Abandoned medieval settlement in Spain was devoted to growing grapes, archaeologists finds
Archaeologists have discovered an abandoned settlement in the Basque Country of Spain that seems to have been turned into a medieval version of a factory-farm in order to concentrate the cultivation of vineyards.
On the windy edge of nothing: Vikings in the North Atlantic World
With a focus upon the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, Kevin Edwards will present a select narrative of past and recent writings, archaeological enquiry and scientific research concerning the Norse settlement of the North Atlantic.
An early medieval symbol carved on a tree trunk: pathfinder or territorial marker?
The chance discovery of a carved symbol on a waterlogged tree of the six–ninth century AD may be the earliest mark on a living tree that has so far come to light.
Traveler’s Tips from the 14th Century: The Detours of Ibn Battuta
What advice can Ibn Battuta provide the globe-trotting public of the 21st century?
Why did Vinland fail?
Brigitta Wallace, one of the leading scholars on the Vikings in North America, examines why their settlements failed.
North America’s First Contact: Norse-Inuit Relations
The interaction between the Norse and Inuit was sparse, at times hostile, and could have possibly doomed the Greenland colonies to extinction.
Vínland and Wishful Thinking: Medieval and Modern Fantasies
Reevaluating the wishful reality of the Vinland islands requires that the stories of the Vinland journeys be squarely situated in the context of the world geographic system adopted by those who told those stories.
Medieval Fortress discovered in Ireland
‘There is no doubt in my mind that we are looking at a major, unstudied settlement.’
Pelagios Project to give better understanding of ancient and medieval maps
A collaborative project is bringing together maps and geographical texts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages in a new online database that will allow researchers and the general public to explore online the changing historical significance of many of the world’s most famous cities, as well as smaller urban centres.
Ten Beautiful Medieval Maps
Our list of the best medieval maps – ten maps created between the sixth and sixteenth centuries, which offer unique views into how medieval people saw their world.
The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Terry Jones and Patrick Geary
Filmed at the British Academy in London on July 1, 2013
Project uses GIS to map Jewish communities of the Byzantine Empire
Geographic information systems – once limited to the domain of physical geographers – are emerging as a promising tool to study the past, as researchers are discovering for medieval history.
The so-called Genoese World Map of 1457: A Stepping Stone Towards Modern Cartography?
Around the time of Christopher Columbus’s birth, we find on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, especially in the north of Italy, a variety of people particularly interested in problems of geography and cartography.
‘Fromm thennes faste he gan avyse/This litel spot of erthe’: GIS and the General Prologue
This paper was given at the Canada Chaucer Seminar on April 27, 2013.
Queen of All Islands: The Imagined Cartography of Matthew Paris’s Britain
In the middle decade of the thirteenth century, the Benedictine monk and historian Matthew Paris drew four regional maps of Britain. The monk’s works stand as the earliest extant maps of the island and mark a distinct shift from the cartographic traditions of medieval Europe.
The European Reconquest of North Africa
The chief structural features of Africa Minor are simple. The territory consists of a long strip of land bounded on the north by the Mediterranean,on the south by the Sahara, on the east by the Gulf of Tripoli and the Libyan Desert, on the west by the Atlantic.
Here there be no dragons: Maravilla in Two Fifteenth-Century Spanish libros de viajes
Monsters, anthropomorphs, and marvels are common ingredients in medieval travel literature, and even narratives of real medieval journeys include these creatures, to the delight of the reading audience.
The Cone of Africa . . . Took Shape in Lisbon
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.
Coastal Command: Surveying Scotland’s maritime superhighway
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.
Body Mass and Body Mass Index estimation in medieval Switzerland
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.
Jews of Medieval Eastern Europe migrated from Caucasus region, study shows
Despite being one of the most genetically analysed groups, the origin of European Jews has remained obscure.
The Effects of the Muslim Conquest on the Persian Population of Iraq
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.
The Emergence of the North
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).
Conquest or Colonisation: The Scandinavians in Ryedale from the Ninth to Eleventh Centuries
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.
An island archaeological approach to the Viking colonization of the North Atlantic
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.