The Archaeology Of Slavery In Early Medieval Northern Europe

This volume is the first comprehensive study of the material imprint of slavery in early medieval Europe. While written sources attest to the ubiquity of slavery and slave trade in early medieval British Isles, Scandinavia and Slavic lands, it is still difficult to find material traces of this reality, other than the hundreds of thousands of Islamic coins paid in exchange for the northern European slaves. This volume offers the first structured reflection on how to bridge this gap. It reviews the types of material evidence that can be associated with the institution of slavery and the slave trade in early medieval northern Europe, from individual objects (such as e.g. shackles) to more comprehensive landscape approaches. The book is divided into four sections. The first presents the analytical tools developed in Africa and prehistoric Europe to identify and describe social phenomena associated with slavery and the slave trade. The following three section review the three main cultural zones of early medieval northern Europe: the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Slavic central Europe. The contributions offer methodological reflections on the concept of the archaeology of slavery. They emphasize that the material record, by its nature, admits multiple interpretations. More broadly, this book comes at a time when the history of slavery is being integrated into academic syllabi in most western countries. The collection of studies contributes to a more nuanced perspective on this important and controversial topic. This volume appeals to multiple audiences interested in comparative and global studies of slavery, and will constitute the point of reference for future debates.

That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another – complementary – explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks – perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.

Concentrating upon the lifestyle, attitudes and motivations of the slave-holders and slave-raiders, this book explores the activities and behavioural codes of Britain and Ireland’s warrior-centred societies c.800-1200 highlighting the significance of slavery for constructions of power, ethnic identity and gender.

This book is first and foremost an extended examination and discussion of the enslavement of men and women by others of their society and in particular of the means and causes of the gradual end of slavery in early medieval Europe between 500 and 1200. Drawing upon a very wide range of primary and archival sources, Professor Bonnassie places fresh findings about subjection, servitude and lordship in relation to the prevailing understanding of social history which has developed since the work of Marc Bloch. The author explains how slavery long persisted in southern France and Spain, as part of a public order that also sheltered free peasants, giving way in the tenth and eleventh centuries to a new regime of harsh lordships that mark the beginnings of feudalism. He shows that feudalism in south-western Europe was no less significant than in northern European lands.

"Thraldom, the old Scandinavian word for slavery, is an elusive phenomenon characterized by different conditions of dependencies and with fluid transitions between being free and unfree; a person could be at once socially respected but still unfree; you could voluntarily go into a slavery; you could be sentenced to time-limit slavery for a criminal offence; you could give away your child to become a slave, but you could also buy yourself out of slavery. Hence, slavery was not a black-and-white social phenomenon. You could be a chattel thrall, living in the barn with the cows, but also a legally unfree steward, living on and running the king's estate. In this study all conceivable source materials are analyzed, such as archaeology, runic inscriptions, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves. Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the Early Middle Ages, and it seems the Scandinavians became a major player in the north European slave trade. However, the hypothesis is that the Scandinavian Vikings were not particularly interested in taking slaves to Scandinavia, instead their 'business model' seems to have been to raid, abduct and then sell of captured people at major slave markets. Their quest was not people, but silver. Scandinavian slavery eventually was abandoned, a process which is very obscure, and seems to have disappeared in society in the beginning of the fourteenth century"--

The result of my research was turned into a book published in Swedish in 2012. This present book is a revised translation and extensively extended version of that book.

Materialising the Roman Empire defines an innovative research agenda for Roman archaeology, highlighting the diverse ways in which the Empire was made materially tangible in the lives of its inhabitants. The volume explores how material culture was integral to the processes of imperialism, both as the Empire grew, and as it fragmented, and in doing so provide up-to-date overviews of major topics in Roman archaeology. Each chapter offers a critical overview of a major field within the archaeology of the Roman Empire. The book’s authors explore the distinctive contribution that archaeology and the study of material culture can make to our understanding of the key institutions and fields of activity in the Roman Empire. The initial chapters address major technologies which, at first glance, appear to be mechanisms of integration across the Roman Empire: roads, writing and coinage. The focus then shifts to analysis of key social structures oriented around material forms and activities found all over the Roman world, such as trade, urbanism, slavery, craft production and frontiers. Finally, the book extends to more abstract dimensions of the Roman world: art, empire, religion and ideology, in which the significant themes remain the dynamics of power and influence. The whole builds towards a broad exploration of the nature of imperial power and the inter-connections that stimulated new community identities and created new social divisions.

The memory of the living and the dead was part of the functioning of monastic and secular communities, dynasties and aristocratic families. The relationship of debitores and fundatores is key to understanding the “mentality” of the era of the formation of Imperium Christianum. The donations made “pro remedio animae nostre et genitoris nostris” indicate the memorial function of transferring the prayer duties of the power elites (or whole groups and communities) to the clergy and illustrate the belief of medieval people in the importance of intercessory prayer. This volume is a memoir of the Piasts and Boleslaw the Brave on the 1000th anniversary of his coronation. It symbolically closes the study of the millennium of the baptism of Poland (966–1966) and opens the study of the early Middle Ages in Poland and Central Europe.