<p>This paper deals with archery in the Viking Age settlement of Birka and in particular the presence of Euro Asiatic, steppe nomadic archery equipment at the Birka Garrison and one Birka grave. The equipment contains for example closed quivers and a bow case. This paper also contains a discussion of archery battle techniques and tactics in Viking Age Birka and the implications of the above mentioned equipment to this discussion. The analysis insinuates the importance and status of archery in 10th century Birka.</p>

<p>The purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss clinch-nails found at an excavation at terrace II in the Garrison of Birka, on the island of Björkö in Sweden. This type of clinch-nails is common in Viking age Sweden and is usually interpreted as coming from boats. The study will try to show that these types of nails could have been used in several kinds of wooden constructions. It will also show how the nails were made and what kinds of tools were used by the Viking smiths. The study has shown that this type of nails were used in several different types of wooden constructions such as boats, sleds, cart bodies, coffins, Birka's ramparts and buildings. Nothing confirms the use of rivets in Viking age buildings but the material from terrace II probably contains clinch-nails from the other categories. The largest portion of the clinch-nails comes from disused boats and from the ramparts surrounding Birka's hill fort Borg. The tools for making nails have not been found in the Birka Garrison.</p>

In the year of 2012 a unique three dimensional figurine was found in Hårby, Denmark depicting what seems to be a woman holding a sword and a shield. Immediately it was defined as a Valkyrie, a female servant of the Viking god Odin. However, this is most likely a simplified interpretation since most female figurines from the Viking age is interpreted in this way. This thesis questions this interpretation, creating an identity crisis for the Valkyries due to their interpretation no longer being obvious and simple. Instead this thesis recognizes the gender ambiguous features of the Hårbyfigurine and tries to determine what it can tell about the perception of gender during the Viking Age. The purpose of this thesis is thus to present how gender theory, queer theory and a comparative method can be used to interpret a gender ambiguous object from the Viking Age. This is done based on the Hårbyfigurine and its different attributes and concludes that the arguments against that female figurines from the Viking Age depicts Valkyries are more numerous than the arguments that support this identification. Alternative interpretations for the figurine is therefore suggested. The thesis also shows that the interpretations gender theory, queer theory and comparative method can produce differs in its complexity and in how they handle the gender ambiguous qualities of the Hårbyfigurine. The conclusion drawn from this is that gender ambiguous objects cannot be interpreted in one single way but must be tackled with a variety of theories and methods to be able to tell something about the worldview of the people who lived in the Viking Age. The term gender ambiguous is also re-evaluated throughout the thesis and turns out to be an interpretation applied to objects based on a modern way of defining gender and sex and is not a trait of the object itself. This means that gender is not defined in the same way today as it was in the Viking Age. Gender is thus strongly connected to the ruling culture and not stable, but ever changing.

This essay provides a study of five Swedish locales in the Mälar Valley and Öland, namely Arkels tingstad, Aspa löt, Tingstad flisor, Anundshög and Signhilds kulle/Fornsigtuna, and their possible use as sites of Viking Age thing assemblies. Historical texts, place names and archaeological excavations are queried through the aid of a theoretical assemblage drawing on De Landa, Deleuze &amp; Guattari, as well as Icelandic, British and Scandinavian research. Following this, I propose that the locales chosen as thing sites were communicational nexuses localised on commons in borderzones between land domains. Thus, space commonly understood as in the elite's periphery insteadbecomes of central importance.

This thesis studies the famous boat graves in Valsgärde, Sweden and Sutton Hoo, England.  Its purpose is to understand the affects these graves had on the people who surrounded and visited them. Affect describes the first reaction when a person experience somthing new. The other focus of this thesis is the boat graves that seemingly lack buried people, and why the bodies in the graves are missing. There are some fragments of both humans and animals in the Valsgärde graves. In Sutton Hoo there are small amounts of remains from humans or animals, the osteologists have not been able to ascertain which of the two. There are some theories that the burials have been open for everyone to see, the question is then why and if this is the case, how did people react to this phenomenon, that is the boat-graves affects. The thesis concludes that the now missing bodies may have been exposed in the open for a long time, before they were buried. The soil´s acidity at Sutton Hoo is at pH 3,8 at the lowest, which has an impact on how well bodies are preserved in the ground. Both the soil and the exposing of the bodies might have done an equal amount of damage to the bodies.

