Journal of Urban Archaeology

This article explores the theoretical and methodological challenges of reconstructing the pace of events and activities, which shaped urban archaeological contexts. It argues that the archaeological context and its stratigraphic relations should be the primary unit of inquiry, as it contains a wealth of heterogeneous data, which require multifaceted investigation. Increasingly, this material is being divided and studied by different specialists from the archaeological sciences. This major development does not diminish the contribution of the artefactual material in understanding the nature of the activities performed by past individuals, in time and space. Through a detailed source-critical analysis of artefacts and their depositional context, this article seeks to highlight the contribution of objects in tracing past events and proposes a short biography of a glass-bead workshop from the beginning of the eighth century excavated in 1985–1986 at the emporium of Ribe, Denmark.

One crucial problem dealing with the earliest urban development in Scandinavia is not only the emergence of urban settlements, but their discontinuity. By examining the case studies of Birka and Hedeby, this paper does not only deal with the likely causes for the towns’ decline, but also takes a more detailed look into the closer chronological sequence of this very process. While Birka seems to become abandoned around c. ad 975, almost contemporaneous with Kaupang, Hedeby in contrast appears to prevail almost a hundred years longer. The possible reasons for this anachronism will be discussed and a so far unobserved, extensive transformation phase in Hedeby suggested.

This article analyses the formation and early development of Copenhagen, Denmark, through the methodological concept of biography. How can we understand the development of the town from a small, anonymous port in the eleventh century to the successful merchant’s town that it was in the thirteenth century? Which people, events, and wider processes in society had impact on the development of early Copenhagen? In this article, a biographical approach is used as a way of looking at the development from a contemporary perspective, considering actors and processes involved in the first settlement without seeing it through the prism of the later ‘result’ — the medieval merchant’s town. This can hopefully give a more nuanced understanding of the actions and events of importance for the development of the town and contribute to an understanding of the course of medieval urbanization as an unpredictable process without a given ‘result’. The study takes its starting point in the new archaeological information revealed in Copenhagen in later years, which together with the re-examination of older archaeological material, historical sources, and new ways to statistically model radiocarbon data present a picture of a dynamic initial period of the town, with several actors involved in the course of events shaping the town.

The central town squares of the medieval towns in the Low Countries are considered to be the theatres of late medieval urban identity and are not rarely associated with the origin of the towns, or at least their glory as merchant towns in the past. In reality, these emblematic places have often complex biographies, in which selected memories were attributed to them in different historical contexts. In this paper, we will explore how these changing townscapes interacted with the social agents at their medieval origins. We will use both archaeological data as well as historical writings in order to reconstruct their biographies and show how their development was not path-dependent but followed deliberate strategies and aims by different actors that used this space.

This paper presents an overview of methodological and theoretical advances in the geoarchaeological study of towns in north-west Europe, c. ad 750-1450. The interpretations based on these new results are anchored within a theoretical framework of ‘Biographies of Place’. This framework offers a strong fit with geoarchaeological methods, and through five themes related to urbanism this paper shows a perspective that bridges geoarchaeology and historical context, and allows researchers to challenge accepted narratives that have to a large degree been reliant on the same sets of material evidence. By illustrating the potential of these geoarchaeological methods and showcasing their specific contributions, this paper aims to show not only that, but also how, different geoarchaeological methods can most fruitfully be built into research designs of North European medieval towns. This high-definition approach allows us to come a step closer to a more detailed picture of early medieval and Viking Age urban communities.

The aim of this article is to compare traditional narratives and new narratives regarding the theme of the origins of Venice (from the Roman period to the Early Middle Ages). New narratives can rely on traditional and less traditional archaeological approaches. However, they are able to question some myths related to the city (that of migrations, for example) and place its history within more complex and articulated social, political, and cultural dynamics related to the Early Middle Ages. A promising approach is to study the colonization processes of lands that are inhabited despite a lack of water or food shortages. This article identifies and explains the reasons for such an unconventional choice.

