Events
- 7th June 2022: "Dating Anglo-Saxon Farming: Findings from the FeedSax Project", Climate and Chronology seminar, University of Oxford - by Mark McKerracher
- 24th February 2022: "The archaeology of land use and agrobiodiversity: recent work from western Asia and Europe", lecture for the Oxford Biodiversity Network - by Amy Bogaard
- 24th February 2022: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: archaeological science and early medieval farming", lecture to the Oxford University Historical Re-enactment Society - by Mark McKerracher
- 17th February 2022: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: Using multiple scientific methods to understand agriculture in early medieval England", Martin Aitken seminar, University of Oxford - by Elizabeth Stroud
- 10th February 2022: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: archaeological science and early medieval farming", lecture to the Banbury Historical Society - by Mark McKerracher
- 6th December 2021: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: the bioarchaeology of an agricultural revolution", online seminar, Christian-Albrecht's University, Kiel - by Helena Hamerow
- 25th November 2021: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: humans, animals and agricultural transformation", University of Newcastle Research Seminar - by Richard Thomas
- 19th November 2021: "Ploughing through early medieval England", Medieval Research Centre, University of Leicester - by Richard Thomas
- 1st November 2021: "Automation and Repetition: The Haystack Archaeobotanical Database", Archaeobotany Discussion Group, University of Oxford - by Mark McKerracher
- 11th September 2021: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England. The Bioarchaeology of an 'Agricultural Revolution'", Session 228 at the European Association of Archaeologists Conference, Kiel - by Helena Hamerow
- 24th July 2021: "Counting sheep: new zooarchaeological perspectives on sheep husbandry in medieval England", Cultures of Cloth: The Archaeology of Textiles in Medieval Northwest Europe, University of Nottingham/Society for Medieval Archaeology - by Richard Thomas and Matilda Holmes
- 17th June 2021: "Tracking the evolution of early medieval cereal farming using the evidence of arable weeds and crop stable isotope values", Research seminar, Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, University of Cologne - by Elizabeth Stroud and Amy Bogaard
- 12th May 2021: "The medieval ‘agricultural revolution’: A bioarchaeological perspective", Oxford Martin School - by Helena Hamerow
- 8th May 2021: "'...in winter, plough': zooarchaeological evidence for the changing role of draught cattle and horses in medieval England AD 400-140", International Draft Animal Conference - by Matilda Holmes and Richard Thomas
- 28th January 2021: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: The Bioarchaeology of an Agricultural Revolution", Archaeology Seminar, Exeter University - by Richard Thomas
- 21st January 2021: "Farming in early medieval England: revolution, evolution, or reformations?", Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society Winter Lectures - by Mark McKerracher
- 30th November 2020: "Under pasture or plough? Exploring post-Roman and medieval land use in England through pollen data", Medieval Archaeology Webinar, University of Oxford - by Emily Forster
- 23rd November 2020: "Understanding crop and animal husbandry during the early medieval period through isotopic analysis", Bioarchaeology Webinar, University of Oxford - by Elizabeth Stroud
- 10th December 2019: "Ploughs, pollen and plants: Investigating changes in medieval agricultural practice", UCL Institute of Archaeology / British Mueseum seminar series - by Matilda Holmes
- 5th December 2019: "Environmental archaeology meets early medieval farming: the Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project", Wessex Centre for History & Archaeology seminar series - by Mark McKerracher
- 29th November - 1st December 2019: "The changing landscape of Anglo-Saxon and later medieval England (FeedSax)", Association for Environmental Archaeology Conference, University of Sheffield - by Emily Forster
- 29th November - 1st December 2019: "Data harvesting: towards the digital automation of charred grain analysis", Association for Environmental Archaeology Conference, University of Sheffield - poster by Mark McKerracher
- 29th November - 1st December 2019: "Crop rotation during the Early Medieval period: the problems of charring temperature and contamination", Association for Environmental Archaeology Conference, University of Sheffield - poster by Elizabeth Stroud
- 8th November 2019: "Farming by numbers: multi-proxy analyses of Anglo-Saxon agriculture", Pitt-Rivers laboratory seminar series, University of Cambridge - by Mark McKerracher
- 4th-7th September 2019: "Ploughs, Plants and Population Growth: Preliminary results from inter-disciplinary collaboration into the increase in English agricultural output between AD 650-1300", European Assocation of Archaeologists, Bern - by Matilda Holmes
