Small changes: local knowledge, resilience and adaptation in medieval landscapes

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Meier
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566618576

Social transformations have been key to archaeology since its beginnings. The interest is usually on the macro level: 'cultures', societies or early states. In this project, however, we ask how local societies reacted to large-scale changes in natural and social conditions (e.g. climate change or urbanization). For this, we take three selected small-scale cultural landscapes in southwest England, southern Bavaria, and the Peloponnese as starting points, which we understand as products of collective practices through time, anchored in local knowledge. By this approach in three very different ecological and historical contexts, and enriched by literature studies on additional case studies, we aim to investigate the range of local societal reactions to external natural and social changes and thus to contrast with the usual, strongly unifying view on the macro level. This perspective can also expand the possibilities of our societies for necessary local adaptations. We choose a longue durée approach, which, according to our core competences, mainly focuses on the 5th-11th centuries AD, but also considers the upheavals of the 12th-16th centuries. Our research questions are: 1. Did small-scale societies of the European Middle Ages respond to changing environmental and societal conditions through landscape transformation? 2. What decision-making processes could have enabled small-scale societies to adapt and how were innovations introduced? 3. How do environmental and societal changes and responses to them manifest in the material fabric of local landscapes? 4. How effective were the adaptations made by small-scale societies in the long term? We will apply the same methodological set in all three small areas: First, the historical landscape relics will be documented three-dimensionally using remote sensing, especially LiDAR (partially with centimeter accuracy), old maps, and other sources, and their relative genetic development will be reconstructed. In the second step, small test trenches will be laid out at selected locations to obtain soil samples. The laboratory analysis of these samples in the third step will provide the absolute chronology using modern OSL and AMS dating and clarify the management of these landscape systems using thin sections, botanical macrofossils, and pollen. Finally, all individual results for each small area will be combined in the interpretative framework of a landscape biography, which allows us to link the (geo)archaeologically obtained data with practices and further back to local knowledge and to ask about reaction patterns to external, large-scale changes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Sam Turner