Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns

Stephen P. Ashby, Søren Sindbaek

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789251616
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

Crafting Communities explores the interface between craft, communication networks, and urbanization in Viking-age Northern Europe. Viking-period towns were the hubs of cross-cultural communication of their age, and innovations in specialized crafts provide archaeologists with some of the best evidence for studying this communication. The integrated results presented in these papers have been made possible through the sustained collaboration of a group of experts with complementary insights into individual crafts. Results emerge from recent scholarly advances in the study of artifacts and production: first, the application of new analytical techniques in artifact studies (e.g. metallographic, isotopic, and biomolecular techniques) and second, the shifted in interpretative focus of medieval artifact studies from a concern with object function to considerations of processes of production, and of the social agency of technology. Furthermore, the introduction of social network theory and actor-network theory has redirected attention toward the process of communication, and highlighted the significance of material culture in the learning and transmission of cultural knowledge, including technology. The volume brings together leading UK and Scandinavian archaeological specialists to explore crafted products and workshop-assemblages from these towns, in order to clarify how such long-range communication worked in pre-modern Northern Europe. Contributors assess the implications for our understanding of early towns and the long-term societal change catalysed by them, including the initial steps towards commercial economies. Results are analyzed in relation to social network theory, social and economic history, and models of communication, setting an agenda for further research. Crafting Communities provides a landmark statement on our knowledge of Viking-Age craft and communication

Chapter 1

Crafting the urban network

Steven P. Ashby and Søren M. Sindbæk

The practice of crafts is a central element of human experience. It ranges from the fashioning of everyday objects in a household setting, to the exclusive work of skilled artisans, or workshop-based specialisation in a single material or product. It can be solitary work, or a complex endeavour combining the skills of many specialists. It is a venue for technologies and innovations that permeate and transform societies.

The history of crafts is intimately connected with that of urbanism. For millennia, towns and cities have provided craftspeople with prime meeting places and communities, access to raw materials, markets for their products and arenas for learning, comparison and competition. In turn, crafts are an important part of what makes places and societies urban. They are occasion to complex connections between people, spaces and materials that are different to those that characterise most other settings, and give towns and cities some of their special character.

In many parts of northern Europe – from Ireland to the Baltic Sea area – the Viking Age is the period in which urban life either first emerges, or recovers from a lengthy hiatus following the demise of the western Roman Empire. Since the mid-20th century, many Viking towns have been investigated by archaeologists, and have offered up extraordinary remains from their earliest communities. One of the major revelations brought about by these discoveries is the wealth of evidence pertaining to the practice of crafts. These structures and assemblages testify to a wide range of skilled town-dwellers: blacksmiths, cup-makers, weavers, combmakers, jewellers and more (Fig. 1.1). The products manufactured by these specialists are known to us from graves, hoards and settlement contexts, but excavated workshops reveal how and where these craftspeople actually practised. The evidence found in urban sites does not appear primarily in the form of finished products, but in the debris of raw materials, tools and production waste like slag, metal droplets or cut-off pieces of bone and antler (Fig. 1.2). These have turned out to be an archaeological treasure.

Figure 1.1 The Coppergate blacksmith. This ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ display was a striking component of the Jorvik Viking Centre’s Artefact Gallery, prior to its redesign in 2016. The exhibition was pioneering in highlighting the interactions and interdependence of early urban craftspeople. © York Archaeological Trust.

Together, crafted products and the refuse from workshops are among the richest and most informative categories of archaeological evidence pertaining to urban sites of the Viking Age. Over the decades, a wealth of studies have explored such materials to reveal the details of how early craftspeople in north European towns practised their skills: the networks they could access to obtain raw materials, the techniques they applied to process them and the range of products they manufactured. Such studies have transformed our understanding of the role of towns, and of the social networks that characterised the Viking Age more broadly.

