Journal of Urban Archaeology

Quantitative analysis of imported artefacts and ecofacts is a method often applied to study trade networks and cultural contacts of the medieval town. Even though such studies may be indicative, they fail to reveal the societal impact of such networks. We suggest expanding the quantitative analysis with a contextual analysis using the concept of object biographies. A contextual approach will allow us to assess to what degree cultural contacts influenced and changed the everyday lives of town dwellers. The argument is explored through a case study based on the archaeological record of Odense in Denmark covering the period c. ad 1000 to 1500. The analyses show that the increase in imports in the fourteenth century is an expression of increased connectivity, mobility, and cultural exchange in the north-west European and Baltic region. It also shows that it was influential enough to change the social practices related to table culture and hygiene measures.

Dispersed, low-density urbanism has conventionally been considered as a unique consequence of industrialization and factors such as mechanized transport. Pre-industrial urbanism by contrast, has been perceived almost entirely in terms of compact densely inhabited cities with a strong differentiation between an urban and a rural populace. Evidence demonstrates, low-density settlements were a notable feature of the agrarian-urban world, especially in the tropics, and have been a characteristic of every known socio-economic system used by Homo sapiens. This paper situates past examples of large, low-density, dispersed urban settlements, with their long histories and their distinct patterns of growth and demise, in relation to contemporary low-density cities. This critical reappraisal of low-density, dispersed cities in the context of a long and culturally diverse urban past is significant for addressing urban sustainability challenges.

In the late first millennium ad, the Aral Sea region comprised two broad cultural zones: in the south the civilizations of Central Asia, in the north the steppe nomads. On their interface, in the delta of the Syr-Darya, there is an isolated cluster of urban sites, including Dzhankent. Fieldwork results show that in the ninth to eleventh centuries ad this site was a fortified urban settlement, but it had a predecessor from the sixth/seventh century onwards. Urban design and finds indicate close links to the southern civilization of Khwarazm, but also to local populations and Turkic nomads. It is suggested here that Dzhankent may originally have been a Khwarazmian trading post, later serving as nomad winter quarters while continuing as a transhipping point on the crossroads of two important trade routes. Location and functions also raise questions about the application of emporia typologies to this case.

Since 2017, excavations have taken place on Caesar’s Forum in Rome. The area holds archaeological evidence covering three thousand years of Rome’s prehistory and historical periods. The excavations offer wide-ranging research possibilities connected to the urban development of one of the classical world’s pivotal city centres. However, the location’s centrality also offers challenges when transforming the vast bulk and complex nature of the archaeological data into scientific publications, while also making the results accessible to the public. This article presents results from the first excavation phases within a best-practice Open Data strategy embedded into the project from its outset. The applied methods and techniques ensure that traditional, analogue scientific publications are supplemented with online access to the excavation’s raw data, high-resolution illustrations, and 3-D reconstructions obtained through laser scans and photogrammetry.

The Malay city state of Srivijaya, a major actor in world economy between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries, grew at the centre of a complex set of networks encompassing much of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. On the basis of a critical review of past studies and the results of recent research in the archaeology and epigraphy of south-east Sumatra and the Thai-Malay Peninsula, this chapter presents a much revised and improved representation of the state and urban formation of this elusive polity, emphasizing the role of trade networks and of accompanying cultural and religious exchange networks, as operated by both local and cosmopolitan actors.

This article employs network thinking in the study of cross-craft relations in order to evaluate the interconnected nature of local economic activities. In analysing the evidence for sixth-century cross-industry relations at the site of Sagalassos, it becomes possible to reconstruct the structure of the crafting network through the directionality of resources, the work practices that sustained these relations, and the historical trajectories of economic development at the local level. It also proposes some implications for the observed patterns, particularly with regard to the lime and ceramic industries.

This article explores the implications of studying Romanization 2.0, a concept that entails putting connectivity and human-object entanglements at the centre of new high-definition narratives. While this perspective brings important payoffs, decentring Rome in historical narratives and moving beyond the methodological nationalism that has often dogged studies of Roman imperialism, it also presents archaeologists with an array of methodological challenges. How can the Big Data of multiple localities connected by flows of objects and people be appropriately visualized and analysed? To address this question, I present some results from a project concerning the selection of standardized objects in funerary contexts and their impacts on local communities in Britannia, Gallia Belgica, and Germania Inferior, c. 100 bc-ad 100, drawing on a database of over three thousand grave assemblages.

Relational approaches have profoundly changed archaeology and related fields in recent years. This has shifted focus from agents to the interaction between them. Past processes, however, are finished and gone, and the only way to investigate them is through their outcomes as preserved in the archaeological record. Every edge (tie) in a network graph describes relations and associations between the entries in the dataset, not within the societies that produced them. In order to move from description to explanation of past processes, the nature and dynamics of connections need to be addressed. In this article, the possibilities and problems connected with this are discussed from the vantage points of four common and timetested qualitative approaches to relational data: ethnographic analogies, semiotics, Actor Network Theory, and outcome analysis, each briefly exemplified on urban networks in the Roman Near East.

Global estimates of early levels of urbanization are shown to be grossly underestimated. An attempt is made to rectify this using Jacobs’s ideas on cities converted into a broad ‘geographical imagination’, a theoretical patterning of cities. This is applied to estimates of urbanization in 300 bc to fill in the many missing cities in a current historical demographic study. This results in a sixfold increase in estimated urbanization that is interpreted as a qualitative difference based upon different approaches to understanding cities. In conclusion, some implications of this difference are discussed.