Assembly in North West Europe: Collective Concerns for Early Societies?

Abstract

The archaeological study of assembly practices in the medieval west is often met with scepticism. The reliance on late documentary records and place-names, and the difficulties inherent in defining what actually constituted an ‘assembly’, are just some of the issues that face researchers. This paper brings together some of the first collated and excavated evidence by the HERA TAP project 1, and offers a cross-European perspective, drawing attention to the great variety of systems and types of structure created for the purpose of assembly in the late prehistoric and medieval eras. Selected case studies emphasize the chronological variations in the inception and life-span of assembly places and underline the diverse relationships of designated assembly sites to pre-existing landscapes, resource patterns, and social structures. Connections between the ‘architecture’ and location of these sites, and their role in the creation, maintenance, and signalling of collective identities are suggested.

Alternatives to Urbanism? Reconsidering Oppida and the Urban Question in Late Iron Age Europe

“…7). Early Medieval assembly sites, although often with little in the way of structural elements, echo the nature of (some) oppida, with their focus on manipulating landscape settings as major meeting places, whilst at the same time being morphologically incredibly diverse (Semple and Sanmark 2013).…”

“…Semple and Sanmark 2013), is often hard to prove because they frequently lack structural evidence. Such locations, however, may explain the choice of oppida sites, on dominant mountain tops and in marshy valleys, seemingly ill-suited to traditional forms of urbanism.…”

The Monumental Cemeteries of Northern Pictland

“…See also Gondek 2010 for discussion of the place-name evidence. 135 Brookes and Reynolds 2011, 235-40; see also Sanmark 2013 andWilliams 2002;. Williams argues that some of the large-scale cremation cemeteries of Anglo-Saxon England were a form of central place.…”

6 There is No Means by Which I Live: Livelihood and Power at the Margins of the State

“…Such traditions of “participatory justice” continued at the local level until the High Middle Ages.” (Korpiola , 96). Germanic and Scandinavian assemblies were specifically described by Tacitus in around 98 CE and their textual and material traces are studied by historians and archaeologists (Bårdseth ; Burmeister ; Sanmark and Semple ; Semple and Sanmark ; Skre ; Sundqvist ).…”