The medieval marketplace is a familiar setting in popular and academic accounts of the Middle Ages, but we actually know very little about the people involved in the transactions that took place there, how their lives were influenced by those transactions, or about the complex networks of individuals whose actions allowed raw materials to be extracted, hewn into objects, stored and ultimately shipped for market. Twenty diverse case studies combine leading edge techniques and novel theoretical approaches to illuminate the identities and lives of these much overlooked ordinary people, painting of a number of detailed portraits to explore the worlds of actors involved in the lives of everyday products - objects of bone, leather, stone, ceramics, and base metal - and their production and use in medieval northern Europe. In so doing, this book seeks to draw attention away from the emergent trend to return to systems and global models, and restore to centre stage what should be the archaeologist’s most important concern: the people of the past.

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Everyday products in the Middle Ages. Crafts, consumption and the individual in northern Europe c. AD 800–1600: an introduction
• 2. ‘With staff in hand, and dog at heel’? What did it mean to be an ‘itinerant’ artisan?
• 3. Itinerant craftspeople in 12th century Bergen, Norway – aspects of their social identities
• 4. Urban craftspeople at Viking-age Kaupang
• 5. Crafts in the landscape of the powerless. A combmaker’s workshop at Viborg Søndersø AD 1020–1024
• 6. Bone-workers in medieval Viljandi, Estonia. Comparison of finds from downtown and the Order’s castle
• 7. Consumers and artisans. Marketing amber and jet in the early medieval British Isles
• 8. The home-made shoe, a glimpse of a hidden, but most ‘affordable’, craft
• 9. Fashion and necessity. Anglo-Norman leatherworkers and changing markets
• 10. Tracing the nameless actors. Leatherworking and production of leather artefacts in the town of Turku and Turku Castle, SW Finland
• 11. Ambiguous stripes – a sign for fashionable wear in medieval Tartu
• 12. Silk finds from Oseberg. Production and distribution of high status markers across ethnic boundaries
• 13. The soapstone vessel production and trade of Agder and its actors
• 14. Actors in quarrying. Production and distribution of quernstones and bakestones during the Viking Age and the Middle Ages
• 15. The role of Laach Abbey in the medieval quarrying and stone trade
• 16. Iron producers in Hedmark in the medieval period – who were they?
• 17. What did the blacksmiths do in Swedish towns? Some new results
• 18. The Iron Age blacksmith, simply a craftsman?
• 19. Bohemian glass in the north. Producers, distributors and consumers of late medieval vessel glass
• 20. If sherds could tell. Imported ceramics from the Hanseatic hinterland in Bergen, Norway. Producers, traders and consumers: who were they, and how were they connected?
• 21. Marine trade and transport-related crafts, and their actors – people without archaeology?