The roots of the Annales paradigm, representing the leading school of French historiography for much of the twentieth century, can be traced back to the late 1890s when scholars such as de la Blache, Durkheim and Berr began to register their disapproval of historical specificity and call for more generalising disciplines for the study of the past. Their sociological and geographical perspectives were enthusiastically adopted by the historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, who in 1929 founded the journal Annales d’histoire economique et sociale (later re-titled Annales: economies, sociétés, civilisations), from which the school of enquiry takes its name. Based on an explicit rejection of rigidly chronological, political history, Annales scholarship draws heavily on the incorporation of other disciplines to develop a concept of a ‘human past’ quite different from the event-led approaches of traditional narrative. The fundamental concept of l’histoire globale, or ‘total history’, first came to the fore with a second generation of Annaliste scholars led by Fernand Braudel (1949, 1964), who developed the framework of study for what he called a ‘structural history’. In essence, the Annales approach conceptualises different historical processes operating at different scales, which can in turn be subjected to different scales of examination. By the mid-1960s, three main levels of multiscalar analysis had been proposed:
•Short term – événements: individuals; events; narrative understandings
•Medium term – conjonctures: historical cycles; history of eras, regions, societies
•Long term – longue durée: ‘geo-history’, climatic change; history of peoples; stable technologies
Historians and sociologists like Gurvitch (1964), Hexter (1972) and Wallerstein (1982) developed Braudel’s concepts, with particular attention to the interplay between the different time-scales. The solution was felt to be a problem-oriented approach – the so-called l’histoire problème – and above all, a focus on cognition. This is primarily expressed in the other key Annales concept, the notion of world-views (mentalités), informing every aspect of a structural history but ultimately deriving from the medium term in a cycle as follows:
mentalités → événements → conjonctures (origin of mentalités) → longue durée → mentalités
In this spirit, during the late 1960s and 70s a third generation of Annaliste scholars further renewed the discipline, with a series of widely-read works in which the individual life and a discrete exploration of place came to assume the greatest prominence as the window through which to view the successive levels of a structural history. It was at this time that the Annales paradigm emerged triumphant in French historical studies and began to be adopted elsewhere in Europe and especially in Anglo-American research (Dosse 1994).
Like their predecessors, the classic works of these scholars largely concentrated on the medieval period, with the lens of study focused at different levels of resolution. Among the central motifs were the cultural biography of settlements, such as Le Roy Ladurie’s famous study of peasant society in Montaillou (1975) and his deconstruction of the carnival at Romans (1979). Others focused on popular belief in contact with state dogma, especially that of the later Inquisition (Ginzberg 1982 & 1983, both first published in the 60s and 70s). The tradition was continued into the 1980s and 90s by scholars such as Schmitt, with his 1994 study of medieval beliefs in the restless dead. The concept of mentalités has also been employed in a similar biographical fashion by non-Annaliste historians who have gone beyond the notion of a collective mind-set to additionally embrace cultural values. Examples here include Georges Duby’s study of medieval chivalry (1984) and, in Sweden, Peter Englund’s work on the Thirty Years’ War (1993 & 2000). The same approaches have also been used with success in the field of military history, first by Martin Middlebrook (1971) in a study of soldiers from different backgrounds who all took part in the catastrophic first day of the Somme offensive. Tracing their lives up to 1st July 1916, and afterwards if they survived, a single day is used to illuminate the structure of British society for decades either side of it. A similar technique has been employed by Evan Connell to analyse Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn (1985).
The potential applications of these ideas to material culture studies are considerable, with their ability to capture scales of time from moments to eras, but Annaliste perspectives were in fact adopted relatively late by archaeologists. Apart from a brief venture in France (Schnapp 1981) it was not until the late 1980s, parallel with the cohesion of post-processualism, that three edited volumes were published on archaeological applications of Annales ideas, representing broadly post-processual (Hodder 1987) and processual (Bintliff 1991; Knapp 1992) viewpoints. At the time of the first edition of this book, these three volumes were the only general works to explicitly take up Annales perspectives on archaeology; even individual papers were very few in number (e.g. Skeates 1990). Furthermore, the works by Hodder and Bintliff were criticised for their undifferentiated readings of Braudel, and above all for their exclusive reliance on his ideas as representing an Annales ‘school’ that, it is argued, does not in reality constitute such a definable methodology (Delano Smith 1992; Chippendale 1993: 34f).
While it is certainly true that Annales scholarship is characterised not by its adherence to any orthodox line but by its willingness to accommodate diverse and competing categories of thought, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that the idea of an Annales school has long been accepted by historiographers (cf. Burke 1990; Héruber 1994; Clark 1999). Moreover, in archaeology these critics overlooked the explicit and important employment of Annaliste methodologies to bridge the theoretical gap between the polarised positions of New Archaeology and post-processualism. In this context, with its central focus on the ‘ancient mind’, the Annales paradigm can be usefully combined with aspects of the cognitive studies considered below, and it is in this context that it has found a ready place in the archaeological theory of the twenty-first century.
In all the major works of later Annaliste history, it is groups of individuals, or social patterns accessed through them, that provide the linking continuity for the crucial realm of mentalités. Indeed, Le Roy Ladurie (1979: 370) has argued persuasively that these tapestries of lives and experiences “show, preserved in cross section, the social and intellectual strata and structures … a complete geology, with all its colours and contortions”. Jacques Le Goff, one of the most prolific of Annaliste scholars, went further (1989: 405): “it becomes possible to approach a specific and unique person, and to write a true biography through which a historically explained individual can emerge out of a given society and period, intimately linked to them yet also impressing on them his or her own personality and actions. From the chorus of human voices, a particular note and style can be made to stand out”.
In the light of this view of contextualised individuals, it is curious that there have been no attempts to write Annaliste studies of the Viking Age. Though much valuable work has been done in the way of focused social history – biographies of royal personages such as Knútr, for example, or studies of the campaigns of 1066 – little of this material has moved far beyond the confines of power politics. In moving to a more humble (and more informative?) level of society, we may think here of Céline’s maxim, adopted by several of the Annaliste scholars: Tout ce qui est intéressant se passe dans l’ombre. On ne sait rien de la véritable histoire des hommes (quoted as epigraph to Ginzburg 1982). This is equally applicable to the late Iron Age, especially for the sorcerers and Óðinnic warriors that we will consider here, who can be the perfect guides into the murkier shadows of the Viking world-view. We can use this fluid boundary between religion and war to illuminate the dialectic of forces operating in the later Viking Age, the social contradictions and contending mentalités which laid the ground for the adoption of Christianity in Scandinavia and the region’s integration into the social environment of literate Europe. In so doing, we may also build up a composite ‘structural history’ of the kind discussed above.
