Poland, work began at Kobiernice in the 1880s as well as on the castle hill of Halich (now in Russia).

Urban archaeology received some attention at this time, but it was patchy. The institutional buildings of Göteborg, Sweden, were studied by Berg, but when he extensively excavated at the town of Kunghälla, he did not note structural evidence from the town itself, despite the many finds, but he did report on a monastery and castle adjacent to the settlement. An unusual example of continuous research on an urban center from the later nineteenth century can be seen at Lund, Sweden, where Karlin collected finds and recorded structures and stratigraphy while sewers were being dug. He later carried out excavations in various parts of the city. During the construction of railway works in Oslo, Norway, the architects recorded finds and deposits revealed by that construction.

Intermittent Interest

In the early twentieth century, there was a shift in activity associated with later medieval archaeology, and the clearance of ruins and their display for the public became common at this time. In England, the Office of Works carried out many programs. For instance, the visible ruins of the late medieval town of Old Sarum near Salisbury were excavated and consolidated before World War I, and after the war there was a program to work on abbeys such as Fountains, Byland, and Whitby. Even poor-quality excavation recovered significant amounts of early medieval material, though its context remains difficult to interpret.

In spain, the study of medieval archaeology was largely architectural, such as Asturian, Visigothic, and Mozarabic buildings of various kinds. Later medieval studies of castles and churches were also carried out. In Bohemia, the Benedictine abbey on Ostrov Island in Prague was excavated by Davle. A study of castles was carried out by the architect G. Fischer for Norway, and work began on the Prague castle, which has been continuously investigated since 1925. British official interest in recording archaeological and architectural heritage was reflected in the establishment of royal commissions for England, Wales, and Scotland, and county volumes appeared steadily after 1908.

The discovery of timber buildings through the identification of postholes by Carl Schuchhardt in the first decade of the twentieth century would lead in due course to tremendous changes in research interests and interpretation, but at the time, such discovery was not widely appreciated. The first large-scale excavation of a medieval settlement was in the 1930s when P. Grimm excavated Hohenrode, in Germany, which was occupied from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries a.d. The resulting wide-ranging report indicated the potential of such studies, but the excavation was not emulated. Rescue excavations on Frankish settlements included Gladbach and an Alemannic settlement at Merdingen, in Germany. One of the great discoveries of the period was that of the Viking Oseberg ship and its contents in Norway in 1904.

There was some important academic consolidation, and some important museum studies were undertaken on the collections assembled during the nineteenth century. Notable examples of such work for early medieval material include the typological classification of Germanic art styles by B. Salin, typologies of Anglo-Saxon brooches by. E.T. Leeds, and corpora of Viking material across Europe by Shetelig. Work on classification was stimulated and continued, with coin-dated Austrasian material published by Werner. Cemetery evidence was dominant, and it was often used to indicate settlement patterns, with variables of time, space, and ethnicity. Examples include K. Schuhmacher for the Rhineland and Leeds for England. The possibility of understanding Slavic material culture was appreciated by L. Niederle, who published a series of volumes on such evidence over a period of fifteen years. Later medieval artifact studies developed in some areas at this time, such as on Bohemian ceramics and on a range of finds in London, which were cataloged and published extensively for the first time.

Urban archaeology continued at Lund, Sweden, but the efforts in this city were not emulated elsewhere. Instead, evidence was collected by amateurs, often local government officials, clergymen, or architects. Such piecemeal recording