Leeds 2013 report part 4 and final

I probably stayed at the dance of the International-Medieval-Congress-before-last longer than I should have done given that I was presenting the next day, but nonetheless I was on time, just, to my own session, and in practice it would have upset few enough people if I had been late, as there were only four people in the audience!

1525. Expressions of Ecclesiastic Authority: from priests to popes

The lessons here, I suppose, apart from the obvious “hope not to be scheduled the morning after the dance“, are to aim to be part of a session, not just to fling a paper title at the organisers as I had done (and as I am avoiding doing next year: had you seen the Call for Papers? I’d be happy to have some more submissions…). All the same, I’d spent quite a lot of the conference in a funk about leaving the profession, although I had during it in fact been offered my next job had I but known this, and this morning audience did not, shall we say, help me with feeling as if my work had value, as didn’t my knowing that because of Montserrat’s e-mail silence I didn’t have the facts I really needed to make it work. Nonetheless, I gave it my best, and I think that certainly the other two papers were very interesting in their own ways. The trouble was rather that there was no single way in which all three were on someone’s wavelength…

• Jonathan Jarrett, “The Priests of Montpeità: Competing Ecclesiastical Interests at the 10th-Century Catalan Frontier”
• Patricia Dalcanale Meneses, “‘Roman Gothic’: Giuliano della Rovere in Avignon”
• David Kennett, “Trouble Finding Bishops: the episcopal crises of Henry VII”

My morning offering was, as you can see, the second part of the Manresa project. Having in my previous paper on this (seen, of course, by none of the same people but hey) tried to set apart the monastic clergy of Sant Benet de Bages from their dense recording of parts of the territory of the city of Manresa in the tenth century, I now tried to see past them to the wider priesthood, concentrating in particular on one of the most densely-documented parts of the record there, a place that is now a basically empty hillside called Montpeità. Having first taken the twenty most frequently-appearing people and shown that they were surprisingly free of direct associations with the monastery, I demonstrated the intermittent monk problem then tried the same trick with the clergy, and yeah, the top three are monastics, one of them being the place’s advocate but never actually dealing with it direct (a sign how little weight this kind of work can bear) but numbers 4-10 of the top 10 are just the actual local priests as far as I can see, albeit that one of them was apparently quite senior at the era of the monastery’s foundation and wrote their foundation and endowment documents (the latter seen below, with his distinctive spelling of his name and signature in capitals). So it does kind of work, there is a possibility of getting at the local clerical distribution through this sample despite the weight of the monastery. But it wasn’t what you could call a finished set of findings.



The act of endowment of Sant Benet de Bages, not in great shape alas, but signed at bottom left by SUNIÆRUS. Slightly larger version linked through, but even at the biggest size I have this is still basically no longer legible

As for the other two speakers, Dr Dalcanale showed us how the man who would become Pope Julius II had, by the time he did, architecturally implanted himself all over the centre of Avignon so that even before his election one could hardly avoid seeing his works, which were furthermore strongly French Gothic in style, rather than the Romanising architecture he might have adopted. Then Mr Kennett looked at the accusations often levelled at King Henry VII of England that he kept bishoprics open for longer than other kings (thus profiting from their revenues). According to Mr Kennett, while there is a statistical justice in this it can be mostly explained by the fact that as Henry took the throne almost all of his bishops were seventy years old or more, and that very rapidly they died: he had 14 new vacancies over the period 1502 to 1505, and it understandably took him time to find competent candidates for so many sees, especially given the kind of hierarchy of importance and income they seem to have had which meant that only some of them could honourably be used as entry-level positions. This was interesting, as was Dr Dalcanale’s paper, but you can see what I mean when I say that there was very little that joined all three of us together in era, geography or focus…

I did get what looked as if it might be a useful contact for the Montserrat problem out of this, though, so I left in a better humour than I’d entered. (Ironically, firstly the contact has been unable to help, and secondly they found me independently though here a few months later anyway! But I wasn’t to know that then.) It was good to have finally done my turn, anyway, and the rest of the day was much more fun for me.

