The Birsay Bay Project Volume 3
The Birsay Bay Project Volume 3

Author: Christopher D. Morris

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2021-06-23

Total Pages: 784

ISBN-13: 1789256100

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The Brough of Birsay was the power-center of the Viking earldom of Orkney and is one of Historic Environment Scotland’s key monuments and visitor attractions on the islands. This publication is the culmination of 60 years of investigations that took place on the site between 1954 and 2014. This new volume incorporates comprehensive accounts of work undertaken by Dr Ralegh Radford and Mr Stewart Cruden between 1954 and 1964, excavations by the Viking and Early Settlement Research Project under the direction of the author on site between 1974 and 1981, a rescue excavation in 1993, a geophysical survey in 2007 and archival research up to 2014. Specialist artefactual and palaeobiological studies of metallurgical material, ogham inscriptions and a gilt-bronze mount of Insular origin are included, together with re-analysis of the radiocarbon dates from all sites in Birsay Bay, and a re-assessment of the architecture and dating of the church and related buildings on the Brough itself. The final two chapters put the Brough, as both a Pictish power-center and the hub of the Viking earldom, in the overall context of Birsay Bay and Viking and late Norse Orkney, and the wider world between the Pictish and late Norse/Medieval periods. As well as being the author’s third and final volume reporting on work for the Birsay Bay Project, this volume completes a trilogy of studies of the Brough itself, alongside Mrs Cecil Curle’s and Prof John Hunter’s earlier monographs.

The Cross Goes North
The Cross Goes North

Author: Martin Carver

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 9781843831259

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37 studies of the adoption of Christianity across northern Europe over1000 years, and the diverse reasons that drove the process. In Europe, the cross went north and east as the centuries unrolled: from the Dingle Peninsula to Estonia, and from the Alps to Lapland, ranging in time from Roman Britain and Gaul in the third and fourth centuries to the conversion of peoples in the Baltic area a thousand years later. These episodes of conversion form the basic narrative here. History encourages the belief that the adoption of Christianity was somehow irresistible, but specialists show theunderside of the process by turning the spotlight from the missionaries, who recorded their triumphs, to the converted, exploring their local situations and motives. What were the reactions of the northern peoples to the Christian message? Why would they wish to adopt it for the sake of its alliances? In what way did they adapt the Christian ethos and infrastructure to suit their own community? How did conversion affect the status of farmers, of smiths, of princes and of women? Was society wholly changed, or only in marginal matters of devotion and superstition? These are the issues discussed here by thirty-eight experts from across northern Europe; some answers come from astute re-readings of the texts alone, but most are owed to a combination of history, art history and archaeology working together. MARTIN CARVER is Professor of Archaeology, University of York.

Routledge Revivals: Medieval Archaeology (2001)
Routledge Revivals: Medieval Archaeology (2001)

Author: Pam J. Crabtree

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 880

ISBN-13: 1351677063

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First published in 2001, this is the first reference work to cover the archaeology of medieval Europe. No other reference can claim such comprehensive coverage -- from Ireland to Russia and from Scandinavia to Italy, the archaeology of the entirety of medieval Europe is discussed. With coverage ranging from the fall of the western Roman empire in the 5th century CE through the end of the high Middle Ages in 1500 CE, Medieval Archaeology: An Encyclopedia answers the needs of medieval scholars from a variety of backgrounds, including archaeologists, historians and classicists. Featuring over 150 entries by an international team of leading archaeologists, this unique reference is soundly based on the most important developments and scholarship in this rapidly growing field.

West Over Sea
West Over Sea

Author: Beverley Ballin Smith

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 647

ISBN-13: 9004158936

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This volume is a collection of 30 papers on the broad subject of the Scandinavian expansion westwards to Britain, Ireland and the North Atlantic, with a particular emphasis on settlement. The volume has been prepared in tribute to the work of Barbara E. Crawford on this subject, and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her seminal book, Scandinavian Scotland. Reflecting Dr Crawford's interests, the papers cover a range of disciplines, and are arranged into four main sections: History and Cultural Contacts; The Church and the Cult of Saints; Archaeology, Material Culture and Settlement; Place-Names and Language. The combination provides a variety of new perspectives both on the Viking expansion and on Scandinavia's continued contacts across the North Sea in the post-Viking period.Contributors include: Lesley Abrams, Haki Antonsson, Beverley Ballin Smith, James Barrett, Paul Bibire, Nicholas Brooks, Dauvit Broun, Margaret Cormac, Neil Curtis, Clare Downham, Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Ian Fisher, Katherine Forsyth, Peder Gammeltoft, Sarah Jane Gibbon, Mark Hall, Hans Emil Liden, Christopher Lowe, Joanne McKenzie, Christopher Morris, Elizabeth Okasha, Elizabeth Ridel, Liv Schei, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Brian Smith, Steffen Stumann Hansen, Frans Arne Stylegård, Simon Taylor, William Thomson, Gareth Williams, Doreen Waugh and Alex Woolf.

The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society
The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society

Author: John Blair

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-01-20

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 0191518832

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From the impact of the first monasteries in the seventh century, to the emergence of the local parochial system five hundred years later, the Church was a force for change in Anglo-Saxon society. It shaped culture and ideas, social and economic behaviour, and the organization of landscape and settlement. This book traces how the widespread foundation of monastic sites ('minsters') during c.670-730 gave the recently pagan English new ways of living, of exploiting their resources, and of absorbing European culture, as well as opening new spiritual and intellectual horizons. Through the era of Viking wars, and the tenth-century reconstruction of political and economic life, the minsters gradually lost their wealth, their independence, and their role as sites of high culture, but grew in stature as foci of local society and eventually towns. After 950, with the increasing prominence of manors, manor-houses, and village communities, a new and much larger category of small churches were founded, endowed, and rebuilt: the parish churches of the emergent eleventh- and twelfth-century local parochial system. In this innovative study, John Blair brings together written, topographical, and archaeological evidence to build a multi-dimensional picture of what local churches and local communities meant to each other in early England.

Anglo-Saxon England: Volume 20
Anglo-Saxon England: Volume 20

Author: Michael Lapidge

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-01-30

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780521413800

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This volume illustrates some of the exciting paths of enquiry in Anglo-Saxon studies.

Medieval Archaeology
Medieval Archaeology

Author: Pamela Crabtree

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 823

ISBN-13: 1135582971

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This is the first reference work to cover the archaeology of medieval Europe. No other reference can claim such comprehensive coverage--from Ireland to Russia and from Scandinavia to Italy, the archaeology of the entirety of medieval Europe is discussed.