Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns
Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns

Author: Rebecca Boyd

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-20

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1000984397

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Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland. This coincides with the arrival of the Vikings and the appearance of the post-and-wattle Type 1 house. These houses reflect this crucial transition to urban living with its attendant changes for individuals, households, and society. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns uses household archaeology as a lens to explore the materiality, variability, and day-to-day experiences of living in these houses. It moves from the intimate scale of individual households to the larger scale of Ireland’s earliest urban communities. For the first time, this book considers how these houses were more than just buildings: they were homes, important places where people lived, worked, and died. These new towns were busy places with a multitude of people, ideas, and things. This book uses the mass of archaeological data to undertake comparative analyses of houses and properties, artefact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to interrogate some 500 Viking-Age urban houses. This analysis is structured in three parts: an investigation of the houses, the households, and the town. Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns discusses how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging in these new environments and allow themselves to develop a new, urban identity. This book is suited to advanced students and specialists of the Viking Age in Ireland, but archaeologists and historians of the early medieval and Viking worlds will find much of interest here. It will also appeal to readers with interests in the archaeology of house and home, households, identities, and urban studies.

Everyday Life in Viking-Age Towns
Everyday Life in Viking-Age Towns

Author: Letty ten Harkel

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2013-11-04

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 1782970096

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The study of early medieval towns has frequently concentrated on urban beginnings, the search for broadly applicable definitions of urban characteristics and the chronological development of towns. Far less attention has been paid to the experience of living in towns. The thirteen chapters in this book bring together the current state of knowledge about Viking-Age towns (c. 800–1100) from both sides of the Irish Sea, focusing on everyday life in and around these emerging settlements. What was it really like to grow up, live, and die in these towns? What did people eat, what did they wear, and how did they make a living for themselves? Although historical sources are addressed, the emphasis of the volume is overwhelmingly archaeological, paying homage to the wealth of new material that has become available since the advent of urban archaeology in the 1960s.

Viking and Ecclesiastical Interactions in the Irish Sea Area from the 9th to 11th Centuries
Viking and Ecclesiastical Interactions in the Irish Sea Area from the 9th to 11th Centuries

Author: Danica Ramsey-Brimberg

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1040013333

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Different approaches have been conducted to analyse the interactions of the different belief systems in the early medieval world. This book assesses the relationship between clerics and Scandinavian-influenced laity in the Irish Sea area through the placement of furnished graves at or near ecclesiastical sites in the ninth through the eleventh centuries. Other areas of funerary studies have moved beyond a dichotomy of Christianity and paganism, acknowledging that practices can be multifaceted. Yet, statements regarding Viking Age furnished graves in or near ecclesiastical sites are still not as pervasively open to this line of thinking. To bridge this gap, this book delves into the historiography and context of the burial practices through multidisciplinary analysis. The ecclesiastical sites and furnished graves of the eastern (southwest Scotland and northwest England), central (Isle of Man), and western (Ireland and Northern Ireland) Irish Sea areas are then examined using various sources to understand their contexts and relationships. In the final chapters, the sites and graves are brought together to identify any trends, any unique circumstances that led to local variances, and their fit into the larger picture. Viking Age furnished graves can be seen as an acceptable variation among an array of burial practices, and the relationship between the clergy and laity is far more complex and closely tied than has been portrayed. Viking and Ecclesiastical Interactions in the Irish Sea Area from the 9th to 11th Centuries will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in the history of the Vikings in the British-Irish Isles and their relationships with ecclesiastical institutions.

Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns
Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns

Author: Rebecca Boyd

Publisher:

Published: 2023-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780367482787

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Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns discusses the emergence of towns, urban lifestyles, and urban identities in Ireland. This coincides with the arrival of the Vikings and the appearance of the post-and-wattle Type 1 house. These houses reflect this crucial transition to urban living with its attendant changes for individuals, households, and society. Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns uses household archaeology as a lens to explore the materiality, variability, and day-to-day experiences of living in these houses. It moves from the intimate scale of individual households to the larger scale of Ireland's earliest urban communities. For the first time, this book considers how these houses were more than just buildings: they were homes, important places where people lived, worked, and died. These new towns were busy places with a multitude of people, ideas, and things. This book uses the mass of archaeological data to undertake comparative analyses of houses and properties, artefact distribution patterns, and access analysis studies to interrogate some 500 Viking-Age urban houses. This analysis is structured in three parts: an investigation of the houses, the households, and the town. Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns discusses how these new urban households managed their homes to create a sense of place and belonging in these new environments and allow themselves to develop a new, urban identity. This book is suited to advanced students and specialists of the Viking Age in Ireland, but archaeologists and historians of the early medieval and Viking worlds will find much of interest here. It will also appeal to readers with interests in the archaeology of house and home, households, identities, and urban studies.

