scholarly journals Early Printed Music and Material Culture in Central and Western Europe

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Printed Music

scholarly journals An ecological niche shift for Neanderthal populations in Western Europe 70,000 years ago

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Banks ◽  
Marie-Hélène Moncel ◽  
Jean-Paul Raynal ◽  
Marlon E. Cobos ◽  
Daniel Romero-Alvarez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Ecological Niche Modeling ◽  
Climatic Variability ◽  
Niche Shift ◽  
Ecological Niches ◽  
Middle Paleolithic ◽  
Niche Dynamics ◽  
Anatomically Modern Humans

AbstractMiddle Paleolithic Neanderthal populations occupied Eurasia for at least 250,000 years prior to the arrival of anatomically modern humans. While a considerable body of archaeological research has focused on Neanderthal material culture and subsistence strategies, little attention has been paid to the relationship between regionally specific cultural trajectories and their associated existing fundamental ecological niches, nor to how the latter varied across periods of climatic variability. We examine the Middle Paleolithic archaeological record of a naturally constrained region of Western Europe between 82,000 and 60,000 years ago using ecological niche modeling methods. Evaluations of ecological niche estimations, in both geographic and environmental dimensions, indicate that 70,000 years ago the range of suitable habitats exploited by these Neanderthal populations contracted and shifted. These ecological niche dynamics are the result of groups continuing to occupy habitual territories that were characterized by new environmental conditions during Marine Isotope Stage 4. The development of original cultural adaptations permitted this territorial stability.

Mobility in Prehistory and Early Historic Times

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
D. W. Harding
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Culture Contact ◽  
Migration And Invasion ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Dna Analyses ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
North Western

For most of the twentieth century migration and invasion were the default explanation of material culture change in archaeology. This model was largely derived from the record of documentary history, which not only recorded the Gaulish diaspora of later prehistory but the migrations that resulted in the breakup of the Roman Empire. The equation of archaeological distributions—the formula ‘pots = people’—was a model adopted and promoted by Gordon Childe, and remained fundamental to archaeological interpretation into the 1960s. Thereafter diffusionism was discredited among British prehistorians, though less so among European archaeologists and classical or historical archaeologists. Even the Beaker phenomenon became a ‘cult package’ rather than the product of settlers, and it is only as a result of more recent isotopic and DNA analyses that the scale of settlement from the continent introducing Beakers has begun to be demonstrated. Other factors in culture contact including long-distance trade have long been evident, for example, from the distribution of finds of Baltic amber from Northern and North-Western Europe to the Mediterranean, or the distribution of continental pottery and glass via the western seaways in the post-Roman period.

scholarly journals The material culture of burial and its microgeography: A Luxembourg cemetery as a methodological example of an object-centred approach to quantitative material culture studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-359
Author(s):  
Christoph K. Streb ◽  
Thomas Kolnberger ◽  
Sonja Kmec
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Spatial Proximity ◽  
Quantitative Methodology ◽  
Data Collection Tool ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The University

This article uses a novel quantitative methodology to examine sepulchral material culture. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of social spatialization and art as agency, the authors contend that variations in grave designs and materiality cannot simply be explained in terms of changes in fashion and mentality. Other factors also need to be taken into account. Using a digital data collection tool, the Cemetery Surveyor Application (CSA) developed at the University of Luxembourg, they compile a set of data encompassing all the material aspects of each grave in a cemetery in Luxembourg (Western Europe), the setting of their case study. The graves are dated from the 1850s to 2015. |The authors compare the chronological evolution of the most recurrent material features with a GIS-based spatial analysis of the same features. The results of the spatial analysis not only largely confirm the chronological study, but also allow them to be more precise (dating is often problematic) and include undated graves (a third of the sample). The digital data collection tool also allows them to compare cemeteries and to highlight variations in these that cannot merely be imputed to chronology, but also to spatial proximity and material agency.

