ABSTRACT
The building of an infrastructure of roads and water pipelines appears to be characteristic of urban foundation in the high and late medieval period. In relation to the urban foundation and formation, two important issues will be discussed. First of all, how progress in urban archaeological research was gained by a conscious encounter with historical models of the origins of particular towns, and secondly, from the viewpoint of archaeological research, characteristic or disputed models of urban foundation and formation in the Middle Ages. An attempt to present urban foundation and formation through the lens of archaeology cannot take into account models that were set up without an attempt to correlate closely the archaeological evidence and the written sources. The constitutional and economic background of this urban transformation have to be discussed; archaeological evidence demands changes to historians' models of town formation that so far have been based solely on documentary evidence.
