Lucifer’s Land invites readers into the social, cultural, and material world of premodern miners. Drawing on a wide array of historical and archaeological sources, G. Geltner argues that miners’ transformation of rural society, culture, and environments was and has been substantial and lasting.

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the economy, and the state collapsed. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming charts this collapse, and its foundational role in making the world we characterize as early medieval.