◽  
Teresa Vegas-Vilarrúbia

Palynological analysis of the last ca. 4300 cal year BP using a sediment core taken from high mountain (ca. 1900 m elevation) Lake Sant Maurici sediments (southern-central Pyrenees) showed remarkable vegetation constancy during the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages. Records of the Iron Age and the Roman period were missing due to a major sedimentary gap. During the studied periods, the vegetation around the lake was largely dominated by pine ( Pinus) forests with birch ( Betula), oak ( Quercus) and hazel ( Corylus) trees, as is the case today. The composition of these forests and the abundance of their components remained quite stable, despite the occurrence of temperature and moisture shifts. The degree of human disturbance, notably that of pastoralism and cereal cultivation by scattered and temporary settlements, was very low and had little or no effect on the dominant forests. This situation contrasts with most high-elevation (subalpine and alpine) environments of the central Pyrenees that were massively anthropized during the Middle Ages. Further research should be aimed at finding sediments corresponding to the Iron Age and the Roman period to verify whether the vegetation constancy can be extended throughout the Late-Holocene. Past records of this type may allow the estimation of natural and anthropogenic thresholds for irreversible forest changes, which would be useful for conservation purposes.


Traditio ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 297-300
Author(s):  
Theodore John Rivers

The term carruca (or carruga), like many other terms in medieval Latin, acquired a new and different meaning in the Middle Ages in place of its original classical meaning. There is no confusion over the meaning of carruca in Roman historical and literary sources: it clearly means a four-wheeled wagon or carriage. However, its original meaning was modified during the medieval period so that by the early ninth century carruca denoted a wheeled plow. Although the medieval plow is often called a carruca (whereas the Roman plow is called an aratrum), one should not infer that all references to carruca in medieval sources signify a plow, particularly if these sources are datable to that transitional period during which the classical meaning of the word was beginning to be transformed into its medieval one. Characteristic of the sources which fall within this period are the Germanic tribal laws (leges barbarorum), and of these, three individual laws in particular are of interest: the Pactus legis Salicae 38.1, Lex Ribuaria 47.2, and Lex Alamannorum 93.2.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabor Földvary

AbstractThe baffling duality of the Carpathian Mountain Range and the Basin it surrounds is briefly discussed. The various attempts at solving the nature of this duality, including plate tectonics with its micro-plates are mentioned. The component ranges of the Carpathians and the structural belts are given, followed by the discussion of the Carpathian Basin System, the Interior, consisting of the Great Hungarian Plain, Transdanubia, the two groups of Central Mountains, also the Apuseni (Bihar) Mountains and the Banat Contact Belt. Economic ore deposits are featured in the relevant sections.


1882 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 354-360
Author(s):  
H. F. Tozer

The central peninsula of the three that project from the south of the Peloponnese, which since the Middle Ages has been known as the district of Maina, is one of the wildest parts of Greece owing to its rugged mountains and rocky shores, and has always been the abode of independent and intractable races. The emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus speaks of the Mainotes as having retained their primitive heathenism until the latter half of the ninth century. At the present day they are notorious for their blood-feuds, which are the scourge of the country, and seriously interfere with its social life. On the western shore of this remote district, near a small harbour that runs in from the Messenian gulf, is the town of Vitylo, one of the comparatively few places in the Morea, though these are more numerous on the seaboard than in the interior, which have retained their classical name. It was formerly called and this appellation now appears in the form which accounts for its pronunciation as Vitylo. The modern form of the name is probably the original one, for Ptolemy calls the place Rather more than two centuries ago this town was the scene of a remarkable emigration. At that time the Turks, who had made themselves masters of Crete in 1669, proceeded to attempt the subjugation of Maina. Spon and Wheler, who sailed round cape Matapan on their way to Constantinople in the summer of 1675, were told that the invaders had succeeded in reducing most of the country by means of forts built on the coasts—they seem to have been aided by the treachery of some of the inhabitants—and that part of the population had escaped to Apulia. A few months after these travellers passed by, a number of the inhabitants of Vitylo and its neighbourhood, amounting to about 1000 souls, were persuaded by the Genoese to emigrate under their auspices to Western Europe. They ware led by one of their countrymen, John Stephanopoulos, and were established by their new protectors in Corsica, which was at that time a Genoese possession; and in that island their descendants remain at the present day.


Author(s):  
Dženan Brigić

The transformation of hunter-gatherer society, who lived as nomads for a  very long time, largely influenced the development of road communication. These communities now established permanent settlements, especially in arable lands, and had a somewhat lifestyle than before. The cultivation of grains  and domestication of animals meant that people had no more need for migration and the search for better locations, instead they started setting up their  homes in the proximity to other community members, thereby forming the  first Neolithic settlements. By forming the settlements appeared the need to  establish a communication with other communities in the territory of present-day Balkans and wider, usually for the purpose of trade of certain goods,  which had a direct impact on the road communication development that laid  foundations for the development of the roads in the Roman period. Several  such settlements are known in the territory of present-day Bosnia that maintained continuity and tradition as well as road communications from the  Neolithic period up to the Roman period, i.e. Roman governor Publius Cornelius Dolabella, under whose governorship the widest road communication  network was built in the territory of the province of Dalmatia.     


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