1602. ‘Defended Communities’: fortified settlements of the 8th-10th centuries – origins, forms and functions, II

• Rossina Kostova, “The Western Black Sea Coast: how and how much was it defended?”
• Immaculada Ollich i Castanyer, Montserrat Rocafiguera & Maria Ocaña-Subirana, “The Southern Carolingian Frontier along the River Ter: ‘Roda Civitas’ identified in the archaeological site of l’Esquerda (Catalonia)”

This thread was ill-favoured by its position on the last day, as all the sessions I could make were really interesting but people kept leaving during them. This session here had even lost one of the planned speakers, but to me this mattered not at all because what it meant was that the small-scale Catalan invasion got to take up far more of the session than it otherwise would have been allowed. (You may have recognised some of the names…) But before that happened, Dr Kostova gave us an interesting summary of the medieval fortress archæology along the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea. She saw a division at the Danube, south of which the Byzantines kept forts active in some places, planted settlements when they could and generally kept the space full, and which the Bulgars subsequently blocked up with earth dykes to prevent easy movement of armies; the Byzantines recapture of this zone during the eleventh and twelfth centuries didn’t change that much but they did make a good attempt to hold the Danube. North of the Danube, however, whether Byzantine or Bulgar (or, briefly, Avar) there was much less investment except at a few notable coastal centres. What this seemed to show to the audience was that whoever held that territory, they could usually mobilise a good deal of labour: the Bulgarian dyke system extends for 120 km in some of its lengths! But though the how is impressive, the why of all of this would also be informative if we could get closer to figuring it out.



Aerial view of l’Esquerda

Then, however, came a site dear to my work, good old l’Esquerda, being presented in the UK for the first time in a long time, and with much done since then.¹ The site has a very long chronology, late Bronze Age to twelfth century, so Dr Rocafiguera took us through the background, which included one more big square Iberian tower than they thought they had when I was last there, possible Punic War defences that became the gateways of a Roman village. They now also have a hitherto unsuspected Visigothic phase, however, dating evidence including a radio-carbon date centering around 614, and it comprises a thoroughgoing refortification period with a huge new wall slighting the older defences. Within it, however, the excavated area seems to have been turned over to silos that eventually became rubbish pits and cut through each other, with burials going on in the area of the walls. A village was presumably there somewhere but as of the 2012 season they hadn’t yet found it. It was this somewhat dilapidated complex, anyway, rather than a half-functional Iberian fortress-town, that the Carolingians inherited and refurbished, then.² There was obviously enough for the Carolingian forces to reuse.



The newly-discovered wall exposed in the 2012 excavations

The star find in all this, however, was a silver denier of Louis the Pious that came from the Carolingian destruction layers, whose deposition we can thus reasonably date to 826 or very narrowly before, an unusually close chronology. Coins are just vanishingly rare finds in Catalonia anyway, so they were understandably excited, but the find also helps remove any doubt (if there were any) that this is the Roda mentioned as destroyed in the rebellion of Aizó in the Royal Frankish Annals.³ That’s great, because pinning textually-attested events to archæology so closely hardly ever happens, but now we have quite a lot more questions about what on earth the Visigothic-period site was for and who was using it…

All of that gave me quite an appetite for lunch, once I managed to stop talking Catalonia. But I was clear which strand I needed to be in for what remained of the conference now! First, however, came lunch with friends and also some unexpected neighbours…

Hawks and owls peacefully waiting for showtime

I didn’t get to see the actual show, however, because I had more fortresses to go and hear about!

‘Defended Communities’: Fortified Settlements of the 8th-10th Centuries – Origins, Forms, and Functions, III

• Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, “Early Medieval ‘Incastellamento’ in the North of Iberia”
• Alessandra Molinari, “Rural Landscapes of Sicily between Byzantines and Muslims (7th-11th c.)”
• Neil Christie, “Creating Defended Communities in late Saxon Wessex”

Yes, that’s right, every single session I went to this day had something about Spain in it and I only had to supply one of them! (This was not least because I’d suggested a bunch of Spanish castellologists to Hajnalka Herold when she was setting the sessions up and they apparently proved agreeable, but hey, you do what you have to.) Nonetheless, and despite his prodigious output, much of it internationally aimed, this was the first time I’d actually seen and met Professor Quirós. He was here to tell us of a sea-change, however, in which Pierre Toubert’s model of castles as the social centres that drive everything because of élite demand have been shunted out in the archaeolography (if there can be such a word) of northern Iberia in favour of villages being the key, and castles being basically defence apparatus, more symbols of power than agents of it.⁴



