Alix Thoeming
Archaeologist turned higher education professional. I used to think about early medieval towns in the Baltic (2013-2019), now I think about how best to support students through teaching and learning (2019 - present).
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The New Eyes on Old Objects project was a trial digitisation initiative between the University of Sydney Department of Archaeology, Arts eLearning and Sydney University Museums that aimed to both increase student access to the collection and support its use in practical assessment tasks. Selected objects from the West Asian and ancient Mediterranean collections were digitised using a low-cost photogrammetric method. Students were initially given access to the physical objects in class and then were able to access their models online afterwards, before incorporation into object-based assessments. This paper will present the architecture of the NEOO project, staff and student reception, and the lessons we learned in its implementation. Digital accessibility, in particular, remains a challenge for projects of this sort. We argue that through the use of this relatively simple tool, archaeology departments can leverage their collections in increasingly adaptive and progressive ways.
The case study for this paper will be the initial urban development which took place in the Baltic region during the early medieval period. New and unusual settlements of very similar form, albeit with varying emphases on elements such as ritual, royal power, politics and trade, appear across the landscape between the 7th and 9th centuries CE. This development comes ostensibly in response to the changes happening in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the establishment of new trade routes from the north is seen as a significant contributor both here and in the North Sea region. These Baltic settlements - for which terminology has proven notoriously difficult - mostly exist in their initial form for no more than a quarter of a millennium, before transforming into a more recognisable, high medieval town-like form. This process, however, is variable in its execution. The settlements, among other outcomes, experience destruction, abandonment, conquest, and re-use in conjunction with a younger settlement close by, revealing this particular space-time context as incredibly valuable in exploring the social-material-outcome triad.
While these sites all have their own distinct, regional characteristics, their contemporaneity, analogous circumstances, and rapid development links them in a significant way, suggesting the additional value of a cross-regional comparative study. This paper will present the background research and preliminary observations of a PhD thesis which aims to analyse the relationship between regionally unique trajectories and broader inter-regional patterns in this remarkable community of settlements.
In order to explore temporal differentiation in the rune-stones, a way was sought to investigate just how to rectify the large number of undated stones in the corpus. Using Gräslund’s stylistic dating, a distribution pattern of four separate ‘phases’ (Early, M1, M2, Late) was established, and a Naīve Bayes Classifier was built. Bayes Classifiers are seeing more and more use in archaeological analysis, often in situations where a date-range for an assemblage has been established, but dating an entire corpus of artefacts is either impossible, or prohibitively expensive. Data assembled from the database was input into a test-learner, and the classifier attempted to assign values to the undated rune-stones based on the information obtained from those already assigned to a phase. Ultimately very low levels of differentiation were detected by the classifier, making it difficult to assign dates, but this homogeneity is in itself significant, as it can be interpreted as being symptomatic of high levels of cultural similarity across the various Scandinavian communities of the Viking Age. The implications of the use of the Bayes Classifier, among other forms of analysis, will be discussed, and possibilities for future use explored.""
Public outreach papers
Teaching Documents
Thesis
The development of urbanism in the Viking Age is undoubtedly one of the best-studied fields in the archaeology of the period. The Viking towns of Birka, Kaupang, Hedeby and Ribe have captured the imagination of archaeologists and the public alike, presenting the lives of their enigmatic inhabitants. Discussed in the literature but only occasionally discussed comparatively are a significant number of other settlements founded across the Baltic coast in the Early Medieval Period, from northern Germany to the tributary rivers of north-western Russia. These settlements appear across the Mare Barbarum at a very similar time, in similar forms, in response to ostensibly similar circumstances. Some survive through to today, most meet a variety of different ends, but all transformed in some way into the world of the later, more easily recognisable High Medieval town.
This thesis presents a model of Early Medieval settlement in the Baltic region, acknowledging the modern day historical and political reasons for the lack of representation of the southern and eastern Baltic countries and emphasizing a comparative approach to remove these barriers of recent history. Thirteen settlements have been chosen for analysis, selected for the availability of information for the development of a quantitative model of settlement trajectory. Despite their similar beginnings, the settlements all met very different ends, and a triadic framework of settlement analysis is applied to this problem, emphasizing interconnection between material form, social operation, and settlement outcome. Regardless of just what these settlements were, as indeed discussions around the terminology of urbanism have predominated in recent years, they undoubtedly were something, strangers in an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural landscape, situated outside contemporary political and social systems. As the Viking-centric focus on archaeology of the Early Medieval period in Northern Europe begins to change, this thesis illustrates the role of comparative analysis in revealing the importance of sites less well-studied.
