Abstract

Exchanges within past urban networks had the ability to convey economic, cultural and political effects across vast geographic spaces. This connectivity meant, for examples, that travelling merchant-warriors on the Middle Volga might be closely linked with patterns of culture developed in ports in Scandinavia and the Baltic-Sea region, while at the same time responding to trade norms and market demands issuing from Baghdad. This lecture traces the dynamics of urban networks through the changing flows of silver in and out of urban sites in Northern Europe from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. It shows how political and economic events in one part of the network could have direct and immediate consequences in other parts. It also shows how refined chronologies of events and processes, based on a combination of methods and evidence, have the potential to alter the terms of the debate between archaeology and history.