Browsing by Author "Artto, Andreas V."

The Viking Age is the roughly 300-year period of European history marked by the martial activities of raiding and wars of conquest as well as trading and colony building of broadly Scandinavian peoples. These people who left their homelands as part of raiding bands and armies are left their marks on peoples, material cultures and languages of Europe that are visible to this day. The reach of viking warriors was felt from Western Europe to the banks of Volga and the courts of Byzantium. These people are known by their reputation, but how are they defined in archaeological research of the Viking Age and how do these definitions affect archaeological research? This thesis examines the concepts of Viking warriorhood and warrior burials used in the previous research and identify problems these concepts contain. This is done by critical analysis of the definition of warriorhood, and the argumentation used to support it. This analysis is further complemented by examining the archaeological source value of the known burials of the Viking age through existing scholarship and presenting three Viking burial sites outside of Scandinavia as case studies. Patterns of burial behaviour conventionally associated with warrior burials in the Viking context are also tested by employing multivariate analysis techniques. The results are interpreted and used to leverage fragmentary bioarchaeological data of the burials. The multivariate analysis is performed on a cohort formed by sampling the burial grounds of the Swedish Viking age town of Birka. Based on the results reached by the combination of these methods, in this thesis it is argued that both the concept of warriorhood as well as the concept of warrior burials in their present usage contain several problems and no longer represent the current reach of archaeological methodology. As this has ramifications for further research on the subject matter, these concepts need to be refined and adjusted to keep their usefulness for the archaeological research of the Viking warriorhood.