The Viking Age was a period of great economic complexity and experimentation in Scandinavia. By the end of the period, an ancient 'display' economy, based on ornaments of precious metal, had been largely replaced by counted money and national coinages. But this development was neither simple nor linear: for much of the Viking Age, several silver economies co-existed and interacted. The role of silver in Viking-age society and economy has recently developed into an exciting interdisciplinary topic for research. New evidence raises debates on the nature of valuables, bullion, monetisation, commodity money, and early urban trade. This book brings together an international group of archaeologists, historians and numismatists to draw a balance sheet of current research. Based on a symposium held in Aarhus, Denmark in 2008, it provides a structured basis for comparison, combining regional overviews with case-studies of significant sites or hoards. The book is dedicated to Dr Mark Blackburn (1953-2011) in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Viking-age numismatics and monetary history.

In this third volume deriving from the excavations of the Viking town of Kaupang of 2000-2003, a range of artefacts is presented along with a discussion of the town's inhabitants: their origins, activities and trading connexions. The main categories of artefact are metal jewellery and ornaments, gemstones, vessel glass, pottery, finds of soapstone, whetstones and textile-production equipment. The artefacts are described and dated, and their areas of origin discussed. The volume is lavishly illustrated. An exceptional wealth and diversity of artefacts distinguishes sites such as Kaupang from all other types of site in the Viking World. Above all, they reflect the fact that a large population of some 400-600 people lived closely together in the town, engaged in a comprehensive range of production and trade. The stratigraphically distinct layers from the first half of the 9th century allow us to put precise dates to the finds, and to the buildings and evidence of activities associated with them.

This final report describes the study of an exceptionally well-preserved Iron Age building discovered in northern Burkina Faso, West Africa. The site of Oursi hu-beero, meaning "the big house of Oursi" in the locally spoken Songhay language, was excavated in 2000 and 2001 by a scientific team from the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Ouagadougou. It is situated in the middle of a group of settlement mounds, nearby the modern village of Oursi. In the year 2000, deep erosion gullies were threatening the architectural remains on the surface, which were provisionally dated to the 10th century AD. Scholars from both universities saw the importance of this site and undertook immediate action. But even they were not prepared for what they uncovered under only one metre of destruction debris. The rich diversity of incredible finds in the 25 different rooms rendered their exposure of enormous importance for the archaeology and history of Burkina Faso. Complete storage jars, metal equipment, wooden furniture, rope and textile fragments, grinding stones and charred botanical remains are only a fraction of the total assemblage of finds. Although we are dealing with the results of a single occupation phase and from one building only, the density of finds, the preservation of the architecture and the absence of later disturbances add considerably to our understanding of daily life in this part of West Africa. Up to now the limited contextual information about life in villages and towns prior to the historical periods has promoted divergent and weakly argued interpretations. This volume breaks open new grounds of investigation and calls for further study. Additionally, the editors hope that this report will stimulate and encourage the discussion between historians and archaeologists of the fascinating West African past. The current volume presents an introduction to the expedition, an analysis of the site formation processes, the presentation of the architectural features, in-depth studies of the findings and a lively account of the heritage management project that resulted in an on-site museum. Nine authors contributed to this rich and multifaceted final report. The account of the construction, intensive use, violent destruction and subsequent rediscovery of the building is the enthralling subject of this volume, which is richly illustrated with numerous coloured drawings, photographs, maps and reconstruction drawings. It melds archaeological, historical and environmental data into a thrilling story. A story that reads like a new Crime Scene Investigation episode but happens to have been a real-life tragedy in the African Sahel almost 1,000 years ago.

St Peter's, Barton-upon-Humber, is a redundant medieval church in the care of English Heritage. As a result of a major programme of research carried out between 1978 and 2007, it is now the most intensively studied parish church in the UK. Excavations between 1978 and 1984 investigated most of the interior of the building, as well as a swathe of churchyard around its exterior. At the same time, a stone-by-stone record and detailed archaeological study of the fabric and furnishings of the church was undertaken, continuing down to 2007. The twin aims of the project were to understand the architectural history and setting of this complex, multi-period building (Volume 1, Parts 1 and 2) and to recover a substantial sample of the population for palaeopathological study (Volume 2). An extensive programme of historical and topographical research also took place in order to set the archaeological evidence firmly in context. The nearby substantial church of St Mary, which was once a chapel dependent on St Peter's, has also been studied, as have the furnishings, fittings and funerary monuments in both buildings. The topography of the small market town and port of Barton has been researched and its Saxon and Norman defensive earthworks have been traced. All aspects of settlement, from the Roman period onwards, have been studied and the vicissitudes of the Christian community in this typical English country town reconstructed through the history, archaeology and architecture of its two magnificent churches.

