Raiding (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Raffield. Neil Price. Mark Collard.

The surge of violent raiding that traditionally marks the beginning of the Viking Age at the end of the 8th century ushered in a period of turmoil and change across much of Europe. Though the factors that might have triggered this have been repeatedly debated, no hypothesis has thus far provided a convincing explanation for this important historical phenomenon. One of the oldest arguments, discussed in this paper, was that proposed during the 11th century by Dudo of St. Quentin in Gesta...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler M Caldwell.

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is situated at the crossroads of the Near East and the Aegean Civilizations. During the Middle Ages, Cyprus experienced raids that would devastate the coastal landscape. Coastal towns and villages were destroyed, and many of them never rebuilt. Fortifications were constructed to defend the coastline from raiders and potential invaders. Scholars...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Price.

The contextualised meaning of specifically ‘Viking’ identities, in relation to the general population of early medieval Scandinavia, is a topic of perennial debate. Who were the Viking raiders, how did they see themselves, and how did others see them? How did our artificial construct of ‘the Viking Age’ actually begin? A key concept in unravelling these problems may be what the Vikings’ much later successors, the pirates of the so-called Golden Age, called "the new government of the ship". Over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Price.

In December 2015, the Swedish Research Council made an unprecedented investment in archaeology with a ten-year, multi-million dollar grant to establish a center of excellence in Viking Studies at Uppsala University. Much of the recent research into the Vikings and their time (c. 750-1050 CE) has focused on the complex processes of state formation and Christian conversion that eventually gave rise to the modern Scandinavian nations. Far less attention has been devoted to the very beginnings of...