Everyday Products in the Middle Ages

The medieval marketplace is a familiar setting in popular and academic accounts of the Middle Ages, but we actually know very little about the people involved in the transactions that took place there, how their lives were influenced by those transactions, or about the complex networks of individuals whose actions allowed raw materials to be extracted, hewn into objects, stored and ultimately shipped for market. Twenty diverse case studies combine leading edge techniques and novel theoretical approaches to illuminate the identities and lives of these much overlooked ordinary people, painting of a number of detailed portraits to explore the worlds of actors involved in the lives of everyday products - objects of bone, leather, stone, ceramics, and base metal - and their production and use in medieval northern Europe. In so doing, this book seeks to draw attention away from the emergent trend to return to systems and global models, and restore to centre stage what should be the archaeologist s most important concern: the people of the past.

Table of Contents

1: Everyday products in the Middle Ages: Crafts, Consumption and the Individual in Northern Europe c. AD 800-1600: An Introduction / Steven P. Ashby, Gitte Hansen, and Irene Baug

2: ‘With staff in hand, and dog at heel’? What did it mean to be an ‘Itinerant’ artisan? / Steven P. Ashby

3: Itinerant Craftspeople in 12th Century Bergen, Norway - Aspects of Their Social Identities / Gitte Hansen

4: Urban craftspeople at Viking-age Kaupang / Unn Pedersen

5. Crafts in the landscape of the powerless : A combmaker’s workshop at Viborg Søndersø AD 1020-1024 / Jette Linaa

6. Bone-workers in medieval Viljandi, Estonia: comparison of finds from downtown and the Order’s castle / Heidi Luik

7: Consumers and Artisans: Marketing Amber and Jet in the Early Medieval British Isles / Carolyn Coulter

8. The home-made shoe, a glimpse of a hidden, but most ‘affordable’, craft. / Quita Mould

9. Fashion and Necessity. Anglo-Norman leatherworkers and changing markets / Quita Mould and Esther Cameron

10. Tracing the nameless actors: Leatherworking and production of leather artefacts in the town of Turku and Turku Castle, SW Finland / Janne Harjula

11. Ambiguous Stripes: a Sign for Fashionable Wear in Medieval Tartu / Riina Rammo

12. Silk finds from Oseberg: Production and distribution of high status markers across ethnic boundaries / Marianne Vedeler

13. The soapstone vessel production and trade of Agder and its actors / Torbjørn P. Schou

14. Actors in quarrying. Production and distribution of quernstones and bakestones during the Viking Age and the Middle Ages / Irene Baug

15. The role of Laach Abbey in the medieval quarrying and stone trade / Meinrad Pohl

16. Iron producers in Hedmark in the medieval period - who were they? / Bernt Rundberget

17. What did the blacksmiths do in Swedish towns? Some new results / Hans Andersson

18. The Iron Age blacksmith, simply a craftsman? / Roger Jørgensen

19. Bohemian Glass in the North: Producers, distributors and consumers of late medieval vessel glass / Georg Haggrén

20. If sherds could tell: imported ceramics from the Hanseatic hinterland in Bergen, Norway. Producers, traders and consumers: who were they, and how were they connected? / Volker Demuth

21. Marine trade and transport-related crafts and their actors: People without archaeology? / Natascha Mehler