Archaeology of Motion

This book proposes archaeology of motion — a methodological framework that extends the artefact concept to bodily techniques preserved in historical recipes, enabling rigorous reconstruction of discontinued embodied practices. Drawing on Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Timothy Ingold, Ben Spatz, Wojciech Klimczyk, Nicholai Bernstein, and James Gibson's affordance theory, while engaging seriously with sceptics including Hayden White, Kalle Pihlainen, and Eric Burkart, it grounds practice-based research in four operational principles: verifiability, longitudinity, material triangulation, and transparent documentation. The result is a methodological response to recent calls for embodied historical inquiry — including Lauren Mancia's reperformance — that addresses the verifiability problem head-on. The framework is tested through a twelve-month longitudinal case study on manuscript 3227a, the earliest and most enigmatic Liechtenauerian fight book. New source-critical analysis yields revises dating and geographical attribution, and proposes genre reinterpretation as a martial compendium for urban laboratores-bellatores. The technical content is then reconstructed through sustained embodied practice triangulated against a catalogue of over 360 Central-European longsword finds, generating a structured inventory of 180 body techniques, elementary actions, kinetic artefacts, and underlying principles, including the system-defining concept of moße (measure). The book addresses philosophers and theorists of history working on practice-based and embodied historiography; experimental archaeologists and scholars working in material engagement theory; anthropologists of skill acquisition and apprenticeship; and the international HEMA research community alongside specialists in late-medieval German martial culture. By offering a transferable methodological infrastructure, it opens new avenues for research on other discontinued embodied practices — artisanal, performative, ritual, or martial — and reframes bodily motion as a legitimate object of historical and archaeological inquiry.