Listmembers,
we are posting the programme for the Cultural identity conference.
This is an international conference with speakers from many parts of
Europe and the States. It will be held from the 4th to the 6th of
April at the University of Glasgow, with backing from the Society of
Medieval Archaeology. If any one would still like to subscribe there
are still places. If you have any queries please feel free to write to me -
Allan Rutherford,
Department of Archaeology,
University of Glasgow,
Glasgow,
Scotland.
[log in to unmask]
Conference Programme
Friday 4th of April.
9.30 Chair - Prof. C. D. Morris (University of Glasgow)
9.40 Prof. Klaus Randsborg (University of Copenhagen)
Denmark: National History, Unnational Archaeology.
10.20 Dr Alan Vince (Lincoln Archaeology Unit and University of York)
Culture and Economy: Explanations of Culture Change in North-western
Europe.
11.00-11.30 Morning Coffee
11.30 Dr John Hines (University of Wales, Cardiff)
The Symbolism of Material Cultural Difference in Early Medieval
Northern Europe.
12.10 Dr Joern Steecker (University of Lund)
The Mission of the Triangle. The Christianization of the Saxons,
Westslavs and Danes in a regional perspective.
12.50 General Discussion.
1.10-2.10 Lunch
2.10 Chair - Dr Stuart Airlie (University of Glasgow)
2.20 Dr. Guy Halsall (Birkbeck College, London)
Bringing it all back home: Putting regional history into the 'End of
Rome' and the creation of the post-Roman kingdoms.
3.00 Dr. Anders Andren (University of Lund)
Against War! Regional Identity and Popular Peace Treaties in Medieval
Denmark and Sweden.
3.40-4.10 Afternoon Tea
4.10 Genevieve Fisher (University of Pennsylvania)
Custom, costume, and cultural identity: women's dress in early
Anglo-Saxon eastern England.
4.50 Dr. Sam Lucy (University of Durham)
Burial practice in Early Medieval East Yorkshire: the construction of
local identities.
5.30 Discussion and concluding remarks.
6.00-8.00 Reception in the Hunterian Museum.
Saturday 5th of April.
9.30 Chair - Dr Sally Foster (Historic Scotland)
9.40 Dr Ewan Campbell (University of Glasgow)
Ireland, Scotland and Wales: archaeology and Celtic regional
identity.
10.20 Dr. Raghnall O Floinn (National Museum of Ireland)
Artefacts in Context: Personal Ornament in Early Medieval Ireland - a
Case Study.
Morning Coffee 11.00-1130
11.30 Dr. Finbar McCormick (Queens University, Belfast)
The Adoption of Contrasting Livestock Strategies in Britain and
Ireland.
12.10 Dr. Stephen T. Driscoll (University of Glasgow)
Cultural Imperialism in Early Medieval Scotland: The Conquest of the
Picts and Britons.
12.50 General Discussion
1.10-2.10 Lunch
2.10 Chair - Dr. Barbara Crawford (University of St Andrews)
2.20 Prof. David Austin (University of Wales, Lampeter)
Material Politics of Dominance: State Institutions, Medieval
Monuments and Welsh Cultural Identity.
3.00 Allan G. Rutherford (University of Glasgow)
Scottish castles: a view of aristocratic identity in the Middle Ages.
3.40-4.10 Afternoon tea
4.10 Janet Hooper (University of Glasgow)
Unique or merely parochial? An exploration of personal identities in
the Highlands of Scotland.
4.50 Alex Woolf (University of Wales, Lampeter)
What do we mean by rich and poor? Inter regional economic comparison
reconsidered.
5.30-6.00 Discussion and concluding remarks.
Sunday 6th of April.
9.30 Chair - Dr. David Barrett (Derbyshire County Archaeologist)
9.40 Prof. Christopher Dyer (University of Birmingham)
Did the English midlands have a cultural identity?
10.20 Dr. Pamela Graves (University of Durham)
One Church, many Churches: English regional identity as reflected in
the church architecture of East Anglia and Devon.
11.00-11.30 Morning Coffee
11.30 Duncan Brown (Archaeology Unit of Southampton)
Ceramic Identities in a Maritime Urban Community.
12.10 Prof. Paolo Delogu (University of Rome)
Southern Italy in the Middle Ages: a Difficult Case of Cultural
Identity.
12.50 General Discussion
1.10-2.10 Lunch
2.10 Chair
2.20 Prof. Jozsef Laszlovsky (University of Budapest)
Living standards and material culture as expressions of social
identity.
3.00 Dr Christopher Gerrard (King Alfred's College, Winchester)
A case of confused identity? The architecture of the Military Orders
in Spain.
3.40 Discussion and concluding remarks.
4.00-4.30 Afternoon tea
Speakers and Abstracts:
Dr. Anders Andren - Against War! Regional Identity and Popular Peace
Treaties in Medieval Denmark and Sweden.
