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:
-
YNumber of items: 9.
2012
- Pluskowski, A. (2012) The archaeology of the Prussian Crusade: Holy War and colonisation. Routledge, London. ISBN 9780415691703 (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
- 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. ISSN 1745-817X (In Press)
2010
- 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
2009
- 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.
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
- Qualifications:
- BA PhD (Cambridge)
