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Drying kilns, corn-dryers and malting ovens are increasingly familiar features in post-Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval archaeology. Their forms, functions and distributions offer critical insights into agricultural, technological, economic and dietary history across the British Isles. Despite the significance and growing corpus of these structures, exceptionally few works of synthesis have been published. Yet such a foundational study was produced by Robert Rickett as early as 1975: an undergraduate dissertation which, for the first time, assembled a gazetteer of drying kilns from across the British Isles, critically examined this archaeological evidence in the light of documentary research, and established a typology and uniform terminology for drying kiln studies. This pioneering and oft-cited dissertation is here published for the first time, providing a foundation for the future study of drying kilns in Britain, Ireland and beyond. A new introduction and notes by Mark McKerracher set the original work within the context of drying kiln research since 1975.
Great Britain --- History --- CHEMISTRY, TECHNICAL --- SCIENCE --- Chemistry, technical --- Science
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Across Europe, the early medieval period saw the advent of new ways of cereal farming which fed the growth of towns, markets and populations, but also fuelled wealth disparities and the rise of lordship. These developments have sometimes been referred to as marking an ‘agricultural revolution’, yet the nature and timing of these critical changes remain subject to intense debate, despite more than a century of research.The papers in this volume demonstrate how the combined application of cutting-edge scientific analyses, along with new theoretical models and challenges to conventional understandings, can reveal trajectories of agricultural development which, while complementary overall, do not indicate a single period of change involving the extension of arable, the introduction of the mouldboard plough, and regular crop rotation. Rather, these phenomena become evident at different times and in different places across England throughout the period, and rarely in an unambiguously ‘progressive’ fashion.Presenting innovative bioarchaeological research from the ground-breaking Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project, along with fresh insights into ploughing technology, brewing, the nature of agricultural revolutions, and farming practices in Roman Britain and Carolingian Europe, this volume is a critical new contribution to environmental archaeology and medieval studies in England and beyond.
Agricultural productivity --- Agriculture --- Excavations (Archaeology) --- History --- Europe --- Antiquities. --- Productivity, Agricultural --- Farm management --- Farming --- Husbandry --- Industrial arts --- Life sciences --- Food supply --- Land use, Rural --- Economic aspects --- Medieval history --- Medieval European archaeology --- Landscape archaeology --- England --- c 500 CE to c 1000 CE --- archaeological science; environmental archaeology; agricultural history; field systems; early medieval
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Farming practices underwent momentous transformations in the Mid Saxon period, between the 7th and 9th centuries AD. This study applies a standardised set of repeatable quantitative analyses to the charred remains of Anglo-Saxon crops and weeds, to shed light on crucial developments in crop husbandry between the 7th and 9th centuries.
Excavations (Archaeology) --- Crops --- Agriculture --- History --- Great Britain
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Anglo-Saxon farming has traditionally been seen as the wellspring of English agriculture, setting the pattern for 1000 years to come - but it was more important than that. A rich harvest of archaeological data is now revealing the untold story of agricultural innovation, the beginnings of a revolution, in the age of Bede. Armed with a powerful new dataset, Farming Transformed explores fundamental questions about the minutiae of early medieval farming and its wider relevance. How old were sheep left to grow, for example, and what pathologies did cattle sustain? What does wheat chaff have to do with lordship and the market economy? What connects ovens in Roman Germany with barley maltings in early medieval Northamptonshire? And just how interested were Saxon nuns in cultivating the opium poppy? Farming Transformed is the first book to draw together the variegated evidence of pollen, sediments, charred seeds, animal bones, watermills, corn-drying ovens, granaries and stockyards on an extensive, regional scale. The result is an inter-disciplinary dataset of unprecedented scope and size, which reveals how cereal cultivation boomed, and new watermills, granaries and ovens were erected to cope with - and flaunt - the fat of the land. As arable farming grew at the expense of pasture, sheep and cattle came under closer management and lived longer lives, yielding more wool, dairy goods, and traction power for ploughing. These and other innovations are found to be concentrated at royal, aristocratic and monastic centres, placing lordship at the forefront of agricultural innovation, and farming as the force behind kingdom-formation and economic resurgence in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Agriculture --- Agriculture. --- Angelsachsen. --- Landwirtschaft. --- History --- To 1500. --- England.
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