Archaeologists investigating large, stratified sites face a persistent problem of scale: research questions that demand diachronic, site-wide understanding are constrained by the cost, logistics, and ethics of extensive excavation. Near-surface geophysical techniques offer a powerful alternative for subsurface mapping, and a growing body of work has demonstrated the value of integrating these methods with targeted subsurface interventions in iterative, collaborative workflows. Yet such approaches have remained underused in practice, are unevenly documented, and lack a shared vocabulary or a set of guiding principles. This article synthesizes these threads into a framework dubbed para-excavation: a methodology that pairs geophysical survey with minimally invasive interventions in a recursive analytical cycle. We demonstrate para-excavation through nearly a decade of research at a buried medieval village in Ballintober, County Roscommon, Ireland, where magnetometry, ground-penetrating radar, targeted excavation, and soil coring informed and refined one another across multiple field seasons. We then generalize from this experience to propose four interpretive roles—compositional prospection, stratigraphic prospection, block exposure, and targeted sampling—that define the methodological space of para-excavation and can be adapted to different sites and tool kits. The result is a scalable, replicable, and ethically minded approach to investigating extensive buried sites.

This is a reflection on some of the ways in which book reviewing might inform and enrich the study of medieval literature. Looking to my own experiences as a medievalist who also writes and edits general-audience review essays, I begin by considering the particular mode of reading it encourages, and then explore what that mode might offer us as scholars. I argue against the idea that non-academic reviewing promotes a superficial or derivative engagement with the books in question, and suggest instead that it demands an evaluative and instinct-led—but deeply serious—kind of reading. Showing how reviewing has prompted me to rethink a number of canonical medieval texts, I make a case for its value not just as a means of outreach or professional development, but as a scholarly activity.

As a medieval researcher and a performance storyteller, I use performances to bridge the gap between the groundbreaking work being done on gender in medieval studies and public perceptions of this period. My show Yde and Olive is an adaptation of an Old French thirteenth-century story of cross-dressing, female autonomy, and queer love. It is the latest among my six medieval storytelling shows, which aim to confront the problem that histories and stories showing diverse gender roles remain underrepresented in modern medievalism. Meanwhile, my audience response data demonstrates an eagerness beyond academia to hear stories from the past that contain more expansive representations of gender and sexuality. In Yde and Olive, I wanted to make connections between medieval and modern gender concerns and diversify the repertoire of commonly told medieval stories (often stories told about men and by men), to include tales which centre the agencies of female and queer characters and those who research them. This self-reflective paper provides a case study of the creative and research methods I used to adapt Yde and Olive for modern audiences, as well as considering the responsibilities inherent in any form of public medievalism.

The Good Shepherd of Miseeda project investigates remains in a section of the Mahas region in northern Sudan. Centred on a church built around an ancient petroglyph, integrated archaeological survey and ethnographic research trace millennia of cultural interaction, continuity and transformation that shaped the sacred and social landscape.

Despite common associations with plague pits and mass graves, many individuals who succumbed to the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century AD, and to the numerous subsequent outbreaks of plague, were buried in parish cemeteries. This limits the usefulness of contemporaneous cemetery assemblages for the establishment of comparative, non-catastrophic (or ‘attritional’) demographic profiles for medieval populations in Britain. Drawing from three earlier cemeteries, this study reveals similarities in age-at-death and survivorship profiles for adults, offering a characteristic pre-Black Death profile that helps reinforce the distinctiveness of the over-representation of individuals aged 15–24 years among plague burials.

While absolute dating has become the archaeological gold standard, typology can provide context beyond time frames. Here, the authors demonstrate this with the chronological assessment of iron helmets from the underwater site of Piedras de la Barbada, near Benicarló (eastern Spain). Marine concretions helped preserve fabric linings in several helmets, permitting direct radiocarbon dating of the assemblage to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries AD. Typological and iconographic comparisons agree, identifying the helmets as regionally produced, light-infantry equipment that pre-dates the fifteenth-century standardisation of European plate armour systems, corresponding with a period of maritime insecurity along the Valencian coast.

