Navigating Early Medieval Europe

Navigating Early Medieval Europe (NEME) is a product of the Rural Riches project financed by the European Research Council (ERC advanced grant no 741340). The main research question of the project is: What role did the mass of the rural population play in the post-Roman economic development in north-western Europe and what was the nature of that economy?

Such research is not possible without creating a new overview of Merovingian sites in Northern Gaul. Such an overview did not exist and the team members set themselves the task of creating a new comprehensive, interdisciplinary database on archaeological sites, historical attestations and inscriptions. Moreover, a lot of data was recorded on various aspects of those sites including several types of finds, characteristics of the burial rites, settlement features etc. This portal allows to enter this database.

We started in 2018 and continued since then to add information to the database. Of course, not every available piece of information has yet been recorded, but we are progressing and welcome participants in this endeavour.

Moreover, this is the first step. The database contains much more information than available via this portal now, but we will advance by continually opening up new parts of the database.

We are convinced that this database will greatly enhance the research on early medieval Europe and we hope that its geographical scope will increase to cover an ever-larger part of Europe!

For more information about the database and its contents go to 'Manuals and Comments' .

Finally NEME intends to provide information on the Research Community for Early Medieval Europe

The Team

Principle investigator: Frans Theuws 
Programming/technical realization: David Schaper 
GIS programming/archaeologist: Roeland Emaus 
Archaeologists: Martine van Haperen, Line van Wersch, Mette Langbroek, Femke Lippok 
Historian: Jip Barreveld 
Numismatist: Arent Pol 
Research assistants: Marieke van Winkelhoff, Robbin van Splunder, Sophie Vullings, Veronica Jackson, Katarina Mokranova, Dusan Maczek, Bram van Heusden

Contributors

Laurent Verslype (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) 
Partners and associates 
Olivier Vrielynck (Service Public de Wallonie, Belgium)  
Rica Annaert (Agentschap Onroerend erfgoed Vlaanderen, Belgium)

When thinking about the form and layout of the portal we were inspired by the Thanados portal which is about recording data on Austrian early medieval burials. We considered it important to have comparable portals. The differences are however also substantial.