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In this, the first of six volumes, the main results of the excavations that the University of Oslo carried out at Kaupang from 1998 to 2003 are presented. A completely new picture is put forward of the port that Ottar visited in c.890. It is now clear that Kaupang was one of the four Scandinavian towns that were founded around the year 800. Kaupang is connected to the power centre of Skiringssal, to the Ynglings - the legendary Norwegian royal lineage, and to the King of the Danes - the dominant political actor in south-west Scandinavia. In nine of the book's 20 chapters, the excavations' finds, analyses and results are presented. Kaupang is shown to have had several of the same features revealed in Birka, Hedeby and Ribe - i.e., a compact permanent settlement, divided into small plots, each with a dwelling. The town could have had 400-800 inhabitants. Substantial traces of trade and craftwork are proof of the main areas of occupation. Advanced geo- and environmental-archaeological analyses have played a large role in interpreting the finds. In three chapters, 200 years of research on Kaupang and Skiringssal are summarised, while in the remaining eight chapters an endeavour is made to re-establish the holistic approach to Skiringssal that dominated research during the first 100 years. Documentary sources indicate that Skiringssal was an important royal seat in the 700s and 800s. In this volume, these sources are put together with the archaeological and toponymical sources which, united, show a centre of power with a clear likeness to similar places in Denmark and Sweden. A hall or sal building, presumably the Skirings-sall itself, was excavated at Huseby, near Kaupang. Nearby, a thing site is situated by a holy lake. In this, the Yngling kings' centre of power, to which many people came to attend thing meetings and sacrificial feasts, the town Kaupang was founded.
In this, the first of six volumes, the main results of the excavations that the University of Oslo carried out at Kaupang from 1998 to 2003 are presented. A completely new picture is put forward of the port that Ottar visited in c.890. It is now clear that Kaupang was one of the four Scandinavian towns that were founded around the year 800. Kaupang is connected to the power centre of Skiringssal, to the Ynglings - the legendary Norwegian royal lineage, and to the King of the Danes - the dominant political actor in south-west Scandinavia. In nine of the book's 20 chapters, the excavations' finds, analyses and results are presented. Kaupang is shown to have had several of the same features revealed in Birka, Hedeby and Ribe - i.e., a compact permanent settlement, divided into small plots, each with a dwelling. The town could have had 400-800 inhabitants. Substantial traces of trade and craftwork are proof of the main areas of occupation. Advanced geo- and environmental-archaeological analyses have played a large role in interpreting the finds. In three chapters, 200 years of research on Kaupang and Skiringssal are summarised, while in the remaining eight chapters an endeavour is made to re-establish the holistic approach to Skiringssal that dominated research during the first 100 years. Documentary sources indicate that Skiringssal was an important royal seat in the 700s and 800s. In this volume, these sources are put together with the archaeological and toponymical sources which, united, show a centre of power with a clear likeness to similar places in Denmark and Sweden. A hall or sal building, presumably the Skirings-sall itself, was excavated at Huseby, near Kaupang. Nearby, a thing site is situated by a holy lake. In this, the Yngling kings' centre of power, to which many people came to attend thing meetings and sacrificial feasts, the town Kaupang was founded.
This second volume, based on the excavations of the Viking town Kaupang 2000-2003, presents find types used in economic transactions - coins, hacksilver, ingots, weights and balances. Changes in type and volume of economic transactions at Kaupang and in Scandinavia are discussed, and the economic mentality of Viking crafts- and tradesmen is explored. Earlier, the study of Viking silver currency was based mainly on hoards containing coins and hacksilver. In this volume, the combined study of the find types mentioned, as well as the sophisticated chronology of settlements finds from sites like Kaupang, gives a completely new insight into economy and exchange. In the early 9th century, silver and goods seem to have come to Kaupang mainly from the Carolingian world. Silver, weighed with locally produced lead weights, was used as currency on a limited scale. The old e unit was easily convertible to Carolingian units. After the mid-9th century this early system was altered. The increased availability of silver caused by the import of Islamic coins, as well as the introduction in most of Scandinavia in the 860s/870s of standardized weights of probable Islamic origin, paved the way from then on for an increasing use of silver as payment. These studies demonstrate that sites like Kaupang led the way in economic development in Scandinavia. The urban environment promoted an economic mentality which contributed significantly to the fundamental transformation of Scandinavian culture and society, which culminated in the region's integration in Christian Europe in the High Middle Ages.
In the tradition of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, Brown lays to rest the hoary myth that Viking society was ruled by men and celebrates the dramatic lives of female Viking warriors “Once again, Brown brings Viking history to vivid, unexpected life—and in the process, turns what we thought we knew about Norse culture on its head. Superb.” —Scott Weidensaul, author of New York Times bestselling A World on the Wing "Magnificent. It captured me from the very first page." —Pat Shipman, author of The Invaders In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history, and literature to imagine her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined. Nancy Marie Brown uses science to link the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines her life intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as The Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor’s short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data, but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, law, saga, poetry, and myth carry weapons. These women brag, “As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone.” In this compelling narrative Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.