Vikings

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy L. Wicker
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Early Medieval Period ◽  
The North ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
America South

The Viking Age spans the period from approximately 750 to 1100 ce in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The name “Viking” is used to refer to the inhabitants of Scandinavia and its colonies during the early medieval period, even though the name originally most likely referred only to sea-pirates from Scandinavia. Much of the research on the Vikings has focused on three great narratives of the Viking Age: expansion through raids, trade, and settlement; the beginnings of political unification of the three Scandinavian nations; and the Christianization of these kingdoms. The Viking incursions into the British Isles began late in the 8th century, and in the 9th century, Vikings pushed farther west to the North Atlantic and North America, south along the coast of the European continent, and east to Russia and the East and beyond, even into Central Asia. By the 12th century, Scandinavia is Christianized and the Viking Age is over. This list of works focuses on Material Culture and the Historical Sources—Western Europe of the Viking Age rather than the medieval literature (12th and 13th centuries) of Scandinavia and Iceland, except for brief mention of Eddic literature that may contain information from earlier times and has been influential for the study of the Vikings.

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
And Gender

This book maps out what we now firmly know—and what we are just beginning to know--after four decades of scholarship on women and gender in medieval Europe. Medieval gender rules seem both foreign and familiar today. Medieval people understood religion, law, love, marriage, and sexual identity in distinctive ways that compel us today to understand women and gender as changeable, malleable, and unyoked from constraints of nature or biology. Yet some medieval views are echoed in modern traditions, and those echoes tease out critical tensions of continuity and change in gender relations. The essays collected here also speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women’s and gender history—that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on western Europe in the Middle Ages but essays also offer some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium. The essays range widely and are gathered together under seven themes: Christian, Jewish and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labor, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change over the medieval millennium.

Envoi

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Hinton
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Relative Value ◽  
Political Units

The significance of material culture, and the portable objects that are part of it, is dictated by people’s economic and social power, and their need to give physical expression to their status and aspirations. As in any society, the ability and wish to acquire, display, and use metals, glass, gems, or pots depended in the Middle Ages upon the supply of raw materials and finished products, and the demand that their availability might meet or create. The island of Britain had never been united by the Romans, and different reactions to their army’s withdrawal were only to be expected. Generally, however, power-seeking leaders establishing petty and impermanent fiefdoms relied largely upon being able to demonstrate their success by the acquisition of booty that could be profligately consumed, shown off, or distributed to families and supporters. Swords, brooches, or drinking-vessels symbolize how these social affinities were created and maintained, whether recorded in graves, hoards, and other deliberate deposits, or in accidental loss or intentional jettisoning of what was beyond reuse. The precise meanings that were given to gold and silver, glass and garnets, changed according to their contexts; some gave physical expression to an ambition to inherit the prestigious authority of Rome, others gave credence to stories of descent from far-travelling heroes, while others stressed a person’s place within their own immediate society. Yet artefacts such as pottery show that even people whose priority was subsistence were part of a wider network of contact. External factors influenced behaviour: no leader of a group in Britain could negotiate directly with the Byzantine emperor for the subsidies that brought gold into western Europe, so none could take action to ensure its continuing availability during the seventh century. Its relative value changed as it became rarer, so that it had to be used sparingly if at all; consequently, for some people the display of access to it became even more important. Contemporaneously, however, Christianity’s infiltration changed beliefs about what happened after death, and how people should use and dispose of their worldly goods. In bigger political units, using symbols to show origins and allegiances mattered less, but the large numbers of artefacts now known show that prosperity was not confined in the eighth and ninth centuries to the royal families.

scholarly journals New evidence on the earliest domesticated animals and possible small-scale husbandry in Atlantic NW Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Crombé ◽  
Kim Aluwé ◽  
Mathieu Boudin ◽  
Christophe Snoeck ◽  
Liesbeth Messiaen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Contact Period ◽  
Domesticated Animals ◽  
Early Introduction ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
Hard Evidence ◽  
Nw Europe

AbstractThe distribution of the first domesticated animals and crops along the coastal area of Atlantic NW Europe, which triggered the transition from a hunter-gatherer-fisher to a farmer-herder economy, has been debated for many decades among archaeologists. While some advocate a gradual transition in which indigenous hunter-gatherers from the very beginning of the 5th millennium cal BC progressively adopted Neolithic commodities, others are more in favor of a rapid transition near the end of the 5th millennium caused by a further northwest migration of farmers-herders colonizing the lowlands. Here, radiocarbon dated bones from sheep/goat and possibly also cattle are presented which provide the first hard evidence of an early introduction of domesticated animals within a hunter-gatherer context in NW Belgium, situated ca. 80 km north of the agro-pastoral frontier. Based on their isotope signal it is suggested that these first domesticates were probably not merely obtained through exchange with contemporaneous farmers but were kept locally, providing evidence of small-scale local stockbreeding in the lowlands maybe as early as ca. 4800/4600 cal BC. If confirmed by future in-depth isotope analyses, the latter testifies of intense contact and transmission of knowledge in this early contact period, which is also visible in the material culture, such as the lithic and pottery technology. It also implies direct and prolonged involvement of farmer-herders, either through visiting specialists or intermarriage, which follows recent genetic evidence demonstrating much more hunter-gatherer ancestry in early farmer’s genes in western Europe compared to central and SE Europe.

