Living and Dying with Vikings: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations in the Viking Age

Viking societies (c.700-1200 CE) in northern Europe and the North Atlantic region were made up of multi-species households in which the life-courses of humans and animals were intimately entangled. We know from written sources, visual art, and animal bones recovered from archaeological sites that 8th-12th century Scandinavians shared their lives with domestic horses, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, cats, poultry, and sometimes deer, and that some of these animals went on to share their spaces in death. However, we know comparatively little about how animals and humans shared their spaces in life, and how cohabited spaces mediated communications and interactions between them. Drawing on case studies such as the Viking-Age farmstead at Aðalstræti 16, in Reykjavik, Iceland, the Viking-Age grave at Fregerslev II, in Denmark, and sagas and laws from medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, this talk presents a novel approach to the understanding of human-animal cohabitation and interaction – in both life and death – using integrated archaeological, geoarchaeological, lipid biomarker, and textual sources.

 
Karen Milek is Associate Professor of Geoarchaeology at Durham University. Her research focusses on rural and urban settlements, daily life, and human-environment relations during the Viking Age in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic Region. She is PI on the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Cohabiting with Vikings: Social Space in Multi-Species Communities’.

Harriet Evans Tang is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Durham University in the UK, working on the project: Cohabiting with Vikings: Social Space in Multispecies Communities. Her monograph: Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas, has recently been published by Boydell and Brewer.