Course Aims: This course aims to critically
explore the archaeological evidence for the origins, world-view, development
and expansion of Scandinavian culture during the Viking Age, c. AD 750-1100.
Students will gain an understanding of a major and catalytic period of European
history that laid the foundations for many institutions of the modern Western
world. As an introduction to the archaeology of the Viking Age, this course
will provide students with:
- an insight into the nature of Viking Age Scandinavian society and culture,
including settlement and subsistence patterns, material culture, social
structures, issues of identity and ethnicity, and world
-views and mentalities from the traditional belief systems of the North to the
introduction of Christianity
- an understanding of the political developments in the Viking Age and the
transformation from tribal- to state-based societies in Norway, Sweden and
Denmark, including the development of urban centres, coinage, and Christian
monarchies
- detailed knowledge of the geographical scope of the Viking world, including
an understanding of the Viking diaspora and its long-term effects, including
the complex patterns of culture contacts and environmental impacts that
characterised Scandinavian raiding, warfare, trading, colonisation and
settlement activities
- an understanding of how archaeologists combine a range of sources (material,
textual and environmental) to achieve a synthetic understanding of a discrete
period of history
Content: This course provides students with
an overview of the Viking Age peoples of Scandinavia, and their dramatic
expansion in the 8th-11th centuries AD. We will review the archaeological
evidence for population and settlement patterns, ethnicity and social
structure, the development of urban centres and commerce, and Viking Age
religion, and will chart the political process that led to the rise of the
modern nation states of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. This Scandinavian
background will then be set in the wider context of the Viking diaspora,
examining Norse contact, conflict, trade and colonisation from Canada in the
West to the Asian steppe in the East.
