Abstract
Contact zones are attractive areas for the study of socio-cultural changes in the early Middle Ages. One of the best European examples is today's north-eastern Bavaria in Germany, where Slavic and Germanic-speaking populations lived side by side on the eastern border of the Frankish Empire.
A combination of archaeology and linguistics, using the tools of modern data sciences and statistical analysis, has revealed new opportunities for research in this area. The identification of spatial differences between place names of Slavic or Germanic origin and archaeological sources can illustrate various socio-cultural changes.
The evidence indicates that Bavaria was integrated into Frankish power structures gradually, a process that is reflected in the presence there of Carolingian-Ottonian cemeteries. This spatially restricted variable was chosen for our analysis because the Carolingian-Ottonian cemeteries are the only locally reliable archeological diagnostic for tracing the development of and trends in settlement progression in the early Middle Ages.
Our toponomastic dataset consists of place names known through historical linguistic analysis to be of Slavic origin in comparison to German and Early Germanic place names. These place names help us to understand which populations lived in the study region and how the medieval settlement process took place there.
The landscape of Bavaria is diverse and, therefore, we focus on the question of how the distribution of toponymy and archaeological sites is related to the natural environment, altitude and climatic conditions. This paper presents the results of point pattern analysis involving a linear model and kernel density.
This study was supported by a project of the Grant Schemes at Charles University, reg. no. CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/19_073/0016935 - "Interlinking language and material culture - a study of European populations in time and space" (4EU+).