This volume examines workshop waste and discusses the craftspeople in the Viking town of Kaupang including their activities, crafted products, raw materials, skills and networks. The study focuses on artefacts used in non-ferrous metalworking: crucibles, moulds, matrix dies, tuyeres and a unique collection of lead models.The tools and the waste material provide a completely new understanding of the craftspeople who were working with gold, silver, copper alloys, lead and tin. These metalworkers mastered many different materials and techniques; indeed, they were well-informed, well-trained and skillful, and manufactured a range of different items for women and men. There is every reason to believe that visitors and residents perceived the non-ferrous metalworking as a defining feature of the Viking-period town. The combination of excavations and surface surveys has produced a broad and diverse collection of material very similar to finds in different Viking-period towns in Scandinavia including Ribe, Birka and Hedeby. The finds show that Kaupang was an important centre for the production of jewelry, and the craftsmen appear to have had access to a range of high quality raw materials including brass and kaolin clay. Their activity can be traced from the earliest layers of the beginning of the 9th Century to the early 10th Century. Altogether, the production waste from Kaupang illustrates how a range of different social groups were involved in the process of forging an urban identity.
The Viking Age was a period of profound change in Scandinavia. As kingdoms were established, Christianity became the encompassing ideological and cosmological framework and towns were formed. This book examines a central backdrop to these changes: the economic transformation of West Scandinavia. With a focus on the development of intensive and organized use of woodlands and alpine regions and domestic raw materials, together with the increasing standardization of products intended for long-distance trade, the volume sheds light on the emergence of a strong interconnectedness between remote rural areas and central markets. Viking-Age Transformations explores the connection between legal and economic practice, as the rural economy and monetary system developed in conjunction with nascent state power and the legal system. Thematically, the book is organized into sections addressing the nature and extent of trade in both marginal and centralized areas; production and the social, legal and economic aspects of exploiting natural resources and distributing products; and the various markets and sites of trade and consumption. A theoretically informed and empirically grounded collection that reveals the manner in which relationships of production and consumption transformed Scandinavian society with their influence on the legal and fiscal division of the landscape, this volume will appeal to scholars of archaeology, the history of trade and Viking studies.
Franks and Northmen explores the full spectrum of Franco-Scandinavian interaction, examining not just violence but also less well-known relationships centered on acts of diplomacy, commerce, and mission and demonstrating the transformative nature of cross-cultural encounter during the Viking Age. In the year 777, the Frankish sources mention the Northmen, better known to most as the Vikings, for the first time. By the tenth century these Northmen, once a mysterious people on the borders of the Carolingian Empire, would be a familiar presence in the Frankish world. As raiders and pillagers, the Vikings would fill the pages of Frankish authors, leaving a legacy that continues to fascinate even to the twenty-first century. But a closer look at sources, both textual and material, reveals that the relationships between Franks and Northmen were far more complex and multifaceted than a rigid focus on Viking violence might suggest. Merchants carried goods across the North Sea, missionaries encouraged new ways of understanding the world, and Franks and Northmen formed relationships and bonds even amidst conflict and violence. This study is a useful resource for both students and specialists of central and northern Europe in the early medieval period.
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.
At some time in the late 9th century, a Norwegian seafarer by the name of Ohthere [Oht-her-e] told the West Saxon king Alfred of his voyages along the coasts of Norway and Denmark. Ohthere's report made such an impression at the court of King Alfred that it was recorded and subsequently inserted into the Old English version of the late Roman world history by Orosius, accompanied by Wulfstan's account of a voyage across the Baltic Sea. Ohthere's account is the earliest known description of the North by a Scandinavian and gives a fascinating and highly trustworthy glimpse of the early Viking Age. Since the 16th century, Ohthere's voyages have been debated by an ever growing number of scholars, such as linguists, historians and archaeologists. In this book, a panel of experts presents the original source in its geographical, cultural, nautical and economic context.
Now, with the chamber boarded up, came what was probably the heart of the proceedings. Four or five dogs and two more oxen were slaughtered, as well as fifteen horses that had first been run to exhaustion. The furniture, tools and carriages scattered across the foredeck were bathed in their blood.Stones were then piled over the ship, breaking many of the grave-goods and rendering them unusable. The sights and sounds accompanying such an orgy of blood-letting we might perhaps be able to imagine, the atmosphere conjured by it probably not. As the mourners then set about completing the mound the sight before them must have been eerie and awe-inspiring, the blood-spattered ship with its cargo of dead women seeming to lurch forward across the field in a last attempt to shake off the engulfing wave of dark earth rising behind it. The meadow flowers preserved from this stage of the proceedings were autumnal, showing that the whole process from the opening of the furrow to the closing of the mound must have taken about four months. Clearly at least one of the women had died long before the burial took place.