Abstrakt
Contact zones with a lively exchange of material culture, language and ethnicities have an untapped potential for the study of the early Middle Ages. One such area is today's northern Bavaria in Germany, where Slavic and Germanic-speaking populations met 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. The identification of spatial differences between place names of Slavic or Germanic origin and archaeological sources can illustrate various socio-cultural changes.
An important source of evidence of the gradual integration into Frankish power structures are Carolingian-Ottonian cemeteries there. Their establishment in northern Bavaria began only after this funeral practice had been abandoned in the western part of the Frankish Empire in favour of cemeteries that were adjoined to churches.
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. Some of them belong to a specific socio-economic context, such as names bearing the lemmas -hausen and -hofen, which are related to royal and aristocratic landlords' estates.
This paper presents the results of point pattern analysis involving a linear model and kernel density. It thereby outlines trends that can be monitored in Bavaria based on confrontation of the archaeological evidence with that of toponomastics.