The inscription from Mesas do Castelinho, south Portugal, was discovered in September 2008. With 82 readable signs it is now the longest of the corpus of 95 Tartessian inscriptions. These texts survive from the Early Iron Age in the south-western Iberian Peninsula, the earliest writing from Atlantic Europe. By recombining word roots, prefixes and endings previously attested, the new inscription permits a major breakthrough with the language, confirming word divisions and contributing to the critical mass of evidence. It is now possible to take the case for Tartessian as an Indo-European and specifically Celtic language a step further, to ask what sort of Celtic language Tartessian was and how its syntax and sound system compares with those of Celtiberian, Gaulish, Old Irish and Welsh.

The Sturlunga Saga is a collection of secular contemporary literature of historical events in the 11th and 12th century. The Sturlunga Saga has mainly been used as a source in historical research. This book, however, emphasises the expression of secular contemporary stories as a whole as interactions regarding the events they portray without questioning the truthfulness of the storytelling. The common opinion is that it is necessary to validate the narrative study of the Sturlunga Saga before it is used as a source. Its validity as a source is not merely based on what it portrays, but is based also on its narrative. Icelandic text,

One of the largest excavations in the City of London at 1 Poultry recovered a remarkable archaeological sequence from the 1st to the 20th century AD. This volume presents the evidence for Late Saxon, medieval and post-medieval development of this part of the city. Poultry occupied a prominent position at the eastern end of Cheapside, the city's principal medieval market street; integrating documentary evidence with the archaeological record has provided an outstandingly detailed account of this area. Re-occupation of the site in the later 10th century began with the construction of scattered sunken-floored buildings; a more regular pattern of settlement, characterised by narrow-fronted timber buildings along the roadsides, developed by the early 11th century. Occupation became progressively denser up to the 13th century when large stone-built houses began to be built in previously open areas behind the street frontages. Metalworking evidence from the excavated buildings provides evidence of early economic activity, corresponding with later documentary evidence for smiths, ironmongers and other metalworkers in the area.

Focusing on the differences and similarities between the renowned 'Alpais' Limoges ciborium, dated to c. 1200, in the Musée du Louvre, and examples in the British Museum, the National Museums of Scotland, together with two electrotype copies of the 'Alpais' ciborium in the Victoria and Albert Museum, this volume uses a cross-disciplinary approach, based on the differing specialisations of the authors (curators, scientists and conservators) to examine the group of ciboria. New and previously unpublished information, analyses and conclusions are presented that will serve to locate all the ciboria in their respective artistic and cultural context.

The articles published in this volume are based on papers which were delivered at a conference in Iceland in 2007 entitled "Nordic Civilisation in the Medieval World". Twenty five participants from eight countries, representing a range of scholarly disciplines - history, archaeology, anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and runology - took part in the conference.

Westminster Abbey is one of the most important and well-known medieval buildings in Europe but, despite being studied by generations of scholars, there is still much to learn about its history and architecture. The lantern over the centre of the church is a case in point. Edward the Confessor built a great tower here, which is depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. When Henry III was rebuilding the Abbey in the 1250s, a new tower was begun which was to have dominated the Westminster skyline, but it was never finished and 150 years later an octagonal lantern like that at Ely Cathedral was built on the roof. It in turn was demolished in the sixteenth century, and in 1710 Sir Christopher Wren designed a 400-foot tower and spire, but did not live to see it built. His successor, Nicholas Hawksmoor, then produced a range of options for completing the lantern tower: a design was chosen and construction began in 1724. However, King George I died in 1727 and the Abbey had to be cleared of scaffolding for the coronation of his son. Although only the first stage of the new tower and spire had been built, construction never resumed and the inelegant stump was capped with a temporary roof. Subsequently, the lantern was burnt out in 1803 and again in 1941, but its shell remains today basically as Hawksmoor left it. In this study, Professor Warwick Rodwell assembles for the first time all the historical and architectural evidence, to tell the remarkable story of Westminster Abbey's unfinished lantern tower over the last 950 years.

