Catherine R. Squires^a,#

^aNovosibirsk State University, Humanitarian Research Laboratory, Novosibirsk, Russia

^#E-mail: skvayrs@gmail.com

Keywords: the Hanseatic League and Novgorod, 15th–16th century Low German, waste disposal terminology, archaeology of medieval towns.

The article focuses on the problem of checking linguistic facts for subsequent use in archeological studies. A reliable comparison of archeological data to medieval textual evidence depends on the soundness of the linguistic interpretation of the latter. The paper proposes a two-step method of clarifying technical terminology of waste disposal in 15th–16th century Hanseatic towns by first checking it against a chronologically similar case from another region (15th century Schaffhausen), where both language data and the matching realia are known. The results are then in a second step applied to archaeological finds revealed in Lubeck in 2006–2009. On this basis interpretations of further contexts from Lubeck documents – the book of administrative records of the magistrate (Liber Memorialis) for 1318–early 16th century and a letter from 1453 – are attempted. A semantic, grammatical and syntactic analysis of the sources from Lubeck yields additional information which allows a correct reading of a historic document pertaining to the Hanseatic Peterhof in Novgorod, which in turn will be useful in working with prospective archaeological finds in Veliky Novgorod.

DOI: 10.31857/S0869606322020155