Spiritual belief can be plausibly put forward as one of the most appropriate aspects of society through which to study these phenomena, dealing as we are with the essentially unprovable and, up to a point, the insubstantial: attitudes, thoughts, emotions and responses. It is in this arena that we find the archaeology of power, the archaeology of fear (both fear of knowledge and fear of its lack, the unknown) and the archaeology of hope, and thus the territory of this thesis.
Such a search for the ‘essence’ of ancient lives is in itself hardly a new idea, and with all its varying degrees of prevarication it is one that goes back to the roots of our discipline. It has been especially prevalent in the post-war period, running as a continuum from Mortimer Wheeler’s ‘archaeology of people’ (1954) to Colin Renfrew’s ‘archaeology of mind’ and ‘archaeology of mental processes’ (1982a, 1994), the latter albeit clothed anew as cognitive processualism. In order to understand what this means for the study of the Viking Age, we must briefly examine the archaeology of the period in relation to theoretical developments in the discipline as a whole.
Students of archaeological theory have become used to the relatively uniform manner in which the intellectual development of the discipline is presented in academic fora. Both textbooks and courses trace a familiar path from the origins of archaeological thought, through the famously-termed ‘long sleep’ until the advent of the New Archaeology (Renfrew 1982b: 6), to the concomitant development of Marxist and structuralist interpretations, and on to the impact of post-modernism together with its epistemological and phenomenological offshoots of the 1980s and 90s. For the present, we seem to be enjoying the comfortably vague reassurance of a ‘transitional phase’ in archaeological theory, in which complimentary discourses gently chide one another in a spirit of happy pluralism.
Archaeology is a complex discipline, and so much more than an illusorily sequential parade of paradigms. Such a linear view of the subject is still propagated surprisingly widely, with an unfortunate emphasis on Anglo-European and North American perspectives at the expense of other traditions. There is also a tendency to homogenise the early trajectories of archaeological thinking. What we now think of as modern archaeological method – as founded by men such as Thomsen, Worsaae, Montelius, and the rest – actually emerged from far more complex intellectual currents of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries than we usually credit, and from circumstances in which women had considerable influence. At this time, the development of ‘scientific’ archaeology was only one possible outcome for a subject that was equally composed of poetics and literary aestheticism, of subjective emotion actively embraced. This was subtly different from the National Romanticism that would succeed it in the late 1800s, and the other paths that this process might have taken form a vital, but largely unknown, backdrop to the present state of archaeological theory (see Notelid 2000, 2001a & b on this early phase of Nordic prehistoric enquiry; also Bokholm’s 2000 biography of Montelius’ wife, Agda, and Nordbladh’s 2002 paper on Pehr Tham).
I have mentioned this here because it serves as a neat parallel for what I will later say about the archaeology of the so-called Fourth World of indigenous peoples, and its application to the study of the Viking Age: there are still alternative routes that we may take in our exploration of the past. This also illustrates the fallacy of assuming that old work is necessarily inferior to more modern research. No archaeologist would assert this openly, of course, but the meaning is frequently implicit in the one-way street of theoretical progress that is often presented. As we shall see in relation to Old Norse religion, when we look beyond the antiquated syntax of the time it is clear that the ideas discussed in the nineteenth century were in many cases more constructively imaginative than today’s interpretations.
With all the above in mind, I have striven to write an integrated text which reflects the intellectual seams that I have mined in its creation. Some of these approaches may be relatively unfamiliar to early medieval scholars (see Price 2005d), and thus my discussion here includes a short introduction against which the work below can be oriented.
Cognition is a problematic term in archaeology, with a simultaneous potential for the most profound and the most superficial insights into antiquity. The profession has been rightly criticised for producing far too many ‘straw people’ propounding a shallow grasp of complex issues under the guise of theoretical awareness (Johnson 1999: 182), and this is particularly true of cognitive studies. The same sentiment is echoed in Flannery & Marcus’ caustic view of what they see as cognitive archaeology’s fall from scientific rigour (1993). Aside from the inevitable question as to whether one might find oneself counted among such individuals, it is clear that the very nature of cognitive enquiry brings difficulties.
Essentially, cognitive studies concern the archaeology of the intangible as inferred from the material. Many archaeologists, especially on the positivist wing of the discipline, would argue that it is nearly or completely impossible to access the mentalities of past people, as opposed to the patterns in material culture that those mentalities have produced and which have been preserved through the taphonomic variables of the archaeological record. Others, of whom I am one, argue that archaeology has a unique opportunity for the recovery of such data in a form inaccessible by any other means, and I would link this to the Annaliste notion of mentalités outlined above. We can briefly examine this conflict, looking first at its uneasy incorporation into processualist theory, and the emergence of so-called cognitive processualism.
Although strands of this thinking were coming together in North American archaeology during the late 1970s (e.g. Fritz 1978 on ‘palaeopsychology’), in many ways cognitive processualism entered the scene in a formalised sense with Colin Renfrew’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1982(a), in which he set out the desirability of a ‘scientific’ investigation of the way in which past people thought. The major breakthroughs came a decade later, when several general publications appeared such as Renfrew’s second call to arms for a softer alternative to an already established post-processualism (1993) and his collection of papers with Zubrow on The Ancient Mind (1994). Essentially, these approaches are linked together by the notion that the analysis of prehistoric mind-sets can be incorporated into the systems thinking that characterises processualist archaeology. To take one of the most famous examples, cognition could be viewed as the kind of ‘psychological subsystem’ that Clarke suggested as one core of the culture complex (1968: Fig. 17), or the ‘ideational systems’ still commonly found in Transatlantic theory.
