Small Things – Wide Horizons

Small Things – Wide Horizons
Author: Lars Larsson
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2015-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784911321

This publication honours Birgitta Hardh on her 70th birthday. Birgitta Hardh is one of the leading experts on European Viking Age, engaged in diverse research projects, and also a vital collaborator in various networks specializing in the period. Through time, Birgitta has extended her research to comprise other periods of the Iron Age.

Vikings Across Boundaries

Vikings Across Boundaries
Author: Hanne Lovise Aannestad
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000204723

This volume explores the changes that occurred during the Viking Age, as Scandinavian societies fell in line with the larger forces that dominated the Insular world and Continental Europe, absorbing the powerful symbiosis of Christianity and monarchy, adapting to the idea of royal lineage and supremacy, and developing a buzzing urbanism coupled with large-scale trade networks. Presenting research on the grand context of the Viking Age alongside localised studies, it contributes to the furthering of collaborations between local and ‘outsider’ research on the Viking Age. Through a diversity of approaches on the Viking homelands and the wider world of the Vikings, it offers studies of a range of phenomena, including urban and rural settlements; continuity in the use of places as well as new types of places specific to the Viking Age; the social significance of change; the construction and maintenance of social identity both within the ‘homelands’ and across large territories; ethnicity; and ideas of identity and the creation and recreation of identity both at home and abroad. As such, it will appeal to historians and archaeologists with interests in Viking-Age studies, as well as scholars of Scandinavian studies.

Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age

Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age
Author: Jonathan Shepard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0755618181

The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This pioneering interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan's text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both 'the bigger picture' of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data.

Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050-1250, Volume I

Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050-1250, Volume I
Author: Bjørn Poulsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2019-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429557280

This book, first in a series of three, examines the social elites in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, and which social, political, and cultural resources went into their creation. The elite controlled enormous economic resources and exercised power over people. Power over agrarian production was essential to the elites during this period, although mobile capital was becoming increasingly important. The book focuses on the material resources of the elites, through questions such as: Which types of resources were at play? How did the elites acquire and exchange resources?

Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns

Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns
Author: Stephen P. Ashby
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-02-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 178925163X

Crafting Communities explores the interface between craft, communication networks, and urbanization in Viking-age Northern Europe. Viking-period towns were the hubs of cross-cultural communication of their age, and innovations in specialized crafts provide archaeologists with some of the best evidence for studying this communication. The integrated results presented in these papers have been made possible through the sustained collaboration of a group of experts with complementary insights into individual crafts. Results emerge from recent scholarly advances in the study of artifacts and production: first, the application of new analytical techniques in artifact studies (e.g. metallographic, isotopic, and biomolecular techniques) and second, the shifted in interpretative focus of medieval artifact studies from a concern with object function to considerations of processes of production, and of the social agency of technology. Furthermore, the introduction of social network theory and actor-network theory has redirected attention toward the process of communication, and highlighted the significance of material culture in the learning and transmission of cultural knowledge, including technology. The volume brings together leading UK and Scandinavian archaeological specialists to explore crafted products and workshop-assemblages from these towns, in order to clarify how such long-range communication worked in pre-modern Northern Europe. Contributors assess the implications for our understanding of early towns and the long-term societal change catalysed by them, including the initial steps towards commercial economies. Results are analyzed in relation to social network theory, social and economic history, and models of communication, setting an agenda for further research. Crafting Communities provides a landmark statement on our knowledge of Viking-Age craft and communication

Northern Emporium

Northern Emporium
Author: Søren M. Sindbæk
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2023-02-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8793423837

This is the second and final volume presenting the results of the Northern Emporium research project and the high-definition excavations carried out within this programme in 2017-18 in Ribe. The 22 chapters survey the remarkable range of finds retrieved from this hub of the North Sea world in the eighth and ninth centuries AD: artefacts made from pottery, stone, shell, glass, metals, amber, leather, wood, textile, bone and antler. They offer detailed insights that highlight discoveries such as the assemblages from glass bead or comb-making workshops, and rare finds such as wooden furnishings and musical instruments. The focus of the book is on assembling Ribe’s early urban network. By analysing finds and their context, we develop a picture of social roles and interactions between residents and visitors in the emporium. And we follow the connections they created with other worlds as we trace the flows of glass vessels, pottery and wine barrels from Western Europe; iron, stone and animal products from North and Central Scandinavia and beads and coins that travelled from the Middle East and the Indian Ocean into northern Europe’s new maritime frontier.

Digging into the Dark Ages

Digging into the Dark Ages
Author: Howard Williams
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2020-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789695287

What does the ‘Dark Ages’ mean in contemporary society? Tackling public engagements through archaeological fieldwork, heritage sites and museums, fictional portrayals and art, and increasingly via a broad range of digital media, this is the first-ever dedicated collection exploring the public archaeology of the Early Middle Ages.

Viking-Age Trade

Viking-Age Trade
Author: Jacek Gruszczyński
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 135186615X

That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another – complementary – explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks – perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.

Making Money in the Early Middle Ages

Making Money in the Early Middle Ages
Author: Rory Naismith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2023-07-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691177406

An examination of coined money and its significance to rulers, aristocrats and peasants in early medieval Europe Between the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the economic transformations of the twelfth, coined money in western Europe was scarce and high in value, difficult for the majority of the population to make use of. And yet, as Rory Naismith shows in this illuminating study, coined money was made and used throughout early medieval Europe. It was, he argues, a powerful tool for articulating people’s place in economic and social structures and an important gauge for levels of economic complexity. Working from the premise that using coined money carried special significance when there was less of it around, Naismith uses detailed case studies from the Mediterranean and northern Europe to propose a new reading of early medieval money as a point of contact between economic, social, and institutional history. Naismith examines structural issues, including the mining and circulation of metal and the use of bullion and other commodities as money, and then offers a chronological account of monetary development, discussing the post-Roman period of gold coinage, the rise of the silver penny in the seventh century and the reconfiguration of elite power in relation to coinage in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the process, he counters the conventional view of early medieval currency as the domain only of elite gift-givers and intrepid long-distance traders. Even when there were few coins in circulation, Naismith argues, the ways they were used—to give gifts, to pay rents, to spend at markets—have much to tell us.