This paper presents 56 AMS radiocarbon dates from three early medieval sites in Italy: nine from the Roman Villa of Vacone in Vacone (RI), Lazio, 29 from the Roman Villa of Selvicciola in Ischia di Castro (VT), Lazio, and 18 from the necropolis of Povegliano Veronese (VR), Veneto. These results more than double the number of previously published radiocarbon dates from early medieval Italy and are therefore a substantial contribution to the absolute chronology of early medieval cemeteries of Italy. These dates have implications for the relative dating of grave goods, grave reuse, and explaining the presence of graves with multiple individuals.

The deep evolutionary relationship between humans and intestinal parasites offers opportunities for the reconstruction of diet and living conditions in archaeological populations. Here, the authors identify eggs preserved in sediment adhering to the surface of the sacrum in Muslim burials from the Southern Necropolis at Deraheib (upper reaches of Wadi al-Allaqi, Sudan, ninth–eleventh centuries AD). Species-level identification is suggested based on egg morphology and religious taboos, revealing a high prevalence of infection by Taenia saginata, the beef tapeworm, and contributing to our understanding of diet, subsistence, climate and health in the medieval Nubian Desert.

The analysis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bone collagen can reveal aspects of diet and how this may change between periods and places. Here, the authors apply a ‘whole-town’ approach to isotopic analysis, to characterise and explore variation in diet within medieval Cambridge and its hinterland. By adopting this approach, and a robust isotopic baseline, the authors argue that the number of confounding variables that typically plague archaeometric research are reduced, allowing for more nuanced interpretation of data. For medieval Cambridge, this nuance comes in the form of inter-site comparisons in the lived experience of social differentiation.

Ostrów Lednicki was a centre of the Piast dynasty (tenth–fourteenth centuries AD), laying the foundations for the development of the Polish state. A collapsed tenth-century wooden fortification associated with Bolesław the Brave (the first king of Poland) and its unique sculptural element provide insights into early-medieval construction techniques.

This essay studies gender in medieval heresy by focusing on an inquisitorial trial in Milan in 1300. The inquisitors investigated a small group of devotees of a deceased penitent woman named Guglielma for venerating her as the Holy Spirit. A noble Humiliati nun, who would become Guglielma’s pope in a coming new age, and a wealthy layman cooperated as the devotees’ leaders. On the surface, the devotees seemed to have reversed gender roles, which late medieval male clergy-female mystic partnerships exemplified. Through an analysis of the surviving records, this article demonstrates that, instead of inverting gender expectations as the inquisitors assumed, the devotees’ vision of a new age – somewhat infused with Joachimism – and the co-leadership of the nun and the layman developed out of transcending the gender binary. As a result, the devotees saw Guglielma not as a co-redeemer with Christ but as the Holy Spirit who comforted them, would convert non-Christians, and had helped unite the devotees, even those of opposing political factions, into a family. Rejecting violent rupture as well as binary gender roles, their future age, which would begin with the nonviolent replacement of the Roman Church, would both preserve Milan’s social hierarchy and eschew binary gender roles.

Macroscopic analysis of potsherds used to make herringbone-patterned pavements at two medieval centres in northern Yorùbáland suggests production variations despite shared architectural traditions. Reflecting local production choices and broader regional interactions, these results affect our understanding of pottery production, cultural interaction and social complexity in medieval West Africa.

Widowers make occasional appearances in Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and—even though Old Norse did not even have a word for them—they exhibit some distinctive behavioral patterns. This article uses the framework of bereavement studies to examine the interplay of gender, affect, and small-scale politics in the wake of the loss of a wife. It proposes two archetypes of dysfunctional bereaved husband, observable in the medieval Norse world which the sagas describe (ca. 800–1300): the widower on the warpath and the widower on the bridal path. Both followed cultural scripts for widowers’ conduct, but did so imperfectly, in a manner that exposes their society’s constructions of masculinity, its prescriptive family codes, and the clandestine channels linking private emotional turmoil with public socio-political disruption. My typology of maladjusted Norse widowers offers heuristic tools for further study of bereaved husbands in other periods and places, as well as for comparison with bereaved wives and with men in other life-stages.