Linguistic and cultural dynamics in a frontier society: New perspectives on northeastern Bavaria and western Bohemia in the Early Middle Ages

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As a territory on the fringes of active Frankish political expansion from the west and witness to the emergence of new Slavic political structures in the east, northeastern Bavaria and western Bohemia are understood as a frontier area from the 7th to the 12th centuries. This area was inhabited by a heterogenous society subject to fluid adaptation and negotiation of social and cultural norms, where language and other semiotic means interacted in a multi-layered way. The project correspondingly takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines qualitative data and insights from historical linguistics, archaeology and historiography with high-level quantitative digital data processing and evaluation in order to grasp the distributional patterns that shifted during the centuries under investigation.Within this framework the project integrates contemporary theoretical and methodological advances in the historical disciplines as well as in cultural studies to investigate indicators of social practice and settlement processes and their potential correlation with evidence on naming processes and word-formation patterns. We thereby regard hydronyms, settlement names, loan words, burial customs, ceramic styles and building traditions as various cultural expressions with potential both to correlate within cultural and social networks and to transfer between them. Within the study region, these expressions are rarely co-terminus with one another and differ between esp. Upper Franconia and the Upper Palatinate or Bohemia, indicating a composite cultural and social space. A broad contact zone thus emerges, characterized by gradual changes in cultural affiliations and in the social and economic organization of society. At the same time, the emergent patterns of social practice upon both territories become recognizable in the latter half of the first millennium AD as continuous with cultures deemed to be German and Slavic.On the general level, we aim to develop a transferable model for the reconstruction of social and cultural processes in contact situations and advance the discourse pertaining to the frontier society that inhabited the liminal space between Bavaria and Bohemia in the Early Middle Ages. In particular, the project aims to (1) linguistically analyze the preserved toponymic and relevant lexical evidence and re-evaluate the relative and approx. chronology of its emergence as well as the sociocultural contexts to which it refers; (2) analyze archaeological findings, including ceramic styles and burial practices to reconstruct cultural markers and rituals as expressions of dynamic and negotiated identities; (3) systematically investigate the potential and difficulties of connecting archaeological and linguistic evidence (of continuity or convergence) via geospatial analysis of distributional patterns in order to reconstruct past cultural interaction and developments.