Marginalized Potters and Ceramic Compositional Groups: Neutron Activation Analysis of Contemporary Pottery from Tigray,Northern Highland Ethiopia

The study presents the results of neutron activation analysis (NAA) of contemporary pottery from Tigray Regional State, northern highland Ethiopia. This is the first regional-scale study of ceramic composition of Tigray’s pottery and is part of an ethnoarchaeological study of the material and social contexts of pottery production and consumption in Tigray’s Eastern (Misraqawi), Central (Mehakelegnaw), and North-western (Semien Mi’irabawi) zones. The analysis identifies clear compositional groups with strong regional patterns, an encouraging result for the use of NAA to study Tigray’s ancient pottery trade. Significantly, the study further contributes to discussions of how mutually constituted social identities of potters and consumers affect compositional patterning in the distribution of pottery in market networks.     

‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world.The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.     

Hosting the king: hospitality and the royal iter in tenth-century England

Traditional studies of royal itinerancy have depended on locating the king’s progress through his kingdom(s) as precisely as possible and it should therefore not surprise that the iter regis in pre-conquest England has received relatively little attention, since Anglo-Saxon diplomas only rarely record their date and place of issue, making the establishment of the royal itinerary all but impossible. However, more recent studies, particularly by German scholars, have moved away from the earlier attention to the concrete details of the royal iter and focus more on the effects of itinerancy as a method of rulership, viewing itinerancy as a central part of royal ritual. This study argues that if we investigate itinerancy in tenth-century England from this standpoint, we can throw new light onto the subject. Contemporary sources reveal that in England as in France and Germany the iter regis was of great importance, with symbolic acts of feasting and gift-giving accompanying royal visits. The attention given to these ritualised acts in contemporary sources suggests, moreover, that Anglo-Saxon kingship possessed an important ‘charismatic’ quality, which deserves further investigation.