The North Sea and the "Long" Viking Age: Connections and Communication

Summary

This talk presents the results of a northern European collaborative pilot study on the compilation and analysis of internationally-derived datasets of metal-detected material culture. Drawing on nascent heritage initiatives across northern Europe designed to protect and record our at-risk portable material culture, the project seeks to develop and trial a methodology for the synthesis and analysis of metal-detected datasets from England, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands, resulting in the first international synthesis of this material. The project focuses on the North Sea littoral in the the Iron Age/Early Medieval period leading up to and throughout the ‘Viking Age’ (c.700-1100 AD) — a period characterised by extensive long-distance networks of trade, migration, and communication. In addition to piloting cross-border data synthesis, the project will analyse the distributions and long-distance routes of movement of artefacts and people, thus shedding light on the interconnectedness of the 'Long Viking Age’ in the North Sea. The results will be of interest to those making use of metal-detected data regardless of period specialization, particularly with reference to strategies for the effective integration of these diverse and problematic datasets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16876