The Castillo d’Arganzón, another of those Professor Quirós has been digging

That fits what I see in Catalonia quite well, but it is also something much more likely to come up in archæology because the units the newest digs, his type site here being a place called Treviño, are showing up are effectively self-contained, so would not show up in transactions. I’m less sure about that argument or whether any such places exist outside mountain Navarre, but I suppose that the Catalan archæologists would probably brandish Roc d’Enclar at me and they’d probably have a point.⁵ From the survey Professor Quirós’s team have, in any case, early medieval castles in Navarra and the Basque Country seem to have been exterior to settlements, churches were more integral and a late antique precedent is also often common; it’s only in the twelfth century that the picture of a castle as the obvious tool of social domination begins to stick, which means that such incastallamento as was being carried out was being done from existing, centralised, sites. That paradigm was already struggling, but this doesn’t do it much good…⁶

Meanwhile, in Sicily, wouldn’t you know, it’s the tenth century that turns out to be crucial; Dr Molinari painted us a picture of a society where late antique settlement organisation went on till quite late, and while it began to be dotted with Byzantine fortresses in the face of the Muslim invasion in the ninth century, it’s only in the tenth that peasant settlement moves up to the hills. What is missing from the picture so far is much sign of Islamic fortification; the Byzantine state here seems to have been attenuated enough that it just withered back in the face of opposition. And lastly, Neil Christie, co-organiser of the sessions, took us through the now-appreciated variety of the Anglo-Saxon burghal system of fortresses against the Vikings and added to it a perspective that many of the other papers had also adopted, that control of territory may not have been as important for their location as control of routeways (including waterways).⁷ This interests me because, as I hope to show soon, it just doesn’t work in Catalonia (except maybe the waterways, but the Ter is no quick way to get anywhere, especially upstream). The other factor that came up again here was the workforce needed to get these sites up, which was not just a matter of a quick bit of earth-moving but often demolition, clearance, and then quite heavy building for all that stone was not usually involved. Of course, Asser tells us about how this was resented, but it was good to have the Anglo-Saxon sites brought into the same dialogue as everyone else was having.⁸

So, that was it; after that it was an hour or so of hanging about, gathering bags, drinking tea and saying goodbye, and then I set off home, quite possibly as I then thought having just done my last Leeds as an academic. I’m pleased that this was not so, and I had extensive plans for how to handle it if it were so, but all the same the abyss yawned near, and spending most of a day remembering that other people are also interested in the things I’m interested in and get paid for investigating them was a boost in an otherwise slightly dark time. But it’s OK: I was about to head for the sunshine…

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1. That first presentation being Immaculada Ollich i Castanyer & Montserrat Rocafiguera, “Ancient patterns in settlement and urbanism: the medieval site of L’Esquerda (Catalonia)” in Rural Settlement, Medieval Europe 1992: a conference on medieval archaeology in Europe, 21st-24th September 1992 at the University of York volume 4 (York 1992), pp. 131-137.

2. Cf., well, basically everything previously published on the site alas. Happily, in a way, there’s still basically no later ninth- or tenth-century evidence beyond the church, so J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 87-99, is still basically OK on the place, and you can find there the other most useful earlier references.

3. Friedrich Kurze (ed.), Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores Rerum Germanicum) VI (Hannover 1895; repr. 1950), transl. in B. Scholz & B. Rogers (transl.), Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories (Michigan 1972), pp. 35-125, with commentary pp. 2-21, s. a. 826. On the coinage of the area see most easily J. Jarrett, “Currency change in pre-millennial Catalonia: coinage, counts and economics” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 169 (London: Royal Numismatic Society 2010 for 2009), pp. 217-243.

4. Toubert, classically, in Pierre Toubert, Les Structures du Latium médiéval : Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siècle à la fin du XIIe siècle, Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome CCXXI (Paris 1973), 2 vols, but now cf. his “L’Incastellamento aujourd’hui : Quelques réflexions en marge de deux colloques” in Miquel Barcelo & Toubert (edd.), L’incastellamento : Actes des recontres de Gerone (26-27 novembre 1992) et de Rome (5-7 mai 1994), Collection de l’École française de Rome 241 (Rome 1999), pp. xi-xviii, also printed as “L’incastellamento, mode d’emploi” in Hélène Débax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal (Espagne, Italie et sud de la France Xe-XIIIe s.) : Hommage à Pierre Bonnassie, Méridiennes 8 (Toulouse 1999), pp. 119-124. For Professor Quirós the new gospel appears to be the work of Iñaki Martín Viso, most obviously I suppose his “Un mundo en transformación: los espacios rurales en la Hispania post-romana (siglos V-VII)” in Luis Caballero Zoreda, Pedro Mateos Cruz & Tomás Cordero Ruiz (edd.), Visigodos y omeyas: el territorio (Mérida 2012), pp. 31-63.

