Any reader expecting yet another contribution on the urbanization of Scandinavia will be misguided reading Axel Christophersen's contribution on ‘performing towns’. As the author makes very clear, he focuses on urbanity in the sense of urban social practice rather than on urbanization itself. The latter concept is straightforwardly dismissed as belonging to processual archaeology, and was trying to understand the town as a being structure and neglecting the dynamic role of its individual inhabitants as a ‘crucial historical driving force’ (p. 110). Christophersen also omits the classic discussion – actually besides Christianization one of the two most prominent topics in early medieval archaeology – on the designation and character of the earliest towns in the north, where early towns are merely defined as population centres ‘larger than a village and smaller than a city’ (p. 112). Instead, with the adoption of practice theory, Christophersen picks one heuristic approach from modern social theory (mentalism (subjectivistic/objectivistic), intersubjectivism, textualism and practice theory itself) for the analysis of social phenomena as routinized body/knowledge/things complexes (Reckwitz Reference Reckwitz2002, 257–58).

Christophersen emphasizes that urban environments are not static, but dynamically created and re-created through the everyday performance of social practice. In practice theory, the carrier performing a certain practice as a routinized type of behaviour is the single individual as bodily and mental agent (ibid., 250). However, Christophersen strangely avoids naming or characterizing actual agents. Since even artefacts and structures can obtain a certain social role, everyday social practice/performance thus would, next to meaning (intention/mood) and knowledge, to some extent also be reflected in the respective material culture. With this entry Christophersen joins a current general trend in the archaeological discussion tending to focus on both social approaches of everyday life (Hadley and ten Harkel Reference Hadley, ten Harkel, Hadley and Harkel2013) and personal and communal identities (e.g. Hem Eriksen et al. Reference Hem Eriksen, Pedersen, Rundberget, Axelsen, Berg, Eriksen, Pedersen, Rundberget, Axelsen and Lund2014, viii) – in prolongation one might even add isotope analysis of particular individuals here (cf. Price et al. Reference Price, Frei, Dobat, Lynnerup and Bennike2011; Linderholm et al. Reference Linderholm, Hedenstierna-Jonson, Svensk and Lidén2008; Grupe, von Carnap-Bornheim and Söllner Reference Grupe, Carnap-Bornheim and Söllner2011) – rather than on early towns as entities. In focusing on social interaction, the author aspires to capture ‘the historical breadth and diversity of the “town” as a phenomenon’ (p. 114), which up to now would have been obstructed by earlier approaches. For him, ‘in the processual urban archaeology research tradition the diachronic or vertical analyses of the course of events and the historical and socially given (meta)structures will be important. By contrast, in a practice approach the event and the synchronous or horizontal interaction between individuals, intent, material resources, space and time will be in focus’ (p. 116, my emphasis).

After a minute exposition of the theoretical apparatus consuming half the contribution he turns to the more practical benefit in archaeology: the adaption of this preferred social theory as an ‘urban archaeology of practice’ in its own right is intended to shed light on the identification and analysis of the formation, development and disintegration of social practices. Or, to put it in the author's words, to consider ‘how the material resources in spaces and places become part of the formation of practices through performance’ (p. 118). In contrast to customary archaeological approaches, harbours are rather looked upon as places where people with different backgrounds and experiences meet and interact, town houses are perceived as central spaces for the formation of private and public patterns of practice. Of course, the performative mechanisms that Christophersen is after are not always that trivial and independent only: in a densely populated townscape different practices tend to bundle and intertwine by their mere physical proximity of performance and so create new patterns of practice, as in the case of the relocation of craft quarters in Trondheim in the mid-12th century, which may have led to sharing of competences and cooperation. Complexes of practices appear in places where agents share material elements and have to synchronize their performances, such as in harbour environments, as illustrated by the example of Trondheim's river harbour at the Nidelven and the changing requirements for loading and unloading commodities. Finally, leaking zones of contact, informal encounters due to spatial proximity, are regarded as ‘the decisive driving force behind a unique form of urban development in terms of innovation, spontaneity and creativity’ (p. 130) and thus it would be a central task to identify them archaeologically in medieval urban landscapes.

Whether the general application of the expression ‘urban lifestyle’ – later equalized with Christophersen's own ideas of ‘urbanity’ – really supersedes the perception of ‘urbanization’ as a conscious process, with the ‘intention to push back processual archaeology's steadfast reconstruction of the medieval town’ (pp. 109–10), can actually be questioned. This claim might be motivated by the author's specific line of argument and his attempt to constitute an ‘urban archaeology of practice’ in its own right. Building his argument, Christophersen exposes the school of processual archaeology to a particularly hard critique, even if the author actually tries to distinguish his approach from postprocessual archaeology, too. At this point, maybe we should briefly recall what is rebutted here: in contrast to the normative and descriptive cultural-historical archaeology, processual archaeology shared the general insight that a mere collection of empirical data, building typologies and drawing distribution maps, is not enough. Data should henceforth be tested by more scientific and anthropologically underpinned hypotheses in order to be able to focus on processes, trends and generalization in a positivistic approach. In contrast, a non-positivistic approach is specific to postprocessualism: due to the dilemma of equifinality, the problem of testing or proving anything conclusively, the school of postprocessual or ‘interpretive’ archaeology turned to theoretical approaches from structuralism, Marxist and neo-Marxist theory, and phenomenology. With his focus on the subjective human experience, the social performance/practice of bodily and mental agents, Christophersen's approach indeed is closely related to phenomenology and thus could be addressed as postprocessual. Also, the universally criticized processualism in fact is commonly assessed as having remained ‘absolutely central to contemporary archaeological theory and practice’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2010, 11), and it also has not remained in its 1960s state.

