Pieterjan Deckers obtained his PhD in Archaeology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) in 2014, with a dissertation on the post-Roman/early medieval resettlement of the Flemish coastal plain, and the social and cultural relations of its inhabitants within the wider context of the southern North Sea between the 6^th and 11^th century AD. As part of this study, he studied private collections of metal-detected artefacts, which shed important new light on these topics. This category of evidence, hitherto largely overlooked in Flanders, formed the focus of his subsequent project MEDEA (VUB, 2014-2017), which involved setting up a recording scheme for detector finds in Flanders (www.vondsten.be).

As part of the Northern Emporium team, Pieterjan will consider the artefactual evidence recovered from the excavation in Ribe: how flows of things both exotic and mundane constituted urban life and connected the town with the outside world, in particular the maritime network of 8th-9th-century emporia across the North and Baltic Seas.