The weight of cognitive processualist research has focused on the evolution of human thought at the most fundamental level, looking at early hominids and their mental processes. A significant place in this must go to the work of Steven Mithen on patterned behaviour among early hunter-gatherers (e.g. 1990, 1996) and the recent achievements of the McDonald Institute scholars at Cambridge and their circle (e.g. Mellars & Gibson 1996; Davidson & Noble 1996; Mithen 1998; Renfrew & Scarre 1999; Renfrew 2007; Renfrew & Morley 2009). Virtually the only Scandinavian archaeologist who has ventured into this terrain is Bo Gräslund (2001), with his comprehensive investigation into the cognitive-biological origins of the human species, and especially its sexual evolution.
This is probably the only effective way of approaching the world of the early hominids beyond the confines of biology, ethology and the archaeological analysis of crude technologies. However, once these first humans are left behind, cognitive processualism becomes problematic. In general terms it risks being watered down into banality, becoming at worst a kind of “linguistic ploy to capture the middle ground while minimising the influence of other approaches” (Johnson 1999: 181). This becomes more serious when what is essentially the notion of biological determinism is applied, explicitly or implicitly, to the cultural development of complex societies. The search for normative principles and cross-cultural generalisations that are necessary for a processualist perspective to be maintained have a tendency to rest in this context on an unspoken ethnocentricity, extending the values of Western culture to ancient societies that clearly had very different responses. This problem will be taken up below when we look at Viking archaeology in the context of indigenous peoples.
The ‘mainstream’ of cognitive studies is still dominated by the archaeology of religion and spiritual belief (e.g. Insoll 2004, 2011; Kyriakidis 2007; Whitley & Hays-Gilpin 2008), but all forms of perception are included. These can concern anything from categorisation and the conscious ordering of the environment to regulatory concepts such as law. This work has been much more loosely anchored in theory, being defined more by its subject matter than specific method. Structuralism, with its potential for generalising models, has not surprisingly proved a popular line of approach. However, a more pronounced concern for symbolism, semiotics and an acknowledgement of the subjective has drawn cognitive archaeology under the umbrella of post-processualism almost from its inception (Hodder’s Symbols in Action from 1982 is the type example here, appearing in the same year as Renfrew gave impetus to what would become the cognitive processual wave). The topics embraced by this work are too numerous to more than mention here: the study of ‘art’ and imagery, iconography, the body, gender, identity, ideology, power, literacy, language and even the concept of time itself have all been pursued from an explicitly ‘cognitive’ perspective. In every sense of the term, the growth of cognitive archaeology has been rapid that a Reader in the subject has long since been compiled (Whitley 1998). Most introductions to the discipline also feature sections on the mind, ‘looking at thoughts’, and so on (e.g. Johnson 2010: ch. 6; Renfrew & Bahn 2016: pt. II).
The impact of mainstream cognitive archaeology on the more specific study of the Viking Age has been slow in coming, in part because every other area of Viking archaeology has undergone a period of rapid growth during the last few decades. Our information on all aspects of the artefactual, environmental and settlement remains of the early medieval Scandinavians has increased many times over. Particularly important discoveries have come from urban archaeology in the early towns of Scandinavia and the colonial settlements, from excavations on rural sites throughout the Viking world, and from the growth of metal detector use. For the most part, these developments have come within very specific aspects of the period, concentrating upon artefactual typology and refinements in chronology, art-historical studies, settlement and cemetery archaeology, and analyses of early medieval economic systems. From this broadly empirical foundation a consistent, general model of Viking-Age society has been built up, published in its details in individual reports and presented as an overview in updated form through synthetic volumes at regular intervals.
The speed of this expansion has in some ways brought its own problems. Despite the immense achievements of these years, the emphasis on empirical approaches and a concentration upon economic modes of explanation has been favoured at the expense of social and especially cognitive interpretations.
In the late 1980s this picture began to change, and an increasing number of Viking researchers started to address exactly these issues of behavioural study, using paths of analysis quite different to more traditional studies of the period – some of these have been reviewed above in the context of ‘textual’ archaeology (see also Price 1998b, 2005d, 2015a & c). Tending to focus on discussions of power, religion, social structure and ideology, these new approaches are characterised by an increased awareness of the meaning content of material culture, and in particular the sophistication of Viking-Age symbolic articulation and representation. Gender studies form a central part of this movement, and is in this area that some of the most rapid changes have taken place in Viking research. In this context it is vitally important to stress that recent theoretical perspectives on the Viking Age have not been proposed as replacements for earlier models – in effect as a ‘new’ tradition – but as pluralistic enhancements to them, what could in Swedish be called a form of kompletteringsarbete (a useful word which means, approximately, ‘work of complimentary addition’). In many instances social and cognitive models are in no way incompatible with existing, empiricist ones, and it should also be noted that the artefactual and art-historical researches which form the foundation of archaeological Viking studies will continue to do so regardless of the interpretative framework within which they are utilised.
The application of these perspectives characterised a good deal of my own earlier work on the period. One starting point for me was the focus on landscape in the mainstream archaeology of cognition. In the 1990s scholars such as Richard Bradley (1993a, 1998, 2000), Christopher Tilley (1994), John Barrett (1994) and others explored notions of monumentality, and the relationship of prehistoric people to their ancestors as negotiated through traces of their physical presence in the landscape. The notion of ‘the past in the past’ is central here, the way in which ancient cultures understood not only the monuments that they built themselves, but also those constructed earlier (Bradley 2002; Jones 2007; see Thäte 2007 and Hållans Stenholm 2012 for Viking-Age examples). In this vein I worked through a series of research projects to examine the Viking-Age built environment as it developed over time, especially in colonial or ‘sacred’ contexts. In particular I looked for signs of the mentalities underpinning the specific choices involved: why a certain type of mound, with a certain pattern of contents, was raised in a certain place, in certain spatial relationships to other monuments of their own certain types, and so on. My work focused variously on the Russian river systems (Price 1994b, 1998a, 2000d), the colonial architecture of Iceland (Price 1994c, 1995a) and Gamla Uppsala (Price 1994d, 1997; Price & Wikborg 1998). These ideas were finally drawn together in a synthetic discussion of the way in which Viking-Age Scandinavians perceived the interplay of power, place and space, both at home and in the context of interaction with other cultures (Price 2000e). A crucial element in all these negotiations, which of course had their own internal strata of affiliations within Scandinavian society, were the Vikings themselves.