The New Eyes on Old Objects project was a trial digitisation initiative between the University of Sydney Department of Archaeology, Arts eLearning and Sydney University Museums that aimed to both increase student access to the collection and support its use in practical assessment tasks. Selected objects from the West Asian and ancient Mediterranean collections were digitised using a low-cost photogrammetric method. Students were initially given access to the physical objects in class and then were able to access their models online afterwards, before incorporation into object-based assessments. This paper will present the architecture of the NEOO project, staff and student reception, and the lessons we learned in its implementation. Digital accessibility, in particular, remains a challenge for projects of this sort. We argue that through the use of this relatively simple tool, archaeology departments can leverage their collections in increasingly adaptive and progressive ways.
The case study for this paper will be the initial urban development which took place in the Baltic region during the early medieval period. New and unusual settlements of very similar form, albeit with varying emphases on elements such as ritual, royal power, politics and trade, appear across the landscape between the 7th and 9th centuries CE. This development comes ostensibly in response to the changes happening in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the establishment of new trade routes from the north is seen as a significant contributor both here and in the North Sea region. These Baltic settlements - for which terminology has proven notoriously difficult - mostly exist in their initial form for no more than a quarter of a millennium, before transforming into a more recognisable, high medieval town-like form. This process, however, is variable in its execution. The settlements, among other outcomes, experience destruction, abandonment, conquest, and re-use in conjunction with a younger settlement close by, revealing this particular space-time context as incredibly valuable in exploring the social-material-outcome triad.
While these sites all have their own distinct, regional characteristics, their contemporaneity, analogous circumstances, and rapid development links them in a significant way, suggesting the additional value of a cross-regional comparative study. This paper will present the background research and preliminary observations of a PhD thesis which aims to analyse the relationship between regionally unique trajectories and broader inter-regional patterns in this remarkable community of settlements.
In order to explore temporal differentiation in the rune-stones, a way was sought to investigate just how to rectify the large number of undated stones in the corpus. Using Gräslund’s stylistic dating, a distribution pattern of four separate ‘phases’ (Early, M1, M2, Late) was established, and a Naīve Bayes Classifier was built. Bayes Classifiers are seeing more and more use in archaeological analysis, often in situations where a date-range for an assemblage has been established, but dating an entire corpus of artefacts is either impossible, or prohibitively expensive. Data assembled from the database was input into a test-learner, and the classifier attempted to assign values to the undated rune-stones based on the information obtained from those already assigned to a phase. Ultimately very low levels of differentiation were detected by the classifier, making it difficult to assign dates, but this homogeneity is in itself significant, as it can be interpreted as being symptomatic of high levels of cultural similarity across the various Scandinavian communities of the Viking Age. The implications of the use of the Bayes Classifier, among other forms of analysis, will be discussed, and possibilities for future use explored.""
The development of urbanism in the Viking Age is undoubtedly one of the best-studied fields in the archaeology of the period. The Viking towns of Birka, Kaupang, Hedeby and Ribe have captured the imagination of archaeologists and the public alike, presenting the lives of their enigmatic inhabitants. Discussed in the literature but only occasionally discussed comparatively are a significant number of other settlements founded across the Baltic coast in the Early Medieval Period, from northern Germany to the tributary rivers of north-western Russia. These settlements appear across the Mare Barbarum at a very similar time, in similar forms, in response to ostensibly similar circumstances. Some survive through to today, most meet a variety of different ends, but all transformed in some way into the world of the later, more easily recognisable High Medieval town.
This thesis presents a model of Early Medieval settlement in the Baltic region, acknowledging the modern day historical and political reasons for the lack of representation of the southern and eastern Baltic countries and emphasizing a comparative approach to remove these barriers of recent history. Thirteen settlements have been chosen for analysis, selected for the availability of information for the development of a quantitative model of settlement trajectory. Despite their similar beginnings, the settlements all met very different ends, and a triadic framework of settlement analysis is applied to this problem, emphasizing interconnection between material form, social operation, and settlement outcome. Regardless of just what these settlements were, as indeed discussions around the terminology of urbanism have predominated in recent years, they undoubtedly were something, strangers in an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural landscape, situated outside contemporary political and social systems. As the Viking-centric focus on archaeology of the Early Medieval period in Northern Europe begins to change, this thesis illustrates the role of comparative analysis in revealing the importance of sites less well-studied.