Medieval Rural Settlement and Infrastructure Archaeology Across Europe

This volume surveys how new infrastructure across 15 European countries affects medieval rural archaeology. Case studies assess legal frameworks, impacts, and mitigation, with concluding best‑practice recommendations to ensure future developments better support understanding of medieval settlements.

This volume provides a unique new Europe-wide perspective on the impact of infrastructure‑led archaeology on our knowledge of medieval rural settlement.

Across the 5th–16th centuries, most of Europe’s population lived and worked in the countryside, based in villages, hamlets, farms and small towns. Some of these medieval settlements persist today, but many others were abandoned and, over time, erased from memory.

Good infrastructure is essential for modern society to function well, but its construction can be immensely destructive of archaeological sites including medieval settlements whose remains are rarely sufficiently monumental to warrant costly redesign to preserve them intact. However, since the adoption across Europe of the ‘polluter pays’ principle obliging developers to fund the identification, investigation and recording for posterity of at-risk archaeological remains, our understanding of the extent and range of medieval settlement remains in the landscape has expanded substantially.

The volume explores the paradox that ‘While large‑scale infrastructure projects represent a major challenge for archaeology, they also offer opportunities to expand scientific knowledge’ (Rácz & Sárosi, this volume). Fifteen new reviews by experts in medieval archaeology and heritage management in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Scotland and Spain consider the impact of discoveries from infrastructure-led archaeology on knowledge of rural settlement in the past, and on archaeological practice today. The volume culminates in a synthesising overview distilling transnational themes and identifying ten key actions shown by experience across these fifteen different states to maximise the knowledge dividend of infrastructure archaeology.

This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the historic countryside, heritage management or impactful archaeological investigation.

Contributor: Carenza Lewis (Edited by), Neil Christie (Edited by), Gareth Davies (Edited by), Aidan O'Sullivan (Edited by)

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