PhD Students

Although many previous studies explicitly state, and most others imply, that relationality is at the heart of the Iron Age economy, relational economic theory tends not to be referenced. Relational economics begins with the premise that “economic transactions are fundamentally social interactions,” regardless of whether they were conducted in pre-history versus today, or in commodity versus gift-based economies. Further, the model posits that relations are constitutive; economy is created in our own image. In the Baltic Sea area, various interest groups were in contact with one another, but may have had quite distinct worldviews and belief systems, and tensions likely existed both within and between communities as they navigated the international socio-economic landscape. From a relational economic perspective, this would have entailed the use of a number of strategies to participate successfully in the Iron Age Baltic Sea economy, ranging from standardization of weights and measures for trade, to negotiation of friendships or even personhood.

It has also often been the case that many regions between the “Viking homeland” in Scandinavia and the southeastern destinations of Scandinavian merchants in the Byzantine Empire are treated as fly-over zones, of little interest to Scandinavians passing through them, or scholars for that matter. Within the Baltic Sea region, these fly-over zones include parts of Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. In Finland, particularly, the Viking Age has often been neglected in favor of Stone Age or Medieval research. When these regions are examined in connection to the Viking Age, it is often from a typological or Scandinavian centric perspective, with a strong focus on Scandinavian cultural and other influences on their neighbors, or Scandinavian movement to and within these regions. More recently however there has been increased focus on mutual influences, interactions, and non-Scandinavian agency. My research, in line with this trend towards more nuanced views of interaction, takes a transnational approach to include parts of Finland, Russia, Estonia, and Latvia in the wider discussions of cultural, cosmological, and knowledge exchange between people who shared the Baltic Sea.

My path to archaeology has not been linear. I discovered archaeology as an undergraduate at St. Olaf College, where I had the opportunity to join a field school unearthing a Byzantine church in Turkey. This led to a general fascination with material culture - more field schools, museum studies, art history, and other material culture related coursework soon followed, although there was no dedicated archaeology program at my institution. In 2017, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in both History and Music. In 2020, I completed my master’s degree in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, where I was supervised by Dr. James Barrett. During my time in the program and working with Dr. Barrett, I became increasingly interested in the Medieval and Iron Age north, and topics relating to cultural contact, entanglement, and exchange. This fascination culminated in both the conception of my current project, and the decision to apply to the PhD program at Uppsala University, where I am currently supervised by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, and Neil Price, in addition to Anna Wessman from the University of Bergen.

Historical Chinese texts identify two principal sources of amber: the Baltic region and Myanmar. Advances in analytical techniques, particularly infrared spectroscopy, now allow the precise determination of amber provenance. Over the past decade, these methods have identified Baltic amber in contexts such as King Muryeong’s sixth-century tomb on the Korean Peninsula and at Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) archaeological sites in China. Despite these advances, research has predominantly focused on Roman-era trade, overlooking substantial amber finds from Tang- to Liao-dynasty graves (618–1125 CE), including more than 2,100 amber artefacts — animal figures and Buddhist ornaments — from the tomb of the Khitan Princess Chen (died 1018 CE).

Amber Routes seeks to address these knowledge gaps by integrating archaeology and materials science in order to construct a comprehensive history of amber trade and to examine its role in cross-cultural exchange. In collaboration with the Swedish Cultural Heritage Laboratory, I will analyse amber artefacts from several museums, applying the FTIR method to determine the provenance of the material (see Figure). Amber — a fossilised tree resin prized since the Neolithic period for its beauty and perceived magical properties — provides a valuable lens through which to reconsider patterns of ancient exchange. Rather than concentrating on conventional indicators of trade, such as silver, glass and silk, this project redirects attention towards amber, a highly significant organic material that played an important role in Scandinavia’s prehistoric economy and craft production.