Crafting practices represent some of the situations in which networks between people and material become most evident and illuminating. This coincidence provides archaeology with a special opportunity, as craft workshops are also places that generate a rich archaeological record of materials to study and compare. Paradoxically, the very richness of this evidence has hampered some areas of study. The challenge of analysing and comprehending assemblages often consisting of thousands of finds is considerable. Identifying dozens of enigmatic pieces and unknown materials, and establishing their contexts in buildings, areas, stratigraphies and phases: these are daunting research tasks. As a consequence, most assemblages have hitherto been analysed only on a single-site basis.

Figure 1.2 Craftworking debris from Ribe. (a) Mould fragments related to non-ferrous metalworking; (b) Antler debris produced in the manufacture of combs. Photographs courtesy of the Museums of South-west Jutland.

The many questions that might be answered by comparing sites have seen less attention: where did craftspeople learn their skills? Did they develop their crafts within communities tied to particular towns or regions, perhaps guarding the valuable tricks of their trade; or did they travel frequently between distant places, bringing new innovations and inspirations with them? The finds from Viking towns could indeed inform such questions, widening the focus from individual skills to social networks, if we could compare in detail the rich evidence of practices, workshop by workshop.

Today such comparative work seems more attainable. Recent years have seen significant changes in the study of artefacts and production. These developments have been threefold. First, the application of new techniques for material analysis in artefact studies (e.g. metallographic, isotopic and biomolecular techniques) has unleashed a ‘Science Revolution’ (Kristiansen 2014), which has enabled us to revisit previous research. Many previously accepted results are now being considered in the light of this new evidence. Scientific methods now facilitate the identification and provenancing of raw materials (e.g. Hunter et al. 1993; Smith and Clark 2004; Palanivel and Meyvel 2010; Frahm and Doonan 2013; Buckley 2018), while photogrammetry, 3D- and CT-scanning and high-magnification microscopic techniques allow for the fine-grained characterisation of manufacturing process, through the identification of surface modifications that are diagnostic of particular tools or techniques (e.g. Di Maida 2013; Nicolae et al. 2014) (Fig. 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Viking-Age metalwork undergoing Micro-XRF analysis at AGiR Lab, Aarhus University. Photograph by Søren Sindbæk.

Second, the interpretative focus of artefact studies has shifted from the functional treatment of objects that characterises the main body of basic research literature, to a concern with processes of production and the social agency of technology and of things. This idea, sometimes labelled the ‘material turn’, is transformative in that it re-characterises artefact study: what was once seen as an important but second-order concern is now central to the informed study of past society and economics (see Lemonnier 1993a; Latour 2005).

Third, the introduction of social network theory has redirected attention toward the process of communication, and pointed to the significance of towns and other centres in the learning and transmission of cultural knowledge, including technology (Knappett 2013). Recent network studies have demonstrated how interaction across large, complex groups and societies involves patterns and dynamics which may sustain or impede cultural exchange, and how material and technological choices may bear witness to such processes. These ideas remain to be explored in relation to specific and detailed evidence.

Focused research in this field has the potential to revitalise scholarly discourse in several key areas. An important question surrounds the relationship between technological innovation and social, economic and political change (Ashby in press). In a rapidly developing trade network characterised by the power of magnates and kings, the entrepreneurial practice of merchants, the urbanisation and specialisation of craft and the increasing carrying capacity of ships, how does one discern the dynamics of causation? It will often be misleading to ask how a particular technique or way of doing was invented or transferred, and more relevant to explore how and why it became useful at a particular time and place. In the words of Levi-Strauss (1974), ‘things are not known because they are useful, they become useful because they are known’. Humans are always collecting and curating a surplus of knowledge and things. Thus, we need not seek to fit technological change to grand narrative, nor view it as a driver of political, social and economic change. Rather, we may find meaning in analysis of how people went about doing things.

Technological adoption does not appear to act as a direct proxy for communication, but rather seems to emerge in new choices, or in combinations of practices arising from broader developments and social transformations (Arthur 2010). There is thus a need to distinguish between the intensification and specialisation associated with accelerating urbanisation on the one hand, and the effects of cultural communication and technological transfer on the other. Indeed, in sorting out the fine detail of technology and its communication, we may provide a context for social action that is resolvable at the micro-scale, allowing us to consider not only the workings of systems and networks over centuries, but the actions and fortunes of individuals over the course of a lifetime, or even a single season. This kind of ‘high-definition archaeology’ (Raja and Sindbæk 2018; Croix et al. 2019a), made possible by newly developed approaches to excavation, recording and artefactual analysis, has the potential not only to provide finer-grained data, but to fundamentally transform grand narratives.

