Projects
The Viking Phenomenon
Who were the Vikings? Why did they do what they did? What kind of societies produced them? Why did they start to expand into the world at precisely this time?
The Vikings in Asia: Diversity and Distance in the Norse Diaspora
Neil Price, PI, 2026-2031
Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
‘The Vikings in Asia’ (VIA) activates an international team of scholars in archaeology, history, religions, and economics in the first serious engagement with Norse connections to the far south and east. The Viking Age (c.750-1050 CE) saw the creation of a Scandinavian diaspora that spanned a vast multicultural and multi-ethnic arena of encounter. However, this has often been Eurocentrically divided into separate western and eastern silos. There is a bias towards the former, while research on the Rus’ and Varangians (the names by which the Norse were known in the east) is geographically limited and tends not to look further than the Caspian or south of Constantinople. Abundant archaeological and textual evidence paints a very different picture, of Norse networks intersecting with those of western, central, and eastern Asia. This is vividly described in contemporary Arabic sources, and supported by archaeological finds in Scandinavia of Steppe clothing and weapons; Islamic bronzes, glass, jewellery, silks, and over 100,000 dirham coins; Afghan metalwork; Tang Chinese textiles; Red Sea and Indian Ocean products, and more. Baltic amber is also found in elite burials from Inner Mongolia, Korea, and beyond. Through five packages of collaborative, data-driven research that has never previously been attempted, VIA will fundamentally transform our understanding of Norse activity across the across the overland and maritime Silk Roads, and the Asian frontiers of the Viking diaspora.
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Outland Networks– transports and exchange in the global north (AD 0-1300)
Andreas Hennius, John Ljungkvist and Eva Svensson, 2026-2028
Funded by the Swedish Research Council
This project will explore the networks that connected the outland areas in the north with central agrarian regions in southern Scandinavia during the Iron Age and Early Medieval period (0-1300AD). Several studies have been made on the diversity of resources and production, from forests and mountains in the north and the presence of these materials in central agrarian regions. However, there is still no satisfying understanding or models covering the complete process from extraction, refinement, storage, transportation and exchange of resources, from the mountains to the coast.
The aim of the OUTNET project is to unravel the networks connecting the outland production areas with the central regions and elite environments in agrarian Scandinavia by identifying and analysing the intermediate trading sites and transportation routes. For this purpose, we will develop a method for detecting smaller nodal points in the landscape, which will be useful also beyond this study. This will be done through detailed landscape analyses, including registered monuments and finds, retrogressive methods, field surveying and metal detecting.
The role of the outland resource extraction has lately been identified as a missing link to understand the societal development during the late Iron Age and a key component to understand the development of trade and urbanisation during the Viking Age.
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Investigating the Europe-wide connections of early medieval commoners
A large research group involving Uppsala University as a partner has been awarded a major European grant, the ERC Synergy Grant. This is for research on how Europe developed after the fall of the Roman Empire with special attention to the underexplored but important contribution of the ‘common people’.
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Social Inequality, Structural Violence, and Marginalisation in Viking Age Scandinavia
Ben Raffield, PI, 2022-2025
Funded by the Swedish Research Council
The aim of the project is to develop an interdisciplinary framework for the identification and study of social inequality in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Drawing on a large corpus of burials from excavated cemeteries in modern-day Sweden, the project mobilises both bioarchaeological and material analyses in order to explore the ways in which social hierarchies and inequality impacted the health and lifeways of different groups within communities.
Making a Warrior: The Social Implications of Viking Age Martial Ideologies
Ben Raffield, Co-I, 2023-2026
Funded by NordForsk, project lead Dr. Marianne Moen, Oslo
This project aims to critically appraise and redefine the concept of warriorhood in Late Iron Age/Viking Age Scandinavia. The initiative, which involves partners from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland, will adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, anthropological, historical, and literary perspectives on the life course and social role of warrior groups within the wider milieu of prehistoric Scandinavian society.
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Benjamin Raffield
Transforming heaven and earth: local communities and the end of life in the conversion to Christianity in east- central Sweden (950-1250 CE)
Cecilia Ljung, Astrid A. Noterman and Alison Klevnäs,
2025-2029
Funded by the Swedish Research Council
This project aims to understand how local communities at the end of the Viking Age responded and contributed to the radical socio-religious transformations brought about by the conversion to Christianity. It will study the diverse ways families and communities took care of their dead through funerary rituals and monuments and how changes in their practices enabled the reconceptualization of life and death.
Transformation will be traced from the microbiology of buried individuals to collective action that shaped the spiritual and commemorative landscape.
The project shifts focus from simple causal models, where Christianisation has primarily been seen as an elite- controlled process, to the perspective of local communities as they adopted - or resisted - new ways and values.
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Early adopters: the search for Gotland’s first churchyard burials
Cecilia Ljung and Alison Klevnäs, 2023-2025
Funded by Berit Wallenbergs Stiftelse
This project is investigating the locations and forms of the first burials made at the earliest churchyards on the Baltic island of Gotland. Understanding the decisions made by the early adopters of these new places about where and how to care for their dead gives a unique route into the complexities of a period of rapid and fundamental transformation in socio-religious life. By placing the early churchyard burials in a wider picture of the treatment of the dead at the time of the conversion to Christianity on Gotland, the project aims to explore how local communities managed new divisions in life and death. Who were the first adopters of churchyard burials and Christian practices? In which circumstances were the old ways and sites preferred? How do mortuary customs performed in different landscape settings relate to each other: which aspects of rituals were combined or discarded?