The regions along the former border between Denmark and Sweden are
famous for their late medieval peace treaties, created by peasants
during war times, and directed against the two states. The paper will
give an archaeological background and interpretation of the regional
identity across the border, that is expressed in these peace treaties.
Prof. David Austin - Material Politics of Dominance: State
Institutions, Medieval Monuments and Welsh Cultural Identity.
Beginning with two personal experiences involving the castles of North
Wales which have come at either end of my career, I want to critique
the match between the strategies of state-projected identities, and
the aspirations of a pluralistic Welsh culture. First I shall attempt
to characterise how the state manages identity through monuments and
to show how historically this has arisen and been motivated. Next I
will provide a brief analysis of how various strands of Welsh society
have chosen other material monuments in the processes of acceptance,
resistance and apathy. On the eve of a General Election (or during) in
which the fundamental institutions of the State, and their purposes,
will be under review I shall want to find some general propositions to
serve our approaches to the Middle Ages and its material symbols.
Duncan Brown - Ceramic Identities in a Maritime Urban Community.
The quantification of imported medieval pottery is commonly presented
to demonstrate, archaeologically, patterns of trade and exchange. It
is patterns of ceramic consumption that are examined in this paper.
The medieval port of Southampton appears to have been a market for
pottery from a wide variety of Europeansources. Initially, the
relative quantities of imported pottery in Southampton and hinterland
towns such as Winchester will be compared; firstly to establish the
cultural significance of imported pottery regionally; also to give
some hint of the cultural differences between inland towns and ports.
Individual cultural identities will then be discussed through a
comparison of the pottery types occurring at particular dwellings.
Documentary evidence will be employed in the association of certain
dwellings with particular individuals and the ceramic character of
those sites will be considered with a view to establishing cultural
differences in pottery use. Finally, the worth of pottery as an
indicator of regional and individual culture will be evaluated.
Dr. Ewan Campbell - Ireland, Scotland and Wales: archaeology and
Celtic regional identity.
The fifth to seventh centuries saw the emergence of a mosaic of small
kingdoms in the Celtic areas of the western Britain and Ireland,
though it was only in Scotland that theses developed into a state in
the later middle ages. Quasi-historical sources attest migration from
Ireland to both Scotland and Wales, and archaeologists have long
accepted this as an agenda for explaining the material culture of the
areas affected. Whilst regional diversity in some settlement forms and
artefacts can be established, there appears to be little relationship
to supposed ethnic origins. Comparison between Dalriada and Wales
suggests that only a few, and different, 'Irish' characteristics have
been adopted in these areas, and that theses could be explained by the
differing political, social and economic characteristics of the
regions rather than any widespread migration.
Prof. Paolo Delogu - Southern Italy in the Middle Ages: a Difficult
Case of Cultural Identity.
Dr. Stephen Driscoll - Cultural Imperialism in Early Medieval Scotland:
The Conquest of the Picts and Britons.
This paper will consider the deployment of cultural materials by the
Scots in the course of the ninth to eleventh centuries, during the
expansion of their authority in North Britain. It will examine the
evidence of settlements, portable objects and art styles.
Prof. Christopher Dyer - Did the English midlands have a cultural
identity?
We look to the continent where scholars seem to be able to recognise
regions and identify their characteristics with comparative ease, but
in England, attempts to define clear regions seem to meet with
difficulties. The hardest case of all must be the midlands, which has
no coastline to impose unambiguous borders. This paper will examine
some of the variations in material culture, together with political,
social and cultural features, and attempt to define some, with
reference to discrepancies and coincidences in their distribution. The
conclusion will weigh up the merits of a regional approach to the
study of the past.
Genevieve Fisher - Custom, costume, and cultural identity: women's
dress in early Anglo-Saxon eastern England.
This paper will examine the components and composition of women's
dress in early Anglo-Saxon eastern England. During this period,
socio-political structures underwent profound and rapid change.
Women's dress provided a medium for expressing both group and personal
identity within this context. A model that locates Anglo-Saxon kingdom
formation within the extended family suggests that women's dress, and
the kin-based ties that it expressed, assisted in detailing crucial
social relationships.
Dr. Christopher Gerrard - A case of confused identity? The architecture
of the Military Orders in Spain.
This paper charts the changing architectural identity of a Templar and
Hospitaller preceptory in a part- Christian, part-Muslim rural
community from the days of its medieval and post-medieval inhabitants
up to the present day. It seeks to examine the different ways in which
the same building, as a potent symbol of religion, money, Christian
community and warfare, has been regarded and promoted over a long
sequence of building activity.
Dr. C. Pamela Graves - One Church, Many Churches: English regional
identity as reflected in the church architecture of East Anglia and Devon.