The Vikings in Poland
The Vikings in Poland

Author: Leszek Gardeła

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-26

Total Pages: 547

ISBN-13: 0429790589

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This pioneering work offers a meticulous exploration of Scandinavian presence in Viking Age Poland. Unveiling the complexities and controversies of past research and delving into the nuances of reciprocal interactions between Western Slavic and Scandinavian populations as revealed through archaeology and medieval texts, the book casts genuinely new light on a previously overlooked part of the Viking world. In setting the stage for these investigations, the monograph traces the evolution of Viking and Old Norse studies in Poland. It covers the romanticisation of Norse culture and literature, the dark days of the Second World War when archaeology was strongly driven by violent ideologies, and the profound changes that occurred in academia after the fall of communism and Poland’s accession to the European Union. At the core of this book are thorough investigations into cross-cultural interactions along the shores of the southern Baltic as well as in the interior of Poland. Using first-hand analyses of archaeological evidence from bustling ports of trade, settlement sites, silver hoards, and burial grounds, it is argued that the relationship between the local Western Slavic population and the Scandinavian migrants was highly complex but overall very symmetrical. Crucial notions such as the construction of identity in diasporic communities, ritual behaviour, and the symbolic content of Viking Age material culture are also discussed at length, offering new insights into Scandinavian and Slavic minds. Enriched with high-quality illustrations, photographs, as well as artistic reconstructions, this book fills many blank spaces in the field of Viking studies and is intended both for professional audiences and general readers interested in the intricacies of our shared past.

Bodies, Beings, and the Multiple Burial Rite of the Western Viking World
Bodies, Beings, and the Multiple Burial Rite of the Western Viking World

Author: Claire F. Ratican

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-25

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1040051057

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This book explores multiple burials, the presence of more than one individual within a grave, within the Viking Age mortuary landscape throughout Scandinavia and the lands of their westward diaspora. Even though a number of spectacular examples have captured the imagination of professionals and the public alike, multiple burials have not been the subject of dedicated and systematic archaeological investigation. By adopting a perspective grounded in relationality and an analysis that centres on three types of beings—humans, animals and things—this book explores the ways in which each being entered into entangled relationships with the other, thereby mutually constituting the nature of their existence in Viking Age minds. For the first time, the corpus of Viking Age multiple burials located across the lands of the Western Scandinavian diaspora and their counterparts in the urban trading centres of Kaupang (Norway) and Hedeby (formerly Denmark) is synthesised into a single study, firmly situating the multiple burial rite within the wider suite of normative burial practices observed across the Viking World. The book meaningfully engages with a developing discourse in the Scandinavian tradition increasingly revealing the fluidity of being across human, animal and thing bodies in Iron Age mentalities and material culture. Ultimately, it poses the question: are humans, animals, and things similar forms of bodies and beings in the Viking World? This book will appeal to students and researchers of death and burial in the Viking World.

Heritage, Diaspora and the Consumption of Culture
Heritage, Diaspora and the Consumption of Culture

Author: Diane Sabenacio Nititham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1317122291

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Using an interdisciplinary and transhistorical framework this book examines the cultural, material, and symbolic articulations of Irish migration relationships from the medieval period through to the contemporary post-Celtic Tiger era. With attention to people’s different uses of social space, relationships with and memories of the landscape, as well as their symbolic expressions of diasporic identity, Heritage, Diaspora and the Consumption of Culture examines the different forms of diaspora over time and contributes to contemporary debates on home, foreignness, globalization and consumption. By examining various movements of people into and out of Ireland, the book explores how expressions of cultural capital and symbolic power have changed over time in the Irish collective imagination, shedding light on the ways in which Ireland is represented and Irish culture consumed and materialized overseas. Arranged around the themes of home and location, identity and material culture, and global culture and consumption, this collection brings together the work of scholars from the UK, Ireland, Europe, the US and Canada, to explore the ways in which the processes of movement affect the people’s negotiation and contestation of concepts of identity, the local and the global. As such, it will appeal to scholars working in fields such as sociology, politics, cultural studies, history and archaeology, with interests in migration, gender studies, diasporic identities, heritage and material culture.

Vikings Across Boundaries
Vikings Across Boundaries

Author: Hanne Lovise Aannestad

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1000204723

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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.

A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain
A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain

Author: Tom Horne

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 100053314X

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Viking-Age trade, network theory, silver economies, kingdom formation, and the Scandinavian raiding and settlement of Ireland and Britain are all popular subjects. However, few have looked for possible connections between these phenomena, something this book suggests were closely related. By allying Blomkvist’s network-kingdoms with Sindbæk’s nodal market-networks, it is argued that the political and economic character of Viking-Age Britain and Ireland – my ‘Insular Scandinavia’ – is best understood if Dublin and Jórvík are seen as being established as nodes of a market-based network-kingdom. Based on a dataset relating to the then developing bullion economies of the central and eastern Scandinavian worlds and southern Scandinavia in particular, it is argued that war-band leaders from, or familiar with, ‘Danish’ markets like Hedeby and Kaupang transposed to Insular Scandinavia the concept of polities based on establishment of markets and the protection of routeways between them. Using this book, readers can think of interlinked Dublin and Great Army elites creating an Insular version of a Danish-style nodal market kingdom based on commerce and silver currencies. A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain will help specialist researchers and students of Viking archaeology make connections between southern Scandinavia and the market economy of the Uí Ímair (‘descendants of Ívarr’) operating out of the twin nodes of Dublin and Jórvík via the initial establishment of Hiberno-Scandinavian longphuirt and the related winter-camps of the Viking Great Army.

Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns
Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns

Author: Stephen P. Ashby

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2020-02-19

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 1789251613

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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