The growing need to understand this group and their place in their culture has been mentioned above. In the context of the crisis of confidence in Viking studies that I have described, a search for a deeper understanding of these individuals formed an obvious prerequisite for the study of cultural interaction that was the original subject of my doctorate. However, as work progressed it was this question that soon came to dominate the book itself, revealing more and more layers of potential study. As the original analysis of cultural interaction turned into a more basic examination of cultural definition, the theme of identity came naturally to assume greater prominence, and in particular its social construction in relation to the patterns of power emerging in early medieval Scandinavia. The role of gender in the constitution of this Viking identity seemed crucial from an early stage in the research, as did the ritual practices (in both religious and secular contexts) for which archaeology provides such a wealth of evidence. This shift of emphasis in the research clearly brought with it a radical change in the source material under scrutiny, moving from the settlements of Anglo-Scandinavian Northumbria to a broad range of data from the history of religion, folklore studies and Old Norse textual scholarship, in addition to the existing historical material. Within archaeology, my inspiration originated primarily from the above-mentioned work on the ancient mind.
In essence, this project had become a cognitive exploration of the Vikings, in the context of their relationship to the rest of the Scandinavian population and the other cultures with which they came into contact: what they were, what they were not, and what they became having left Viking activities behind them. But how to approach this?
An obvious beginning lay with other studies of ancient mentalities that have also focused on themes especially relevant to the present book, concerned with human emotions and appetites of various kinds. Some of this work, such as Taylor’s The Prehistory of Sex (1996), takes a decidedly modern spin on the interpretation of early mind-sets, though one of oblique relevance to the discussions in chapter 3 below. Others are more profound, as with the growing literature on ancient sensuality which has concentrated on classical Athens (e.g. Dalby 1995; Davidson 1997) and Rome (e.g. Dalby 2000), alongside the many writings that have appeared on Greek homosexuality. The sensitivity of these accounts, focusing primarily on attitudes to food and sex, has been a model for my own work with the Vikings which in the following chapters also addresses sexual identity and its social location. Davidson’s study of Greek hedonism has been a particular inspiration, and his nuanced reading of our dialogue with the Athenians could equally apply to the Viking Age:
There are two main dangers in approaching the Greeks. The first is to think of them as our cousins and to interpret everything in our own terms. We are entering a very different world, very strange and very foreign, a world inconceivably long ago, centuries before Christ or Christianity … a world indeed without our centuries, or weeks or minutes or markings of time. And yet these Greeks will sometimes seem very familiar, very lively, warm and affable. Occasionally we might even get their jokes. We must be careful, however, that we are not being deceived by false friends. Often what seems most familiar, most obvious, most easy to understand is in fact the most peculiar thing of all. On the other hand, we must resist the temptation to push the Greeks further into outer space than is necessary. They are not our cousins, but neither are they our opposites. They are just different, just trying to be themselves.
Davidson 1997: xxvi
Central to all this work, of course, is the problematic idea of the Other. Deriving in large part from Lévinas’ philosophy of ethics (1987; Peperzak 1993), the concept also owes much to the work of G. H. Mead on the rational self held in tension with the ‘significant other’ (1934). These two scholars’ work embodies an important dichotomy between the Other as a personal and potentially reflexive socio-psychological category, and a meeting with it as an ethical dilemma on a professional level that does not need to be personal at all. These relationships are often unconsciously blurred by archaeologists, who have mostly employed the term as a useful image for the mass of dead humanity that silently faces us through the medium of the material culture that we study, unreachable directly but nevertheless constantly present as we touch the things that the Other has touched.
The idea entered Swedish archaeological theory again during the late 1990s. In my brief comments here I have found helpful Svante Norr’s discussion of the term as a key to the archaeological use of texts (1998: 9–19), in which he argues that, “the meeting between us as archaeologists and the past Other … involves a meeting of two horizons of understanding or languages in a kind of dialogue between participants who from an ethical point of view should be considered equal” (ibid: 10). This question of ethics is crucial. I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere (Price 2004c) and will expand on it below, but we can also mention here Johan Hegardt’s deconstruction of “the ethical relationship between the Self and the Other” (1997: 266), and his argument that the latter must be the central conceptual tool in our understanding of the past. He has also identified the core problem of processual archaeology in this respect, in its implicit efforts to make the Other the Same (ibid: 257).
Håkan Karlsson has also approached the Other through what is to my mind a rather partial reading of Heidegger’s notion of Being. He interprets the distance between archaeologists and their subject as a ‘contemplative’ relationship, at the centre of which is a reflective response to the ancient lives that archaeological categories represent (1998, 1999). However, this presents another fundamental problem, because the archaeologist’s voluntary relegation to voyeuristic passivity, seemingly without direction, is simultaneously a resignation of active engagement with the past. If some archaeologists would see excavation as a process of careful interrogation, in which we (might) obtain answers to the specific questions that we think to ask, for Karlsson the Other seems to be expected to offer of itself. Ultimately this seems little different to the extremes of positivist belief that we simply ‘dig up’ a past that provides its own self-evident interpretation through the application of common sense; perhaps Karlsson would argue that processualism looks at prehistory through an analytical intelligence, whereas a contemplative archaeology lets it into our hearts.
This essential impasse of irreconcilable perspectives was laid at the door of post-processualism as the single most fundamental problem in archaeological theory at the turn of the millennium, an accusation just as hotly rejected by the post-processualists themselves. Others saw postprocessualism as something that broadened the entire framework of debate, rather than setting up an opposing camp (e.g. Hegardt 1997). The spectre of empty relativism conjured up by limitless deconstruction loomed large over this discussion, but to a great extent this problem has been satisfactorily resolved, or at least contextualised, for some considerable time.
The end of the 1990s saw a move towards shared experience and reciprocity of interpretation, as a means of approaching the differentness of the past. This was attempted at sites such as Stonehenge (Bender 1998), and Leskernick on Dartmoor (Bender, Hamilton & Tilley 1997; Tilley, Hamilton & Bender 2000), with variable success. The only endeavour of this kind that carried its ambition through into the long-term is the extraordinary project of explicitly self-reflexive fieldwork at Çatalhöyük in Turkey from 1993–2017 (Hodder 1996–2014; see www.catalhoyuk.com for a full bibliography of this remarkable acheievement, that uniquely charts the changing theories of the past three decades through the practical medium of fieldwork, including the dimension of built-in pluralistic critique).
