Sites dating to the last part of the Scandinavian Iron Age, the “Viking Age” (c. 800– 1030 AD), are in Norway characterized by a near total absence of pottery sherds and vessels (e.g. Stylegar 1999, 243). There are examples of iron pots and wooden vessels, but soapstone is the dominant material in archaeological assemblages of domestic cooking and storage vessels. Indeed, soapstone vessels seem to have completely replaced local pottery production in Norway (Petersen 1951, 380; Lossius 1977, 13), and every Viking-Age household probably included one or more examples of such vessels. A chronologically significant characteristic of Norwegian soapstone vessels is that they do not appear at all in archaeological material dating to the period between the pre-Roman Iron Age (c. 400 BC–0 AD) and the Viking Age (Skjølsvold 1961, 12; Pilø 1990). Although vessels were produced continually into the medieval period (c. 1030–1537), they were usually typologically different from the Viking-Age types (cf. Lossius 1977, 50). The character of production and distribution of soapstone vessels seems to increase in magnitude during the Viking Age, from a rather limited beginning in the first half of the 9th century, to widespread distribution networks and large quantities of affordable commodities in the 10th century (cf. Schou 2007). This increase coincided with a general expansion in the production and trade of such goods in Scandinavia as a whole (e.g. Christoffersen 1991; Näsman 1991; Sindbæk 2005), as well as changes in associated structures such as means of transportation (Näsman 1991, 37) and payment (Hårdh 1996). Central to these changes were the actors, who, I would argue, through routinized practice institutionalized the whole process from quarries to consumers. This article aims to present one particular temporally and spatially regionalized process – the Viking-Age production and distribution of the soapstone (henceforth colloquially termed the soapstone trade) of the Agder region in South Norway, with a focus on the area around the old parish of Fjære – and three groups of actors that the archaeological material suggests were involved.
Agder is today divided into two counties – Aust-Agder and Vest-Agder – with several towns, lying primarily along the coast. However, settlement in towns is in general a recent development in Norway, as before the industrial revolution the vast majority of the population lived in clustered or isolated farms and farmsteads scattered throughout the country. This is particularly true for the Agder region, with its long, roughly southward-flowing rivers moving through valleys, each more or less completely separated by characteristic steep, densely forested hills (e.g. see Figure 13.2), dotted with small lakes and bogs. Given these topographical hindrances, the coast has traditionally provided the most practical communication route when moving in an east-west direction, while river valleys constituted the better choice for traversing between north and south. The best agricultural land is situated along the coast, and the mainland coast itself from Lindesnes eastwards is incised by numerous inlets, bays and coves, in many places sheltered from the open sea of Skagerrak by islands and skerries (cf. Schou 2007, 3–4).
The Agder coast has thus long provided traditional shipping with excellent anchorages. One of the best is Vikkilen in Aust-Agder (Wikander 1985), which during the Viking Age was the boat landing (Norse stóð) for several large farms lying along a fertile ridge of moraine between the sea and the steep hills behind (Figure 13.1). Today, Vikkilen is the harbour of the town of Grimstad (pop. 20,000), but in the Middle Ages the area was instead divided into the two agricultural parishes of Fjære and Landvik, which here will be termed the Fjære-area (cf. Schou 2007). The river emptying into the sea near the Fjære-area is called Nidelva. It stretches northward to 210 km inland, and crucially provides a potential transportation route for a multitude of commodities produced in the forested hills and mountains of Aust-Agder right up to the 20th century. Although a large and relatively powerful waterfall called Rygene hinders unbroken travel from the interior to the coast, a viable option would have been to sail or row into a large lake called Rore, just before Rygene, an option which was exploited when floating timber in the 18th–19th century. From there, the Fjære-area and the coast were easily accessed (cf. Schou 2007, 73–74). As will be argued below, the Fjære-area is central to the understanding of the soapstone vessel trade in Agder and potentially also for other regions bordering on the Skagerrak sea (cf. Schou 2007). However, before presenting the actors of the Agder soapstone trade and their activities, a consideration of some theoretical and contextual issues relating to the character and development of the structure of the trade is necessary.