Where the Middle Ages Begin
The year that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic and Isabel and Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain, an unheralded event took place. A cartographer in Lisbon, Portugal, drew an amazing map detailing the coasts of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and western Africa.
From ground level, the western Scottish seaboard can be a place of glorious isolation. Dave Cowley and Colin Martin climb to 2,000 feet to reveal once bustling sea-lanes and a Viking harbour.
The aim of the present study is to test the available BM estimation formulae based on the femoral head breadth (Auerbach and Ruff 2004, Grine et al. 1995, McHenry 1992, Ruff et al. 1991) on skeletal populations from medieval Switzerland and to reconstruct the BM and the BMI within a specific temporal and geographical setting.
Despite being one of the most genetically analysed groups, the origin of European Jews has remained obscure.
The Muslim conquest was responsible for changes in the distribution of Persians in Iraq wrought by the combined effects of death, captivity, defection, and migration.
Apart from this bipolar system that contrasted North and South, authors writing in the Old Norse-Icelandic language also appear to use the term Norðrlönd within a quadripolar system that held good beyond the immediate region: Norðrlönd, the Vestrlönd (the British Isles), Suðrríki (Germany, the Holy Roman Empire), and Austrríki or Austrvegr (Russia and other lands to the East).
The study of settlement history has developed within the fields of history, archaeology and geography. As a result much of the work carried out in settlement studies has borrowed the research and conclusions of scholars from other disciplines.
The present paper is a brief exploration of the application of methods commonly used in the archaeological study of the Pacific and Mediterranean islands to the expansion of the Vikings across the North Atlantic during the ninth to eleventh centuries AD.
The attempt made in this paper to answer these questions will be based almost entirely on Welsh evidence. The English evidence, examined and re- examined since the late nineteenth century, is already sufficiently familiar to members of the British Agricultural History Society.
Focusing in particular on the southern and eastern parts of the Ocean Sea, this article traces the broad contours of a representational and conceptual shift brought about, I argue, by the interplay between geographical thought and social (navigational, mercantile) practice.
Since the eighties and increasingly during the nineties there has been a renewed interest on the continent in medieval rural settlement, mainly among archaeologists and geographers
Leicestershire’s medieval settlement pattern consisted of nucleated villages, generally 1·2 miles apart; these followed a regime of mixed farming on common fields.
Román Iberia became thoroughly Romanized early in its existenec. Spain adopted the law, the language, the culture, and eventually the religión of clas- sicat Rome. Moreover, Hispania produced some truly stellar figures in the arena of Latin scholarship, including Séneca, Lucían, Quintilian, Columella, and Prudentius.
The idea that complex social order in the past can be ‘read’ in the built environment, and indeed in material culture – tangible artefacts and landscape phenomena – in general, is a foundation of contemporary archaeology and historical geography.
Beside the intention of Charlemagne to build a continuous waterway network for his extensive travels, there are two more possible reasons for connecting the river systems of Main and Danube.
The reason why Muslims authors of the 9th and 10th century A.D. dealt with the history and culture not only of
the Romans but also of other ancient and contemporary nations is related to the social, political and cultural
circumstances of their age.
To a modern cartographer a map should represent geographic reality by means of coordinates such as latitude and longitude. Not one of the cartographic images in the Liber Floridus corresponds to this definition, yet not a single work on historical cartography omits the early-twelfth-century encyclopaedia
While the role of Byzantine Hellenism on the art, literature, and society of the Empire has been the subject of tremendous study, the question of its origins has, nonetheless, rarely been raised, and the strongly Hellenic Byzantine identity seems, to a large extent, to have been taken for granted historiographically.
To begin, we must ask the question, ‘what was ʻmedievalʼ about medieval Kyoto?’
One of the most skilful forgeries of the Middle Ages, the Cosmography of Aethicus Ister has puzzled scholars for over 150 years, not least because of its challenging Latinity.
The first European explorers to make contact with North America did so far to the north of the area contacted by Columbus, and their voyages would almost certainly have taken place regardless of the success or failure of Columbus
The definition of the Celts and Celtic is at the core of Celtic Studies, either in antiquity or the early medieval period.
A previously unknown version of Martin Waldseemüller’s famous world map has been disocvered in the collections of the University Library in Munich.
The title of this paper encapsulates a central problem to be faced when looking at the notion of a frontier zone in the islands which fringe western mainland Scotland. It asks if the region was a „Norse frontier‟, yet the territorial designation of the kingdom which encompassed most of the maritime zone from Lewis in the north to Man in the south is given in its medieval Gaelic form.
Renaissance geography began in the early 1400s with the translation from Greek and dissemination among scholars of the Geographia or Cosmographia by the second-century Alexandrian scientist Claudius Ptolemy.
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