Environment and Identity in the Viking Age North Atlantic

Summary

The cultures that arose in the North Atlantic during the Viking Age - the Scottish Isles, Faroes, Iceland and Greenland - were emphatically Norse in their ethnic signalling. Yet the environments of these islands, especially the more westerly ones, were significantly different from Scandinavia or Britain and supported quite different lifeways, different economic strategies, settlement patterns and material cultures. Focusing on Iceland and Greenland the paper aims to highlight the tension between environment and cultural identity asking whether there is a point at which a peripheral environment becomes so different from that of the core that it cannot sustain the same culture. Based on the study of settlement patterns the paper suggests ways in which archaeological data can be used to assess cultural divergence.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Identities in the Viking Worlds

Keywords

Spatial Coverage