The Project will provide a novel understanding of the integration of the peripheral regions in the early Middle Ages and the importance of the empires for the stabilization of local peripheral polities and their elites (9th c.).
The goals will be reached through the combination of archaeometry and database-oriented discourse analysis of written sources that will focus on conflict solutions, tributes, strategies of identification and “othering”, establishment of social status, and finally on the perception of early Middle Ages in later local perspective. The archaeometry of carefully selected new samples from Central Europe will provide us with a detailed local perspective. It will shed new light on the socio-economics networks in emerging polities and on the importance of the imperial frontiers for its stabilization. The comparative scrutiny of written sources used usually in a limited way and ignoring Central and Eastern Europe due to the language barrier, promises to overcome the regional “nationalistic” perspective by uncovering similar trends and strategies used by the empires and their local allies and often also opponents and identifying local specifics. The unique combination of the methods will be used for building new models of the establishment of the peripheral polities. It will enable us to test the largely disputed impact of the empires on these processes.
Both approaches, local and European, promise to give new impulses to our understanding of the integration of culturally less developed areas (or its failure) and will open the way to a better understanding of the establishment of local hierarchies of power through the new exact data and “bigger picture”. The PI has already rich experience with comparative research in Medieval History and adequate language skills. He also intensely implements the archaeological data in his previous research. This set of skills is key for coping with high conceptual risks.

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