Carnium and Carneola.The central settlement and its surroundings between antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The project focuses on the research of the Late Antique and Early Medieval period in the area of present-day Gorenjska (Upper Carniola) and central Slovenia. The area is recorded in late antique written sources as the province of Carneola. The most important settlement in the region was Carnium (today's Kranj), which played an important role in the varied historical events of the 5th and 6th centuries. As one of the few towns in the area, Late Antique Carnium continued with urban life into the Middle Ages under the name Creina. Its position on a conglomerate pier above the confluence of two rivers (Kokra and Sava) made it the focal point of the landscape, in which other Late Antique settlements were located mainly on well-protected elevated sites. The fact that ancient Carnium stood on the site of today's Kranj has long been indicated, above all, by the rich burial ground discovered on the terraces below the town centre, on the Lajh site. With its remarkable finds and its location between Pannonia and Italy, it has attracted the interest of European scholars since its discovery at the end of the 19th century. The location of the settlement to which the burial site belonged was only confirmed in the last decades of the 20th century. At that time, protection works in the Old Town uncovered the remains of wooden buildings in several places and sections of the late antique city walls on the western edge of the pier. The buildings also yielded a wealth of small artefacts, confirming the important role of Kranj in the political and economic changes at the end of Late Antiquity, also in the wider Central European area. Unfortunately, the results of the research are as yet almost entirely unpublished. The image of the Late Antique Carneola was complemented by a network of contemporary high-altitude fortified settlements. The project will explore the similarities and differences between Carnium as a multiethnic central settlement and the dependent, predominantly indigenous settlements. We will analyse finds from unpublished field excavations at selected highland settlements (e.g. Ajdna above Potoki, Gradišče above Bašelj, Sv. Lovrenc above Bašelj, Puštal above Trnje, etc.) and compare them with those from Carnium. As Kranj is one of the few Late Antique settlements in the region that lived continuously into the Middle Ages, we will also analyse the transition from the Late Antique to the Early Medieval period and the subsequent life of the settlement. In doing so, we will rely in particular on the results of excavations in the vicinity of the parish church, where a large burial ground developed in the early Middle Ages, with continuity of burials from Late Antiquity into the modern period. The project is structured in sections to investigate the organisation of the region, the functioning of the central settlement of Carnium and its subsidiary settlements, the involvement of the town and the region in economic and trade flows, changes in ethnic composition, and changes at the end of Late Antiquity and at the transition to the Early Middle Ages. In the final synthesis, we will try to answer many topical questions about the space at the interface between the major political formations (Gothic, Byzantine, Frankish and Langobardic state) between antiquity and the Middle Ages.