6 - Landscape and Material Culture

Summary

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.