Vikings (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. It has become increasingly common to understand Vikings, or medieval Scandinavians, beyond their role as raiders of the Medieval Period and to see them in other jobs, such as skilled traders. This is made clear through the many trading centers throughout the Northern European region. Many of these centers arose...
Exploring the limits of the island Anthropocene: the Norse colonisation of Greenland in an Atlantic context. (2017)
The medieval Norse colonisation of Greenland was unique, but we can use this completed experiment to explore key drivers of, and limits to, the ‘island Anthropocene’. The indigenous biota of Greenland while sensitive, lacks the fragility of small, isolated low latitude oceanic islands rich in endemic species. The timing of Norse settlement was determined by the patterns and process of island colonisation to the east combined with a suitable environmental and economic window of opportunity. The...
Female mobility in the Viking Worlds (2015)
Recent reassessments of the gender balance among Viking Age Scandinavian populations in the British Isles have suggested a greater presence of immigrant women than previously thought. At the same time, increasing support for a view of the Viking world as a diaspora, with a sustained network between the original and the acquired homelands, has necessitated a better understanding of the mechanics of the migration process. This paper evaluates interdisciplinary evidence for the level of mobility...
Growing up on the move: childhood experience in the Viking Age (2016)
The involvement of children in the Viking Age migrations, and their experiences upon settlement in new regions, has been afforded little attention by archaeologists. In part this derives from the perceived paucity of evidence for children and their lives. It is also arguably because migration is generally overlooked as a facet of childhood because of an assumption that ‘the home’ is the environment in which childhood is experienced and thus this is where analytical attention is often focused....
Pirates of the North Sea? The Viking ship as political space (2015)
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...
Religious belief and cooperation in Viking societies (2017)
It has become clear in recent years that it was not uncommon for Viking groups to be heterogeneous. Numerous studies carried out over the last 25 years indicate that, in the short term at least, sociocultural diversity has a negative impact on trust within communities, and that this leads to a reduction in the willingness of community members to support public projects. Thus, one issue raised by the discovery that many Viking groups were heterogeneous is how loyalty to the group was achieved. In...
Slavery and the Vikings: archaeological perspectives (2016)
The cultures of the Viking Age in Scandinavia (AD c. 750-1100) were economically dependent on widespread, complex and deeply rooted systems of slavery. However, this aspect of the period was long neglected by scholars, partly due to the diluting influence of contemporary terminology. A Viking slave was a träl, producing the rather weaker English word 'thrall', and the nationalistic approaches to the period that dominated Viking studies far into the twentieth century often tended to subsume an...
The Viking Phenomenon (2017)
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...