Description
The maritime communities of Viking Age Scandinavia are enjoying great popularity in and beyond academia, thanks to frequent appearances in popular culture, a growing body of archaeological evidence, and UNESCO’s recent designation of Nordic clinker boat traditions as intangible heritage of humanity. These communities were part of a complex and lively network of interaction and exchange spanning the seas and oceans of the Viking world involving frequent maritime travel over vast distances. Unfortunately, most of the surviving evidence for this network provides us only with a point of origin and a point of burial, deposition, or diffusion. We still know very little about the journeys in between, that brought people, goods, ideas, and beliefs across the water. Both the nature of these routes (geographical itinerary, duration, seasonality, cost) and the ontological implications of mobility and discovery (consequent mental maps and worldviews) remain hard to reconstruct and characterise with current research methods. This presentation will examine a methodological approach that might provide us with new insights into maritime mobility and connectivity in the Viking Age. In this approach, digital mapping methods from a range of cartographic traditions are used to record, represent and re-process field data from experimental archaeology. These data are then used as the basis for a digital model of Viking Age seafaring that may answer some of our questions about these iconic voyages.In this presentation I will summarise the results of recent experimental fieldwork, which aimed to identify the most important factors for determining route choice for Viking Age mariners. The results indicate that the main factor in this choice is a multi-faceted judgement of the perceived risk to vessel and crew. These results allow us to hypothesise about which routes would have been preferred, but how best to model and represent such a subjective, contextual and dynamic concept as risk judgement? To answer this, a range of digital methods will be explored and evaluated, such as isochronic cartography and deep maps. It is hoped that these will trigger discussion and feedback surrounding the representation and reconstruction of maritime route choices in the past, and provide inspiration for new approaches and methodologies.
| Period | 2023 Apr 5 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Amsterdan, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |