This is coupled with looking at objects created during the Middle Ages that still exist, whether castles, churches, or beautifully decorated Bibles. I myself feel that I have a much better sense of what life in a castle would have been like from climbing around a lot of castle ruins.
Historians have not tended to look a lot at biology or information technology. But now a group at Harvard, called the Science of the Human Past, is trying to integrate the hard sciences into medieval history. They use geology, archaeology, dendochronology (the study of tree rings), and the like to give a broader sense of the world in which medieval people lived. They have been able to find out quite a lot from ice cores, taken from Europe's glaciers.
For example, they have recently been able to determine that ash from Iceland's volcanoes reached as far as the Alps during the Middle Ages (where they froze into the glaciers), which means that we have a better sense of really how big were what were described as "big eruptions" at the same time.
By examining air-borne seeds which were frozen into glaciers, they have been able to trace the spread of agricultural practices--for example, being able to tell when woods were replaced by open fields, and which crops were most common. Similarly, they have been able to look at particle pollutants, for a better sense of what the air quality was like around a medieval city.
One of their early conclusions is that one of the many disasters that marked late Antiquity (fifth through seventh centuries) was crop failure, caused by several years in which volcanic eruptions around the world meant much less sunlight making it to earth, and hence much less plant growth. The "fall of the Roman Empire" (on which see more here) can be blamed on volcanoes rather than Germans!
The Harvard group is using modern computer technology to integrate the many maps of Roman and medieval Europe, including such things as the locations of churches or pagan temples, trading centers, roads, and the like. This makes possible things like determining how long it would take people who lived in a certain place to get to a harbor, and similar findings.
The group has also been doing quite a lot with DNA. With modern gene sequencing (think about how easy it is now to send in and find out if you have English ancestors), they are hoping to be able to trace migrations across medieval Europe, studying the DNA that can still be found in old bones.
The group is showing that historians can benefit from incorporating other approaches into the study of the past, both to give more context to something we already know from the written record and to help fill in some gaps for information where there is no written record (such as early establishment of agriculture).
Here's their website: https://sohp.fas.harvard.edu/
© C. Dale Brittain 2018
For more on medieval social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.
Ice cores, and DNA, and other scientific forensics sound lovely: a thrill to professionals. They can even be a thrill to amateurs when experienced in moderate doses. But a higher art, that in the long run will do more to keep history funded as an academic discipline, is the ability of some historians to weave what incomplete facts and fantasies they have into stories :-).
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