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?
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?