At that time, other scholars such as John Bintliff (e.g. 1993, 2000) proposed a solution in the promotion of archaeology as a ‘human science of complementary discourses’, in the spirit of Wittgenstein. This would supposedly accord space for all perspectives in parallel, a kind of short-cut to a platform of constructive opposition. This is one of the most optimistic alternatives on offer, but there are nevertheless problems with this too. As Johnson has again observed, “the search for such a middle ground all too often becomes an easy replacement for the hard work of serious yet sympathetic critique of one’s own and others’ theoretical positions” (1999: 187). We can all agree to disagree, but where does this leave us?
In particular, where does this leave the archaeologist’s search for the individual and the ancient mind? It is easy to feel a sense of hopelessness. Indeed, the debilitative potential inherent in the current theoretical trajectory was presciently foreseen by Richard Bradley, in a crucial article from 1993(b). Playing on Clarke’s idea of archaeology’s loss of innocence, with which he famously heralded the dawn of the New Archaeology twenty years earlier, the title of Bradley’s paper says it all: ‘Archaeology: the loss of nerve’. Addressing a problem that still threatens to paralyse the theoretical debate today, he gives a shape to our new-found fear of using the controlled imagination that has always been necessary for the investigation of the past. James Davidson has again written perceptively on this post-modern dilemma in his studies on the hermeneutics of Athenian sensuality:
Greek civilisation, according to this [post-modernist] interpretation, is an irretrievably alien culture, constituting a separate sealed world with its own peculiar possibilities for experience. … In fetishizing a culture’s representations of the world in this way, Foucault and his followers sometimes seem to forget about the world itself, which is still waving through the window, as if what a culture says is, is, on some important level, as if the Greeks walked around in a virtual reality they had constructed for themselves from discourse.
Davidson 1997: xxv
Norr echoed this with reference to another post-modernist icon who found archaeological favour in the 1980s, by emphasising how “the language of Derrida is not relevant to human life as everyday experience” (1998: 10). However, he also made the point that the same applies to any metalanguage, “whether post-modern, realist, positivist or some other”. All of these narratives are inevitably detached and exclusive, in a manner which has unfortunately become part of what Bo Gräslund has called the ‘liturgy’ of archaeological theory (1989: 47). Certainly, the achievements of postprocessualism should not be under-estimated, and the boundaries of the discipline have been expanded since the advent of these ideas in the mid-1980s in ways that with several decades of hindsight were in my opinion almost entirely beneficial. Not least, this book is itself a product of this development and could not have been written without it.
To my mind, one of the defining characteristics of the middle years of post-processual archaeology (when the first edition of this book was being written) was the marked degree of intellectual comfort that some – by no means all – its adherents afforded themselves. In their defence, this was primarily manifested in small self-indulgences, such as the trend for creating an imaginary interlocutor to supposedly question or critique the author’s ideas on behalf of the reader, and often in the context of the latter’s education (e.g. Tilley 1991: ch.11 and appendix; Preucel & Hodder 1996: 667–77; Hodder 1999 and Johnson 1999 throughout). Of course, a conceit of this kind did not provide an external viewpoint at all, and it would be difficult to find a more potent symbol of the reduction of archaeological enquiry to an internalised monologue, masquerading as a dialogue. In the field, however, the situation is more serious. Here I would argue that very few of those who considered themselves active post-processualists or ‘self-reflexive’ archaeologists put themselves in a position which genuinely challenged their ideas, which truly placed them outside the Western intellectual context that so many of them have tried to deconstruct. The same applies to the idea of archaeology as performance, of which the most developed example was probably Michael Shanks’ long collaboration with contemporary dramatists (Pearson & Shanks 2001). The more provocative and confrontational the departure from academic convention, the more these approaches seem to embody what they are trying to reject. This was indeed “archaeology as theatre”, in Tilley’s contentious phrase from 1989, and its practitioners increasingly appeared to be pursuing “an art which tells us more about themselves than about anything else, and what it reveals about them is, quite frankly, rather dull” (Malone & Stoddart 2000: 458).
At one level, of course, it is impossible to move outside one’s culture, but it is possible to bring ideas to a new human context and to explore what happens when that meeting takes place. Again, it may be significant that most of the archaeologists that I have encountered who are trying to work in this way would probably not take on a theoretical ‘affiliation’ at all, while nevertheless remaining solidly theoretically-aware.
Of course, all this also relates to the risk of Othering the Vikings, of making them into a reductive social category – something “rich and strange” – that is more a product of our own prejudice and bias than reflective of any past reality (Mountz 2009). With this comes a sense of marginalisation, in which the Othered is culturally subordinated through juxtaposition with claimed norms in a discourse of colonial dominance (cf. Svanberg 2003a). Awareness of the phenomenon has a long tradition, seen for example in Said’s classic 1978 study of Orientalism, and the push back against it continues now in studies of the subaltern voice (e.g. Sharp 2009). It should be clear that in this book, the term is not used in the colonial sense of establishing a false binary, but as an opposition to an interpretive paradigm that in 2002 was very much the norm, a received wisdom limiting curiosity and new ideas (in line with how the Other is treated in Harris & Cipolla 2017: ch. 10). Above all, in viewing the Vikings in this way, the sense was to make them unfamiliar again, to recover a lost nuance in their complexity, sophistication and variation.
With these caveats in mind, it is at this point that we can make perhaps the most important contextual link to situation in Viking-Age Scandinavia, via the Sámi people who formed a large proportion of its population: the archaeology of the so-called Fourth World.
It is important to emphasise again that we should not isolate Viking research from the developments that have been taking place in the profession as a collective (cf. Price 2004c). Strangely as it seems to me now, in 2018 as the second edition goes to press, this sentiment appears still not to be shared by everyone in Viking studies, and the debate continues. For me, this centres on the ongoing call for a multivocal, pluralised archaeology with a truly global (but not globalised) equality of access that began in the mid-1980s. This movement has been characterised above all by the development of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), its influential series of One World Archaeology volumes with more than fifty titles now published, and its journal Archaeologies. Especially important here is the post-colonial legacy, and the reactions of Western archaeologists to the demands of the Third and Fourth Worlds for access to their own past, and the right to interpret or relate to it in the manner of their choice. Central to this is the primary concern given by many indigenous groups and descendant communities to concepts of the sacred, particularly in relation to the dead. From this has developed the debate on cultural property, repatriation and the reburial issue (for a historical introduction to the debate, see Ucko 1987 on WAC; for overviews of indigenous archaeology, see Layton 1989a & b, Carmichael et al. 1994, Atalay 2006, Smith & Wobst 2010; Greenfield 1996 and Fforde et al. 2001 introduce the repatriation debate).
