The Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project: analysing archaeological housing data

The GINI project investigates the dynamics of inequality among populations over the long term by synthesising global archaeological housing data. This project brings archaeologists together from around the world to assess hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of inequality that are of relevance to contemporary societies globally

‘Sons of athelings given to the earth’: Infant Mortality within Anglo-Saxon Mortuary Geography

FOR 20 OR MORE YEARS early Anglo-Saxon archaeologists have believed children are underrepresented in the cemetery evidence. They conclude that excavation misses small bones, that previous attitudes to reporting overlook the very young, or that infants and children were buried elsewhere. This is all well and good, but we must be careful of oversimplifying compound social and cultural responses to childhood and infant mortality. Previous approaches have offered methodological quandaries in the face of this under-representation. However, proportionally more infants were placed in large cemeteries and sometimes in specific zones. This trend is statistically significant and is therefore unlikely to result entirely from preservation or excavation problems. Early medieval cemeteries were part of regional mortuary geographies and provided places to stage events that promoted social cohesion across kinship systems extending over tribal territories. This paper argues that patterns in early Anglo-Saxon infant burial were the result of female mobility. Many women probably travelled locally to marry in a union which reinforced existing social networks. For an expectant mother, however, the safest place to give birth was with experience women in her maternal home. Infant identities were affected by personal and legal association with their mother’s parental kindred, so when an infant died in childbirth or months and years later, it was their mother’s identity which dictated burial location. As a result, cemeteries central to tribal identities became places to bury the sons and daughters of a regional tribal aristocracy

Mead-halls of the Oiscingas: a new Kentish perspective on the Anglo-Saxon great hall complex phenomenon

Widely cited as a metaphor for the emergence of kingship in early medieval England, the great hall complex represents one of the most distinctive and evocative expressions of the Anglo-Saxon settlement record, yet interpretation of these sites remains underdeveloped and heavily weighted towards Yeavering. Inspired by the results of recent excavations at Lyminge, this paper undertakes a detailed comparative interrogation of three great hall complexes in Kent and exploits this new regional perspective to advance understanding of the agency and embodied meanings of these settlements as ‘theatres of power’. Explored through the thematic prisms of place, social memory and monumental hybridity, this examination leads to a new appreciation of the involvement of great hall sites in the genealogical strategies of 7th-century royal dynasties and a fresh perspective on how this remarkable yet short-lived monumental idiom was adapted to harness the symbolic capital of Romanitas

The ‘cerealisation’ of the Rhineland: extensification, crop rotation and the medieval ‘agricultural revolution’ in the longue durée

This paper presents selected results of a research project designed to generate direct evidence for the spread of low-input cereal farming and crop rotation, key elements of the so-called ‘Medieval agricultural revolution’. This type of farming greatly increased overall crop production, enriching landowners and fuelling population growth. The results presented here situate these developments within the longue durée of farming in the lower Rhine basin, from the Neolithic to the central Middle Ages. They also have important implications for our understanding of agricultural production during the Roman to post-Roman transition

Feeding Anglo-Saxon England (FeedSax): Grain Photograph Archive

The Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project (FeedSax: 2017-2022) used bioarchaeological methods to address longstanding questions about the development of medieval field systems. As part of this research, FeedSax - in collaboration with doctoral researcher Tina Roushannafas - collated a large collection of microscope photographs of charred cereal grains from Anglo-Saxon and medieval archaeological contexts. These photographs, which are valuable both as a record of grains destroyed in biomolecular analysis and as a source in geometric morphometric studies, are deposited with the Sustainable Digital Scholarship platform at the University of Oxford (https://portal.sds.ox.ac.uk/feedsax)

Feeding Anglo-Saxon England (FeedSax): Digital Data Archive

The Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project (FeedSax: 2017-2022) used bioarchaeological methods to address longstanding questions about the development of medieval field systems. To this end, FeedSax created a large collection of archaeological data - both compiled from existing sources, and newly created through primary analyses - pertaining to charred plant remains, animal bones, stable isotopes, radiocarbon dates, and pollen records. The FeedSax digital archives includes the resultant datasets in CSV and Excel formats as well as a SQL database ('Haystack'), along with accompanying SQL queries and documentation in MS Word format. The archive is deposited with the Archaeology Data Service (https://doi.org/10.5284/1057492)

Uneven Power and the Pursuit of Peace: How Regional Power Transitions Motivate Integration. CES Working Paper, no. 150, 2007

This paper addresses two related puzzles confronting students of regional and international integration: Why do states willingly pool and delegate sovereignty within international institutions? What accounts for the timing and content of regional integration agreements? Most theories of integration suggest that states integrate in order to solve problems of incomplete information and reduce transaction costs and other barriers to economic growth. In contrast I argue that integration can serve to establish a credible commitment that rules out the risk of future conflict among states of unequal power. Specifically, I suggest that integration presents an alternative to preventive war as a means to preclude a rising revisionist power from establishing a regional hegemony. The implication is that it is not countries enjoying stable and peaceful relations that are most likely to pursue integration, but rather countries that find themselves caught in a regional security dilemma, which they hope to break out of by means of institutionalized cooperation. I evaluate this proposition against evidence from two historical cases of regional integration: the German Zollverein and the European Communities