Fragments of meals in eastern Denmark from the Viking Age to the Renaissance: New evidence from organic remains in latrines (original) (raw)
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WATERS - Conference Proceedings for 'Waters as a Resource' of the SFB 1070 ResourceCulures and DEGUWA (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Unterwasserarchäologie e.V.), 2020
Hedeby, Dorestad and Ribe were well-connected trading places and burial grounds, settlements and waypoints of long-distance travel during the Viking Age. These sites, which became leading centres in an expanding world, had one key element in common. They were located close to the coast, navigable rivers or lakes. This is not only true for early and late Viking Age towns, like Hedeby or Sigtuna, but also for settlements in the centre of the Viking Age world, like Ribe, and remote places at the periphery of the known world back then, like L’Anse aux Meadows. Waters indeed were omnipresent, but does presence alone mean they also played a main role as a food resource? What were the key factors in uencing shing activities and how were they connected to the actors, granting supply, distribution and consume of water-based food re sources? The following article summarises the recent research on aquatic food components in the Viking Age diet, focussing on the results of stable isotope analyses. Additionally, the contribution of the SFB 1070 RESOURCE CULTURES’ project B06 ‘Humans and Re sources in the Viking Age – Anthropological and Bioarchaeological Analyses of the Use of Food Re sources and the Detection of Migrations’ to the topic is studied before the backdrop of this survey of recent literature and aims to initiate future exchange and cooperation.
The combined analyses of grains, seeds, fruits, pollen, animal bones and parasite eggs from a latrine dating from the late 1680s provides us with a detailed view of the diet in a Renaissance neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Analyses show that the residents had access to a varied diet of primarily fish, bread/porridge, and a range of fruits, nuts and herbs, including exotic products deriving from a global trade network. This study also shows that combining strands of evidence in a multi-proxy analysis of latrine deposits leads to much more nuanced results than with single-evidence analysis. Botanical evidence from seeds and pollen is combined here with results from previously published DNA analysis of plastids (Søe et al., 2018). Pollen of myrtle family, possibly cloves, as well as that of citrus family, have been observed, neither of which have been recorded archaeologically in Denmark before. Also, human tapeworm is recorded here for the first time in a Danish archaeological context.
2022
This volume includes contributions from scholars who presented at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, 2016. The theme was 'Food, feasts and famine', and the authors were able to provide a wide range of perspectives on Medieval Scandinavia. The aim was to represent Old Norse literary and historical topics in different panels and sections. One result from those panels can be found in this volume: a selection of papers by scholars who share the same research interest, that is, Medieval Scandinavia. Cover illustration: Einherjar are served by Valkyries in Valhöll while Odin sits upon his throne, flanked by one of his wolves (c. 1905).