Books by Stuart Brookes
Las sociedades humanas han concebido su relación con el espacio físico en el que habitaban en tér... more Las sociedades humanas han concebido su relación con el espacio físico en el que habitaban en términos territoriales. Este concepto dota a la noción de territorio de una serie de significados sociales y culturales, convirtiéndolo así en un instrumento de articulación de las complejas y cambiantes relaciones entre grupos sociales y medio natural. Generalmente la territorialidad se examina desde el prisma de los estados modernos como zonas perfectamente delimitadas, tanto desde un punto de vista topográfico como desde una óptica del significado político. Sin embargo, se trata de una visión parcial, que no toma en
consideración la existencia de otras formas de territorialidad existentes en sociedades preindustriales. La Alta Edad Media, un periodo que cubrió los siglos VI al XI aproximadamente, fue un auténtico laboratorio de territorialidad. Los modelos romanos, fuertemente condicionados por el poder imperial, se diluyeron y surgieron nuevas y muy diversas formas de articulación del territorio. Las sociedades locales se convirtieron en protagonistas activas, al crear patrones territoriales que sirvieron de
escenario para implementar las relaciones con la autoridad central, al tiempo que se fueron construyendo los espacios episcopales y se crearon “lugares centrales” de nuevo cuño. Esta compleja relación entre lo local y lo englobante se aborda en este volumen a través de un conjunto de estudios que cubren la Península Ibérica, Inglaterra, Irlanda e Italia. La construcción de la territorialidad en la Alta Edad Media es una obra deliberadamente orientada hacia una historiografía de escala europea que supere las miradas exclusivamente nacionales.
by Catarina Tente, Iñaki Martín Viso, Manuel Luis Real, Gabriel Venturini de Souza, Catarina Meira, Sara Prata, Carlos Alves, Pedro Sobral de Carvalho, Carla Santos, nadia figueira, Sonia Cravo, Stuart Brookes, Margarida Cércio, Francisca Alves Cardoso, Marina Vieira, Sílvia Casimiro, Cláudia Oliveira, and Antonio Lima
Book Reviews by Stuart Brookes
European Journal of Archaeology, 2010
European Journal of Archaeology, Jan 1, 2010
Eva S. Thäte, Monuments and Minds: Monument Re-use in Scandinavia in the Second Half of the First... more Eva S. Thäte, Monuments and Minds: Monument Re-use in Scandinavia in the Second Half of the First Millennium A.D. (Lund: Institutionen för arkeologi och antikens historia, Lunds universitet [Acta Archaeologica Lundensia. Series in 4˚, 27], 2007, 336 pp., illustr., CD-Rom, ISBN 91-89578-04-X).
Journal Articles by Stuart Brookes
Life on the Edge: Social, Political and Religious Frontiers in Early Medieval Europe. Neue Studien zur Sachsenforschung, 2017
By definition, liminal spaces exist outside the sphere of normal everyday activity — they form ‘t... more By definition, liminal spaces exist outside the sphere of normal everyday activity — they form ‘thresholds’ of or between different structures and behaviours; but there are many instances in Anglo-Saxon England where liminal locations can be recognised as important loci of social, political and legal interaction, as gateways that simultaneously divide and unite. This function is very clearly displayed in the positioning of sites of public assembly on major regional or national boundaries. This paper uses historical, archaeological and toponymic evidence to examine this ‘liminal centrality’ and the importance of thresholds in defining political groups and the geography of Anglo-Saxon England.
Venues of outdoorr assembly are an important type of archaeological site. Using the example of ea... more Venues of outdoorr assembly are an important type of archaeological site. Using the example of early medieval (Anglo-Saxon; 5th–11th centuries A.D.) meeting places in England we describe a new multidisciplinary method for identifying and characterizing such sites. This method employs place name
studies, field survey, and phenomenological approaches such as viewshed, sound-mark, and landscape character recording. While each site may comprise a unique combination of landscape features, it is argued that by applying criteria of accessibility, distinctiveness, functionality, and location, important patterns in the characteristics of outdoor assembly places emerge. Our observations relating to Anglo-Saxon meeting places have relevance to other ephemeral sites. Archaeological fieldwork can benefit greatly by a rigorous application of evidence from place name studies and folklore/oral history to the question of outdoor assembly sites. Also, phenomenological approaches are important in assessing the choice of assembly places by past peoples.
Many aspects of English early medieval (Anglo-Saxon) legal landscapes can be discerned in archaeo... more Many aspects of English early medieval (Anglo-Saxon) legal landscapes can be discerned in archaeological and toponymic evidence, ranging from the locations of legislative councils and judicial assemblies to sites of capital punishment. Among the corpus of such sites a striking group can be detected at the periphery of urban spaces. Gates into a number of towns appear to have functioned as legislative meeting-places, and even gave their names to some legally constituted communities, while suburban locations also feature prominently as sites of gallows and public punishment. In this paper historical, archaeological and toponymic evidence is used to examine this phenomenon of suburban legal practices and to pose questions about the wider dimensions of the early medieval legal landscape.
