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

巴伐利亚东北部和波希米亚西部是法兰克人从西部积极政治扩张的边缘地区，也是东部新斯拉夫政治结构出现的见证，从7世纪到12世纪，巴伐利亚东北部和波希米亚西部被认为是一个边境地区。这一地区居住着一个异质社会，社会和文化规范的适应和谈判是流动的，语言和其他符号手段以多层次的方式相互作用。该项目相应地采取了跨学科的方法，结合定性数据和历史语言学的见解，考古学和历史学，水平的定量数字数据处理和评估，以掌握在调查的几个世纪中变化的分布模式。在这个框架内，该项目整合了历史学科以及文化研究的当代理论和方法论进步调查社会实践和定居过程的指标及其与命名过程和构词模式证据的潜在相关性。因此，我们认为，hydronyms，定居点名称，外来语，埋葬习俗，陶瓷风格和建筑传统的各种文化表现形式，既有潜力的文化和社交网络内的相互关联，并在它们之间转移。在研究区域内，这些表达很少相互一致，并且在上弗兰肯和上普法尔茨或波希米亚之间存在差异，这表明了一个复合的文化和社会空间。因此，出现了一个广泛的接触区，其特点是文化联系以及社会的社会和经济组织逐渐发生变化。与此同时，在公元第一个千年的后半期，这两个地区出现的社会实践模式被认为是与被认为是德国和斯拉夫的文化相延续的。我们的目标是开发一个可转移的模型，用于重建接触情境中的社会和文化过程，并推进与居住在巴伐利亚州之间的边缘空间的边疆社会有关的话语中世纪早期的波希米亚特别是，该项目的目的是（1）从语言学角度分析保存下来的地名和相关词汇证据，并重新评估相对和近似的词汇。（2）分析考古发现，包括陶瓷风格和墓葬习俗，以重建文化标志和仪式，作为动态和协商身份的表达;（3）系统地调查将考古学和语言学证据联系起来的潜力和困难通过对分布模式的地理空间分析，以重建过去的文化互动和发展。

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.