5. There’s probably a full report on Roc d’Enclar by now but I know it from J. M. Bosch Casadevall, “El Roc d’Enclar: el poblado fortificado d’época carolingia” in Jordi Camps (ed.), Cataluña en la época carolingia: arte y cultura antes del Románico (siglos I y X), pp. 107-110, transl. as “El Roc d’Enclar. The Fortified Site in the Carolingian Age”, ibid. pp. 473-476.

6. See Richard Hodges, “Size matters: new light on the Italian Dark Ages” in Philippe Sénac (ed.), De la Tarraconaise à la Marche Supérieure d’al-Andalus : les habitats ruraux (IV^e-XI^e siècle). Desde la Tarraconense a la Marca Superior de al-Andalus: los asentamientos rurales (siglos IV-XI), Méridiennes : Études Médiévales Ibériques 2 (Toulouse 2006), pp. 223-229.

7. Here the cite of choice, which I must follow up some day when world enough etc., was Jeremy Haslam, Urban-rural connections in Domesday Book and late Anglo-Saxon royal administration, British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 571 (Oxford 2012).

Leeds report 4 and final (Thursday 16th July 2009)

The last day of the International Medieval Congress at Leeds is a half-day, unless you’re on one of the excursions. I never do these because of being conscious that I could visit the Royal Armouries or Conisborough Castle any time I liked, and more specifically when it didn’t clash with conference papers, and yet of course left to myself I never do. Anyway. It was the last day, there were only two sessions, and I went to one each.

The first of these was perhaps a mistake. I always regret that there isn’t more archæology presented at Leeds, but often when I go and seek it I find that the papers aren’t very good. I have yet to work out whether this is just because I am a historian and see merit in papers differently from archæologists, or because I am trained to expect quite a lot of analytical rigour and don’t always get it from archæology as presented, in easy-to-consume chunks, for historians. Anyway, my first venture was this:

1522. Hagiography and Archaeology: contrasts and convergences (4th-11th centuries)

• Sébastien Bully, “Entre vitae et archéologie : le case des tombes saintes des abbés Lupicin (V^e siècles et Valbert (VII^e)”

The main lesson from this one is that if you have too much material, even switching unannounced back out of English (which annoyed two Scandinavians in the audience who were there expressly because it was French archæology in English—one’s audience in Leeds is not all English and US no matter how much the comments make it seem so, and a lot of people are already listening in their second language) will not prevent you over-running. I got far less of this than I should have because it’s a long time since I’ve had to listen to scholarly French and scholarly French delivered nervously at high speed is not the best way back in. I think the guy had a really interesting site in which one cult more or less appropriated the space used by another older one, but I’m not sure about this or about anything I wrote down. My poor language skills mostly to blame, but also his lack of preparation.

• Michèle Gaillard, “The Tomb of the Martyr Quentinus from the 4th to the 10th Century: hagiographic evidence and recent archaeological investigations”

A particular Picardy site where archæological digging has substantiated two different Merovingian saints’ lives by finding the saints’ burials, though the modern church is basically as restored after the Great War and therefore full of its own complications of periodization; a real link between past memory and living memory here.

• Pascale Chevalier, “The Tomb and the Miracles of the Cluniac Abbos Maieul and Odilo in Souvigny in the 11th Century: a confrontation of texts and material evidence”

Basically the exploration of a particular possession of Cluny which came to hold the bodies of two of Cluny’s most famous abbots, and the points where their lives and histories tie up with the actual archæogical evidence for cult, which the monks of Souvigny progressively separated from the general public with screens and translations out of the public area of their church where the cults were first established. Lots for someone to draw out of this.

The Cluniac abbey of Souvigny, west front

Then coffee then the last session of the conference, It was good to see a decent showing for this, in fact, especially given that two of the speakers were relatively unknown locally, but the first one may have helped make up the difference, or it may just have been the interest of the theme:

1629. Methods of Christianization

• Julia Barrow, “How Coifi Pierced Christ’s Side: another look at Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, II, 13

Occasionally Dr Barrow brings a voice of authority to comments here and now she was doing the same to the famous episode in Bede’s History where King Edwin’s court converts, arguing that it hadn’t been seen allegorically enough and that the whole thing is a Biblical reference to John spiced with symbolism. I asked stupid questions showing that I don’t know either text well enough but it was really interesting, and while distancing us inevitably from the actual conversion brought us that bit closer to Bede, which rarely seems like a bad thing.