There is something about horses. Something that through the ages has made people see these animals as something special, almost magical. The use, care and murder of these animals contain information of high value for archaeology. Information that can be hard to find in other materials.These animals and their final resting places bear traces of the emic values and inner worlds of the people that once put them there. People’s thoughts, values and traditions can be visualised from the bodies of the horses that once served them, at times gave their lives for them.The purpose of this essay is to study possible regional similarities and differences in the tradition relating to living and dead horses. This is done through osteological analysis of skeletal remains mainly of horse (Equus) and analysis of the archaeological contexts.The initial hypothesis was that the reason for a somewhat scarce representation of skeletal remains of horse in some places, perhaps relates to how the people in these places handled the bodies of the horses due to tradition and norms within their society.The study also sets out to examine what has made up the foundation for an interpretation of sacrifice and ritual, problematise the application of the concept of sacrifice as well as how archaeology as a research field has been affected and influenced by these notions.A delamination was made to Iron Age since the use of horses for man’s benefit and enjoyment was well established by that time. Geographically a delamination has been made to the islands of Gotland, Stora Karlsö and Öland with the intention of creating a distinct island perspective, where peculiar and unique traditions as well as more general similarities are allowed the same presuppositions. For this reason, three materials from the chosen geographical areas have been subject to osteological analysis; Stormyr in Bäl Parish on Gotland, Norderhamn in Eksta Parish on Stora Karlsö and a material from Löt Parish on Öland.The results show a general pattern in handling as well as in how both living and dead horses were perceived in the studied locations. However, it is also clear that regional differences occur in these areas.No osteological markers that can indicate any difference in type between the analysed horses have been found. There is however some trauma that indicates that some horses may have been used as workforce and means of transportation for example.The result also show that several factors in the represented cases could have affected the basis of estimation that led to a ritualistic interpretation, for example the frequency of finds, the extent of exploitation of an area, education, the development of methodology over time, etc.

Despite decades of scholarly scrutiny, the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm (c. 750-940 CE) remain - to a considerable extent - obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence, conveying the impression that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character. For this reason, rather than selectively assessing individual instances of regional Franco-Scandinavian interaction, the present study approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, and combines this with the innovative use of GIS to detect and define overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity. Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities - or 'hydrarchies'. By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiated by its application to three distinct regional case studies: the lower Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Basin, the Seine Basin, and the Loire Basin. As well as facilitating the deductive analysis of viking activity for which primary evidence has thus far been ambiguous or altogether absent, the parameters of this abstract model affirm that Scandinavian movements across Francia were the result of prudent and expedient decision-making processes, contingent on exchanged intelligence, cumulative experience, and the ongoing individual and collective need for socioeconomic subsistence and enrichment.

Figurines with a human shape have been created in almost every culture all throughout human history. In this thesis one such group of figurines is under investigation, Viking age female figurines. These figurines are most often interpreted as representations of the Valkyries – shieldmaidens of the god Odin – or as the goddess Fröja. Interpretations made through comparative studies with the medieval written sources. However, these interpretations always privileges some attributes of the figurines over others, creating simplified and general interpretations. The purpose of this thesis is to (re)interpret the figurines beyond the concept of representation, and instead focus on what the figurines, through their various attributes (size, motive, material), do and how they influence human actions. This is realized through the creation of a catalogue of all currently known female figurines from the Viking age (53 pieces), a correspondence analysis and through the use of symmetrical archaeology and embodiment theory. The result shows that the most important attributes of the figurines is their physical bodies, through which they can interact with the world, trigger emotions, hold memory, become animated and be part of the performative practice of upholding individual identity as well as upholding both the social- and cosmological worlds.

<p>Abstract: Previous research on the Viking Age trade centre of Birka has suggested the parallel use of two harmonising standard weight units, differing in mass by five percent. As an explanation to this phenomenon, this paper puts forward a hypothesis of a trading fee, embedded in the weights. This is corroborated through a hypothetical deductive study; including a reassertion of earlier results by means of a new method for archaeometrological analysis, using a 3D scanner and Computer-Aided Design. Further, the role of silver, as a preferred unit of payment in Birka, is supported through a spatial analysis of the distribution of Islamic coins and Oriental beads in the provinces of Middle Sweden. Plausible manufacturing sites for the cylindrical lead weights, adhering to the Birka mitqal, are discussed as a possible way of falsifying the hypothesis. The results suggest that a trading fee was extracted, using the Birka mitqal for imports and the Islamic mitqal for exports. The metrological analysis was also expanded to weights from Sigtuna, which proved the Birka mitqal, as well the dual metrics system, continued to be in use there until, at least, the first half of the 11^th century. Finally, a short study on the origins of the Scandinavian/Islamic weight system suggests that the direct influence for the system primarily can be attributed the Volga-Bulgarians.</p>

<p>This paper deals with the connection between food and burial habits during the late Iron Age in present-day Sweden. The archaeological material used in the study consists of 16 potsherds from a burial site at Alsike hage, Alsike parish, in the province of Uppland in east-central Sweden. On these potsherds have been conducted FTIR- and GCMS-analyses, in order to see what types of food have been deposited in the burials. Furthermore, the result of the GCMS-analyses has been compared to contemporary material from both burial sites and settlement sites, in order to establish whether differences between the compared materials exist. The analyses show that there are differences between the material from burial sites compared with the material from settlement sites, but not any particular differences between the material from different burial sites. Among these differences we can see that the settlement sites show: a higher amount of total lipid content, a higher amount of vessels which contained lipids indicating that food was heated in them, a higher amount of vessels which contained lipids from crop products as the only content, and a higher amount of vessels which contained lipids from ruminant animals. The interpretation of these results is also discussed in the paper. Furthermore, the results of the FTIR-analyses also shows a good correlation with the results from the GCMS-analyses, it seems that the organic “foodcrusts” analysed with FTIR indeed stem from the same meal indicated by the GCMS-analyses.</p>