Navigating Early Medieval Europe

Navigating Early Medieval Europe (NEME) was first created by the Rural Riches project financed by the European Research Council (ERC advanced grant no 741340) at the University of Leiden with the University of Liège as second beneficiary.

Now it is further developed by the COCO Connected Communities in Early Medieval Europe project again financed by the European Research Council (ERC Synergy grant no 101224625).

Central elements in both projects are a bottom-up approach to the development of Europe after the erosion of the Roman State institutions and a pan-European perspective.

These projects analyse the contribution of the ‘common people’ to the development of post-Roman Europe and the Europe-wide connections they may have had.

Our aim is to create a more nuanced image of Early Medieval Europe, focussing on the agency, creativity and economic impact of subaltern groups. The combination of the existing top-down (elite) perspective with a new bottom-up (common people) perspective will lead to a more inclusive image of Europe in the centuries after the ‘fall’ of the Roman State in the West.

The period of interest is the Early Middle Ages (c. 430 – 950).

The database contains:

  • data on cemeteries, settlements, hoards, river finds and stray finds as well as some other types of sites;
  • data on various types of brooches, glass vessels, beads, pottery, weapons and some other types of objects;
  • data on attestations of places in written sources and the reasons for them being mentioned and the persons present;
  • data on inscriptions (very limited up to now);
  • geodata (exact locations of Roman roads and late-Roman town walls, research areas, geological maps, landscape maps).

Not all data collected in the database are yet available in this public portal, we are working towards an open access of all data, for which substantial programming must take place to create intelligent queries, and export possibilities the creation of which depends on the available finances. What we record in the database and how we do it can be extracted from the Manuals.

A growing international team is now taking care of the Database and the public presentation in this portal Navigating Early Medieval Europe (NEME).