1st Edition

Connections and Transformations in Early Europe Essays in Honor of Peter S. Wells

Edited By Peter Bogucki, Rachel Cartwright Copyright 2026
288 Pages 62 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Connections and Transformations in Early Europe examines the diverse economic, social, and symbolic practices of Iron Age and early medieval societies in northern, western, and central Europe, offering fresh insights into the innovative processes of the 1 st millennium BC and AD. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of connectivity, mobility, urbanism, and visual worlds in... Read more

List of figures

List of tables

List of contributors

Foreword

1. Introduction

Part 1: Connectivity and Mobility

2. Connectivities and coming together in Europe in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC

Colin Haselgrove

3. A prestige item or ornament for broader social groups? On the production and social use of Late Iron Age glass bracelets in transalpine Europe and the connectivity with the Mediterranean world

Nico Roymans

4. Money On the Hoof: animal economies within and outside the Roman Empire

Erin Crowley-Champoux

5. Viking Age Diasporic Identities in the North Atlantic: Adaptation and Transformation in the Scottish Isles and Iceland

Rachel Cartwright

Part 2: Urbanism in the First Millennia

6. Concepts of European Urbanism in the Iron Age

Jinoh Kim and Simon Stoddart

7. From Theories to Stories: building alternative concepts of urbanism

John Soderberg

8. Feeding Early Medieval Towns: Zooarchaeological Evidence from 7th-10th Century Urban Sites in Northwest Europe

Pam J. Crabtree

9. Thoughts on the organization of rural, proto-urban and urban crafts production in the late prehistoric and historic North

T L Thurston

10. First-millennium AD Central Places on the Polish Plains: the case of Łęczyca

Ryszard Grygiel, Michał Grygiel and Peter Bogucki

Part 3: Material and Visual Worlds

11. Frequent Hearses: The Archaeology of Funeral Ritual in Early Iron Age Southwest Germany

Bettina Arnold

12. Seeing and Knowing: How Wrapping Transformed the Visual Experience of Iron Age Funerals

Matthew Leigh Murray 

13. Visual worlds on the northern frontier

Fraser Hunter 

14. Visualization and Material Studies: Where Archaeology and Art History Meet

Nancy L. Wicker

15. The images of ancient Britons: entangled colonial parallels

Richard Hingley.

Index

Biography

Rachel Cartwright is the Editorial Coordinator for the journal Archaeometry at the University of Oxford and a Lecturer at Florida State University-London Centre. Her research focuses on early medieval Europe, particularly the Viking Age North Atlantic. She is co-editor of Rethinking Migrations in Late Prehistoric Eurasia (2023).

Peter Bogucki is Senior Scholar in Engineering Education in the Keller Center at Princeton University, where he previously was Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He studies prehistoric societies in central Europe. Bogucki is the author of Lost Civilizations: The Barbarians (2017) and co-editor (with Pam J. Crabtree) of Ancient Europe: an Encyclopedia of the Barbarian World (2004).