Anglo-Saxon Trading Centres: Beyond the Emporia

This book stems from a conference that took place back in 1996. As president of the Sheffield University Archaeology Society I was in the enviable position of being able to organise a conference on a subject that held some considerable personal interest. I wanted to know what went on beyond the emporia written about in Richard Hodges's 'Dark Age Economics': how were the regions and hinterlands involved in this process? Were the elite alone responsible for the changes involved? The conference proved a great success and I decided then that a volume which contained papers based upon the conference theme would be a useful addition to the study of early medieval trade and society. This book is the final result and consists of a combination of papers given at the conference and others that were specifically commissioned at a later date. It is my hope that this book will lead people away from the Hodges-centred view of early medieval trading centres and will encourage them to focus on the re-examination of earlier evidence and look at new evidence in a different light. The study of early medieval trade is a complex one and is the sum of many parts. It will be a dream come true if this book provokes people into examining all of the 'parts' at the same time rather than using the Hodgean approach.