Early medieval urban life in the Low Countries before the 10th-11th c.: approaches and problems
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-03-26

The Low Countries were together with Northern Italy the most heavily urbanized regions of the medieval world. The origin and understanding of this phenomenon has been debated in a long and impressive historiographical debate, involving famous scholars like Pirenne, Weber, Verhulst and others.
Today we agree that the take-off of the successful towns can be related to the organisation and stimulus of trade in the context of power in the 10th and 11th centuries. The debate remains however on how to understand the evolution and character of the urban phenomenon before the 10th-11th century. This debate will always tend to suffer from both teleological thinking towards the road of success and the stress on the question of continuity between Roman centres and later towns. The main problem regarding our archaeological understanding of urban life, fabric and functions seems to be that they can have totally different material translations that might be not always be recognisable from the modern perspective. The question is therefor maybe what different forms urban life and functions could have and which methods we need to identify these.

Author - Professor Dries, Tys, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium (Presenting author)