I would still argue that it is in fact within the broad church of this ‘world archaeology’ that we may find the brightest future of the discipline, developing from a combination of unaligned theoretical consciousness and a perception of ethical responsibility. It was therefore with some concern that in 2002 one could observe how the indigenous perspective was almost totally absent from the general introductions to archaeological thought used in western European teaching. Hodder’s classic Reading the Past (2nd ed. 1991) contained less than two pages on the subject, while in The Archaeological Process (1999) he subsumed the issues in a discussion of globalism without ever actually bringing them up specifically; Dark (1995) omitted the indigenous voice completely; Johnson, in his otherwise excellent introduction to theory, absorbed the entire Fourth World without comment into ‘archaeology and politics’ and makes only very oblique reference to these issues (1999: 13, 125ff; the second edition made this more explicit, but confined to only three pages, Johnson 2010: 208ff).
This was remedied only by a couple of articles in Preucel & Hodder’s anthology, compiled as the impact of postprocessualism began to be diluted (1996: part VIII). Indeed, virtually the only other exception to this was Bjørnar Olsen’s Fra ting til tekst (1997), and here it is significant firstly that Olsen is himself a specialist in Sámi archaeology, and secondly that he works in Norway, a country to which these issues are of immediate relevance. When the first edition of this present book appeared, there were signs that a change was on the way, for example in Hodder’s Archaeological Theory Today (2001) which for the first time explicitly included post-colonial approaches, and Gamble’s then-new introductory text, Archaeology: the basics, in which he became one of the first to use the Fourth World as a coda to Trigger’s threefold division of archaeological politics (2001: 2; cf. Trigger 1989). Back in 2002 it remained to be seen whether this represented the start of a genuine paradigm shift, or a small deviation from a familiar path. In 2018 as this goes to press, there have been small but significant changes as these perspectives have been integrated into the general practice of theory, rather than treated distinctly (cf. Renfrew & Bahn 2016: chs 14 & 15; Harris & Cipolla 2017: ch. 10).
This is not to say that the ‘world archaeology’ movement is without its problems. WAC itself still retains a core power-base and agenda in the developed countries, despite the varied nationalities on its committees. This reflects back onto the material and our approach to it. The critical problem still with archaeology’s embrace of the Other as embodied by traditional cultures, is that it is nevertheless through the agency of archaeologists that the Other is allowed to allegedly speak. A typical example is provided in Shanks’ Experiencing the Past (1992: 112), when the repatriation claims of the Zuni people in the American Southwest are discussed in terms of “the significance of the dynamic object”. Converting the demands of indigenous peoples into European academic language may well be relevant within that specific context – there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Shanks’ analysis – but the crucial point is that it says nothing at all about those making the original statement, nor about what they actually said and meant.
As archaeologists congratulate themselves on providing an egalitarian platform for the indigenous voice, the latter refuses to be homogenised and furthermore may simply not care to be ‘welcomed’ to a debate in which it has no interest at any level other than its own defence. It is fascinating that so few theoreticians have paid more than lip service to the fact that for many people the idea of archaeology itself – let alone any theoretical position within such a discipline – is at best utterly irrelevant and at worst actually offensive or distressing. This is quite unlike the indifference of someone who does not happen to have an explicit interest in the past, but rather has its basis in a culturally-embedded view of the world which has little sympathy for the entire fabric of Western intellectual thought within which the idea of archaeological enquiry developed.
In this sense, it may be that a literal, as opposed to figurative, confrontation with the Other is rather more than some theorists can cope with. Post-processualists sometimes portrayed their processualist colleagues as being afraid of subjectivity, of fearing the loss of control over the illusion of scientific method. And yet if we look at post-processualism in a Fourth World context, even the most eminent figures in what has become a kind of alternative orthodoxy risk becoming merely irrelevant, embarrassingly square.
Part of the reason for this lies in the circumstances in which these ideas have developed. The American processual archaeologist Peter Whiteley (2002: 415) has suggested that, “post-processualists … may be more open-minded, but the terms of their conceptual relativism are largely defined in the metropolitan space of the university rather than the cosmopolitan space of plural cultural reality”. Whiteley seems to see the solution in a rather bizarre understanding of indigenous oral history, in which the latter speaks essentially the same language of empirically testable truthclaims as processual science, albeit expressed in a different vocabulary of verifiable stories (2002: 407). This misses the point that these two perspectives emerge from utterly different concepts of reality, but Whiteley’s critique of postprocessualism is still valid in this context.
A sharper insight into this was presented several years earlier by Christopher Chippindale, in an Antiquity editorial from 1995. Reflecting on his rock art studies and work with the indigenous peoples of Arnhem Land in Australia, he argued for the academic benefits of encounters with an Other that can talk back:
You can see another side of this [the archaeologist’s distance from the past] in the proposals of the post-modern thinkers who diffuse across the world from my own archaeology department in Cambridge; intended to be self-consciously radical, their visions of what prehistoric worlds might have been like seem too dependent on the encircled ideas of academics in other disciplines who also lead bourgeois lives by the fixed conventions of the decade. Inward-looking shall write for inward-looking. If you were to read that work in Arnhem Land, where you may encounter a notice by the road-side announcing ‘Diversion, road closed due to ceremonies’, it would seem cosy and timid. Frankly, these attempts at different approaches are not odd enough: which is a sign that their creators, like all of us, should go more often to Deaf Adder Creek or – better – to somewhere further removed from their home environments (since the last thing Deaf Adder Creek could do with is mobs of archaeologists in search of the exotic).
Chippindale 1995: 437f
Chippindale’s idea of the ‘odd’ is perhaps significant in that the concept was not expressed as ‘theory’ at all, but as a comment in a journal editorial. I believe it encapsulates exactly what I am aiming for in this study of the Viking Age, especially in the context of a pan-Scandinavian analysis that considers the Sámi alongside the Norse. Linked to a global commitment along the lines of the WAC-model or something similar, as with Davidson’s Greeks an ‘odd’ archaeology simply acknowledges the past’s right to be itself, irrespective of (or even because of) how peculiar it appears to us.
