13 - Feasts, Food and Fodder: Viking and Late Norse Farming Systems in Scotland

Summary

When Vikings in Scotland was first published, consideration of human– animal interactions was largely focused on agricultural interpretations. Since the late 1980s, there has been a shift in zooarchaeology away from purely economic interpretations towards perspectives encompassing the materiality of animals, animals in identity, ritual and so on. At the same time there has been an expansion in the application of scientific approaches within archaeology – most notably palaeodietary techniques, but also increasingly aDNA. The last thirty years have also witnessed new excavations of significant Viking and Late Norse settlements not only in Scotland but across the North Atlantic, providing many new insights into farming practices and other human–animal interactions across the Viking ‘diaspora’. This chapter explores how some of these diverse sources of evidence have transformed our understanding of the agricultural economy and the role of animals in Viking and Late Norse society within Scotland, situating this within the wider context of Scandinavian North Atlantic settlement during the end of the 1st and early 2nd millennium AD.

Data sets and approaches to human–animal interactions in Viking and Late Norse Scotland

The animal faunas arising from Viking and Late Norse Orkney and Shetland has generated considerable archaeological interest over the last forty years, with major environmental archaeology programmes undertaken on earldom sites featured in the Orkneyinga Saga (OS), including residences of the Orkney Earls on the Brough of Birsay (Morris, this volume) and at the Earl’s Bu in Orphir (Batey, this volume), those of their chieftains, or goðing, at Tuquoy in Westray (Owen, this volume) and Skaill in Deerness, and increasingly at other locations across the islands: Pool (Sanday), Quoygrew (Westray), Old Scatness (Shetland), Snusgar (Sandwick) and Skaill (Rousay). The preceding Late Iron-Age or ‘Pictish’ settlements have been less systematically targeted but have benefited from the multi-period nature of many of the Orcadian sites, which afford insight into the transition between Pictish and Viking at several locations, including the Birsay Bay area and Deerness on the Mainland of Orkney, Pool, Westness/Swandro in Rousay and Old Scatness. There has been less sustained interest in human–animal interactions in the areas of Viking settlement on the mainland of Scotland, with few sites additional to those summarised in Vikings in Scotland; however, the publication of large faunal assemblages from Bornais (Sharples 2020) and Cille Phedair (Mulville et al. 2018) have added significantly to our understanding of Viking farming in the Western Isles.