This paper will provide a narrative of the social experience of
Christianity in specific historical contexts as an alternative to
generalised studies of medieval religion between the 14th and early
16th centuries. It will expose a tension between institutional
ecclesiastical projects pursued within the dioceses of Norwich and
Exeter, and those conditions which shaped how populations experienced
their religion locally. I will argue that the sacraments, particularly
the mass - central expressions of Christian salvation - were subject
to a degree of local invention. Through the spectrum of religious
practice, the parish church became the locale for the constitution of
more than one kind of Christian consciousness, a process inseparable
from the negotiation of social relations amongst the parishioners. I
have argued elsewhere that it is possible to make comparison of the
doctrinal priorities of the Church hierarchy in each diocese through
an examination of the institutional contexts, sanctioned liturgies,
and architectural evidence of each cathedral. These institutional
priorities may be used as a measure of obedient and dissident
practices in parish churches in their respective dioceses. I have
concluded that, from a variety of perspectives amongst the laity and
the clergy, there are a variety of conditions of the encounter with
religion which can be revealed in each parish church. These social
experiences were partial, parallel, and sometimes contradictory. This
paper will highlight issues regarding the reproduction of relations of
power, subject and identity in the local context, in selected parishes
in Norfolk and Devon. I will propose that a theorised understanding of
the relationship between material conditions and practice allows us to
contrast the relative success of the respective diocesan institutions
of Norwich and Exeter to produce and maintain authoritative practices.
It will expose the degree to which local social structure and
political aspirations transformed religious discourse. I aim to
demonstrate that apparent regional differences in the architecture and
furnishings of churches are the material indices of quite real
differences in the historical conditions under which people
encountered and understood the teachings of a supposedly universal
Church.
Dr. Guy Hallsall - Bringing it all back home: Putting regional history
into the End of Rome' and the creation of the post-Roman kingdoms.
This paper will emerge from my current research on 'Barbarian
Migrations and the Roman West'. Its key theme will be the
relationships between local society and politics and the ways in which
localities are bound into larger political entities. I will examine
the ways in which these relationships were actively determined by
local societies, rather than being imposed from above. This should
show how regional surveys ought to play an even larger part in
providing a global and sophisticated view of the general political,
economic and social history of the late fourth, fifth and sixth
centuries. I will draw examples in particular from my work in the
region of Metz, to make points about how historical and archaeological
data should be used together to further these aims.
Dr. John Hines - The Symbolism of Material Cultural Difference in
Early Medieval Northern Europe.
This paper will focus upon the principles involved in the study of
culture and identity from a primarily archaeological perspective.
Primary attention will be paid to real, empirical evidence and the
specific problems which it poses, and theories on the subject will be
judged strictly in relation to these. An attempt will be made to
identify and discuss crucial issues by reference to a very broad
chronological and geographical field, covering Northern Europe from
the British Isles to the Baltic and taking account of evidence and
developments running from later European prehistory through the Roman
Period to the Early Medieval Period (i.e. ad circa 1000 AD).
Janet Hooper - Unique or merely parochial? An exploration of personal
identities in the Highlands of Scotland.
For each individual, identity will be determined through their
interactions with the people and places around them. To those living
in the isolated glens of the Highlands of Scotland this is perhaps
particularly true, although how this is perpetually created and
re-created on a day-to-day level is usually abandoned to the realms of
clan history. In opposition to these intimate, localised horizons is
the history of regions and kingdoms such as Atholl, which have both a
longer and more accurately documented history than do the extended kin
groups that made up the clans. Atholl originates in the first
millennium A.D. yet retains its significance for local people into the
20th century. The relevance of these differing identities in the heart
of Atholl and those on its fringes, with far looser ties to the
earldom, will be explored through the medium of the house and the
family unit.
Prof. Jozsef Laszlovsky - Living standards and material culture as
expressions of social identity.
Emerging as the result of a long process, urban culture in medieval
Hungary was extremely complex. Unfortunately, the first main phase of
this development is hardly represented in the historical sources, and
proto-urban settlements can generally only be studied through
archaeological excavations. Late medieval urban society is much better
known from the written documents, but the relationship between the
material conditions and legal status of different urban groups should
be studied with the help of various sources (texts, archaeological
finds, eco-finds, pictorial sources etc.). According to the medieval
legal definition of towns, such settlements are lacking in several
regions of the country. However, market centres, non-privileged towns
- the so-called oppidum type of settlements - acted as central places
and represented many aspects of urban culture. This paper will discuss
and compare the material culture and the problem of living standards
in both types of urban settlement. Urban architecture, prestige
articles and industrial production can indicate different social
layers, but differences in these aspects can be taken to reflect
different types of identities (ethnic groups within urban populations,
non-urban social groups, etc.). Similarly, proto-urban settlements can
only be identified by a complex analysis of their material culture, of
which various examples will be discussed.
