Craig-Atkins, E.

White Rose Research Online

This is a repository copy of Book review: Charterhouse Square: Black Death Cemetery and Carthusian Monastery, Meat Market and Suburb.White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/143541/Version: Accepted VersionArticle:Craig-Atkins, E. orcid.org/0000-0003-2560-548X (2018) Book review: Charterhouse Square: Black Death Cemetery and Carthusian Monastery, Meat Market and Suburb. Medieval Archaeology, 62 (2). p. 464. ISSN 0076-6097 https://doi.org/10.1080/00766097.2018.1535389This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Medieval Archaeology on 20/12/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00766097.2018.1535389eprints@whiterose.ac.ukhttps://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. Charterhouse Square: Black Death Cemetery and Carthusian Monastery, Meat Market and Suburb. (Crossrail Archaeology Series – 7). By Sam Pfizenmaier. 19 x 25 cm. MOLA xv + 152 pp, 93 colour and b&w pls and figs, 33 tables. London: Museum of London Archaeology & Crossrail Limited, 2016. ISBN 978-1-907586-41-5. Price: £10.00 pb.  This volume reports the part of MOLA’s Crossrail excavations which took place at Farringdon eastern ticket hall and Charterhouse Square, London and revealed part of the West Smithfield cemetery. Known previously from documentary records alone, this cemetery was the slightly earlier of two emergency burial grounds opened in response to the Black Death in 1348-9 (the other was the better-known and previously-excavated East Smithfield). The volume presents detailed investigation of the 25 14th- and 15th-century skeletons recovered and a suite of scientific analyses including the positive identification of Yersinia pestis, the pathogen responsible for plague. A second key finding was the large ditch marking the southern boundary of the cemetery, the remains of Faggeswell Brook which ran westward towards the Fleet. The fill of the brook produced a significant assemblage of 16th-century material culture, including fragments of silk cloth of Italian or Spanish origin and a wonderful selection of leather shoes, some of which belonged to children. The latter phases: encroachment of the nearby Spitalfield meat market; construction of the Metropolitan tube line and 1930s cellars bring the report to a close, and the present.   This volume is expertly produced and very well presented. It reflects MOLAs aims to bring their commercial work to a wide audience through their publication programme and has effectively tackled the challenge of being accessible to the non-expert and conveying the academic quality at the core of their work. Footnotes, for example, provide both extra technical detail for the researcher and explanations for the layperson where necessary. Section drawings are presented with photos of key finds placed in their stratigraphic context. I also particularly enjoyed the vignettes of contextual detail, for example forays into medieval medical theory and Tudor costume, but the brevity of wider contextualization of the evidence was a slight disappointment for me, as a researcher.   This is an archaeological site report for the digital age – a visually engaging, concise and accessible volume tied in to a web-based digital project report archive where the finer detail and raw data can be found. It provides a taster of every aspect of the project, and an effective route through which MOLA’s work can reach its very broad audience.   

Book review: Charterhouse Square: Black Death Cemetery and Carthusian Monastery, Meat Market and Suburb

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Moreland, J.

This is a repository copy of Review: Villa Magna. An Imperial Estate and its Legacies. Excavations 2006-10.White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/141438/Version: Accepted VersionArticle:Moreland, J. (2018) Review: Villa Magna. An Imperial Estate and its Legacies. Excavations2006-10. Medieval Archaeology, 62 (2). pp. 440-441. ISSN 0076-6097 https://doi.org/10.1080/00766097.2018.1535389This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Medieval Archaeology on 20/12/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00766097.2018.1535389eprints@whiterose.ac.ukhttps://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. Villa Magna. An Imperial Estate and its Legacies. Excavations 2006-10. (Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome, 23). Edited by E Fentress, C Goodson & M Maiuro, with M Andrews & A Dufton. 22 x 29 cm. xix + 516 pp, 34 colour pls and figs, 295 b&w pls and figs, 21 tables. London: The British School at Rome, 2016. ISBN 978-0-904152-74-6. Price: £90.00hb.   Villa Magna was a Roman imperial winery, is ‘known from the letters of Marcus Aurelius’ (7), and continued to dominate its region into late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It was therefore, as Liza Fentress readily admits, hardly typical, and if its archaeology and history are key to understanding ‘the longue durée of central Italy’ (1), they do so from a particular perspective – that of those who wielded power. Fentress and her team situate Villa Magna in the context of an efflorescence of grandiose villas around Rome in the early part of the 2nd century AD. The evidence for viniculture there sits rather oddly beside the villa’s clear material splendour (see, for example, plates 5.6 – 5.21) until we realise that the latter provided the stage on which the emperor performed a series of rituals which connected him, though the act of wine making, to locality, fertility, and tradition. Villa Magna, Fentress argues, was the ‘architectural setting for a rite that deliberately recalled the ancient ceremonies surrounding the harvest of Latium and, with it, the role of the emperor as priest, assuring the success of the vintage and the well-being of the farmers as well as the peace of the gods’ (208, see also 446). The past, through the physical remains of the villa, continued to act on the present with the ‘revival’ of the site in late Antiquity, when the ‘cella vinaria was reconstructed as a church and a dolarium created in the substructures of the old imperial residence’ (254; also 443). One of the dolia from the Roman Imperial winery was reused in this Byzantine-period structure, raising the possibility that there may have been a ‘heritage premium’ in new wine stored in old containers (444, 451). The power of things from the past is also manifest in their destruction, in the ‘breaking up of statues and marble architectural elements’ (451, also 87-88).         Throughout this volume, Fentress and her colleagues succeed in reconstructing the setting for elite power, and in exploring the basis for that power. Narratives about the powerful invariably bring to mind those they dominated and exploited (or at least they should!). At Villa Magna, as so often, ideology, ancestry and tradition legitimized that domination. Fentress tells us that one of the aims of the project was ‘train young archaeologists in an international environment’ (1). There is much to be learned from this volume, not least, as countries increasingly look inwards, the benefits of this openness and generosity of spirit.    JOHN MORELAND (University of Sheffield, j.moreland@sheffield.ac.uk). 413 words.   

Review: Villa Magna. An Imperial Estate and its Legacies. Excavations 2006-10

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/141438/3/Villa%20Magna%20-%20Fentress%20-%20Moreland%20review%20-%20Medieval%20Archaeology.pdf

Book review: Charterhouse Square: Black Death Cemetery and Carthusian Monastery, Meat Market and Suburb

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