Staff Profile:Dr Aleks Pluskowski

Name:

Dr Aleks Pluskowski

Job Title:

Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology

Responsibilities:

Areas of Interest:

• The environmental archaeology of medieval Europe, especially zooarchaeology; ecology, biodiversity, human-animal relations.
• The archaeology of crusading and colonisation.
• Religious conversion from paganism to Christianity in northern Europe.
• Aristocratic culture in medieval Europe.
• Inter-disciplinary medieval studies.
• Hyper-real, virtual and digital representations of the past.

Postgraduate Supervision

Aleks is happy to discuss proposals for postgraduate research in any area of zooarchaeology and medieval European archaeology, but especially the archaeology of crusading, colonisation, religious conversion, religious diversity, authority and frontier regions. For further information, please contact Dr Aleks Pluskowski

Research groups / Centres:

Scientific Archaeology Research Group

Key Facts:

Dr Aleks Pluskowski teaches the archaeology of later medieval Europe and crusading. His interests include exploring ecological diversity across medieval Europe, focused on zooarchaeology and inter-disciplinary perspectives of human-animal relations. He is the author of Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages (Boydell, 2006), which compares human responses to wolves and their shared environments in medieval Britain and Scandinavia. He has published several articles on responses to the wolf in the Middle Ages, as well as on the treatment of exotic animals, hunting space and broader understandings of predation in medieval society. He is currently preparing two volumes: an ecological survey of medieval Europe, and a new cultural history of the European wolf. He has also edited volumes on the topic of medieval animals and founded the "Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages" annual conference series, which has been held in Cambridge (2005), Foggia (2006), Vienna (2007) and is forthcoming in Budapest (2008). He also helped set up the "Medieval Animals Database", in collaboration with the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Krems and the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. He is regularly involved in organising and moderating sessions at international archaeology and medievalist conferences.

In recent years he has become involved in exploring the ecological aspects of Venetian colonisation in the Eastern Mediterranean, collaborating with a team from the Università Ca'Foscari di Venezia, led by Professor Sauro Gellichi and based on excavations in north Italy and Montenegro. He has also set up a series of pilot projects at the castle of the Teutonic Order in Malbork, Pomerania (north Poland), and most recently Feldioara Fortress in southern Transylvania (Romania), with the intention of creating a methodological foundation for investigating the environmental impact of crusading and related colonisation. He has recently been awarded a larger research grant from the British Academy to continue this work in northern Poland (medieval Prussia), collaborating with the Castle Museum at Malbork and colleagues from the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge and the School of Conservation Sciences in Bournemouth. This will build up to an international project comparing the 'ecological role' of crusader castle sites in Poland, Estonia and Lithuania.

Research Projects:

• The Ecology of Crusading: The Environmental Impact of Conquest and Colonisation in the Medieval Baltic
• The Environmental Impact of Venetian Colonisation in the Medieval Mediterranean, part of The Heritage of the Serenissima project (collaborating with Università Ca'Foscari di Venezia)
• Dominion: People, Animals and Environments in Medieval Europe.

Publications:

Y

Jump to: 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

Number of items: 26.

2013

• Pluskowski, A. and Brown, A. (2013) From forest to field: the changing environment of Medieval Prussia. In: Pluskowski, A. (ed.) The archaeology of the Prussian Crusades: Holy War and Colonisation. Routledge, London, pp. 294-336. ISBN 9780415691703
• Pluskowski, A. (2013) Before the werewolf trials: contextualising shape changers and animal identities in medieval north-western Europe. In: De Blecourt, W. (ed.) Werewolf traditions in historical perspectives. University of Amsterdam Press, Amsterdam. (In Press)
• Pluskowski, A., Brown, A., Shillito, L.-M. and Seetah, K., eds. (2013) The Ecological Signatures of Human Colonisation in the North. Archaeologia Baltica, 19. Klaipeda University Press. (In Press)
• Pluskowski, A. and Brown, A. (2013) Life at the frontier: introduction. In: Pluskowski, A. and Brown, A. (eds.) Life at the frontier: the ecological signatures of human colonisation in the North. Archaeologia Baltica (19). Klaipeda University Press, Klaipeda. (In Press)
• Brown, A. and Pluskowski, A. (2013) Medieval landscape transformation in the south-eastern and eastern Baltic: palaeoenvironmental perspectives on the colonization of frontier landscapes. Archaeologia Baltica, 19. (In Press)
• Pluskowski, A. (2013) The castle and the warren: Medieval East Anglian fur culture in context. In: Liddiard, R. e. a. (ed.) East Anglia and the North Sea World. Boydell, Woodbridge. (In Press)
• Pluskowski, A. (2013) The dragon's skull. How can zooarchaeologists contribute to our understanding of otherness in the Middle Ages? In: Vadillo et al., M. W. (ed.) Animals and otherness in the Middle Ages. BAR: International Series/Oxford: Archaeopress.. (In Press)