This volume will throw new light on the intellect of the earliest English - the way they thought, the way they viewed the world, and the way they viewed worlds other than this. Previous understanding of the topic, well rooted in the ideas of its time, regarded the English as adherents of two consecutive religions: Paganism governed the settlers of the 4th-6th century, but was superseded in the 7th-10th century by Christianity. Of the two, Christianity, a religion of the book, documented itself thoroughly, while in failing to do so Paganism laid itself open to centuries of abuse, conjecture or mindless admiration. In developing new objectives, the papers here demonstrate that beliefs varied from place to place and were expressed in material culture. Through archaeology therefore, these beliefs can be rediscovered. Aware of the fact that even the best archaeology provides no open access to the mind, the contributors record, and study, signals of belief rather than what was believed. The premise of this volume is therefore that paganism was not a religion with supraregional rules and institutions but a loose term for a variety of local intellectual world views. The same courtesy is extended to Christianity. Both religions are treated as sources on which people, local people - the true agents of Anglo-Saxon England - eclectically drew. A range of material culture and locations across Northern Europe are explored, looking at signals of belief from the landscape, water cults, burial rites, the hall and animals in life and art. Each author looks across the sea to Scandinavia, as well as to the woods and fields, mires and mounds of Old England, resulting in a new perspective on the intellectual preoccupations and anxieties of a crucial age.

This volume tells the complete story of the Westminster Abbey chapter house, which ranks as one of the spectacular achievements of European Gothic art and architecture; and that is precisely what its builder, King Henry III, intended. Begun in the mid-1240s, and completed within a decade, its pre-eminence was recognized in its own day, when the chronicler Matthew Paris described Westminster as having 'a chapter house beyond compare'. Papers by leading scholars in the field of medieval art and architecture reveal the reasons for the construction of the chapter house and trace the possible influences upon the master mason in charge of the project. The subsequent history of the structure is revealed as it evolved from a meeting place of the king's Great Court, the predecessor of the English Parliament, and as a royal treasury into a repository for government archives after the Dissolution, home to the Public Record Office until the late 1850s, and its subsequent restoration at the hands of Sir George Gilbert Scott. Now under the care of English Heritage, the chapter house has just been cleaned and restored again, leading to the spectacular light-filled building that we see today, to which full justice is done by this richly illustrated book, filled with pictures of the architectural and sculptural details, the medieval tilework and the wall painting that justify the motto inscribed in the chapter house floor: 'as the rose is the flower of flowers, so is this the house of houses'.

This groundbreaking, authoritative and best-selling study of the Vikings establishes the facts behind their rise to prominence, and cuts away the myths about their military and seafaring skills, reputation, and exploits. The author applies modern military thinking to the Viking art of war and examines their tactics, seamanship, mobility, strategy, and how they exploited victories and dealt with defeats. Learn how the Vikings established colonies in hostile territory and defeated a diverse array of enemies, including the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, the Volga Bulgars, and the wild tribes of Ireland, in three centuries of military adventure. About the AuthorPaddy Griffith was a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for 16 years. He is the author of numerous articles and books on the history of warfare, including Battle Tactics of the Western Front, 1916-18 and The Art of War of Revolutionary France, 1789-1802.

Dorchester-on-Thames and its abbey have been subjects of antiquarian interest for more than 450 years, and during that time much has been written about them. They are, however, still far from being comprehensively studied and recorded. Indeed, the most substantial architectural description of the medieval church was written as long ago as 1845, and a thoroughgoing reappraisal has long been overdue. In this major new study on the origins, history and architecture of Dorchester Abbey, Warwick Rodwell assembles a huge amount of material from observations during repair and conservation and information derived from archaeological excavation, as well as the unexpected discovery of previously unstudied and unpublished topographical and architectural material, housed in several archives. The volume is divided into two parts: the first contains an account of the archaeology of the site and the architectural development of the abbey, while the second comprises a series of detailed notes and observations on the present structure, its fittings and furnishings.

The aim of this volume is to explore Anglo-Saxon perceptions of form and order in their different manifestations, through two main strands texts of all kinds, and art, architecture and archaeology. Contributors come from many different specialisms, enabling wide-ranging discussion, as well contributions from other Insular cultures and a continental European perspective.

Wulfstan’s account covers a voyage from the root of Jutland to the Vistula Delta – connecting the trading centres of Hedeby and Truso – and provides a rare and vivid view of the south-eastern Baltic Sea region in the early Viking Age, including aspects of inland navigation and local culture. In this book, a panel of scholars presents the original source and debate its geographical, cultural, nautical and economic context in the light of recent investigations.