• Cullen Chandler, “Orthodoxy in Doctrine and Practice in the Carolingian Spanish March”

Cullen is of course my principal rival in print, and so far he’s winning. This is the first time I’ve actually seen him present, and of course I had quarrels with it but it was an interesting attempt to show how the Carolingians, here as with many other places, brought an ideological conquest as well as a political one, and how here also as elsewhere the former wound up taking a deeper root than the latter. I felt that the biggest thing missing here was an awareness of the parallel battlefront between Adoptionism and Carolingian-style orthodoxy being waged in Asturias, which fed into the Carolingian one at both ends—Alcuin responds to Beatus of Liébana as well as Felix of Urgell and the Asturian kings and clergy seem to have used the new orthodoxy as part of their legitimation process.¹ But as Cullen said, in twenty minutes you can only cover so much, one can be excused for not suddenly moving two hundred miles east for five minutes only to conclude that more work needs to be done.

• Asya Bereznyak, “From Paganism to Heresy: the conversion of Bulgaria as an example of Byzantine Christianization Methods”

I can’t help feeling that this is the paper the session was originally built round: it was certainly the one that most closely addressed the session title. The principal focus was a study of what themes most interested Bulgar converts—principally the Apocrypha it seems—but also by way of passing pointing out that Christianity in Bulgar territories seems to have predated the Byzantine missions to an extent, and so we don’t really know what kind of background those missionaries were pushing against. This fits quite nicely with work of other sorts I’ve mentioned here before and when my most relevant colleague gets back from digging bits of the relevant area up I’ll have to pass this on…

And so it was over. Lunch with Cullen, at which we both agreed to vilify each other in print like Vroomfondel and Majikthise so as to keep each other on the gravy train for life, was followed by a very kind lift back home by one of the many Cambridge ASNaCs with whom I seem to have friends in common by other routes, which, as my bicycle managed to find a nice piece of glass to skewer its tyre with even as I rode up to the car, was much appreciated, and then a scant few hours of gossip and philosophy later, I was at home considering what I’d achieved.

I think chief among achievements was having fun, to be honest. I haven’t always managed this and even at this one I felt quite glum about my place in the whole history business, or indeed life more widely at times, but there were people around who helped me feel better. After this long chasing the impossible some of the people in the same pursuit are genuine friends, and several of them were there. I won’t embarrass them by naming them as such, also but I owe specifically academic thanks to Julio Escalona, Wendy Davies (as ever), Alex Woolf and Teresa Earenfight, and it was good to meet Jeffrey Cohen, Eileen Joy and Mary Kate Hurley of In the Medieval Middle, Stuart Airlie, Cullen Chandler (know thine enemy! :-) ), Anine Madvig Struer, and a bunch of other people too who deserve better than to be anonymised like this, sorry. And of course especial thanks to those who either spoke in or moderated my sessions and thus saved me all the nerves that could be saved. And I managed a publisher’s meeting, two (I think) invitations to submit to a journal, a lot of well-chosen but ill-timed book purchasing and only a sensible amount of drinking, and recognised the references of most if not all of Guy Halsall’s t-shirts, which probably means that I get onto some special hitlist or something. I’m not sure I did so much of meeting people as introducing people I knew to other people I knew (someone complimented me on my memory for the catalogue of research interests I seemed to be carrying round in my head, which only goes to show that not all of these people knew me very well) and that’s also good.