Antiquaries Journal, 2013
It is a commonplace notion of Anglo-Saxon studies that by the 11 th century, and perhaps very muc... more It is a commonplace notion of Anglo-Saxon studies that by the 11 th century, and perhaps very much earlier, English shires were subdivided into administrative territories known as "hundreds" or "wapentakes". These units consisted Sites in England, 5 th -11 th evolution. This paper describes evidence for the hundredal patterns of the southern Danelaw in order to consider the West Debating the Thing in the North I: The Assembly Project Journal of the North Atlantic 1 2 UCL Institute of * Corresponding author [email protected]. Special Volume 5:76-95
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 8, 2012
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Books by Stuart Brookes
consideración la existencia de otras formas de territorialidad existentes en sociedades preindustriales. La Alta Edad Media, un periodo que cubrió los siglos VI al XI aproximadamente, fue un auténtico laboratorio de territorialidad. Los modelos romanos, fuertemente condicionados por el poder imperial, se diluyeron y surgieron nuevas y muy diversas formas de articulación del territorio. Las sociedades locales se convirtieron en protagonistas activas, al crear patrones territoriales que sirvieron de
escenario para implementar las relaciones con la autoridad central, al tiempo que se fueron construyendo los espacios episcopales y se crearon “lugares centrales” de nuevo cuño. Esta compleja relación entre lo local y lo englobante se aborda en este volumen a través de un conjunto de estudios que cubren la Península Ibérica, Inglaterra, Irlanda e Italia. La construcción de la territorialidad en la Alta Edad Media es una obra deliberadamente orientada hacia una historiografía de escala europea que supere las miradas exclusivamente nacionales.
Book Reviews by Stuart Brookes
Journal Articles by Stuart Brookes
studies, field survey, and phenomenological approaches such as viewshed, sound-mark, and landscape character recording. While each site may comprise a unique combination of landscape features, it is argued that by applying criteria of accessibility, distinctiveness, functionality, and location, important patterns in the characteristics of outdoor assembly places emerge. Our observations relating to Anglo-Saxon meeting places have relevance to other ephemeral sites. Archaeological fieldwork can benefit greatly by a rigorous application of evidence from place name studies and folklore/oral history to the question of outdoor assembly sites. Also, phenomenological approaches are important in assessing the choice of assembly places by past peoples.
consideración la existencia de otras formas de territorialidad existentes en sociedades preindustriales. La Alta Edad Media, un periodo que cubrió los siglos VI al XI aproximadamente, fue un auténtico laboratorio de territorialidad. Los modelos romanos, fuertemente condicionados por el poder imperial, se diluyeron y surgieron nuevas y muy diversas formas de articulación del territorio. Las sociedades locales se convirtieron en protagonistas activas, al crear patrones territoriales que sirvieron de
escenario para implementar las relaciones con la autoridad central, al tiempo que se fueron construyendo los espacios episcopales y se crearon “lugares centrales” de nuevo cuño. Esta compleja relación entre lo local y lo englobante se aborda en este volumen a través de un conjunto de estudios que cubren la Península Ibérica, Inglaterra, Irlanda e Italia. La construcción de la territorialidad en la Alta Edad Media es una obra deliberadamente orientada hacia una historiografía de escala europea que supere las miradas exclusivamente nacionales.
studies, field survey, and phenomenological approaches such as viewshed, sound-mark, and landscape character recording. While each site may comprise a unique combination of landscape features, it is argued that by applying criteria of accessibility, distinctiveness, functionality, and location, important patterns in the characteristics of outdoor assembly places emerge. Our observations relating to Anglo-Saxon meeting places have relevance to other ephemeral sites. Archaeological fieldwork can benefit greatly by a rigorous application of evidence from place name studies and folklore/oral history to the question of outdoor assembly sites. Also, phenomenological approaches are important in assessing the choice of assembly places by past peoples.
The project highlights and discusses several forms of reflection:
a) The subjective experience of archaeological fieldtrips, i.e. the learner’s viewpoint of the fieldtrip
b) Peer interaction and engagement with the institutional practices of archaeological fieldtrips, including emphases on power relationships between participants, self and group regulation and resistance
c) Disciplinary concerns, including phenomenological engagement with archaeological materials / landscapes
d) Tutor’s experience of fieldtrips
The research used intensive documentary and landscape research alongside concepts drawn from anthropology and sociology in order to understand the changing relationship between landscape character, settlement type and perceptions of landscape, locality and community. The study area comprised over 10,000 ha of mixed landscape in the former hundred of Ewelme. The hundred’s 14 parishes included nucleated villages and large open fields (in the vale) as well as dispersed settlements and early enclosed wood-pasture landscapes (in the Chilterns). The area has a rich collection of documents and early estate maps, and strong archaeological potential. Analysis of documents, archaeology, standing buildings, early field-names and peasant bynames was framed around a GIS database constructed by Dr Stuart Brookes.