scholarly journals Crafting Idiosyncrasies. Early Social Complexity, Ivory and Identity-Making in Copper Age Iberia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Miriam Luciañez-Triviño ◽  
Leonardo García Sanjuán ◽  
Thomas Schuhmacher
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Morphological Variability ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Southern Spain ◽  
Copper Age ◽  
Complex Societies ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Technological Tradition ◽  
Definition Of

As a raw material, ivory has been used to manufacture a wide range of objects, normally associated with sumptuous material culture. In this article we explore the role played by ivory and ivory artefacts among early complex societies, and particularly its importance in the definition of identities among emergent elites. To this end, we make a thorough examination of the evidence from Copper Age Iberia, focusing on the mega-site of Valencina, in southern Spain. This site has provided what to date is the largest assemblage of prehistoric ivory in western Europe, with an estimated total of 8.8 kg, including finely crafted artefacts of unrivalled beauty and sophistication. Our study looks carefully at the technological, morphological and contextual dimensions of Copper Age ivory. As a result, we contend that the broad morphological variability together with the technological uniformity of this assemblage suggest that, while belonging to a common technological tradition, objects were deliberately crafted as unique and unrepeatable so that they could be used to create and maintain socio-cultural idiosyncrasies and ideological legitimation.

scholarly journals Arheološki nalazi dekorativno-funkcionalnih elemenata obuće iz kasnoga srednjeg vijeka u Kaštelima

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonči Burić
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Church

Late medieval graves in the Kaštela region have been found to contain, in addition to jewelry, decorative-functional elements of clothing and footwear, termed Gothic according to the stylistic period then in fashion. These are finds from graves that were then on the territory of the commune districts of Split and Trogir. Finds are taken into consideration here that belong to remains of footwear, which so far in Croatia have not even been recognized as such, and which can be stratigraphically and typologically placed in the late Middle Ages (14th-15th cent.). These are objects of a utilitarian character that at the same time have clear stylistic traits, and they have been discovered in the past two decades during systematic excavation of medieval cemeteries in Kaštela. These are large parish cemeteries that grew up around early medieval churches; the cemetery around the church of St. George of Putalj and the cemetery around the church of St. George of Radun. The Putalj cemetery was the graveyard for the inhabitants of medieval Sućurac for more than four centuries (12th-16th cent.), and the Radun cemetery belonged to part of the village of Radun and had an even longer continuity of burial (11th-16th cent.). The first examples were found at these sites, some of them in situ, which enabled a more precise functional determination of them through stylistic-typological parallels and also among dislocated finds in graves with multiple burials, as well as parallels at cemeteries in neighboring regions in central Dalmatia. Finds to the present of shoe buckles can be classified to two typological variants (Pl. I:1-3), one of them called the Radun type according to the eponymous site (Pl. I:1, 3). They are all chronologically coherent and belong to those strata of the cemeteries that are dated according to determined parameters (stratigraphy, typology of the finds) to the 14th and beginning of the 15th centuries, when the Gothic style in art was already completely developed. They can thus be attributed as artistic craft products of the artisan workshops in Split and Trogir at that time, which were distributed throughout the area of the urban districts of those communes. Finds of functionally identical objects have been recorded on the territory of Roman Salona and its broader vicinity, but in the period of late antiquity, while in the early modern period (16th-18th cent.) finds of iron hobnails for shoes or boots have been registered at a large number of sites in the hinterland of central Dalmatia. In addition to the rare and generalized tiny depictions of shoe buckles in the artistic sources of the Gothic and Renaissance (paintings, frescoes, sculptures) in Western Europe, references to them can also be found in written sources. One notarial document from the 16th century in Zadar mentions shoe buckles under the term fiube da scarpe. The investigation of this segment of material culture is just beginning, and new data can be expected to be discovered in documents and works of art, and above all in new archaeological finds of buckles for footwear, which will considerably improve our knowledge of this interesting attire detail from the Gothic and Renaissance periods.

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