Stratigraphies are amazing. They tell you all sorts of things you did not know about the past — things both big and small, and important in understanding how the world worked. The dense, fine-meshed layers in the accumulated urban stratigraphies hold immense amounts of information about important developments, many of which are simply waiting to be unlocked through high-definition methods. Today, we can unwrap knowledge of things that have long been enigmas, and we can pull nitty-gritty submicroscopic information from these layers, the pure earth and its invisible elements. We can blow this information up to global scale and examine it within its local, regional, and global contexts, all of which provides us with new possibilities of truly understanding the ways of the world across time and space. This is what we call high-definition narratives.

Yet for all the complexity, we also need synthesis: the simple guiding concepts that can set everything in its rightful place. That is where we sometimes realize the strengths of our predecessors in scholarship. In academia, it is invariably the case that someone came before you, and they could lead all roads (back) to Rome — or to Denmark.

York was an important centre for several centuries in the Roman period and the Middle Ages — and, of course, an icon of Viking Age England. We recently visited the city in order to explore its high-definition potential. What a surprise it was to discover that someone had already been there before us and had deciphered the stratigraphies, and how well we agreed with their results. Roman — Danish — Recent — is all you need. Here we are again, sandwiched between times past and present, caught in a matrix, surrounded by past cultures and the quest for research.

Rubina Raja and Søren M. Sindbæk
Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University