 Ladies and gentlemen, so this presentation, I just want to give a small impact to this discussion. And so as I'm a medieval archeologist, I will have a look on the Middle Ages, but I will not concentrate on very specific archeological excavations. I will rather go back to reflect some of our own past projects to think what this means for an understanding of dynamics of agglomerations. And so I will try to make two points. One point is the role of medieval urban archeology, and the other point is what is the meaning of urban ecology for understanding dynamics of agglomerations. So I want to emphasize that I want to understand medieval archeology as a kind of a historical archeology. So what is an important point? It gives us important background information about society in history. Many cases we have very detailed information, younger in time, the better the written sources are normally, and we need to take this as an opportunity to critically reflect our conceptions. So we heard already today that it's a problem for comparative approach that we normally compare to some classical towns. And I would like to show you that even if we have a look on the medieval towns, it's a little bit more complicated than we normally think. So the point is to get a synthesis of archeological data and written and pictorial evidence, not to take the modern example just as an analog for earlier periods, but to take this to critically reflect our definitions and to reflect our methods and our theoretical background. So quite short, I would like to refer to three case studies coming from some recent projects which are most cases not yet completely finished. So the one which is currently going on, that's some giant French, Serbian, German excavation project in Serbia, which deals with some town of the sixth century. So not the typical urban archeology of the Middle Ages. It's rather late antiquity. A town founded 525 AD and it was abandoned after three to four generations. We know about a very specific political background and specific historical situation of the foundation of this town. In fact, the emperor, Justinian I was born in that town. He had a direct neighborhood and so he had a political program to establish the city at that point. And if you have a look in the surrounding, you can learn quite fast that there is no economic reason or not yet clearly visible an economic reason, so it wasn't in the middle of nowhere. But in order to understand what happened there in terms of a process, we tried to have a look in the surrounding landscape. And so one of the quite different methods we used, one of them was the georachology and so we had them look at several spots in the close surrounding of the city. So you can see here the lighthouse scan with the main city here in the Acropolis, lower town, upper town, and we can see some more fortification surrounding this. And what is very important is to see the impact of this city, which existed a very short time on the landscape. So the one point which is, you can't clearly visible it here, so there is visible in the lighthouse a dam and there was an artificial lake here which changed the landscape at that point. And we have interesting georachological results on the opposite side of the city where we can see that we have a huge sedimentation just from the time when the town was founded. So for this very short time there was an impact on the landscape. And so we want to try to understand even if it was a founded town from political reasons, we want to understand this town as a kind of a process. And the idea that's not based on archaeological results, it's just a hypothesis which you can use to reflect what we find. So we had the idea to think about several phases of the existence of the town. So one line marks the hypothetical need for energy. We have an idea about carrying capacity which changes in time because it's not only dependent from the environment, it also depends from the social organization. And we have the idea that there may have been some external events like barbaric invasions or earthquakes which may require some repairs. So this is again a change in the need for resources. And in the final stage we can now observe by our hypothetical data that there was a kind of ruralization. So we can recognize that in the latest period there was a lot of dung heaps and a lot of animals and a lot of agrarian tools in the rather representative parts of the urban landscape. So this is... Over the time there are some periods of increased risk. We have these impacts on the landscape and we probably also have some conflicts we can recognize within the city between the inhabitants which have different ideas how to use that space. So different agents or stakeholders. So we can gain some ideas what was going on within the city. I need to emphasize we don't have a lot of written evidence from that specific city but at least we have a clear idea how an antique administration functioned, how an antique city functioned. So we can take this historical background information to understand that case study. The second example, this is... I called it now hill sites. It's normally known as cave towns in southwestern Crimea. This was a joint Ukrainian-German project up to 2009. It's not yet published but the problem is our colleagues, our corporations, various Ukrainian institutions and the colleagues are now working in Russia and they feel belonging to Russia. So it's a little bit complicated to go on. But from what we have done there was a lot of surveys in the surrounding of mainly two hill sites. The one you can see here, that's Mangup. The other one you can see here in the foreground, it's Eskikarmen. Very close together, the question how they were related. So the normal interpretation is that there is a chronological differentiation. We can't trace it by the archaeological evidence. Today the whole situation is a quite remote landscape. The geology shows that it's not a very easy usable landscape because of a cast and lack of water with very stony soils. So it's a little bit a problematic landscape. But what we have done there is also some geo-archeological research and there was already an American project in the neighborhood before. So we have here a lot of radiocarbon dates from different situations of sedimentation. So we can see several stages of increased sedimentation. And to a certain degree this corresponds with some periods we know from the written sources and we know