History of law and archeology
Cooperation
The network ‘Legal History and Archaeology’ is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of transregional and diachronic cultural relations from ancient history to the High Middle Ages, mainly in Central Europe. The focus is on the translation of peoples and ideas, which are usually not described in detail in the written record. Which cultural practices spread when and in which areas? The production of everyday objects, the construction of settlements, the layout of cemeteries and religious sites as well as the uses of natural resources in an area provide insights into the migration of techniques in the sense of transmission and reception, but – and as importantly – also into the development of knowledge and norms. Of particular interest are cases in which the emergence and dissemination of knowledge, and the epistemic groups involved in these processes, can be traced on the basis of a variety of evidence, not only in written sources. In addition, methods from the natural sciences can be used to open up new types of source material for historical enquiry.
The network currently consists of the interdisciplinary research project Law and mission based in the Department of Historical Regimes of Normativity at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, headed by Johannes Krause, the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt in Halle/Saale, led by Harald Meller, and the Kaiserpfalz Research Centre, directed by Holger Grewe.
