Pirates of the North Sea? The Viking ship as political space

Summary

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 the last two decades, influential work on these pirate communities has recast them as radical actors and social revolutionaries, subverting political norms among state-based societies to create a new and freer maritime identity for themselves and others on the margins. More recent studies have retreated from this vision of political enfranchisement and instead re-emphasised the rational pursuit of self-interest and profit under the cloak of controlled anarchy. All this research can be usefully applied to the Viking Age, not by a direct transfer of paradigms but as a lens through which to view the archaeology of the period afresh, and to shape new models of agency and influence.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Conflict and Society in Viking Age Scandinavia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage