Recreating urban landscapes: making 150 years of excavations in Randers and Odense come to life
Thomas Guntzelnick Poulsen, Museum Østjylland & Kirstine Haase, Museum Odense
Since the late 19th century, data on the extent and nature of cultural layers in Danish cities have been collected through archaeological excavations and geotechnical surveys. Over the past 50 years, the volume of this data has grown exponentially. Despite its potential value for researching Danish cities and towns’ historical and topographical development, this data remains highly under-utilized.
Two research projects in Randers and Odense have sought to counter this by digitising and systematising archaeological and geotechnical data. In both projects, reconstructing the paleo-landscape in which the urban settlement developed has been central. Moreover, the topographical development of the cities has been recreated, and an understanding of the landscape’s role in the development and dynamics of the cities has been given.
The similarities and differences between the two projects demonstrate the vast potential of this type of approach to legacy data.
In this paper we will focus on:
1. How recreating the topographical development has made it possible to describe the original landscape Randers was settled in and how the city’s population shaped it through the ages by including more and more land from the wet areas around the Gudenå River. The systematic review of data from the archives and focus on exact dating has also enabled a deeper understanding of the character of the city and how it was placed in the regional and national network of cities in the late Viking and early medieval periods.
2. How heterogeneous data from archaeological excavations and geotechnical drilling has been used to create a voxel-based 3D model of Odense’s subsurface. Through the model, it is possible to recreate the origins and development of the urban landscape and map the extent and preservation of the archaeological stratigraphy. Additionally, it has been possible to recreate the formation process of cultural layers on specific sites.
Both projects also have the potential to be valuable communication tools. They have made the archaeological data more accessible for researchers and serve as a basis for disseminating the city’s history and landscape transformation to the general public. Moreover, the 3D model from Odense makes it possible to create virtual sections through areas of interest before excavation. This visualisation can facilitate communication with contractors and authorities and provides researchers, archaeologists, and heritage managers with an overview of the preservation and extent of the archaeological deposits.
Where have all the trenches gone?
Michael Derrick and Therese Marie Edman, The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU)
Archaeology has been likened to a puzzle, with lots of pieces missing and more being added as time passes. A new building project or a broken water pipe provides the opportunity for archaeologists to fill in some of these spaces. Unfortunately, the process is quite random, and the archaeologist very rarely gets to choose where and how much of an area is excavated. Over time, these small holes combine to create a window which provides a more comprehensive view of the study area. This, however, is only the beginning of a time-consuming and costly process which includes dredging through archives and examining hundreds of drawings, diaries, reports and pictures.
Large-scale digital documentation of archaeological sites has only really taken off at NIKU in the last 15 years. Before this time documentation was predominately handwritten/drawn. The processing of such a large amount of non-digitalised documentation is made more difficult when taking into account the myriads of different measuring systems used throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This need for recalibration of height measurements and grid systems only adds to the complexity of the job in hand and makes it difficult to immediately identify connections between activity in different trenches.
Digitising maps, although a laborious task, provides vital assistance for researchers and project managers alike and can lay the foundation for new discoveries to be made within the old material. One such example is new research which enabled the placement of Oslo’s medieval main street: Vestre strete. The research combined documentation from several excavations dating from the 19th and 20th centuries together with digitised documentation from recent excavations.
By digitising the old documentation and combining it with new information it is possible to create a continually evolving database which can provide a greater understanding of the city and how it functioned during the medieval period. This is what we would like to discuss in our paper.
Excavating excavations – part two. Research on unpublished excavations in Ribe
Michael Alrø Jensen, Museum Vest
Ribe, situated on the North Sea coast of southwest Jutland (Denmark), was founded around AD 700 as the first real emporium in Scandinavia. The town experienced renewed rapid growth during the late 11th and 12th centuries when the town expanded west of the cathedral centre into previously uninhabited areas. Between 1993 and 2000 this area saw several large rescue excavations; all-in-all 4000 m2 covered with up to 3.5 meters of cultural layers.
The largest of these excavations, Danielsens Tømmerhandel, was the most expensive excavation conducted in Denmark prior the present Museum Act to which it was a contributing factor. The excavation was caused by a private housing project and therefore paid for by the Danish state. The funding was insufficient and like many other larger urban excavations in Denmark it was never published or properly analysed.
Since 2020 the unpublished excavation material has been part of an ongoing research project funded by Dronning Margrethe II’s Arkæologiske Fond and by Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond. The purpose is to examine Ribe’s urban fabric and merchant networks between 1050 and 1250 AD – the formative phase of the Danish town history before Lubeck and later the Hanseatic League became a dominant factor in Scandinavian and Baltic trade. The project is finally coming to an end with the completion of a manuscript on the results of three large excavations.
At the first NUA conference in 2023 the first part of the research project was presented. This consisted of a digitization of both the drawings and the 130,000 finds from the excavations in the database of Museum Vest. By applying GIS it was for the first time possible to create an overview of the archaeological structures and to reconstruct the development of the settlement from the 11th to the 18th century by contextual analysis as the excavations were carried out stratigraphically.
Since 2023 work has been focused on presenting the excavation results in text and to analyse the excavations from the perspective of the finds. The results underpin Ribe’s mercantile connections to Friesland, Flanders, the Rhineland and Normandy and to a lesser degree also England and Norway. The town appears as an integrated part of northwest Europe’s material culture. At the same time, from an early stage it has a distinct urban material culture which is also found in other Danish towns, among which Lund and Schleswig are the clearest examples. Combined with the few written sources this points to the close connection between the formative phase of the Danish town history and the rise of a new social group which was able to affect both town and society.
The purpose of the paper is to illustrate the great potential in unlocking the hidden results of past excavations. Many results from Scandinavian towns remain unpublished. We should shift our focus towards them as we have great tools in GIS and databases which were not available to our predecessors. It has never been easier!