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Archaeology over the past fifty years has shown that in the early 9th century Western Europe experimented with a coalescing of states affirmed by a common reform ideology and with it increased communication to regions beyond. At different speeds, regions of Western Europe adopted this new strategy known as the correctio. Within a generation, the correctio gave rise to a new ‘feudal’ economy and significantly a new regionalism. The archaeology of Europe shows that there were winners and losers in these fast-changing regions. The losers, in many cases, controlled the written narratives and ascribed their altered socio-economic condition to the Others of the time, not least because the Others were leading exponents of the pot-correctio economic agenda. This paper revisits Klavs Randsborg’s groundbreaking book, The Viking Age of Denmark, in the context of post-war approaches to Europe’s post-classical narrative.
In the early to mid-1990s in a pre-GIS era, Klavs Randsborg with a team from the University of Copenhagen directed a wide-ranging survey of the Ionian (Greek) island of Kephallénia. Randsborg punctiliously published the multi-period sites he discovered, and analysed the results, paying special attention to the island’s archaic Greek sites but also later medieval afterlife of certain of these sites, including the castles re-occupying Paleókastro (Sami) and Pronnoi (2002). Since the Kephallénia survey was made, new research in the early 2000s on castles and Byzantine urbanism in the western Balkans has significantly expanded the base of knowledge. With this new evidence, it is now possible to provide new interpretations of the Paleókastro, Sami and Paleókastro, Pronnoi castles that in turn shed new light on the management of Kephallénia in the Mid-Byzantine period.