The archaeology of crafts

Urban craft has long been a focus in the study of archaeology. The occurrence of manufacturing activities in Viking towns was noted in the earliest excavations of the North Sea emporia (e.g. Stolpe 1876), but until the 1970s most excavations were too limited to assess the scale of production. Specialised crafts were largely assumed to occur as a secondary activity in response to trading opportunities, and were argued to confirm the operation of the specialised activities and hinterland interaction that defined urban societies in prevailing historical and sociological models (Arbman 1939, 129; Jankuhn 1944; 1956, 217; Ennen 1985, 8; Clarke and Ambrosiani 1991, 167).

Few researchers at the time could envisage how synthesised studies of the production of Viking-Age ornamental metalwork might be ‘of outstanding interest for the interpretation for the early medieval towns’ (Callmer 1971, 279). However, from the late 1970s onward, greater quantities of material became available for analysis, as a result of a series of urban excavations, and the details of both artefacts and manufacturing evidence from these sites became more widely known (e.g. Davidan 1977; 1982; 1992; Ulbricht 1978; Ambrosiani 1981; Brinch Madsen 1984; Duczko 1985; Ottaway 1989; Mainman 1990; Fanning 1994). Meanwhile, reports were emerging from excavations in actual workshop areas (Bencard et al. 1979; Vierck 1983; Callmer 1984; Hall 1984). One result of this was a nuancing of interpretative models, as studies of individual crafts identified more specific patterning. In the case of non-ferrous metalwork or the production of bone and antler combs, for example, the results seemed initially to confirm a picture of mobile artisans, who worked individually in simple, even seasonal workshops, and who supplied a well-defined end product to individual consumers. The craftspeople were widely supposed to have been either itinerant specialists, who took ‘rounds’ between a number of production sites, or else part-time generalists, living more sedentary lives in which they engaged with their craft in a less intensive fashion (Ulbricht 1978, 118; Bencard et al. 1979; Ambrosiani 1981, 157; Christophersen 1980; 1982; Brinch Madsen 1984, 95).

A change came in the 1990s, with the publication of the large-scale excavations in Ribe (Bencard and Bender Jørgensen 1990), Southampton (Andrews 1997), and York (e.g. Bayley 1992; Mainman and Rogers 2000; Fig. 1.4). These volumes documented the fact that production in (some) towns had taken place on a much greater scale and level of complexity than had hitherto been realised. Surveys such as Justine Bayley’s (1991) review of the evidence for metalworking provided a new foundation for analysis, and studies of textiles and textile tools proposed important comparative perspectives (see Bender Jørgensen 1992; Walton Rogers 1997). The implications of these revelations were emphasised by Richard Hodges, also influenced by recent finds of abundant craft-working materials from excavations in the 9th-century monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno in southern Italy. He argued that specialised craft production had been a distinctive aspect of the character of early medieval trading towns, and questioned the previous focus on long-distance trade (Hodges 2000, 83). Hence, craftspeople were accorded a more permanent presence and an integral role in the activities taking place in emporia.

Figure 1.4 Hearth under excavation at Coppergate, York. © York Archaeological Trust.

The high degree of specialisation involved in urban craft activities has been confirmed by subsequent investigations in ironworking (Westphalen 2002), goldsmithing (Armbruster 2002) and textile manufacture (Andersson 2003). Excavations in Birka between 1990 and 1995 uncovered the remains of a non-ferrous metalworking workshop that had maintained a substantial volume of highly standardised production over several decades between the late 8th and the mid-9th centuries (Ambrosiani 2013). Meanwhile, a series of seminal studies by Johan Callmer drew attention to connections between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Crafting the urban network
• 2. Craft: some pragmatic notes on the study of craft production and craftspeople in early medieval northern Europe
• I
• II
• III
• List of contributors