Early Medieval Settlements
Helena Hamerow
225 pages including index
published in 2002

I wasn't quite sure whether I should get this book -- complete title: Early Medieval Settlements - The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400-900 from the library. It looked as if much of what it covered I had already read about in Chris Wickham's books Framing the Early Middle Ages and The Inheritance of Rome, only concentrating on the archaeological side of things rather than the history, which I'm more interested in. I also worried about whether it wouldn't be too dry or technical, something I had problems with occasionally in the Wickham books. On the other hand, it was short, a quick scan didn't make it look too boring and reading the introduction showed me it was meant as a general introduction to this subject, rather than an indepth analysis, all of which persuaded me into getting this.

The fact that I finished it means I made the right choice. Helena Hamerow writes well, knows her subject and also knows when to go into detail and when not to, making good use of footnotes. The end result is a good overview of the archaeology of everyday rural life around the North Sea coasts of the modern Netherlands, Germany and Denmark during the transition from Late Antiquity into the early Middle Ages and its relationship to the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England in the same period. Hamerow, as she explains in the first chapter, meant this book both as a general introduction to this period and area and as a pointer for her (monolingual) UK colleagues working on Anglo-Saxon England to the work done on the continent in the same period. Each chapter therefore ends with a quick overview of the relevant English archaeology.

As Hamerow argues, such a book was necessary because English archaeology lags behind the continent when it comes to this period, in general lacking the kind of large scale settlement excavations that have been done succesfully in Denmark, Holland and Germany for several decades now, giving archaeology on the continent a much larger evidence base to work with. Because of that larger evidence base it has been possible to make some generalisations about the way rural settlements evolved and developed in this period, though of course always with the necessary caveats and with no guarantee that new discoveries won't upend some splendid theory. According to Hamerow this means that the work done on the continental side of the North Sea can be related to Anglo-Saxon discoveries in England, also because it is possible to --cautiously-- speak of a similar cultural context in all these regions.

She sets this all up in the first chapter, introducing the differing archaeological approaches and frameworks used for this period, to provide the context for the more specialised chapters to follow, each of which treat one aspect of settlement archaeology. She starts with the most concrete and physical archaeological evidence, steadily opening out in scope. So we go from "Houses and Households: the Archaeology of Buildings" via "Settlement Structure and Social Space" to "Land and Power: Settlements in their Terrirorial Context", ending with two chapters on "The Forces of Production: Crop and Animal Husbandry" and "Rural Centres, Trade and Non-Agrarian Production". The final chapter is barely worth that name, just a couple of pages of summing up and generalising what we just read.

Each of these chapters is in itself an overview of a much bigger subject, of necessity barely scratching the surface. Each chapter therefore needs to build a balance between the general and the specific, providing specific examples of the subjects treated in it while also putting them in context, where possible. A difficult job, but one that Hamerow manages quite well. Throughout the book she tries to use the same excavations as examples where possible, each time treating a different aspect, which helps a lot in keeping things clear as there's enough information to take in already in this slender book. Interesting enough for me as a Dutchman are the large number of Dutch examples she uses, especially from the province of Drenthe, where as it turns out much pionering settlement archaeology has been done.

Early Medieval Settlements was published in 2002 and as Hamerow admits, uses little information from after 1999, so no doubt some of the information and theories in here are outdated, but this does not diminish its achievements in providing a good, general overview of a difficult subject. I need to keep an eye out for more of Helena Hamerow's work.