The project’s archive comprises a spatial database of vector files, which were created by digitizing historic maps of the 14 parishes of Ewelme hundred (Oxfordshire). The digital archive consists of (1) a shapefile of all digitised fields and settlements of the 14 parishes in the South Oxfordshire hundred of Ewelme in the 19th century. Based on tithe maps of c.1840 and the Newington enclosure map of 1812 (used because the Newington tithe map depicts only the townships of Brookhampton and Holcombe); (2) an interpretative shapefile, based on medieval and early modern documents and maps, showing settlement and land use believed to be in existence c.1300. The database includes settlement areas (villages, hamlets and isolated farmsteads), arable land, pasture (including meadow) and woodland. Open-field strips are shown where depicted on 16th- to 19th-century maps; they would actually have been more extensive in the 14th century, but the map nevertheless conveys the dominance of common-field farming in the vale and its minimal presence in the Chiltern parishes of Nettlebed, Nuffield and Swyncombe.
In order to examine the effects of the physical landscape on past transportation geography, we have created an omnidirectional landscape connectivity map of England and Wales. Based on a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the region, the map attempts to describe the principal paths and corridors as defined purely from the slope of the terrain. This approach allows archaeologists to approximate the complex matrix of accessibility and isolation in a given landscape and to assess to which degree topography could have shaped interaction dynamics of past human communities (see Palmisano 2015). In future work, as part of the project Travel and Communication in Anglo-Saxon England we will examine the further effect on movement of other obstacles such as rivers and vegetation, but it is hoped in the meantime that this map inspires other research on spatial interactions in the past.
The map was created in several steps. First, a friction surface was created from a slope map derived from the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) available from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) of 2000 (http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/). Each grid cell was assigned a resistance value based on the slope degree (see Ericson and Goldstein 1980). Second, we created two pairs of horizontal and vertical parallel strips having zero resistance and used the open source software Circuitscape (http://www.circuitscape.org/) in pairwise option to simulate the flow of current in both west-east and north-south directions (McRae and Shah 2009). Finally, the two resulting current density maps were combined by multiplication in order to generate an omnidirectional connectivity map (see Pellettier et al. 2014).
The resulting map shows a number of sharp corridors of connection (light grey filaments) of different scales and distributions. Other areas (dark filaments) were less well connected. This omnidirectional connectivity map can be used quantitatively to address a range of questions regarding past societies in England and Wales, for e.g.:
Can particular settlement types be related to ‘natural’ corridors of movement (e.g. at pinchpoints or ‘crossroads’, as ‘strings’ along corridors, etc?
Is trade, the movement of resources, or cultural contact influenced by ‘natural’ corridors? Does the distribution of portable objects relate to the distributary network of terrain?
Does the physical road network complement or cut ‘against the grain’ of natural corridors?
How do social, political and territorial configurations relate to natural corridors?
Modern scholarship, including the outcomes of the Travel and Communications project, has shown that the overall shape of the pre-Modern English overland transport network was fundamentally in place by the Central Middle Ages. Any road system in a terrain and climate as wet as that of England must solve the challenges presented by the hydrological features of the landscape, and fords, bridges, causeways and ferry points were necessarily a key aspect of the experience of historical travel.
The great bulk of medieval bridge-sites and fording points in England had been established by the middle of the thirteenth century. The preceding generations had witnessed enormous economic growth and an unprecedented increase in the population. The accompanying efforts to improve the road transport infrastructure fell especially on improvements of river crossings and the construction of new bridges. In aggregate these constitute the most substantial investment made to the overland transport network between the Roman period and the turnpikes of the seventeenth century.
Bridges and river crossings anchored the English road network in space, and once established it proved remarkably durable. The medieval bridge-network appears to have been able to meet the transport requirements of the country up to the eve of the Industrial Revolution: the number of bridges in the mid-eighteenth century was approximately the same as in the Middle Ages. The building of bridges, in particular monumental stone bridges, was an economic and political statement. Bridges may have been built in response to contemporary needs but once in place they exerted a lasting influence on the shape and character of the local and regional transport network. Medieval bridges and river crossings were therefore a key long-term influence on the fundamental underpinnings of the urban, commercial and social development of the country.
The database draws upon two major sources of information: surveys of historical bridges and place-name data. Among the former Edwyn Jervoise's four-volume Ancient Bridges series (Architectural Press, 1930-6) was the first comprehensive survey of historical bridges in England and Wales, many of which date to the Middle Ages. David Harrison's The Bridges of Medieval England: Transport and Society 400-1800 (Oxford University Press, 2004) provides a modern updated study of medieval bridge building and its socio-economic importance. Their work is enormously expanded by onomastic studies. Place-names elements such as brycg "bridge, causeway" and ford "river-crossing" capture vital information on the human historical landscape that is otherwise beyond the reach of direct written or archaeological sources.