Medieval Rural Settlement and Infrastructure Archaeology Across Europe

This volume provides a unique new Europe-wide perspective on the impact of infrastructure led archaeology on our knowledge of medieval rural settlement.Across the 5th-16th centuries, most of Europe’s population lived and worked in the countryside, based in villages, hamlets, farms and small towns. Some of these medieval settlements persist today, but many others were abandoned and, over time, erased from memory. Good infrastructure is essential for modern society to function well, but its construction can be immensely destructive of archaeological sites including medieval settlements whose remains are rarely sufficiently monumental to warrant costly redesign to preserve them intact. However, since the adoption across Europe of the ‘polluter pays’ principle obliging developers to fund the identification, investigation and recording for posterity of at-risk archaeological remains, our understanding of the extent and range of medieval settlement remains in the landscape has expanded subst