Thus, instead of the grave assessment that the previous (‘processual’) archaeology's definitions would a priori delimit what a medieval town is, it would have been helpful to venture a circuit and present an accordant state of the art – which in fact is quite considerable and versatile – before coming up with his utterly minimalistic approach of ‘population centres . . . larger than a village and smaller than a city’. Of course the author is perfectly right in underlining the historical breadth and diversity of towns as well as the fact that they were by no means static, but perpetually created and re-created. Very true, early towns for too long have been perceived as monolithic entities despite their considerable preponderant chronological depth. Yet there are in fact important contributions trying to tackle that problem: for the phase of early urbanization, already Hodges (Reference Hodges1982, 50–52) discerned between type A (seasonal fairs), type B (classic emporia) and type C (emporia, regional administration centres). And in the widely noted article ‘Urbanisation in Scandinavia and the Baltic region’, Callmer (Reference Callmer, Ambrosiani and Clarke1994) suggests a phasing with time slices of 50 years: non-permanent trading places (A.D. 700–50), permanent or semi-permanent sites (750–800), the heyday of early urbanization with a developed hierarchy (800–50), the collapse of ‘second-level trading places’ (850–900), the reorganization of trade (900–50), a breakdown in specialized production (950–1000), new towns as royal foundations after western European models (1000–50), and finally denser populations and brick buildings (1050–1100). Even if one tended to disagree with these proposals, there is certainly much room for discussion. Admittedly in this the town as a social phenomenon plays only a minor role. While in social-practice analysis space and area might be of minor functional interest, this is by no means the case in archaeology, where any find or feature gains significance chiefly by its spatial context. And even if a townscape beyond doubt was also socially shaped, the town itself, of course, was quite a ‘physical objective space’. The purpose of Christophersen's contribution surely is more than just to recapitulate once more the archaeology of Trondheim or else to present the state of knowledge on early urban development in Norway. Yet even here some more background on the physical ‘spaces and areas’ might have been beneficial in order to understand the addressed dynamics of this neither linear nor evolutionary process: why Norway's first town, Kaupang, ceased to exist c. A.D. 930/960 (Pilø Reference Pilø and Skre2007, 178); Trondheim's roots in the 950s as a trading place (Christophersen Reference Christophersen, Christophersen and Nordeide1994b); its royal foundation as Nidaros by Olav Tryggvason in 997 (Christophersen Reference Christophersen and Myrvoll1989); the coincidence with the founding of Oslo and Bergen (Christophersen Reference Christophersen, Karkov, Wickham-Crowley and Young1999b; Molaug Reference Molaug, Buko and McCarthy2010) in the ‘second wave of urbanization’ (cf. Skre Reference Skre and Skre2007, 46); or even the underlying role of Christianity and state formation (Bagge Reference Bagge2005).

The socio-scientific theoretical instrument Christophersen likes to implement in archaeology, as he himself admits, is eligible to help to enunciate more questions rather than to grasp new evidence and provide us with digestible hard facts. Having said this, of course, we have to recall that this contribution is humbly titled ‘Steps towards an understanding . . .’. But indeed the actual outcome of the presented case studies is characterized by a clearly increased use of subjunctives – ‘an archaeological analysis of practice might contribute . . .’, ‘Key questions would then be . . .’ (p. 124, my emphasis), ‘How might this have affected . . .?’ and ‘would have helped to facilitate . . .’ (p. 126, my emphasis) are just a few examples. The case of the longshoremen and the question about ‘the performative practice of loading and unloading . . . the bodily strength and experiences related to lifting, carrying, throwing, receiving, moving and storing goods of varying shape, weight, packaging, texture, smell and value’ (p. 125) is illustrative indeed: this way of thinking would bring us as close as it gets to the respective urban dwellers who, in their performances, all contributed to the everyday social and innovative environment of a town. And of course the study of the daily agitating of individual agents would add another facet to our prevailing knowledge on early medieval towns. However, the question is whether such an approach, focusing on the social in its ‘smallest units’ and its localization in practices (Reckwitz Reference Reckwitz2002, 245), will be fully feasible by means of archaeology and the study of the residues of material culture – or is condemned to remain an intellectual pastime? And have we not already identified our spaces and areas of leaking zones of contact in the quite physical medieval towns themselves? Are changing practices, innovations and their diffusion not a large part of what medieval towns were about? Particularly in otherwise strongly agrarian and traditional societies as in medieval Scandinavia (Bäck Reference Bäck, Andersson, Carelli and Ersgård1997, 130, 135)?

One of the major challenges of our time is to master the steadily increasing amount of exceedingly rich empirical archaeological data from rescue excavations and research surveys in towns and to confront them with decades of earlier efforts on the respective sites. Ultimately, together with the source-critical inclusion of the available historical sources and a respective analytical framework, they must be incorporated into a comprehensive overall picture which should then be mirrored with the rural hinterland and compared to other urban sites if we want to understand the emergence of towns, and even everyday life in them. Projects like this are time-consuming, a little swanky and extremely hard to fund. In the light of this, an orientation towards selected dwellers might often seem to be a convenient small-scale solution. (Which, of course, does not apply to the author, who is a profound connoisseur of the archaeology of Trondheim!) Certainly the increasing debate surrounding the individual, identity and even gender, with either social theories or natural-scientific methods, has its justification and matches the current zeitgeist. Yet at the same time it seems important not to lose sight of the discourse along its main lines.