any significant way, and this interest was inspired by the development of open-area settlement excavation in Denmark by Hatt and Steensberg. In England, the fieldwork identifying medieval villages as earthworks by Maurice Beresford was a vital step, and it was consolidated by a long-term research project at Wharram Percy by Beresford and John Hurst. Partly because of this work, the Medieval Village Research Group was established, and it was followed by the Moated Sites Research Group. The recognition of other forms of medieval settlement in the countryside led to the eventual merger of the two groups to form the Medieval Settlement Group.

From a British origin, such special interest groups have taken on a wider European dimension, and their annual reports have included frequent short reports and some longer papers on Continental material. One of the landmarks of medieval archaeology was the establishment of the Society for Medieval Archaeology in England in 1956 and the publication of the first volume of its journal, Medieval Archaeology, the following year. The European scale of medieval archaeology was indicated by a conference held at Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1966, and a review of urban archaeology was later distilled at an Oxford, England, conference in 1975; the proceedings of both conferences were subsequently published and had considerable impact.

Early medieval studies continued have an ethnic basis, but social questions began to be considered and grave goods were used to establish patterns of ranking. The use of documentary sources to provide a social structure expected in the burial finds was widespread. An early example was W. Veeck in the 1930s, but most studies were undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s by R. Christlein and H. Steuer in Germany and J. Shepherd and C. Arnold in England. In eastern Europe, the role of the Slavs was a major early medieval theme, one that combined both burial and settlement archaeology. The International Union of Slavonic Archaeology was established in 1965 at Warsaw, and subsequent conferences have been held every five years in other cities in eastern Europe.

Typological studies continued for the early medieval material, with examples including the K. Böhner refining chronologies for the Trier region in Germany and sir john myres’s extensive studies of Anglo-Saxon cremation urns. Early medieval cemetery studies have also developed with greater care and consideration being given to skeletal remains, other evidence from the graves and their fills, and structural features around the graves. Cremation cemeteries have also been studied with regard to cremation pyres and the cremated remains within the vessels. Several major rich burial sites were excavated during the twentieth century under high-quality archaeological conditions. Two Frankish graves were recovered from under Cologne Cathedral in Germany and one from Saint-Denis in France, all in 1959. The boat burial and impressive assemblage of artifacts from Mound 1 at sutton hoo were recovered in 1939, and there were further archaeologically significant but less spectacular findings at the site in the 1980s and 1990s.

Recent Developments

Medieval archaeology has continued to expand across Europe, although the amount of rescue excavation has often declined as planning procedures have reduced the amount of destruction. Moreover, a reduction of state funding, replaced by developer funding, has meant that mitigating strategies are often favored by developers. A trend for conservation that started in Britain has now spread to Scandinavia and is becoming increasingly favored in other areas. In contrast, the study of standing remains in a fully archaeological sense has become far more important.

The application of scientific methods in medieval archaeology has been rapid in recent decades. For some early medieval archaeological sites radiocarbon dating offers some potential, although in most situations its precision is too crude to improve on artifactual dating. More success has been obtained with archaeomagnetic dating, and dendrochronology has been of particular importance. The latter has been applied to structural timbers in standing buildings and in waterlogged situations such as wrecks and waterfronts, and the method has provided dates similar in precision to those in