Five royal landscapes across Britain and Ireland—Milfield, Rendlesham, Llangorse, Dunadd, and Navan Fort—are being excavated and analysed to uncover how early medieval rulers used land and resources to create inequality and consolidate power. This matters because current models of early medieval governance are trapped in outdated, ethnically divided frameworks—‘Celtic’ versus ‘Germanic’—that ignore the ecological and economic foundations of rulership. No previous study has systematically compared how these centres exploited their environments to entrench social hierarchy. The project fills that gap by combining targeted excavation, large-scale remote sensing, palaeoecology, and ancient DNA analysis to build high-resolution chronologies of landscape and agrarian change. If successful, the research will produce empirically grounded, comparative evidence for how governance and inequality co-evolved with ecological exploitation. This is primarily fundamental historical science with no immediate practical application. However, by revealing long-term patterns in how regimes extract resources and manage landscapes, the findings could inform contemporary debates about the ecological roots of inequality and the environmental consequences of governance—offering a deeper historical context for policies addressing the climate crisis and social stratification.
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This project interrogates the emergence of inequality and the economic basis of rulership in early medieval, kin-based societies, moving beyond ethno-centric frameworks by undertaking multi-proxy and comparative analyses of the environment and agrarian regimes of major royal landscapes across Britain and Ireland. This project will revolutionise understandings of strategies of rulership and governance, through a fundamental reassessment of the emergence of inequality and its implication in political production. It does so through integrated case studies of five major first-millennium AD royal landscapes in Britain and Ireland within wider context. These occupy seminal places within ethnically-centred but now outmoded models for the origins and functioning of Northwest-European kingdoms, commonly analysed within isolated and diametrically opposed ‘Celtic’/‘Germanic’ historiographies. Deploying novel approaches to their origins, settings, regionality, landscape context and diachronic transformation, we shift emphasis towards scale and scale-change within regime and community relationships, and the associated economic and ecological basis of rulership within emergent polities, to fundamentally redress previous biases, and present novel, empirically-grounded analyses. Governance and its ecological impacts are a fundamental concern of all societies, past and present. In a contemporary context, governmental practices are foundational to the climate crisis and implicated in rising inequalities worldwide, but also central to resolving these challenges. Yet, despite these concepts and their definition becoming acute concerns for various disciplines in recent decades, and featuring heavily in analysis of early medieval polities, rulership or assembly practice, there remains no comprehensive assessment of the ecological foundations of emerging inequality and its relationship to the historical production of governance. Much as environmental agencies have become acutely prominent in analyses of societal collapse and social-ecological change, the tendency towards environmental determinism may be countered through the adoption of long-term frameworks and contextual analysis, where, for example, anti-fragility frameworks, local resilience, or the role of catastrophe in social innovation have been increasingly emphasised. In this context, much can be gained from landscape-centred analysis of the ecological contexts of rulership within comparative and contextual frameworks. Because these relationships form a nexus at the heart of extractive and exploitative regimes, they are centrally implicated in the emergence and transformation of strategies of governance and inequality. We harness recent methodological advances to address governance and rulership within early medieval polities and their ecological and economic contexts. This will be accomplished through five interrelated case studies of seminal royal centres in early medieval Britain and Ireland: Milfield, Rendlesham (Anglo-Saxon), Llangorse (British), Dunadd (Scottish) Navan Fort (Irish). Through these investigatons, we move beyond the compartmentalized approaches of previous studies, to directly compare empirically rich and multifaceted evidence for regime and community relationships across different scales. We utilise targeted excavation alongside large-scale remote sensing of entire landscapes to build ‘thick’ and mutli-scalar understanding of the built environment of royal places and governance, combined with novel palaeoecolgy, bio-geochemistry, and sedaDNA approaches to human-animal-environment relationships. Building high-resolution, highly constrained chronologies for environmental, biological, landscape and agrarian change, we will narrate close-grained analysis of the emergence and transformation of inequality through practices of governance and political reproduction.
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