2012

• Pluskowski, A. (2012) The archaeology of the Prussian Crusade: Holy War and colonisation. Routledge, London, pp427. ISBN 9780415691703
• Carson, S., Shillito, L.-M., Brown, A. and Pluskowski, A. (2012) Environmental assessment of samples from the castle site at Grudziądz, Poland. In: Wiewióra, M. (ed.) Zamek w Grudziądzu w świetle badań archeologiczno-architektonicznych. UMK, Toruń. ISBN 9788323128687
• Pluskowski, A. (2012) The archaeology of paganism. In: Hamerow, H., Hinton, D. and Crawford, S. (eds.) Anglo-Saxon Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (In Press)
• Valk, H., Pluskowski, A., Brown, A., Rannamäe, E., Malve, M. and Varul, L. (2012) The castle of the Teutonic Order in Karksi: preliminary excavation results. Archaeological Fieldwork in Estonia, 2011. pp. 47-56. (In Press)

2011

• Pluskowski, A., Brown, A., Shillito, L.-M. S., Seetah, K., Makowiecki, D., Jarzebowski, M., Klavins, K. and Kreem, J. (2011) The ecology of crusading project: new research on medieval Baltic landscapes. Antiquity. ISSN 0003-598X
• Brown, A. and Pluskowski, A. (2011) Detecting the environmental impact of the Baltic Crusades on a late-medieval (13th-15th century) frontier landscape: palynological analysis from Malbork Castle and hinterland, Northern Poland. Journal of Archaeological Science, 38 (8). pp. 1957-1966. ISSN 0305-4403 doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.04.010
• Pluskowski, A., Boas, A. and Gerrard, C. (2011) The ecology of crusading: investigating the environmental impact of holy war and colonisation at the frontiers of medieval Europe. Medieval Archaeology, 55. pp. 192-225. ISSN 1745-817X doi: 10.1179/174581711X13103897378564

2010

• Pluskowski, A. (2010) Constructing exotic animals and environments in late Medieval Britain. In: Page, S. (ed.) The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain. Neale UCL Studies in British History. Manchester University Press, Manchester. ISBN 9780719078354
• Pluskowski, A., Seetah, K. and Maltby, M. (2010) Potential osteoarchaeological evidence for riding and the military use of horses at the castle in Malbork, Poland. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 20 (3). pp. 335-343. ISSN 1099-1212 doi: 10.1002/oa.1048
• Mitchell, S., Price, N., Hutton, R., Purkiss, D., Patton, K., Raudvere, C., Severi, C., Aldhouse-Green, M., Semple, S., Pluskowski, A., Carver, M. and Ginzburg, C. (2010) Witchcraft and deep time - a debate at Harvard. Antiquity, 84 (325). pp. 864-879. ISSN 0003-598X
• Pluskowski, A. (2010) The wolf. In: O'Connor, T.P. and Sykes, N. J. (eds.) Extinctions and invasions: a social history of British fauna. Windgather Press, Oxford, pp. 68-74. ISBN 9781905119318
• Pluskowski, A. (2010) The zooarchaeology of medieval Christendom: ideology, the treatment of animals and the making of medieval Europe. World Archaeology, 42 (2). pp. 201-214. ISSN 0043-8243 doi: 10.1080/00438241003672815

2009

• Maltby, M., Pluskowski, A. and Seetah, K. (2009) Animal bones from an industrial quarter at Malbork: towards an ecology of a castle built in Prussia by the Teutonic Order. Crusades, 8. pp. 191-212. ISSN 1476-5276
• Valk, H., Pluskowski, A., Thornley, D., Brown, A. and Summerfield, C. (2009) Fluxgate gradiometry survey in the ruins of Karski Castle and palaeoenvironmental analysis in its hinterlands. Archaeological Fieldwork in Estonia. pp. 213-229.
• Pluskowski, A.G. (2009) What is exotic? Sources of animals and animal products from the edges of the medieval world. In: Jaritz, G. and Kreem, J. (eds.) The Edges of the Medieval World. UNSPECIFIED, Krems, pp. 113-129.

2008

• Pluskowski, A. and Seetah, K. (2008) The animal bones. In: Gelichi, S., Piuzzi, F. and Cianciosi, A. (eds.) Sachuidic presso forni superiore: ricerche archeologiche in un castello della carnia. All'Insegna del Giglio, Florence, pp. 98-103.

2007

• Trafford, S. and Pluskowski, A.G. (2007) Antichrist superstars: the Vikings in hard rock and heavy metal. In: Marshall, D.W. (ed.) Mass Market Medieval: essays on the Middle Ages in popular culture. McFarland, Jefferson, pp. 57-73. ISBN 9780786429226
• Pluskowski, A.G. (2007) Communicating through skin and bone: the appropriation of animal bodies in medieval western seigneurial culture. In: Pluskowski, A.G. (ed.) Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies: animals as material culture in the Middle Ages. Oxbow Books, Oxford, pp. 32-51. ISBN 978-1-84217-218-6
• Pluskowski, A.G. (2007) Who ruled the forests? An inter-disciplinary approach towards medieval hunting landscapes. In: Hartmann, S. (ed.) Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages. Peter Lang, Frankfurt, pp. 291-323. ISBN 9783631563021

This list was generated on Sun May 26 02:11:32 2013 BST.

Qualifications:

BA PhD (Cambridge)