All the same. I’ve kind of done this now. I’ve run sessions, I’ve given papers, I’ve networked, and ultimately though it is important to be seen, it is still not winning me the game. And, despite widespread advice that it is vital to do, it may not really be the best use of my time. I think I need to be working on stuff for print almost to the exclusion of everything else. A friend of mine brought this home by being much less well-known than I am, but still getting an interview while we were there for a job that I didn’t; the main difference between us in their favour is recent publication and I can only assume that’s what swung it. People are asking me if I’m running sessions again next year and I don’t know. I don’t myself have anything I can think of to present for it, because my sessions are not on my core research topic; I wouldn’t mind doing a paper that was, but it would have to be for someone else’s session. I don’t have enough speakers to make much of a showing of Problems and Possibilities for next year. People higher up structures than me across the pond are now wondering whether they really need to do Kalamazoo; I think I may have squeezed all the immediate use out of Leeds. Ironically, I am likely to be doing Kalamazoo for the first time just as they all quit. But in this game, or the European instance of it at least, it really isn’t teaching experience as long as you have some, or outreach or activity at conferences though again it’s wise to have those items on the CV somewhere. From where I am nothing counts so much as print. Now, by next year—though how many years have I been saying this?—my print presence will be much advanced, by hopefully three papers and a book. And it would be nice to rock up and see my book on sale, I’ll admit. But, the work that needs to be done now to attend then is probably not the best use of my time. I must communicate with other people about this, and we’ll see.

Bit too much like catharsis there again, sorry. But when it clearly isn’t working one starts looking for things to change. It’s a pity though, because it seems to me that this sort of exercise is what research and international collaboration should be about, but as with many of the things we actually want to do in our jobs, or the jobs we want for those of us that don’t have it yet, it’s not something that the system rewards.

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1. I have in fact just been reading something about this that I should have read ages ago, Julio Escalona, “Family Memories: inventing Alfonso I of Asturias” in Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy & Julio Escalona (edd.), Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimation in Medieval Societies, The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400-1500, 53 (Leiden 2004), pp. 223-262, and now I know that there is much more for me to know about this subject even though there is so little evidence and that my “Neo-Goths, Mozarabs and Kings” still has a long way to go before it’s ready to submit, alas.

New data from unbyzantine Noviodunum

Here’s something you won’t (yet) find on Archaeology in Europe. One of my immediate colleagues, Dr Adrian Popescu, has for some time been co-leader of an ongoing excavation at what was Noviodunum, now on the outskirts of Isaccea in Romania. The site has a long and complex history, but between the year 602, when it was lost by the Byzantines to the Avars and then Bulgars, and somewhere around 971, when it was retaken and refortified by Emperor Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer (who says the Byzantines were over-subtle and finicky with their words, eh?) its history is a bit of a blank. It has been supposed that it was deserted and insignificant during this period of ‘barbarian’ control.

View over the site of Noviodunum

Well, now things are more complicated. The part of the site that has shown the eleventh-century occupation has mainly derived that date from analysis of midden remains and rubbish-pits, and an associated cemetery was expected to date from a later consolidation of the new occupation, not least because the burials are east-west oriented, mostly unfurnished and arranged in rows, all of which suggests a fairly short-chronology Christian burial site which should therefore belong to a resettlement. The chronology has to be short because the arrangement of the graves respects them all, whereas in old cemeteries new graves tend to overwrite the oldest ones, and the religious inference comes from the orientation and the general lack of grave-goods. In fact, Adi tells me, the first radio-carbon dates from the cemetery suggest a date in the tenth century, meaning that they’re probably looking at a site with an urban function before the reconquest. If so, it would be very unusual for a Bulgar site to either be this urban or to have a Christian burial ground, and may prompt a re-evaluation of the political conditions on this frequently-crossed frontier.¹ They’re still trying to work out calibration on the radio-carbon dates, because this area and period are hardly ever dug this seriously as opposed to the Classical levels (a problem we’ve talked about before), but it’s all quite exciting. I’ll let you know when publication looms.²

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1. You want context? Context can be found, in terms of general politics, in Jonathan Shepard, “Slavs and Bulgars” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History vol. II, c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 228-248, online here, and idem, “Bulgaria: the other Balkan Empire” in Timothy Reuter (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History Vol. III: c. 900-c. 1024 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 567-585, online here, and in terms of the frontier more specifically, P. Stephenson, “The Byzantine Frontier at the Lower Danube in the Late Tenth and Eleventh Centuries” in Daniel Power & Naomi Standen (edd.), Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands 700-1700 (London 1998), pp. 80-104.

2. Preliminary results of the earlier seasons of excavation are published as Kris Lockyear, Timothy Sly & Adrian Popescu with Mihaela Ciausescu, Clive Orton, Jane Sidell and Robin Symonds, “The Noviodunum Archaeological Project 2000–2004: results and conclusions from the pilot seasons” in PEUCE: studii şi comunicǎri de istorie şi arheologie, New Series Vol. 3-4 (2005-2006), pp. 121 -158, online here.