Was Norway rich or poor in the year 1000? (original) (raw)
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Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland (2021)
Routledge Archaeologies of the Viking World, 2021
That there was an in!ux of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another – complementary – explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the in!ows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks – perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave- trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.
Silver, Land, Towns, and the Elites. Social and Legal Aspects of Silver in Scandinavia c. 850-1150
In: Bjørn Poulsen, Helle Vogt, and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.) Nordic Elites in Transformation, vol. I Material Resources, pp. 130-160 , 2019
This contribution explores silver in its capacity as a movable and durable resource, as well as the way in which silver as a means of payment and as a substance of value influenced and transformed the elites in Scandinavia. The chapter will sketch the trajectory of silver between the ninth and the twelfth centuries in a social context and discuss the transformative aspects of the growing silver economy. During this period, a broad range of players began to use silver to promote and enhance their positions and employed silver as a medium for expressing themselves and their social identities. Acknowledging the agency of silver means addressing its potential to transform early medieval society, and it is argued that the use of silver could follow two different paths. The first emphasizes silver as durable and stable personal wealth, which perpetuated and reinforced existing power relations. The second path is the potential for silver to be used as cash and money. As cash, silver acted as movable and impersonal wealth in economic relations and market exchange. In these two contexts, silver could be perceived either as something to reinforce social hierarchies or as a mass material that was available to anybody, as having a leveling effect, empowering the powerless in society.
Danish Journal of Archaeology, 2022
The influx of prestigious foreign objects into Southern Scandinavia throughout the Iron Age and Viking Age has been studied by many. For example, Roman or Frankish luxury objects would find their way north via trade or through dynastic gift exchanges as part of a conspicuous elite culture. Access to crucial raw materials was in many ways formative for both prehistoric and historic societies. The availability – or lack thereof – of specific resources could determine technological developments, and the need for nonlocal raw materials could shape evolving networks. For prehistoric and early historic times in Southern Scandinavia, the written sources and typological studies have limited value in determining the provenance of various raw materials. A typological deduction based on design can indicate the area of production for certain artefacts, but the raw materials used might originate from elsewhere. Based on scientific methods, this study sets out to map and analyse the geography of the available provenances of materials used in archaeological objects with special focus on iron in the period c.200-1050. From where did the raw materials found in Southern Scandinavia originate? Was there a connection between the flow of raw materials and the political situation?