Crucially important here is that this feeling for the potential ‘difference’ of prehistory must be something that ultimately derives from our analysis of the material itself, and its relationship to the other elements of the past artefactual environment. We must be receptive to this, but it cannot be a preconception that we wish to apply as an agenda in its own right, like Karlsson’s ‘contemplation’ or an active search for what our culture perceives as the weirder or more profound aspects of the archaeological record. This is a charge sometimes leveled against those who work with indigenous peoples, and especially in a spiritual context, for example by Kehoe (2000: 45; 2002) who has argued – as above – that any concept of the Other is inevitably projected through a racist lens as something inferior to ourselves. In some extreme cases this is certainly true – we are all familiar with the kind of Westerners who regard indigenous peoples as founts of unspoiled natural wisdom, and who thereby promote a patronising notion of cultural primitivism. In general, however, such critique wrongly conflates a respectful acknowledgement of difference with a value judgement.
As Chippindale stresses, the pursuit of an ‘odder’ archaeology is not about a quest for the exotic, the fossilisation of unfamiliar cultures in the museum display of a colonialising Romantic. While we should be honest enough to admit to a certain thrill of displacement in our interactions with indigenous cultures and their world-view – if indeed that is what we feel – we should nevertheless remember that socially-embedded belief systems do not involve a juxtaposition of the sacred (read: exotic) with the mundane; the two are inseparable. The completely ordinary social context of most ritual performance in traditional cultures is rarely stressed enough. Instead, the infinite uniqueness of these circumstances is itself the subject of study, the acceptance of which provides the imperative for a meaningful engagement with past world-views.
We may think here of a single Viking-Age example, an excerpt from the well-known account of an Arab traveller, Ibn Rustah, who met a group of Scandinavians in Russia sometime after 922:
When a leading man among them dies, they dig a grave like a big house and put him inside it. With him they put his clothes and the gold bracelets he wore and also much food and drinking vessels and coins. They also put the woman that he loved in the grave with him, while she is still living. And so the entrance to the grave is stopped up, and she dies there.
Translation by Foote & Wilson 1980: 412, with my
amendments; original text (not given here) after
Jakubovskij 1926
He is describing a chamber grave, of a kind very familiar from both written sources and archaeology. The medieval sagas contain a great many references to live burial and sacrifice, which have been comprehensively summarised by Ellis (1943: 5–8), and the same phenomenon is mentioned in other first-hand Arab sources, such as those by Ibn Miskaweih (Arne 1932a: 216) and of course Ibn Fadlan. The account that the latter writer left of his journey to the Volga Bulghars in 921–2 will be taken up several times in these pages (I have returned to Ibn Fadlan on many occasions, e.g. Price 1998a, 2008a, 2010a, 2012, 2014b).
The reality of the sacrificial descriptions is proven by archaeological finds of several graves with more than one body, in circumstances that suggest either a live burial of this sort or a ritual killing, for example at Bollstanäs in Uppland (Hemmendorf 1984) and grave A129 at Birka (Holmquist Olausson 1990), and of course the Oseberg burial (Christensen et al. 1992). Women have also been found as apparent sacrifices in several chamber-graves of male Scandinavian warriors at Černigov in the Ukraine (Arne 1931: 286), and there is considerable discussion of a possible live burial of a woman in graves Bj. 516/632 at Birka (Arbman 1937: 244–7 & 1939: 77; Gräslund 1980: 36; see also Engdahl 1990: 26f for an overall survey of sacrificial burials).
This is a perfect illustration of the ‘different’ Viking world that I referred to at the start of this chapter, and of Chippindale’s ‘oddness’. We must picture here a couple, living their lives in much the same way as everyone else: the social round of family, friends and acquaintances; the everyday interactions of trade and exchange; all the activities of the domestic and ‘professional’ sphere. And yet when the man of the household dies, his partner – known to all the community in the network of relationships just mentioned – is buried alive in the chamber with his corpse. We can perhaps imagine the feelings of the woman, though we should not be too sure of this. It is hard enough to conjure up the level of horror that we would feel today before such an event, but harder still to envisage a situation where that emotion may not have been paramount. In the accounts of both Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Miskaweih, it is stressed that the slaves volunteer for this death; whether this was actually the case or a matter of convention is harder to discern (we can also consider the ethnographically-documented examples of mortuary suicide from more recent centuries). And how did the onlookers feel, watching this ritual entombment and then walking away, going home or to some continued funeral ceremony, or passing the sealed mound in the subsequent hours and days? How did they articulate the knowledge that inside that grave a woman they knew was slowly suffocating, dying in the dark beside the rotting body of her partner, and that one day the same fate might be theirs? To us this seems unthinkable, and yet to at least some of the people of the Viking Age, at an institutionalised and socially-sanctioned level, it clearly was not. Why? What does this tell us about them, and in this how far can we trust the judgement of a thousand years of hindsight?
For Chippindale in his Australian work and myself in my contacts with the Sámi, this subtle adjustment of perception arises most clearly in encounters with indigenous peoples, and – with their permission – what we bring from those meetings to help us in other archaeological situations. In essence, this concerns a confrontation with difference in an empirical context. For me, one of the benefits of working in Sápmi is that I often feel intellectually uncomfortable there, and I find this to be a decidely healthy experience. However, this does not turn those who live there into an artificial Other that can be domesticated by inclusion in my own ‘academic’ discourse, on the printed page or in the lecture-room. We have come back to the relevance of archaeological theory, the maturity of which can only be assessed in relation to its application (cf. Gräslund 1989: 47).
For our understanding of the Viking Age, as I have argued repeatedly elsewhere (Price 1998a & b, 2000a–c, 2002, 2004a, 2005d, 2008b, 2010b and others), I believe it is crucial to take the Sámi into account on equal terms to their Nordic neighbours. For our perspectives on the Viking Age, I believe it is also crucial to incorporate the theoretical lessons of indigenous archaeologies of which the Sámi are a part. The way in which I play this out will become apparent in the following chapters, as I present and interpret evidence from archaeological finds and written sources, but I can conclude this introduction with a summary of the path that leads there.
