Non-Residential Areas of Early Medieval Centres in Bohemia and Moravia

The aim of this project is to contribute to the clarification of the function of 'non-residential' areas (negative delimitation concerning the concept of a residence as the seat of an elite) - among other things the components described as a bailey, the area beneath the ramparts and suburbia, of strong-holds of the Early Middle Ages, and possibly the functions of settlements in the immediate hinterland of the strongholds. The processing and evaluation of the existing archaeological resources from the central localities of Bohemia and Moravia, surveyed over a long period, linked with the genesis of the oldest state organization in the country, could lead to the knowledge of similarities and differences between these components of settlement agglomerations, to the understanding of their transformation in space and time and to defining precisely the used terminology. Responses to these questions may be dealt with by the processing of component themes devoted to the character, intensity and chronology of settlement activities and the overall evaluation of acquired information. An additional product of the project aim is the evaluation of sources, which will prevent loss of their values as evidence. The starting point for the project is the creation of platforms for the confrontation of methodologies and methods, and evaluating the results of the study of a common theme. The project relies on multidisci-plinary cooperation (natural sciences, historic sources) and uses the most modern technology for proc-essing and evaluation of archaeological data. In the first phase of the output there will be a series of contributions oriented towards the evaluation of the state and processing of research, of individual localities; in the second phase there will be a collection of supplementary studies including a full summary of the given theme, based on an analysis of the newly processed sources (assumed publica-tion in series issued by the Archaeological Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Prague and Brno). The acquired results shall enable interconnection with a study of similar problems in the Central Euro-pean region and formulation of a continued assumption, and in this way a more widely drafted project. This concerns the obligatory historical source both for knowledge of the process of forming the state and for the development of town organisms.

CONTACT PERSON:

PhDr. Ivana Boháčová
phone: 257 014 350
e-mail: bohacova@arup.cas.cz
More details on the project: http://www.arup.cas.cz/www_e/vyzkum/vyzkum.htm
Institute of Archaeology, of the CAS (Prague)