High Medieval News Today

Tolkien’s world of thought could be the ideal bridge between the vague longings of modern youth and the truth of Christian tradition.

Sweden's traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people's minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into prehistory, and so they don't respect the country's cities much, these generally being much later in origin.

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Medieval tomes that recorded how the moon changed color during total lunar eclipses could shed light on the volcanic eruptions that may have triggered the Little Ice Age.

Study combines medieval European, Middle Eastern texts with ice core and tree ring data

2014 trenches A-E and rough locations of 2015 trenches F-H.

A little archaeological conundrum found its solution this morning. At an excavation in Motala in the early 00s, colleagues of mine found a cupped piece of hard, greyish brown material with a distinctly patterned inside. They interpreted it as a piece of a lost-wax casting mould and suggested in a 2004 publication that it was for a Viking Period tortoise brooch. I've never seen the find live, but I could tell from the pictures that the pattern was certainly not from the Viking Period. I wro...

Icelandic sagas and a single archaeological site in Newfoundland document a Viking Period presence of Norse people in the Americas. Now National Geographic's November issue has a piece (here and here) on new work in the field, lab and museum collections by Dr. Patricia Sutherland. It deals with a group of additional and somewhat later sites that may expand that evidence.

Current Archaeology #271 has a long interview with Mick Aston of Time Team fame. When asked how he got into archaeology, Aston paints a little vignette of the renowned High Medieval archaeologist, professor Philip Rahtz:

Evesham will take a trip back in time as medieval music, battle re-enactments and more than 100 stalls fill the town.