Digitizing the Medieval Environment: GIS and Recreations of the Past

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

The use of digital tools in environmental history is consistently recognized as a means of increasing our understanding of diverse topics including the history of land use, landscape change, and modeling climate change effects. The contributions digital tools can make have been profound in the field of pre-modern history. Medieval history notoriously suffers from a lack of written documentation. What written records have survived tend to neglect human-environmental interactions, even among elites. Medieval historians have thus increasingly turned to Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, as a way to integrate their interdisciplinary sources of inquiry. Medievalists using GIS tools create new ways to understand the complex interactions between ordinary people and the world around them, often in the longue durée.
This proposed panel takes three very different geographic studies, all united by their innovative use of GIS technology to answer complex questions. Dowling’s paper focuses on female elite agency in natural resource use, illustrating how GIS mapping can help us understand the spatial arena in which actors operated. Morgan examines elite foodstuffs and explores how trans-European digital mapping of a plethora of sources can explain how medieval Europeans perceived the “the East.” McAlister and Immich illustrate how GIS tools can be used to find deserted medieval villages in the modern landscape – sites of human activity previously thought to be “lost” but really just needed digital tools to be found. The combined papers will be of interest to environmental studies scholars in general through their modeling of best practices. The range of geographic areas and sources analyzed renders the papers legible to attendees working in a range of global histories. Furthermore, the papers will be pitched to an audience with a keen interest in but less existing knowledge of, the use of GIS and digital tools in environmental history research.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Digitizing Deserted Medieval Rural Settlement: Drone Data, GIS, and the HELM Project - Victoria McAlister, Towson University; Jennifer Immich, University of Colorado Boulder

• Mapping Peafowl Management and Consumption in Late Medieval Europe, c. 1250-1550 - Eileen Morgan, University of Notre Dame

• 'Geolocating' medieval accounting: Illuminating the intersection of resource management and political instability in Artois, 1314-1319 - Abigail P. Dowling, Mercer University

Chair

• Ellen Arnold, University of Stavanger