We begin in chapter 2, with a short survey of Norse mythology and an overview of the approaches that have been taken to its study. The different paths adopted by philologists and historians of religions are compared, drawing out the main paradigms for the interpretation of Viking-Age spirituality. The character of this ‘religion’ is then considered, examining its relationship to concepts of worship, ritual and superstition. An emphasis is placed on the broader world of supernatural beings, beyond the gods themselves, and this ‘invisible population’ is then introduced in some detail. From the other world we then move to our own reality, and examine the physical forms taken by religion in the societies of Viking-Age Scandinavia. Here we look at cult places, the ritual landscape and the various kinds of ‘cultic officiaries’ who seem to have presided over these rituals.
Having established a platform of general synthesis for the more formalised religion of the Viking Age, the discussion then turns to the book’s primary subject of sorcery. The connections between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ are reviewed in the context of definition and meaning. It is argued that sorcery was in many ways interlinked with the larger framework of humanity’s relations with the gods and their servants, while still retaining an independent base in an unfocused structure of popular belief. The main complex of Old Norse sorcery – known as seiðr – is then introduced, and discussed in the context of other forms of magic including galdr, gandr and the supernatural skills of Óðinn. Against the background of seiðr as a generic for Nordic sorcery, the chapter concludes with a full review of the written sources in which it appears, and a history of academic research in this field.
Chapters 3 to 5 form the core of the book, presenting an escalating scale of analysis that begins with the Viking-Age Scandinavians, moves to the Sámi, and finally takes us to the level of the circumpolar cultures. Chapter three focuses on seiðr, and begins with an exploration of sorcery in relation to Óðinn, Freyja and the Vanir, and Norse cosmology. Having examined magic among the immortals, we shall then turn to its human practitioners and review the evidence for the different types of ritual specialist operating in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Moving on from the written sources, the extensive archaeological material relating to the burials of probable sorcerers will be discussed. The performers lead us to the performance, and the physical parameters of seiðr will then be considered in depth as we look at the ritual architecture, equipment and props used in the practice of sorcery.
We will then explore the gender constructions with which seiðr was encoded, the different roles sanctioned for men and women, and the apparent development of new forms of socio-sexual identity in connection with the rituals. It will also be argued that in many ways these rites can be seen as fundamentally sexual in nature, not merely symbolically but also literally in the manner of their performance. Part of this involves an intricate system of relations that were believed to exist between human beings and the inhabitants of other worlds, and a discussion of helping spirits in seiðr therefore follows next. Chapter three concludes with a review of the ‘domestic’ functions of Nordic sorcery, as a background for the more developed set of aggressive rituals that I argue formed the core of the seiðr complex and which are presented later.
At first, my account of the rituals and practices of the Scandinavians may seem an outlandish over-interpretation, and – especially to archaeologists specialising in the period – without place in the established models that we have built up for our understanding of Viking-Age society. However, chapter four will demonstrate that very similar behavioural trends and patterns of belief can be traced among the Sámi, the Nordic population’s contemporary neighbours in the Scandinavian peninsula: the ritual world of the Viking-Age North becomes more nuanced and complex.
Chapter 4 begins by examining the history of research into connections between seiðr and its nearest equivalent among the Sámi, known as noaidevuohta. This is then expanded into a consideration of Sámi relations with the Norse population in the Viking Age. Again, an overview of Sámi religion is presented, looking at the world of the gods, conceptions of spirit-beings, and the complex of Sámi soul beliefs. The institution of noaidevuohta is examined in detail with a focus on the noaidi, the Sámi ritual specialist who played a central role in all communal and spiritual life. As with the Nordic material, we shall concentrate on building up a terminology of practice and practitioners to which the other sources can then be related. A detailed section then considers the role of women in noaidevuohta, before examining the rituals associated with this form of sorcery. The archaeological material is reviewed, including the noaidi’s equipment and dress, and the single example of a possible noaidi burial from the early medieval period. As with seiðr, the sexual overtones of the rituals are explored, together with the elements of offensive and defensive magic that are also present. As the functions of noaidevuohta are summarised, the chapter concludes by setting these practices in their pan-Scandinavian context, and in comparison with the Nordic sorcery set out previously.
When we proceed in chapter 5 to the broader cultural context of which the Sámi are a part, that of the circumpolar region, we will find that none of the religious practices hitherto discussed appear at all unusual against this background. Chapter five focuses primarily on the concept of shamanism, which is introduced from the early Siberian ethnographies and followed through the subsequent centuries of anthropological debate. A range of definitions and perspectives are considered, and the components of the ‘shamanic world-view’ are discussed in detail: cosmology, the ensouled environment, the shamanic vocation, special constructions of gender and sexuality, and the role of aggression in shamanic ritual. From this we proceed to a subject which has been alluded to in the preceding chapters, the interpretation of pre-Christian Nordic belief in the context of shamanism. These perspectives too are charted in the history of research, focusing on the archaeology of Scandinavia from the Mesolithic to the early Iron Age. The work on seiðr in the centuries before the Viking Age is considered, followed by a detailed review of Viking-Age magic in the context of circumpolar spirituality. The picture painted of Viking sorcery then emerges as essentially what we ought to expect in the socio-geographical circumstances of early medieval Scandinavia, and in fact the absence of such phenomena would actually be far more remarkable than the oddities of their conventions as they appear to us.
In chapter 6 we return to the Scandinavians, and begin to assess how these complexes of ritual, sorcery, witchcraft and magic could have fitted within the wider social structure of the time: what did they mean, how were they used, whom and what did they serve? It is here that we introduce the concept of seiðr as war sorcery, beginning with an overview of aggressive functions that it performs in the written sources. From this we shall move to the intervention of different supernatural agencies on the battlefield, either in parallel with human spell-working or as a result of it. The valkyrjur are considered at length here, with further discussion of other beings of destruction. From this follows an analysis of Nordic battle magic for both warriors and sorcerers.
At this point we shall shift our attention from the ritual battlefield to the physical one, and examine the operation of supernatural concepts in the actual fighting. The shifting of shape will be considered here in relation to seiðr, and explored through the activities of Óðinnic animal-warriors such as the berserkir and ulfheðnar. These phenomena are then analysed in terms of the psychological dynamics of mass violence, and the concept of sacred battle-rage. The chapter finishes by bringing together the ritual and physical aspects of combat, which are summarised and worked into a coherent whole in what was originally the concluding chapter 7. The ‘Viking Way’ of the title is reviewed in retrospect, and expanded upon with hindsight, in the new chapter 8 on magic and mind added for this second edition.
To begin this project, however, we must start with the religion of the Norse.