- 16th July 2019: "What the Anglo-Saxons did with and in the English landscape", Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project summer lecture series - by Mark McKerracher and Hannah Caroe
- 3rd-8th June 2019: "Investigating the emergence of Early Medieval English open field agriculture using crop stable isotopes and functional weed ecology", International Workgroup for Palaeoethnobotany conference, Lecce, Italy - by Elizabeth Stroud
- 23rd-26th May 2019: "Identifying the introduction and spread of the mouldboard plough in early medieval England", 7th meeting of the ICAZ Animal Palaeopathology Working Group, University of Tartu, Estonia - presented by Richard Thomas
- 16th-17th May 2019: "FeedSax: A Bioarchaeological approach to the Medieval Agricultural Revolution", Early Medieval Rural Settlements in Europe Workshop, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn - by Helena Hamerow
- 24th-26th April 2019: "Early medieval agriculture: exploring evidence for open field systems", UK Archaeological Sciences conference, Manchester, UK - by Elizabeth Stroud
- 10th-14th April 2019: "Identifying crop rotation during the Early Medieval period in England: charring temperature, contamination and isotopic boundaries", Society for American Archaeology conference, Albuquerque, USA - by Elizabeth Stroud
- 19th March 2019: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: The bioarchaeology of an agricultural revolution", UCL/British Museum Joint Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Archaeology, London - by Helena Hamerow
- 30th November 2018: Association for Environmental Archaeology Conference, University of Aarhus - by Mark McKerracher
- 22nd November 2018: Archaeology Research Seminar, University of Reading - by Emily Forster and Mark McKerracher
- 14th March 2018: "Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: collaborating to unravel the mysteries of early medieval farming", at "Working collaboratively with archaeological archives", the CIfA Archaeological Archives Group day conference - by Mark McKerracher
- 8th March 2018: Society of Antiquaries 'Out of London' lecture at Exeter University - by Helena Hamerow
- 21st January 2018: Heidelberg Center for the Environment, University of Heidelberg - by Helena Hamerow
- 16th October 2017: "Introducing FeedSax - Bioarchaeological and a Revolution in Early Medieval Farming", Archaeobotany Discussion Group, University of Oxford - by Mark McKerracher
A dramatic increase in the population of England between the Saxon and medieval periods brought with it alongside economic growth, an increase in urban living and widening social hierarchies. This transition required an expansion of cereal cultivation that culminated in the widespread application of open field farming to facilitate the production of enough food to sustain the increasing population. The Feeding Anglo-Saxon England (FeedSax) project combines analysis from animal bones, seeds, pollen and isotopes to inform the nature of this transition. Did it come about as a wholesale ‘package’ of social and agricultural change, or was it a case of piecemeal technological uptake as the local conditions necessitated?
As the final year of the project approaches, preliminary results are emerging, as well as a better idea of how the various strands of research will come together. This presentation aims to provide some early data regarding animal husbandry, cereal cultivation, geographical variation in settlement archaeology, agriculture and land use.
The past twenty years have witnessed two complementary trends in archaeobotanical research. First, the development of a suite of quantitative and semi-quantitative techniques for the analysis of charred cereal deposits, including crop processing and functional weed ecological analyses; alongside the application of more traditional approaches such as presence analysis and the calculation of the relative proportions of different species. Second, in the United Kingdom as elsewhere, the collection of charred archaeobotanical remains in development-led excavations has become increasingly routine and systematic, creating a growing body of ‘big data’ that has the potential to shed unprecedented light on past environments, diets, and farming practices.
It is advantageous to unite these two trends, by applying a package of tried-and-tested methodologies to the increasing mass of data, in a systematic and repeatable fashion, and to update results as new data emerge. Yet such an approach currently presents a significant practical challenge: how to achieve this level of systematic analysis repeatedly without investing prohibitive levels of time and labour? This poster, arising from the ‘Feeding Anglo-Saxon England’ project, presents recent progress towards the digitized automation of charred crop analyses using a bespoke computer database, in the context of archaeobotanical research into changes in crop production in early medieval English farming.