The altars of the Lares Augusti, their imagery and spatial contexts, as well as the institution of the Augustan vicomagistri are commonly treated as a homogeneous phenomenon in Roman archaeology. Starting from an adjusted concept of ‘biography of places and objects’, the paper analyses the material evidence along the (multidimensional) line from the setting up of the altars in certain spatial contexts — mostly compital shrines — to the renovations of altars and shrines, to their abolishment. Thus, the assumed homogeneity of the cult of the Lares Augusti in the moment of its reinvention (dating to the last decade of the first century bc) becomes secondary to the highly individual and situational adaptations of altars, inscriptions, and compital shrines including the veneration of the Lares Augusti. Seen in its longue durée in the neighbourhoods, with differences, contingencies, and changes, the institution of the Lares Augusti unfolds as a highly adaptable religious, social, and spatial practice in imperial Rome’s urban environment.

Most studies that aim to give integrated accounts of urban development in Hellenistic North Syria rely very much on information gathered from literary sources and draw heavily on analogies and circumstantial evidence. The master narrative developed along these lines is that the Seleucid kings profoundly transformed North Syria. Seleucus I allegedly triggered a largescale urbanization project that revitalized a largely depopulated region. However, the results of recent archaeological research suggest that the urban landscape of pre-Hellenistic North Syria was more diverse than previously acknowledged. While some of the cities can indeed be regarded as new and disembedded foundations, it now seems that most of them developed along individual trajectories rather than reflecting a royal strategy.

Biographies of urban sites have been written for centuries, often following one overarching linear narrative of rise and decline. This contribution investigates the urban biography of Gerasa/Jerash, one of the famous Decapolis cities located in what is modern northern Jordan. It does so from a variety of perspectives in order to lay open the ways in which bringing together several and diverse perspectives might give converging, conflicting, or simply more nuanced views on the biography of a city. It is asked in what ways we might bring together such diverging narratives and correlate archaeological and historical narratives, which is one of the challenges that archaeologists and historians have to tackle. Here, the perspective brought by high-definition archaeology might also bring to the forefront new ways of tackling such biographies, giving visibility to the invisible, for example, by bringing in soil sciences.

Becoming urban is widely recognized as one of the great turning points of human societies across history. Urbanism afforded economies of scale, cultural entanglements, and environmental exchanges, leading to social and material complexity, which are at the core of today’s civilization. This paper argues that a new approach to urban archaeology may establish a more coherent view of urbanism as a defining expression of complex societies. Emerging applications of isotopic, biomolecular, and geoarchaeological methods are transforming archaeology’s ability to read the scale and pace of events and processes in urban stratigraphies. These methods hold the potential to create a ‘high-definition’ view of the past, integrating scientific techniques with contextual archaeological and historical approaches. Redefining urbanism as a network dynamic, such an approach may unleash new forms of data that are able to significantly test, challenge, and revise narratives of particular urban sites as well as fundamental assumptions about trajectories, dynamics, and causal conditions of urbanism.

How do archaeologists understand the relationship between climate, climate change, and urban biographies? In this article, I argue that urban biographies should be approached as the life stories they claim to be, with events propelling the narrative between phases or periods in the history of a city. In order to integrate the wealth of palaeoclimatological data now available into such narratives, scholars need to be conscious about how the relationship between climate and urban change is modelled. Taking a bibliometric survey of urban archaeology as the point of departure, different narrative templates for using climate to explain urban trajectories are identified and briefly exemplified on the basis of scholarship on the Early/Middle Bronze Age transition in the Near East and the Maya Classical/post-Classical transition.

Comparative analysis is an important goal of the research carried out by the Centre for Urban Networks Evolution. Archaeologists and historians conducting research on cities need comparison for several reasons: to distinguish unique features of individual cities from universal urban traits; to better understand individual cities and deposits; and to generalize about cities, towns, and urbanism. In this article, I review methods and concepts of comparative urban analysis, including systematic vs intensive comparisons, the scale of comparison, synchronic vs diachronic comparison, and comparison at different stages in a research trajectory. I also discuss empirical and epistemological linkages between comparisons of cities and comparisons of urban deposits as studied by high-definition archaeological methods. These issues of comparison can help integrate the analysis of urban networks with high-definition localized studies of urban deposits.