already now in Eskikarmen and Mangup as some important phases in the development of these hillsides. But there is also a social aspect because in the time when these hillsides were established, so these triangles here and Mangup and Eskikarmen, this was also a time period when they established a lot of burial sites with imported materials. And in Russian archaeology this is called a very Gothic cemeteries which if you have a look to research history it's a little bit difficult to take this term. But nevertheless this established at that time period with a lot of imports. And we now had the idea that the establishment of these hillsides at Lomorations is something which is related to communication, to establishing groups in competing small neighborhoods. So they're trying to get access to these imports via these Byzantine cities at the coast as Kherson today, Sevastopol. So an environmental aspect and a social aspect. But now let's come to medieval towns and I'll just take one example because I've worked there for many years but you could take any other medieval town. The only specific thing here is you can see on this late 19th century photograph the medieval town in this valley. So we have the situation that this is a delimited landscape and so you can take this as a kind of direct urban surrounding and you can take this as a reference to trace settlement developments. And that is important so we have early medieval settlement here, we have starting here a late medieval village and we have the late medieval town here. So we have in this small area different stages of a settlement development and each stage can be seen as a stage in agglomeration and the town is only the latest point in that development. The latest point is the modern industrialization. Today all you can see here in the valley is just built over by an enlarged modern town. And what is interesting if we have a look on the landscape is to recognize that these medieval towns were established in a changing landscape. So what we need to have in mind if we look on medieval cities, medieval towns it's not just a process of foundation, it's a change in the whole rural landscape. So this is again the valley we have seen in the picture before. Before we have the late medieval town we have the high and late medieval village here still existing and we have the early medieval burial sites and settlements in the surrounding. So we can see in the first hand a kind of settlement concentration leading to the medieval village and then we have later on the establishment of the city we have the name Geislingen here and we have Old Geislingen at the village. So we can trace some changes here and if you have a look on the map on the right it's just a mapping of abandoned medieval rural sites in the surrounding which shows there is a lot of change of abandoned settlements in the surrounding. To see the medieval city, the medieval town as the establishment of a Neclomeration needs to have a look on the surrounding. We can think about the correlation, the interaction between the development of the villages and the development of the towns. This here is just a picture pointing on the development of the villages which in fact are the result of change from a dispersed to a nucleated settlement system where you can have an idea of several interrelations as for example increasing population or a Neclomeration of people increasing need of food and so more food production with some consequences for land use practices as for example shorter fellow periods or enlarged agrarian fields, the removal of hedges and things like this. So it's a complicated system but we need to take this as a framework to understand what happened in the settlement landscape. And now we have seen quite different examples of agglomerations just from the Middle Ages and we had other papers today already showing even more medieval agglomerations. So I think what could be an interesting point to understand these changes is really to have a look on these towns as an urban ecosystem and in several papers we heard already some ideas which are probably very close to that. So we need to see about the interaction of water, soil, plants, animals, humans, climate probably a lot of more factors involved in that. We need to see that a Neclomeration also brings a concentration of material, of energy and it has its material consequences on the landscape. So for example waste and in more modern towns we also have changes like microclimate, heat emission and things like this. So urban ecology I think has an important meaning within Historic Larcology because it helps to understand historical processes of urbanization, of village formation and it helps to integrate daily life and social practice. It helps to understand the interaction of culture and nature however we want to define them. It integrates different methods and disciplines and for sure there have been a lot of critics against this kind of urban ecological methods or approaches as there have been a lot of critics against all these kind of comparative approaches. Especially if we have a look on what we learn as historical archaeology quite often if we have the discussion with historians so they urge us to have a look on the single site and in this session we want to take a more general picture. So if we take these models from urban ecology there is often the suspect that we are too deterministic. So this is true for specific views of history but I think it's very important nevertheless. Another point of criticism is that most parameters we have in these models we can't quantify and archaeologically it's quite hard to find them. But urban ecology in this context is not in hypothesis. It's rather a background where we have to think about all these factors involved in the social development. If you want to understand acclomerations primarily as a social development. It gives an orientation about possible interrelations and I think the most important point it creates research questions. So acclomerations as an ecological and the social transformation I think if we take this as a background and to think about all these single factors which could be involved in that we could probably create an interesting perspective on our topic here. And I was quite lucky to see that these ideas were present in some of the papers we heard today already. So that's my remarks on the topic to just give a small input from a kind of historical archaeology. Thank you.