The bottom-up/top-down question and Early Medieval society. What are meeting places and why do they matter?

"Traditional history-writing tends to look for rulers, influencers and lords. The emperors, kings and warlords decide the fates and the future. Off course governance is much more complex, and no central rule is effective without an extensive administration and apparatus, also on the economic level. When it comes to the post-Roman period, this tension between historical image-building and political end economic governance practices is even stronger. Archaeologists as Richard Hodges for instance declare economic growth from the 8th century onwards as a result of top-down initiatives and processes, such as gift-exchange and the building of ports, infrastructure. In doing so he and others approach the Early Middle Ages from the perspective that strong lords are necessary for dynamics and change (the modernisation bias).  

However, when one analyses this approach, many problems occur, historiographically as well as archaeologically. In our project, Connected Communities, we take a critical stand towards this top-down approaches. No single warlord could exercise such comprehensive control. At the same time, we advocate the importance of broader bottom-up dynamics, in the line of Alfons Dopsch and other scholars.  No ruling class or “elite”, ruling from central places, had the means by which to impose unilateral decisions about production, consumption, distribution of wealth, etc. Meetings between actors, agents and (free) people were much more important. We will present the argument, deconstruct the top-down approach and discuss the importance of meetings and meeting places, from a non-teleological perspective. No early medieval trader knew that successful medieval trade towns and markets would emerge several centuries later, so why do we think that there reproduction strategies led to the origins of cities? In doing so, my focus will be on the Rhine-Schelde estuary as setting."