Dr. Sam Lucy - Burial practice in Early Medieval East Yorkshire: the
construction of local identities.
A contextual approach to early medieval burial practice, drawing on
all the archaeologically visible aspects of funerary ritual, can
demonstrate how early medieval societies actively used the burial of
their dead as an arena in which to construct, change and maintain
various aspects of their cultural identity; a cultural identity which
can be seen to operate on many different levels within society. The
early medieval inhumation cemeteries of East Yorkshire will provide a
case study to show how funerary rituals were drawn on in this way, and
it will be argued that early medieval burial practice sheds more light
on local and regional identities, and social groupings within these
local communities, than on wider, supposedly ethnic, groupings.
Dr. Finbar McCormick - The Adoption of Contrasting Livestock Strategies
in Britain and Ireland.
The last twenty five years has seen great advances in
zooarchaeological study in Britain and Ireland. Large bodies of faunal
data have now been analysed from a wide geographical range of sites,
and site types, which allow us to consider livestock rearing
strategies on a regional basis. This paper will consider the data for
the Early Medieval period (Circa 1100 AD). It will consider the
impact of towns on farming economies and also consider how historical
sources can be used to demonstrate that the rearing of animals was of
great social, as well as economic importance, during this period.
Dr. Ragnhall O Floinn - Artefacts in Context: Personal Ornament in
Early Medieval Ireland - a Case Study.
The study of artefacts of Early Medieval date from Ireland has tended
to focus, apart from chronology, on typology and on art historical
analysis. This paper will attempt an examination of the potential of
artefact studies - specifically the study of personal ornament - in
terms of use, social function and distribution. Dress fasteners have
been chosen because
- they are the most chronologically sensitive artefact type
- they occur in relatively large numbers and
- they were in use over a considerable period of time
A variety of brooch- and pin types is known for the period c500 - 1000
A.D. which have so far been studied in isolation. Their find contexts,
distribution and metrology will be examined along with relevant
place-name and historical sources to examine possible changes in
function through time and the emergence of regional identities.
Prof. Klavs Randsborg Denmark: National History, Unnational
Archaeology.
Allan Rutherford - Scottish castles: a view of aristocratic identity
in the Middle Ages.
Castles and towers are an important aspect of the material culture of
the secular social elite of medieval Scotland. These buildings were
centres of local, regional, and even national power within Scotland,
due to the political standing of the occupants. This was of course
communicated and reinforced by the symbol of the fortified dwelling
and the potential military might held within the walls of such a
structure. The aim of this paper is to look at how local power was
expressed through castle architecture and to contrast this with
castles which also had importance outwith the locality. Two
geographical groups will be investigated - one is to be found in East
Lothian where the influence of the Court at Edinburgh was greatest,
and the other is on the Ayrshire coast, where a group of small
towerhouses could be regarded as a distinct local grouping.
Dr. Joern Steecker - The Mission of the Triangle. The Christianization
of the Saxons, Westslavs and Danes in a regional perspective.
This paper will deal with the Christianization of the regions of North
Germany (Schleswig-Holstein) and Southern Denmark (Nordslesvig), where
the Saxons, Danes and Westslavs were settled. This process took over
300 years and was enacted peacefully (amongst the Danes) or violently
(amongst the Saxons and Slavs). It is possible to tackle these
tremendous differences archaeologically, by concentrating on certain
issues such as the correlation between these differences and the
written sources and on the effect that the Carolingian/Ottonian empire
had on the processes of state formation in these areas. Within this
context, the most valid archaeological explanations for these cultural
differences can then be identified.
Dr. Alan Vince - Culture and Economy: Explanations of Culture Change
in Northwestern Europe.
The adoption of the use and manufacture of a range of pottery vessels
in the 12th and 13th centuries throughout Western and Northwestern
Europe allows us to compare the value of competing explanations. At
one extreme, we have the view that the use of pottery, like all
material culture, is socially embedded with its use being culturally
determined, whilst on the other is the view that the main determinant
of pottery use is availability and price. Taking the west of England,
Wales, Ireland and Scandinavia, I will examine the archaeological
evidence from both perspectives and attempt to arrive at a model for
the adoption, use and production of pottery in medieval Europe which
neither ignores the importance of commerce as a channel for cultural
change nor ignores individual choice.
Alex Woolf - What do we mean by rich and poor? Inter regional economic
comparison reconsidered.
This paper would question the assumptions that lie behind our
interpretations of 'economic strength' in archaeological analyses and
suggest that we are imposing anachronistic and politically suspect
value judgements on our interpretation of past societies. The paper
will be largely methodological but will concentrate, by way of
illustration, on a comparison of early Anglo-Saxon and British regions
and the way in which they have been characterised in the secondary
literature. Examples will, however, be drawn from other cases.
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