Open field systems characterised much of the agricultural landscape in medieval Europe, feeding population growth and leaving a profound impression on the countryside across England and beyond. However, after more than a century of documentary and landscape research, scholars have not yet reached any consensus as to when, where and how these distinctive agricultural regimes emerged and developed. The Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project (FeedSax), based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, is bringing a fresh new perspective to this debate, by applying a suite of quantitative, bioarchaeological methods to track the development of ploughing technology, crop rotation and arable expansion across England between the 8th and 13th centuries AD. Zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, palynological and biomolecular (stable isotope) analyses are all being brought to bear on these issues, in a series of localised case studies as well as in a broader national picture. This paper will introduce the project and some early results from sites in the West Midlands and Upper Thames valley.
A dramatic increase in the population of England occurred between the Saxon and medieval periods, alongside economic growth, an increase in urban living and widening social hierarchies. This transition required an expansion of cereal cultivation that culminated in the widespread application of open field farming to facilitate the production of enough food to sustain the increasing population. The Feeding Anglo-Saxon England (FeedSax) project combines analysis from animal bones, seeds, pollen, isotopes and radiocarbon dating to inform the nature of this transition. Did it come about as a wholesale ‘package’ of social and agricultural change, or was it a case of piecemeal technological uptake as the local conditions necessitated?
As the second year of the project approaches, preliminary results are emerging, as well as a better idea of how the various strands of research will come together. This presentation aims to provide some early data regarding animal husbandry, cereal cultivation, geographical variation in settlement archaeology, agriculture and land use.
One of the strengths of the project is the co-operation of researchers from related but varied disciplines. This is an increasingly common approach as the benefits of cross-discipline enquiry are realised. An overview of the nature of the relationship between these specialists and how the integration of data works within the project will also be presented to provoke a conversation about the ways that it has been implemented on similar projects, and how it can be improved or facilitated better in the future.
During the 8th to 13th centuries AD a major expansion in arable cereal farming occurred in parts of England and Europe, developing into open field agriculture. Three key innovations allowed for the dramatic increase in cereal production during the early medieval period: three-field crop rotation, the spread of the mouldboard plough and the extensification of cultivation. Yet the critical questions of when, where and how these innovations developed remain unanswered despite decades of historical research. This presentation will explore for the first time the possibilities of detecting crop husbandry regimes shifts though stable carbon and nitrogen crop isotopes and functional weed ecology.
Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes from crop remains provide information on arable soil conditions (soil N and moisture availability), allowing inferences regarding the ‘compatibility’ of crops potentially grown in rotation. Such evidence is complemented by functional weed ecology which provides an indication of the intensity of cultivation (soil fertility and mechanical disturbance). This paper presents results from case studies from England and Germany, showing how the integration of isotopes and weed ecology can provide information to help understand when, where and how this ‘cerealisation’ occurred.
The period between c 800 – 1200 AD saw dramatic changes in farming practices across large parts of Europe, enabling an increase in cereal production so great that it has been described as an ‘agricultural revolution’. This ‘cerealisation’ allowed post-Roman populations to recover and boom, fueling the growth of towns and markets. To operate a more productive but costly system of farming, peasants had to share expensive resources such as teams of oxen and mouldboard ploughs and cultivate extensive and unenclosed ‘open fields’ communally.
The ERC-funded Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project aims to understand when, where and how this ‘mouldboard plough package’ originated and spread, by generating the first direct evidence of medieval land use and cultivation regimes from excavated plant remains and animal bones, using a range of scientific methods.
In this paper we present the first results arising from the analysis of pathology in the lower limb bones of cattle from multiple sites spanning the 8th to the 13th centuries. We apply a modified version of the methods for identifying draught cattle pioneered by Bartosiewicz et al. 1997, in light of new research on lesions in feral cattle. These data are combined with changing species proportions and biometric and demographic data. Together, these sources, provide new insights into the introduction and spread of the heavy plough in Anglo Saxon England.
