The Royal manor Avaldsnes in southwest Norway holds a rich history testified by 13th century sagas and exceptional graves from the first millennium AD. In 2011–12 the settlement was excavated. In this first book from the project crucial results from an international team of 23 scholars are published. The chapters cover a wide array of topics ranging from building-remains and scientific analyses of finds to landownership and ritual manifestations.

This book seeks to revitalise the somewhat stagnant scholarly debate on Germanic rulership in the first millennium AD. A series of comprehensive chapters combines literary evidence on Scandinavia’s polities, kings, and other rulers with archaeological, documentary, toponymical, and linguistic evidence. The picture that emerges is one of surprisingly stable rulership institutions, sites, and myths, while control of them was contested between individuals, dynasties, and polities. While in the early centuries, Scandinavia was integrated in Germanic Europe, profound societal and cultural changes in 6th-century Scandinavia and the Christianisation of Continental and English kingdoms set northern kingship on a different path. The pagan heroic warrior ethos, essential to kingship, was developed and refined; only to recur overseas embodied in 9th–10th-century Vikings. Three chapters on a hitherto unknown masonry royal manor at Avaldsnes in western Norway, excavated 2017, concludes this volume with discussions of the late-medieval peak of Norwegian kingship and it’s eventual downfall in the late 14th century. This book’s discussions and results are relevant to all scholars and students of 1st-millenium Germanic kingship, polities, and societies.

As the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm remain, to a considerable extent, obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence, this volume approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, allowing overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity to be detected and defined – and thereby challenging the notion that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character. Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities – or ‘hydrarchies’. By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiated by its application to a number of distinct regional case studies. The parameters of this abstract model affirm that Scandinavian movements across Francia were the result of prudent and expedient decision-making processes, contingent on exchanged intelligence, cumulative experience, and the ongoing individual and collective need for socioeconomic subsistence and enrichment. Monarchs and Hydrarchs will appeal to both students and specialists of the Viking Age, whilst serving as an equally valuable resource to those investigating early medieval Francia, Scandinavia, and the North Sea world as a whole.

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

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?

This book brings together the cumulative results of a three-year project focused on the assemblies and administrative systems of Scandinavia, Britain, and the North Atlantic islands in the 1st and 2nd millennia AD. In this volume we integrate a wide range of historical, cartographic, archaeological, field-based, and onomastic data pertaining to early medieval and medieval administrative practices, geographies, and places of assembly in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Scotland, and eastern England. This transnational perspective has enabled a new understanding of the development of power structures in early medieval northern Europe and the maturation of these systems in later centuries under royal control. In a series of richly illustrated chapters, we explore the emergence and development of mechanisms for consensus. We begin with a historiographical exploration of assembly research that sets the intellectual agenda for the chapters that follow. We then examine the emergence and development of the thing in Scandinavia and its export to the lands colonised by the Norse. We consider more broadly how assembly practices may have developed at a local level, yet played a significant role in the consolidation, and at times regulation, of elite power structures. Presenting a fresh perspective on the agency and power of the thing and cognate types of local and regional assembly, this interdisciplinary volume provides an invaluable, in-depth insight into the people, places, laws, and consensual structures that shaped the early medieval and medieval kingdoms of northern Europe.

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.

The Viking Congresses bring together scholars of archaeology, philology, history, toponymy, numismatics and a number of other disciplines to discuss the Viking Age from a variety of viewpoints. This volume contains 44 peer-reviewed papers selected from those presented at the 18th Viking Congress held in Denmark in August 2017. The contributors take up the interdisciplinary challenge, and the papers cover a wide range of subjects, rooted in the past, but also connecting to the present.

The Alhambra is one of the most famous archaeological sites worldwide, yet knowledge of it remains very partial, focussing on the medieval palaces. This book addresses that imbalance, examining the adjacent urban and industrial zone.The Alhambra is one of the most famous archaeological sites worldwide, yet knowledge of the complex remains very partial, focussing on its medieval Nasrid palaces. Other aspects of the site are virtually unknown, not only to the general public but to archaeologists and historians as well. The Royal Workshops of the Almambra addresses this imbalance, examining the urban and industrial zone adjacent to the palaces. Once the most densely populated and extensive area of the complex, this zone, the Secano, contained houses, tanneries, and workshops including a considerable number of pyrotechnological facilities for the production of metal, glass and ceramic items. Presenting the results of the Royal Workshops of the Alhambra (UNESCO World Heritage Site) project, the book gives a much-needed insight into the industrial sector of the Alhambra. Crucially, the project focusses on the early modern era, when the manufacture of ceramic, glass and metal actually reached their peak. The opening chapters set the archaeological work and the Secano in context and discuss the methodology for archaeological investigation of pyrotechnological activity; while further chapters present the results of the research. Drawing on both traditional and ground-breaking survey and excavation techniques, the book provides an invaluable wide-lens picture of the palatial city.eeded insight into the industrial sector of the Alhambra. Crucially, the project focusses on the early modern era, when the manufacture of ceramic, glass and metal actually reached their peak. The opening chapters set the archaeological work and the Secano in context and discuss the methodology for archaeological investigation of pyrotechnological activity; while further chapters present the results of the research. Drawing on both traditional and ground-breaking survey and excavation techniques, the book provides an invaluable wide-lens picture of the palatial city.eeded insight into the industrial sector of the Alhambra. Crucially, the project focusses on the early modern era, when the manufacture of ceramic, glass and metal actually reached their peak. The opening chapters set the archaeological work and the Secano in context and discuss the methodology for archaeological investigation of pyrotechnological activity; while further chapters present the results of the research. Drawing on both traditional and ground-breaking survey and excavation techniques, the book provides an invaluable wide-lens picture of the palatial city.eeded insight into the industrial sector of the Alhambra. Crucially, the project focusses on the early modern era, when the manufacture of ceramic, glass and metal actually reached their peak. The opening chapters set the archaeological work and the Secano in context and discuss the methodology for archaeological investigation of pyrotechnological activity; while further chapters present the results of the research. Drawing on both traditional and ground-breaking survey and excavation techniques, the book provides an invaluable wide-lens picture of the palatial city. ground-breaking survey and excavation techniques, the book provides an invaluable wide-lens picture of the palatial city.