Archaeological settlement research for the late Middle Ages in Poland

Abstrakt

Archaeological settlement research in Poland has to date not been conducted on a large scale. The remains of medieval villages have usually been excavated when rescue works were required by construction projects – usually along the routes of planned highways. Traces of farming have been discovered only by chance, and research on the distribution of land uses has mainly been carried out by geographers. In a few cases, survey excavations of rural settlements have been carried out in the vicinity of defensive structures being investigated. In cities, even long-term studies have basically been limited to researching only the densely built-up zone, the market square, and defensive walls. Neither agricultural land owned by townsfolk nor the zones outside the city proper that they used economically have been examined. The surface research resulting from the campaign Archeologiczne Zdjęcie Polski – AZP (Polish Archaeological Record) is of little use for the late Middle Ages, firstly because artefacts from that period were not collected at the beginning of the research, and also because of a specific aspect of cultivation (fertilisation), which saw a considerable carrying of movable cultural artefacts out from built-up areas. These weaknesses resulted from various factors. First of all, there was a lack of interest in such research among not only historical preservation services but also archaeologists themselves. However, the main factor was the significant financial outlays that such research requires.

Currently, archaeology has many techniques at its disposal that allow large areas to be studied and that thus allow archaeological sites to be identified and preliminarily investigated. Aerial laser scanning and ground-based geophysical methods provide much valuable data and, above all, allow places requiring excavation to be accurately identified. Unfortunately, deeming such methods to sufficiently record sites can sometimes mean that they constitute the first and only archaeological survey of a site. Then there are problems of dating such sites and, of course, we do not acquire many of the movable cultural objects that research on medieval society demands.