Toruń & Ziemia Chełmińska

I've been in Toruń sorting faunal samples from early medieval and Teutonic Order sites with Daniel Makowiecki for various isotopic studies, doing bits of teaching, meeting with various colleagues and having a look at some castles with Marcin Wiewióra. The best was Lipienek, which is normally completely inaccessible as it's overgrown completely with lethal vegetation - pretty much a wall of thorns. Right now the vegetation is dormant and it's very accessible...given its location, surroundings and importance, potentially a site for future excavation. This is the outer bailey (przedzamcze):

and this is what's left of the main castle:

But soon it will look like this

I also found out that beavers have colonised the Vistula around Toruń, chewed up trees in the process, and there are wolves prowling on the other side of the river, probably going after all the wild boar and roe deer...so all we need now is a bear or two, some lynx and we'd be back in the 13th century...

Poznań March 2011

I got off the plane in Poznań this morning to be greeted by snowflakes gently drifting down from the sky. Apparently the snow was thick on the ground around Malbork castle yesterday...it's a good thing we're not doing any excavation or coring this time around! Instead I'm zipping around north Poland checking out sites and sorting out logistics for the summer excavations. From Poznań, where I'm staying with the Makowieckis (and where I've eaten my first sturgeon - the whole thing, smoked):

 
...we go to Toruń tomorrow, around a few castles in the Kulmerland, then to Malbork, Elbląg, Olsztyn, sites in the Masurian Lakelands, Warsaw, Gdańsk and back to London. Already a lot of material has been gathered, and there's a good chance we'll be able to identify technological differences in the mass processing of animals between the early medieval and crusader periods, and between the towns and castles of the Teutonic Order at a bunch of sites along the Lower Vistula. En route I'm picking up material for isotopic studies. Of all the weird things I've seen today, what people were doing to horse heads in early medieval Gdańsk is the strangest...more on this another time. I'll finish with a snapshot of one of the birthplaces of Polish Christianity in the 10th century - part of a baptismal font uncovered underneath the gothic archcathedral in Pozńan. Not the greatest photo, but it'll do...

Fieldwork for 2011

Fieldwork application forms for the 2011 season of excavations relating to the Ecology of Crusading project in Poland, Estonia and Latvia are available here: http://www.ecologyofcrusading.com/fieldwork.html

The deadline is 7 April 2011 and places are limited, so please get your submissions in as soon as possible!

Seminar at UCL, 16th November

Tomorrow, we'll be giving a major seminar on the project at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL:

"Transforming a sacred frontier landscape: exploring the environmental impact of crusading and colonisation in medieval Prussia and Livonia"

5.30pm, room 209.

Project is up and running...

Welcome to the blog for the Ecology of Crusading project! This is a major international research programme funded by the European Research Council, running from October 2010-2014. The aim of the project is to investigate the environmental transformations in the Baltic region associated with the crusades in the 13th century AD and the process of conquest, colonisation and religious conversion that accompanied them. The project will employ cutting-edge archaeological science and historical studies to provide a holistic, integrated perspective on a fundamental chapter in European history. The website has just been launched here: www.ecologyofcrusading.com

This blog will contain various updates as the project unfolds - details of seminars, conferences, events, fieldwork, discoveries and so on. Please check back here regularly for more information. You can also follow the project on twitter and facebook, linked from the main website.

That's pretty much it for now. We're currently planning the schedule for sampling and excavation for the first phase of the project due to start in 2011. However, if you're in London, Reading or York you can catch some of our early seminars which I'll put up here in due course, but which are already listed on the main website.